Council for the National Interest

Benjamin Franklin once observed that those who would trade their liberties for security will wind up losing both. James Madison stated that no nation can preserve freedom in the midst of perpetual warfare. Few can question that America’s Founding Fathers epitomize true conservatism. There is something seriously wrong in America today precisely because the elites from both political parties have forgotten about Franklin and Madison and ignored their wise counsel.

No one should doubt that ill-conceived security measures and the greatly exaggerated fear of terrorism have driven much of both foreign and domestic policy since 9/11.  9/11 was undeniably a horrific experience for this nation, but it did not threaten the survival of the American Republic. Its remaining perpetrators and their handful of heirs do not do so today. Only we Americans can do that and we are doing so by overreacting to the danger and compromising our own liberties. Conservatives should be the voice of reason. They should demand commensurate and realistic responses to genuine foreign and domestic threats rather than overkill, more bureaucracy, and lots of unneeded government pork. The government’s creation of a no-fly list with one million names and a terrorist suspects list with nearly half a million entries exemplify that damage that has already been done. If there were even one per cent that many people in the US actually threatening terrorist acts there would be waves of bombings in the streets. That that has not taken place tells you that both the lists and the process used to compile them are essentially bogus.

The expression war on terror is meaningless. Terror is a tactic, it is not a foreign government or political movement. To use the expression a “terrorist group” is equally misleading as the groups which come in all shapes sizes and colors are essentially political and have frequently clearly defined political objectives even if they use terrorism to advance their agenda. In most cases, the groups we call terrorists seek to take over the government of the countries where they operate, replacing groups not dissimilar to themselves who are currently in charge.

Why is what we call something important, whether we use the expression “terrorist” or not? It is important because how you name and define something shapes how you think about it and how you respond to it.  It frames the narrative. Instead of bumper sticker definitions, we should instead be asking whether international groups that use terror genuinely threaten either the United States or any vital national interest. If we were to undertake such an analysis, we would quickly learn that frequently the terrorist label is misleading.

The exploitation of fear of terrorism by those in government has led to wars that did not have to be fought. Fear has been the key to the door for expansion of government and government powers and the people in charge in Washington have seized the opportunity. It has also eroded the liberties that have defined us as a nation. To cite only one example, the position taken by the Obama Administration that it is all right to assassinate American citizens overseas based on secret information violates principles of due process and deprives every citizen of the constitutional right to defend himself before a jury consisting of his peers. The government has also decided that it doesn’t need any judicial review to read your emails, look at your bank account, and it can even attach a gps device to your car so it can have a record of where you went and who you visited. John Pistole, head of the Transportation Security Administration, says that his officers can force you to strip naked at the airport and there is nothing you can do about it. If you object and try to leave you can be arrested, fined, and imprisoned.

Government is twice as big and twice as expensive as it was in 2001. The federal deficit has grown nearly five fold during that time. And this is all because America’s leaders, who view the world in terms of institutions and power, looked at the terrorism tactic and drew all the wrong conclusions, namely that those we call terrorists hated the United States for no rational reason and that there was a military solution that could be imposed to make the terrorists go away. The Washington elite confused America’s ability to field a large army with something we call policy, in this case foreign policy, not understanding that using the military is a failure of foreign policy, not an alternative to it. The same officials and politicians also created a vast and ineffective homeland security bureaucracy, the domestic equivalent of an interventionist foreign policy, that has stripped many Americans of their fundamental liberties here at home. Predictably, the international situation has become even more unstable as a result of the enormous expansion of the security state. When meddling in the affairs of others began to produce bad results, the solution was more meddling, most recently in Libya, Syria and Yemen, never looking at intervention itself as a possibly source of the instability and the terrorism.

Some of the numbers behind what has happened should appall every true conservative. The United States now spends nearly one trillion dollars every year on the military, homeland security, and intelligence. Much of the money is borrowed from China. If one assumes that there are something like 500 active terrorists in the world who actually are ready, willing, and able to attack the American mainland (and there are likely less than that), it works out to something like $2 billion per terrorist per year every year. Fear of terrorism drives growth in government and has led to involvement in multiple little wars and some bigger ones as well as subsequent exercises in nation building, all of which have been unconstitutional, and none of which have turned out well. The so-called global war on terror, now referred to as overseas contingency operations, is without end and without limits, and has made the US hated and feared in most of the world, not respected. It has even made American citizens potential targets of their own government without any recourse to the protections afforded by the constitution.

And America’s war against the world did not have to happen. There are real threats in the world against Americans and American interests, but military action in support of the national interest should only be a last option after every other step has been taken. Whenever I hear the expression “American exceptionalism” I cringe because for the Michelle Bachmanns and Rick Perrys that means it’s okay to drop bombs on people because we know we’re good folks and we suspect that the folks being bombed are not. Exceptionalism is no excuse for acting irresponsibly.

And then there is the issue of blowback. Why is America the target of terrorists and suicide bombers? Surely not because it has freedoms. As the dear departed Osama bin Laden once put it, in possibly the only known joke made by a terrorist, if freedoms were the issue al-Qaeda would be attacking Sweden. Ron Paul, former CIA Bin Laden Task Force head Michael Scheurer, and numerous others have noted that America has become a target because it is involved militarily in so many countries, meddling in other people’s business. As they put it, “They are over here because we are over there.”

Above all, the American people should watch the money. It is fashionable to blame the Republican Party for many of our ills, but the war party in America is bipartisan. It is driven both by the lust for power and the good old fashioned profit motive. The current push to attack Iran has more Democrats behind it than Republicans and it is fully supported by a media that has been characterized as being largely liberal but which really shares the collectivist viewpoint and interests of the Washington elite. War is big business and it produces money and jobs for a lot of people, ranging from think tanks to defense contractors to congressmen and senior government officials who are looking for a nice income supplement when they retire. The American people must demand a change in that dynamic. Into the early fifties it was still possible for a traditional conservative Republican like Russell Kirk or Robert Taft to object to America’s growing global role without being labeled an isolationist or being ostracized by one’s own political party. That changed as war became an engine driving the economy with a bit of pork sweetening the deal in every congressional district. Today, one might argue, that weapons are the only thing that the United States produces for which there is a worldwide demand. That is not only sad, it has been the undoing of the American Republic.

In short, real conservatives who believe in small government, fiscal responsibility, a rational foreign policy based on the national interest, and non-involvement in other people’s quarrels should never support global wars on terror or global wars on anything. They should reject completely the insidious and absurd notion that Washington can intervene all over the world and not raise taxes to pay for the cost, handing our security over to the Chinese lenders and bankrupting our children and grandchildren. Some in Washington have already seen the folly of our present course and are speaking out. “The moral and constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars while bringing bankruptcy and economic turmoil to our people.” Ron Paul said that in 2008 and it should be our rallying cry for 2012 to achieve a constitutionally based foreign and defense policy that truly benefits the American people.

Haaretz - Many American senators and congressmen “keep quiet” and refrain from criticizing Israeli policies because they “live in fear” and are “intimidated” by pro-Israeli groups such as the Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI), according to J Street founder and President Jeremy Ben-Ami.

Ben-Ami’s bald assertion came during a debate with Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, a director of ECI, held on Tuesday night at Manhattan’s palatial B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue and moderated by Jane Eisner, the editor of the Forward. Ben Ami said that because of accusatory ECI ads in the New York Times and other media outlets, members of Congress are afraid of being branded as anti-Israel and are deterred by the “ramifications” of voicing open criticism of Israeli policies.

It was a rare moment of tension in an otherwise civil and even friendly debate, which pitted representatives of the two diametrically opposed poles of the current Jewish debate on Israel – the controversial lobby J Street on the left and the no-less contentious Emergency Committee on the right. The crowd of 700-800, mainly from Manhattan’s Upper West Side, clearly favored Ben Ami’s positions though they were obviously pleased by Kristol’s agreement to debate him.

Another reason for the amicable nature of the debate was that Kristol “didn’t supply the goods," as Israelis would put it.  He voiced surprisingly moderate positions about President Obama and about the creation of a Palestinian state, which seemed completely at odds with the harsh tone of ECI advertisements and especially of its popular 30 minute television film “Daylight: The Story of Obama and Israel.”

While the film depicts Obama’s attitude toward Israel as “alarming” and “damaging to the relationship” between the U.S. and Israel, Kristol told the audience that Obama had, in fact, “moved to the center” on both Iran and the peace process, and that his policies today resemble those of his predecessors Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

And while the ECI committee has run billboard campaigns describing Obama as “not pro-Israel," Kristol told the audience that the president had evolved considerably between his 2009 Cairo speech and his 2012 AIPAC speech, and that “the difference” between Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney on issues relating to Iran and Israel “is not that great."

“I am happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree,” said Kristol, one of America’s most well-known conservative commentators. He added that he does not expect Israel to be “that great an issue” in the upcoming November elections.

Nonetheless, Kristol elicited howls of protest from the audience when he predicted that the next U.S. secretary of state in a “Romney administration” would be former Democratic vice presidential nominee Senator Joe Lieberman. Ben-Ami wryly noted, “Israel already has a Lieberman as foreign minister.”

Ben-Ami also seemed to be reciprocating Kristol’s conciliatory tone towards Obama by commending Romney’s refusal to emulate his Republican rivals during the primaries and "pander” on the issue of the transfer of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. He said that Romney’s attitude toward the peace process did not seem to rule out an active U.S. role in advancing the peace process.

Kristol rejected Ben-Ami’s call for the U.S. president to “lay down the parameters” of a peace deal – 1967 borders with modifications, Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and the Palestinians, no right of return and a demilitarized Palestinian state. Kristol said that it was not the business of America to “impose” a peace deal on Israel and the Palestinians nor was it Washington’s duty to “call Israel’s bluff” and to expose its obstinacy, if it exists, to the outside world.

Nonetheless, Kristol surprised many in the audience by voicing clear support for a Palestinian state, saying, “I would be very happy if there was a Palestinian state”. He rejected Ben-Ami’s predictions of a one-state future in which the Palestinians would demand the principle of “one man one vote," saying that Israel has ruled the occupied territories for over 45 years and that the indefinite maintenance of the current status quo “is also an option."

Ben-Ami, who deals with the Israeli-Palestinian issue seven days a week, was clearly better informed on the details of the issues than Kristol, who is a major player in the overall Republican agenda. Kristol repeatedly cited his own ignorance in order to dodge open disagreements with Ben-Ami, conceding that he doesn’t know much about the blockade of Gaza, that he is not aware of the details of Israeli settlement activities in the West Bank and that he is incapable of judging whether Israeli democracy and the rule of law are indeed endangered by the government’s refusal to carry out High Court orders to evacuate the settlements at Migron and at the Ulpana sector of Beit-El, as Ben-Ami asserted.

But, he protested, “This is what American Jews have to do? Criticize the level of democracy and the rule of law in Israel? It is certainly better than in any other country in the Middle East and in other parts of the world.” Ben-Ami drew enthusiastic support from the audience when he retorted that large parts of the American Jewish community “won’t stand for” Kristol’s "Israel right or wrong” attitude.

Kristol said that he welcomed debate with J Street, but would not agree to a dialogue with supporters of BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions – against Israel, while Ben Ami said that BDS supporters should be engaged, despite his disagreement with their positions. He draws the line, he added, at having a dialogue with people who advocate the destruction of the Jewish state.

Kristol then went so far as to actually praise Ben-Ami’s achievements in building the J Street organization, but added that it has no real influence on the Obama administration. “I hope J Street continues to flourish and to have no effect on policy,” he said and was rewarded with the audience’s appreciative laughter.

The Ben-Ami - Kristol debate, coming on the heels of a similar debate held two weeks ago between controversial author Peter Beinart and the conservative Shalem Center’s Daniel Gordis at Columbia University, appears to signal an attempt by the Jewish community – at least in New York - to create an ongoing dialogue between its warring “factions” and to arrest the polarization of the community.

The debates may also herald an end to attempts to ostracize organizations such as J Street and viewpoints like those espoused by Beinart, and to recognize the legitimacy of their hitherto shunned left-wing views.

As an Israeli observer, I must admit I found myself envious of the ability of the two debaters and of their audience to conduct such a potentially volatile political debate in an atmosphere of mutual respect. In Israel, I suspect, such civilized debates may no longer be possible.

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs - The effects of the 2010 census are being felt in many congressional races this year, as states which gained or lost population had to reconfigure their congressional districts accordingly. This has resulted more than once in newly created districts where two incumbents battle for a single available seat.

Such was the case in Ohio, where Democratic incumbents and frequent congressional allies Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur—both members of the Washington Report's 2010 Congressional Hall of Fame—vied to represent the state's new 9th congressional district, redrawn to include more of Kaptur's former district than Kucinich's. Thus, while Kucinich raised $965,670 to Kaptur's $370,360, it is Kaptur, the number two Democrat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, who won the March 6 primary. That Kucinich's voice and conscience will not be heard in the 113th Congress is a loss for all Americans. We fervently hope and trust that he will not depart the national stage, but instead heed popular demand and return to perform in a new role.

Meanwhile, in California's new 30th congressional district, Rep. Howard "Even-before-I-was-a-Democrat-I-was-a-Zionist" Berman is running against fellow Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman. (Or, as the Jewish Journal banner reads, "Two Jews, One District.") Sherman was a member of our 2010 Congressional Hall of Shame; Berman barely missed the cut by casting only four instead of five negative votes.

Pro-Israel PAC Contributions to 2012 Congressional Candidates (175KB PDF)

Formerly chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Berman is now its ranking Democrat. While Kaptur emphasized her ability to bring home the bacon to her Ohio constituents, Berman continues to bring home the bacon to a foreign country—courtesy of the American taxpayer. In March alone he introduced legislation allowing the Obama administration to give more Iron Dome missile systems to Israel should it request more than the three it already has, and extend again the $3.8 billion balance from Israel's 2003 loan guarantee program, despite the State Department's recommendation that the program be terminated. Both bills were co-sponsored by current committee chair Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), the rabidly anti-U.N., pro-Israel legislator of Cuban Jewish descent. Who says there's no bipartisanship in Congress?

Not content with these generous gifts to Israel, Berman also introduced a bill to make Israelis eligible for E-2 U.S. work visas. As Israeli activist Uri Avnery commented: "All we have to do now is to buy a small business in America—say a little delicatessen shop in a corner of Brooklyn, for half the price of an apartment in Jerusalem—to automatically become American residents, and eventually citizens."

While Berman, being Jewish, is eligible to automatically become an Israeli citizen, Israel will not extend that courtesy to the more than 98 percent of Americans—and millions of indigenous Palestinians—who are not Jewish. So much for reciprocity between allies.

At a Feb. 21 debate sponsored by the Jewish Journal, Berman and Sherman both claimed to be the stronger backer of sanctions against Iran, while Republican candidate Mark Reed "dismissed the sanctions so far as ineffective and seemed more inclined toward the option of military action by the United States," according to the paper.

Dennis Kucinich, the people of California's 30th congressional district need you!

Janet McMahon is managing editor of the Washington Report.

Mondoweiss - Representative Joe Walsh’s (R-IL) Op-Ed in the Washington Times May 3 turned heads. He argued that the only real solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “one contiguous Israeli state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” Palestinians who wanted to stay would have “limited voting power.” Walsh also suggests Jordan as a destination for Palestinians. Robert Wright of The Atlantic commented that the Op-Ed should be interpreted as a call for apartheid and ethnic cleansing.

There’s more to this story, thanks to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Ron Kampeas. Kampeas reports that an Israel-oriented political action committee called Allies for Israel gave Walsh $2,500 this year. According to Open Secrets, this donation was given before or on April 30, 2012, a few days before the Op-Ed was published.

The $2,500 is small beans when compared to other donors to Walsh, who was elected in 2010 with Tea Party support and is now facing a tough re-election battle. But you have to wonder if this PAC, or another right-wing Zionist PAC, will pour more money into Walsh’s coffers due to his prominent call for Israeli apartheid. We’ll find out, perhaps, when the next Federal Election Commission numbers come out.

Still, it’s important to look at who the donors to Allies for Israel are. Walsh’s ideas are very much in line with contributors to the Allies for Israel PAC, which donates to both Republicans and Democrats.

The biggest donor to Allies for Israel is Cherna Moskowitz, who gave $5,000 to the group in December 2011. Cherna is the wife of Irving Moskowitz, the wealthy Florida businessman who is known for funding illegal Jewish settlements in occupied East Jerusalem that evict Palestinians living there. The Irving Moskowitz Foundation, which is run by Cherna and Irving, funds a yeshiva in the settlement of Beit El; the Central Fund for Israel, a US-based group that channels donations to settlements; the Hebron Fund; and more. In sum, the Moskowitzes believe in Greater Israel and a Jerusalem where Jews have more rights than Palestinians--a view quite similar to Walsh’s.

Other donors include Cheryl Halpern, a former chairwoman of the Republican Jewish Coalition known for blasting National Public Radio’s coverage of Israel; Michael Sodrel, a former Congressional representative from Indiana and prominent Christian Zionist; and Richard Schifter, a former US official.

Walsh, it seems, was not just supporting apartheid in Israel for kicks. With Tammy Duckworth, his Democratic opponent, giving him a run for his money, expect to see more cash to Walsh from Greater Israel backers.

Mondoweiss - In Tikkun, Peter Beinart struggles to make Israel both Jewish and democratic without affecting Palestinians:

Lerner: Would it be acceptable in your mind to have a democratic Israel if through demographic changes a majority of Israelis were Palestinians? Or would you say that to preserve its Jewish character it would be permissible to infringe on its democratic character?

Beinart: It would be wrong for Israel to take any coercive measure to reduce its Arab population... We are a long way away from the time when an Israeli state would have an Arab majority, but if Israelis thought that was about to happen, I would oppose any measures (such as expulsion of Arabs) designed to coercively impose a Jewish majority.

But Israel has done this continuously for the past 64 years, both in Israel "proper" and in the occupied territories. Israel's Jewish majority is solely due topremeditated ethnic cleansing. If Beinart acknowledges it "would" be wrong for Israel to do this (in an imagined future), was it wrong to do it in the past? Is it wrong to do it now? He thinks it's wrong in the West Bank, but what about Israel's current routine ethnic cleansing of Bedouin villages within the green line? Beinart calls inside-the-green-line Israel "democratic Israel"; what about ethnic cleansing is democratic? (Because the majority -- who is only a majority due to prior ethnic cleansing -- voted for it?)

On the right of return of Palestinian refugees that Israel expelled in order to impose a Jewish majority, Beinart says approvingly:

The formula will most likely [be] a relatively small return by original refugees who are now getting relatively elderly now to pre-1967 Israel—perhaps 20,000 or 50,000 or 100,000, but a number that would not seriously threaten Israel’s demographics....

Is Beinart's opposition to "expulsion of Arabs" lip service?

Or more hopefully, is there a part of Peter Beinart's moral unconscious that is fighting with his tribal ideology, resulting in the cognitive dissonance we see in this interview?

And when will the morality defeat the tribalism, finally, and lead Peter to support genuine Israeli-Palestinian equality from the river to the sea?

P.S. - Changing the hot seat, which is Rabbi Lerner more concerned with: an act of atonement, or the appearance of one?

Lerner: We at Tikkun have suggested that Israel take in twenty to thirty thousand refugees each year for the next thirty years, because at the expectable growth rate of populations that number would not undermine the demographic balance and yet would appear to be a rather significant act of atonement.

Surely this would be a huge concession on Israel's part relative to its current stance. But if more than thirty thousand refugees per year want to return to lands that were stolen from them and live in peace with their neighbors, does Israel have the moral or legal right to say no, while continuing to provide an unlimited right of "return" to Jews who live comfortably in the U.S.? What does that have to do with the so-called "complete equality" promised in the Israeli founding documents these two men revere?

Question to Lerner and Beinart: Can you watch this video and not be for the right of return of refugees who wish to live peaceably with their neighbors? Can you walk up to these children and tell them "No you cannot return, but any Jew anywhere in the world can move tomorrow to live on top of the rubble of your grandparents' destroyed homes?"

MJ Rosenberg - On Tuesday, the House of Representatives is slated to vote on a resolution designed to tie the president’s hands on Iran policy. The resolution, which is coming up under an expedited House procedure, was the centerpiece of AIPAC’s recent conference. In fact, 13,000 AIPAC delegates were dispatched to Capitol Hill, on the last day of the conference, with instructions to tell the senators and representatives whom they met that supporting this resolution was #1 on AIPAC’s election year agenda.

Accordingly, it is not particularly surprising that the resolution is being rushed to the House floor for a vote, nor that it is expected to pass with very little opposition. Those voting “no” on this one will pay a price in campaign contributions (the ones they won’t receive) and, very likely, will be smeared as “anti-Israel.” That is how it works.

Most of the language in H. Res.568 is unremarkable, the usual boilerplate (some of it factual) denouncing the Islamic Republic of Iran as a “state sponsor of terrorism” that is on the road to nuclear weapons capability.

The resolution’s overarching message is that Iran must be deterred from developing weapons, a position the White House (and our allies share). That is why the sanctions regime is in place and also why negotiations with Iran have resumed (the next session is May 23).

But the resolution does not stop with urging the president to use his authority to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran. If it did, the resolution would be uncontroversial .

But there is also this: The House “urges the President to reaffirm the unacceptability of an Iran with nuclear-weapons capability and opposition to any policy that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.”

Think about that.

The resolution, which almost surely will pass on Tuesday, is telling the president that he may not “rely on containment” in response to “the Iranian nuclear threat.”

Since the resolution, and U.S. policy itself defines Iranian possession of nuclear weapons as, ipso facto, a threat, Congress would be telling the president that any U.S. response to that threat other than war is unacceptable. In fact, it goes farther than that, not only ruling out containment of a nuclear armed Iran but also containment of an Iran that has a “nuclear weapons capability.”

That means that the only acceptable response to a nuclear armed or nuclear capable Iran is not containment but its opposite: war.

Any doubt that this is the intention of the backers of this approach was removed back in March, when the Senate was considering new Iran sanctions. Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Bob Casey (D-PA) offered their own “no containment” language to the sanctions bill and the Senate moved to quickly to accept it.

However, amending a bill once it is already on the Senate floor requires unanimous consent and one, and only one, senator objected. Rand Paul (R-KY) said that he would oppose the containment clause unless a provision was added specifying that “nothing in the Act shall be construed as a declaration of war or an authorization of the use of force against Iran…”

That did it.

Neither the Democratic or Republican leadership would accept that (knowing that AIPAC wouldn’t) and Paul’s objection killed the bill, for the time being. In other words, the purpose of “no containment” language is precisely to make war virtually automatic. Because Paul’s provision would thwart that goal, it was unacceptable.

So now it’s the House’s turn.

On the substance, the “no containment” idea is absurd and reckless.

Imagine if President Kennedy had been told by the Congress back in 1962 that if the Soviet Union placed missiles in Cuba, he would have no choice but to attack Cuba or the USSR. If it had, it is likely none of us would be around today.

Presidents need latitude to make decisions affecting matters of national security and, until now, all presidents have been afforded it, as provided for in the United States Constitution. But, in the case of Iran, the cheerleaders for war are trying to change the rules. They are doing that because they understand that after almost a decade of war, the last thing Americans want is another one.

No president is going to ask Congress to declare war, or even to authorize it. Making war against Iran automatic would eliminate that problem. (That is precisely Sen. Paul’s objection; he believes that backing into war is unconstitutional. He recalls the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964 which led to ten years of war in Vietnam and 50,000 American dead without a declaration of war or even a specific authorization for war).

So why would the House vote for a resolution like this? The main reason is AIPAC. It may be the only lobby pushing for war with Iran but it also, by far, the most powerful foreign policy lobby and also the one that sees to it that those who play ball with it are rewarded and those who don’t are punished. AIPAC has been pushing war with Iran for a decade; it won’t stop until the missiles fly.

The other reason is that the resolution is non-binding. Voting for it is good politics but does not affect policy.

Believing that is a mistake. An overwhelming vote for “no containment” may not tie the president’s hands legally, but it does go a long way to tying his hands politically. After all, Congress will be expressing its clear (bipartisan) intent. A president cannot easily ignore that.

Moreover, the lobby is unlikely to stop with a non-binding resolution. Once the House and Senate have passed that, the lobby will look for an opportunity to make it binding. The goal is to take the president’s discretion away from him because this president is unlikely to choose war when there are other options available.

It is those options that the lobby is determined to block. It remains hell-bent for war.

POSTSCRIPT: It can’t hurt to call your House member at 202 225 3131 to tell him that you know about the vote on the AIPAC resolution and will be watching. Assuming the House does not duck for cover by passing this by voice vote, I will post the names of the brave representatives who vote “no.”

IPS - The year 2012 marks the sixty-fourth anniversary of the Nakba, the catastrophic uprooting of the Palestinians and the dismemberment and de-Arabization of Palestine in 1948. The name “Palestine” was wiped off the map. Some five hundred villages and towns disappeared; markers of the Palestinian presence on the land that had survived the Crusades were obliterated to make way for a new militarized European immigrant-settler community.

This is also the twentieth anniversary of the publication of my book Expulsion of the Palestinians, which traced the development of the concept of the “transfer” of Palestinians by the Zionist leadership in the decades before 1948.   The Institute for Palestine Studies, in recognition of the continuing importance and relevance of the subject, has chosen this occasion to release my work in eBook form.

The eBook is available for only $5.99 via Amazon.

“Transfer” was the main euphemism (there were others) used by Zionists for the expulsion of Palestinians from their country in order to create the would-be Jewish state. Transfer was essential to the Zionist project, as it was impossible to create a Jewish majority in Palestine without somehow removing the indigenous population. Transfer rhetoric was embedded in the racist and dehumanizing European Zionist colonial perception that the “Land of Israel” — Palestine — is a Jewish birthright belonging exclusively to the Jewish people. Consequently, it treated Palestinian Arabs as “strangers” and squatters who could either accept Jewish sovereignty over the land or leave. 

Drawing on a range of sources, especially primary Hebrew-language Zionist archival material, Expulsion of the Palestinians documents the Zionist leaders’ preoccupation with “transfer,” especially from the mid-1930s onwards. The most important Zionist leaders — Theodor Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, Berl Katznelson, Moshe Sharett, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and others — all advocated transfer. These advocates of transfer saw nothing immoral about the idea, and even transfer’s Zionist critics opposed it on political and practical, not moral, grounds. For them all, the post-World War I population exchange of Greeks and Turks served as a convenient precedent for Palestine. Uprooting Palestinians and “transferring” them to Arab countries — Jordan, Syria, and Iraq were most often suggested —was depicted as a mere relocation from one district to another. Since Palestinians allegedly had few real ties (and no rights) to Palestine, Zionist leaders rationalized, the uprooted would be just as content outside the “Land of Israel.”

“Transfer” and the Zionist denial of the Palestinians’ national identity and right to self-determination were inextricably linked. Transfer advocates asserted that Palestinians were not a distinct people tied to their homeland but mere “Arabs,” an “Arab encampment,” or an “Arab population” that happened to reside in the Land of Israel. If Palestinians did not constitute a distinct nation, were not integral to the country, and lacked historical ties to it, then they could be transferred to other Arab countries without prejudice. And if Palestinians were merely a small local portion of the larger Middle Eastern Arab population, then their political representatives could be bypassed. Zionists therefore dealt over the Palestinians’ heads with Arab leaders, for example with King Abdullah of Transjordan in pursuit of the so-called “Jordanian option.” Zionist discourse referred, and continues to refer, to vast Arab territories where Palestinians should dwell with the rest of the Arab people.

Transfer remained theoretical until the great wave of Jewish immigration to Palestine in the mid-1930s, and the British endorsement in 1937 of the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states made establishing a Jewish state with a Jewish majority a realistic possibility. From this point on, transfer occupied a central position in the Zionist movement’s strategic thinking and the practical planning of the Jewish Agency (the effective Yishuv government led by David Ben-Gurion) to “solve” the land and demographic “problems” facing the creation of a Jewish state.

Although transfer as the preferred Zionist “solution” to the “Arab question” was constant until 1948, its envisaged modalities changed over the years. From the mid-1930s specific transfer plans were produced by Yishuv officials and organs of the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. The transfer mindset also massively informed the Haganah’s military plans which, when applied with brute force in 1947-48, led to the expulsion of three-quarters of a million Palestinians and the destruction of Mandatory Palestinian society. Memories of pre-1948 life and the shock, humiliation, and suffering wrought by the mass displacements of 1948 (and 1967) continue to shape Palestinian politics. The Nakba as a continuing trauma occupies a central place in the Palestinian psyche. It drastically changed the lives of the Palestinians at both the individual and national levels and continues to structure Palestinians’ lives and to suffuse Palestinian political culture, education, popular arts, poetry, and cinema.

It has also led to the consolidation of a distinct and resistant Palestinian identity. Today, more than six decades after the Nakba, some two-thirds of the eleven million Palestinians are refugees or internally displaced persons. The Israeli state continues to colonize, subjugate, dehumanize, and dispossess the indigenous people of Palestine. With millions still living under Israeli military occupation or in exile, the Nakba is a pervasive state of being. Amidst the current deep crises facing Palestine, the sixty-fourth anniversary of the Nakba should be an opportunity for commemoration of and reflection on the past. The importance of historical truth-telling in scholarly engagement with the painful past is essential to achieving reconciliation in Palestine-Israel. I am grateful to the Institute for Palestine Studies for making my book available in this new format for a new generation of readers. Exposing the truth about the past — a moral imperative — can only help to keep the dream for peace with justice alive.

Professor Nur Masalha is Director of the Centre for Religion and History, St. Mary's University College, London, and Professorial Research Associate, SOAS (University of London).

The Passionate Attachment - There has been no media reporting on H.R.4133 — United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012 introduced into the House of Representatives of the 112th Congress on March 5th “To express the sense of Congress regarding the United States-Israel strategic relationship, to direct the President to submit to Congress reports on United States actions to enhance this relationship and to assist in the defense of Israel, and for other purposes.”

The sponsors include Eric Cantor, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Howard Berman (all of whom are Jewish) and also Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who is Norwegian but might as well be Jewish given his frequently expressed love for Israel. The bill provides Israel with a blank check drawn on the US taxpayer to maintain its “qualitative military superiority” over all of its neighbors combined. It is scheduled for passage on a “suspension of the rules,” which means it will not actually be voted on and will be approved by consent of Congress.

It is perhaps no coincidence that on Monday the Republicans in the guise of the redoubtable Howard “Buck” McKeon released their proposal for increased defense spending (yes, increased) for 2013. It includes a cool $1 billion for Israel to upgrade its missile defenses. That’s on top of the $3 billion it already receives plus numerous co-production programs that are off the books and defense spending that is not considered to be part of the annual grant. Perhaps “Buck” should consider changing his sobriquet to “Warbucks.” Buck is not Jewish but he is a Mormon, perhaps a sign of what will be coming if we are so unlucky as to vote into office the born again Hawk Mitt Romney. Mitt has a foreign policy team consisting of more than thirty stalwarts, mostly drawn from the Bush Administration, and nearly all of whom are neocons. It features Robert Kaplan, John Bolton, and Dan Senor.

Israel and its partisan hacks in Congress are utterly shameless. At a time when the country is screaming for some measure of restraint in government spending, Israel is the one budget line that only sees increases.

A tipping point is where physical momentum, inclined in one direction, reverses its course, stabilizes, and then begins to move the opposite way. Those of us who have been arguing for a sane United States foreign policy in the Middle East have well understood that the odds on shifting the prevailing narrative have been heavily against us thanks to the overwhelming resources possessed by a powerful domestic lobby. Ten years ago in America, it was impossible to place even a letter in a mainstream newspaper or magazine that was in any way critical of Israel. Apart from Pat Buchanan, no one on television provided a critique of Israel and its policies. In the U.S. media, Israel was ever the beleaguered little democracy surrounded by savage Arabs.

But then, all of a sudden, the conspiracy of silence began to break down.

It began with the revisionist history of the antecedents of the Iraq War as that conflict continued to drag on. Many began attributing Washington’s initiation of the fighting, at least in part, to Israeli interests. Philip Zelikow, chief counsel for the 9/11 Commission Report, famously noted in March 2004 that the war was “to protect Israel,” surely an exaggeration but containing more than a kernel of truth. Many also began to observe that the agitation for a new war with Iran was following the same pattern, with supporters of Israel leading the charge.

In 2006, former President Jimmy Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It provoked considerable outrage and highly publicized resignations from the board of the Carter Foundation together with charges that Carter was supporting Palestinian terrorism. But the big breakthrough came with the publication of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in the following year. It became a New York Times best-seller, and it suddenly became acceptable to talk about Israel without the usual bromides. For the first time, people in America were taking notice of the power of the Israel lobby and the inherent downside for U.S. national interests.

Driven by the prospect of unending warfare in an attempt to remake the Muslim world by force, letters and op-eds critical of Israel and its policies began to appear in the mainstream media. There weren’t a lot, mind you, and they were always “balanced” by more numerous contrary commentaries, but there were enough to demonstrate that a shift was taking place. Mainstream Jewish organizations, always vigilant in defense of what they have perceived as Israel’s interest, resorted increasingly to discrediting critics by calling them “anti-Semites.” Indeed, they succeeded in equating any criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism and even managed to pass legislation in Canada and several European nations that made any criticism of Israel ipso facto a hate crime.

Some American Jews have always been bothered by the dark side of Israel’s story, beginning with the Nakba expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes and including the more recent settlement policy, “security” wall, and the denial of civil and human rights to the Arabs living in Israel and the occupied territories. They were convinced, correctly, that Israel had no intention to permit the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Many began to protest, though their voices were at first confined to the alternative media and they had to work through many progressive groups that were advancing a much broader peace agenda in response to George W. Bush’s horrific “global war on terror.”

But now we Americans have finally reached our tipping point. Recently Peter Beinart, a Zionist and defender of Israel for many years, released The Crisis of Zionism, which explains how Israel has become an armed camp dedicated to repressing and even expelling its Palestinian helots. As a liberal Jew, he rejects the militant values that drive the Israel of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has even gone so far as to support an economic boycott of Israel, similar to the pressure that was put on South African apartheid. The book has predictably provoked a firestorm of criticism from the pro-Israel establishment, but Beinart is not alone. Tom Friedman and Paul Krugman of The New York Times, both Jewish and both longtime friends of Israel, have voiced the same concerns, namely that Israel no longer represents the liberal and humanistic values that they themselves cherish. It has been noted in passing that young American Jews increasingly do not view Israel in positive terms, a sign, if one was needed, that the older generation that believes Israel is always right, no matter what it does, is passing into history.

And it does not end there. Even the mainstream media is now, perhaps reluctantly, on board. On April 22, 60 Minutes, the most watched television news and commentary program in the United States, aired a segment on Israeli persecution of Christians. The program was a real shock for the many fundamentalist Christians who have viewed Israel through rose-tinted glasses. Many evangelicals have promoted the myth that Israel is actually a protector of Christians, which it most emphatically is not; it seeks instead to marginalize them and force them to emigrate, as the 60 Minutes program demonstrated. Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, who tried to kill the story and called it a “hatchet job,” was interviewed as part of it. His performance was alternately smug and angry, and it is widely regarded as a public relations disaster. He even said that mainstream Christian churches are “known for their anti-Semitism.”

Benjamin Netanyahu’s office supported Oren’s contention that the broadcast was a “threat to Israel.” It was Netanyahu’s second venture into public relations in a short time, having previously denounced German Nobel Prize–winning author Gunter Grass. Netanyahu banned Grass from traveling to Israel and said that his writings had “hurt Israel profoundly.” Netanyahu was responding to Grass’s rather mild declaration in a poem that the Jewish state’s nuclear program is a threat to an “already fragile world peace.”

Netanyahu knows that the tide is running against him and everything he represents, particularly as the criticism from former senior officials in his own country continues to mount, but he is too obdurate to do what must be done. One of Israel’s darkest secrets is the extent to which young, educated Jews are fleeing the country for greener pastures, most notably the United States. By some guesstimates, one third of university-educated second- and third-generation Israeli Jews have left the country. They are leaving behind the recent Russian immigrants, many of whom are not actually religiously or ethnically Jewish, and the Islamophobic racists who constitute the core of the hard right in Israel. Israel publishes no statistics on the brain drain, which has intensified the country’s demographic problem and lessened its competitiveness.

So we have reached the point where the proverbial cat is out of the bag. Everyone, with the possible exception of the U.S. Congress, has become aware that there is something terribly wrong with Israel. In Israel itself, where there is often ferocious debate over the country’s policies, it is time for a reckoning. Does Israel want to become a normal state with correct relationships with its neighbors, including an independent Palestine, or does it want to continue down the road that it is pursuing, which is folly and will lead to ruin? The choice is ultimately Israel’s, but, for the first time, Americans are actually beginning to talk and write freely and openly about the problem.

IRmep - Declassified files from long-running investigations of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) over alleged illegal diversions of US government-owned weapons-grade uranium to Israel are now available online athttp://www.IRmep.org/ila/numec

The 733 pages of information obtained under the Freedom of Information Act for the new book Divert! NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro and the diversion of US weapons-grade uranium into the Israeli nuclear weapons program include:

A 1980 FBI interview of an eyewitness (PDF) of NUMEC executives stuffing U-235 canisters into sealed equipment shipped toIsrael.

CIA Director of Operations Carl Duckett's 1978 testimony about NUMEC (PDF) before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Atomic Energy Commissioner Glenn T. Seaborg's reaction (PDF) to news that traces of Portsmouth U-235 of the type supplied to NUMEC had been picked up in Israel.

NUMEC corporate correspondence (PDF) with the AEC claiming that undercover Israeli intelligence agents Rafael Eitan and Ephraim Beigun visiting NUMEC in 1968 were merely energy scientists.

National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bresinski's 1979 order (PDF) that Senator John Glenn not be given direct access to a top secret memorandum about "missing material from the NUMEC plant in Apollo, PA."

Deputy Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti's confidential letter (PDF) to President Jimmy Carter to "establish a plan for coordinated interagency action to detect and investigate the theft or diversion of nuclear material in the future."

A 1978 congressional interview transcript (PDF) with NUMEC President Dr. Zalman Shapiro.

National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's 1969 strategy document (PDF) about how the US should respond to Israel's clandestine nuclear weapons program.  "There is circumstantial evidence that some fissionable material available for Israel's weapons development was illegally obtained from the United States by about 1965."

FBI wiretap (PDF) of a 1969 toxic spill at NUMEC caused by improper storage.

According to a 2001 Department of Energy report, NUMEC lost 269 kilograms of highly enriched uranium between 1957 and 1968—the highest in the US and enough for dozens of atomic weapons.  The former NUMEC factory site is currently undergoing a toxic cleanup the US Army Corps of Engineers estimates could cost taxpayers between $250-$500 million. The newly published book Divert! (available in paperback and Kindle) presents additional evidence that NUMEC—unable to complete US government contracts or protect workers and the environment—was originally established as a nuclear smuggling front.

Mondoweiss - The day after we reported high drama in the wild wild West Bank, the government of Israel filed another petition to the high court to appeal the demolition of Ulpana, the illegal outpost previously slated for demolition on Tuesday May 1st. This time the state claimed their appeal was due to new evidence the demolition of the illegal outpost would "have significant ramifications as to the future construction in Beit El"!

Ulpana (Photo: Gil Yohanan)Keep in mind the high court has already ruled in favor of the Palestinian landowners. What a farce! Notice the state did not claim any new evidence suggesting the land was not owned by the Palestinians landowners? No, they want Ulpana to serve as a test case.

Ynet:

According to the petition, "After much deliberation and the examination of various alternatives, and after giving due consideration to the broad social implications the implementation of these policies may have on future construction, the (government) has decided to review the legal priorities in the are."

The government wishes "To take into account all the possible zoning, social, political and operational ramifications," the appeal said.

The prosecution stressed that according to the new policy the government is promoting, "The narrow interpretation of the law, by which a structure's fate is determined, can no longer be applied to the situation on the ground; and is pursuing new policies, by which decisions regarding structures built on land whose ownership is contested, will be made on a case-by-case merit."

Law enforcement priorities in the West Bank must be ordered according to "the bigger picture and in a broad connotation," the appeal said.

The State Prosecutor's Office further argued that Ulpana must be seen as a test case and an example for the need for a more current policy.

Both Michael Sfard, international law specialist, and Peace Now used damning words to describe the radical nature of this latest development.

Yesh Din Attorney Michael Sefarad, who represents the Palestinian petitioners in the case, said in response that "Today, the Israeli government has declared war against the rule of law.

"The government, in its political despair, is assisting the theft of Palestinian land and it is razing the moral values upon which the State of Israel was founded," he said.

Peace Now issued a statement saying that the State's actions were "a constitutional terror attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers are breaking a commitment given to the court and are placing the settlers above the law.

"In the moment of truth, the government is backing land theft and the violation of court orders, only to appease a few thousand settlers who are members of the Likud caucus."

Naturally the settlers are thrilled! "That the government has finally gotten hold of the reins of sovereignty and has given tangible expression to the rule of law, justice and morality."

The State Attorney's Office had filed the appeal last Friday, asking for a three-month delay in the scheduled demolition of the Ulpana outpost. On April 30th the court granted an appeal to postpone the demolition for two months.

Jerusalem Post:

The High Court of Justice on Sunday granted a state appeal to postpone the demolition of illegal structures in the West Bank, granting a 60-day extension. The State Attorney's Office had filed the appeal on Friday, asking for a three-month delay in the scheduled demolition of the Ulpana outpost.

The High Court had previously ordered the evacuation of the 30 homes in the West Bank outpost by May 1 because they were built on land classified as private Palestinian property.

In the past year, right-wing politicians and residents of Ulpana have lobbied the government to legalize the homes.

There is an upcoming High Court of Justice hearing on the case, scheduled for Sunday, May 6th, 10:30am. According to Yesh Din:

Lawyers Michael Sfard, Shlomy Zachary and Avisar Lev, who petitioned the High Court of Justice on behalf of the Palestinian land owners in the Ulpana neighborhood on Jabel Artis through the human rights organization Yesh Din, submitted yesterday (Thursday) to the HCJ their response to the state's motion to nullify the verdict and submit a new state position on the petition that has been concluded. The petitioners' representatives wrote to the court that they consider the motion to be anact of contempt of court, as there is no possibility to renew deliberations on a petition in which a peremptory rule was given. "The commitments of the government of Israel are written in magic ink that can be erased by party politics."

Sfard, Zachary and Lev explain their motion by saying that the government violated the rules of etiquette that have applied to the relations between the judiciary branch and the executive branch for 64 years and threatens to crush the trust upon which our system of government is based.

“Since Israel was founded, no prime minister, no minister and no attorney general have ever dared do such a thing… the current position of the government of Israel, is that the government of Israel is allowed to retract a commitment it gave the honorable court, even when said commitment was anchored in a verdictand even when there are no new facts or force majeure that prevent its execution.”

The petitioners accuse the government that it submitted the motion at the last minute “so that the judicial branch would not to have time to react, express its opinion, or issue a warning. They acted at the last minute, on Friday afternoon, four days before the violation, two days if we subtract the Sabbath.” And they go on to ask: “What must the citizens of Israel think when they see their Prime Minister, Defense Minister, commanding general of a military command and commander in the Israel Police announcing publicly that they decided not to fulfill a commitment they gave and that was anchored in a court verdict? Do the rules that apply to citizens not apply to the government, the army and the police?”

“No citizen could reopen a file in which a verdict was given and the state's request breaks all the rules of the game. To help settlers steal Palestinian land, the government is willing to crush even the most fundamental values upon which Israeli society is built.”

“In this case, the state violated a commitment that was anchored in a verdict in a case where there is no dispute that the petitioners' land was illegally stolen and that illegal construction was built on it… When the rules crumble, when gone is the culture of government where a commitment by a prime minister and defense minister to the Supreme Court is a solid rock and a verdict that anchors a government commitment enjoys the exact same finality as an absolute order issued against a citizen – all of the arrangements that sustain us as a society are in doubt. What should the state prosecutor's office say to a defendant who signed a plea bargain that was validated as a verdict, but changed his mind a year later? What should the state attorney's office say to a commercial company that agreed to a compromise in a civil dispute as part of a legal procedure between them but changed its mind sometime later? That commitments must be fulfilled? That verdicts must be executed?....Which section of the Basic Law: The Judiciary, or Courts Law [Combined Version], 5744-1984, which regulation in the Civil Procedural Law Regulations, 5744-1984 or in the Rules of Procedure in the High Court of Justice, 5744-1984 allow ‘renewal of deliberations’ in a case in which a verdict was given (other than by way of appeal, retrial or additional hearing)?”

Mondoweiss - “I don’t want to open all my wounds…,” says Maher Daoud, a descendent of Iqrit refugees, as we drive to the site where the village of his parents once stood. I wince and apologize, aware of how difficult the subject must be for him.

Iqrit is one of the 350 or so Palestinian villages that were completely destroyed and ethnically cleansed in 1948, its residents barred from returning but turned, overnight, into internal refugees in their own country.

A Flower on His Grave, by Ismail Shammout.

Maher, 43, is married to my cousin, Njoud, and they live in Mi’ilya, a village in the Galilee. They regularly drive up to Iqrit, whose church is all that remains today, to partake in religious celebrations at Christmas and Easter and to visit dead relatives in Iqrit’s cemetery. The occasion of our visit now is sombre: Maher’s mother passed away two years ago, and we are here to visit her grave on the occasion of Good Friday, as is the custom among Palestinian Christians.

The drive to Iqrit takes a mere twenty minutes from my village, Fassouta. Both are in the Galilee: the north of historical Palestine, a few kilometres from the Lebanese border. During Israel’s “War of Independence” in 1948, or the Nakba (Catastrophe) as Palestinians refer to it, the residents of Iqrit and Biram, another nearby village, were uprooted from their homes on “security grounds,” presumably for Israel to protect its northern border. The residents of Iqrit were bussed to Rama village, twenty kilometers south in the Galilee, and told it would be for a few weeks, until the security situation was calm and they could return. But they never did.

On Christmas Eve, 1950, the Israeli army blew up all the houses of Iqrit, in a timely “Christmas gift” to its expelled Christian residents. My father, a boy of 12 at the time, saw the smoke rising above the village in the distance, and, in panic and haste, told a man named Tu’meh from Iqrit, who had taken refuge in Fassouta. Tu’meh’s eyes filled with tears.

In 1951, the Israeli High Court ruled that the villagers be allowed to return “as long as no emergency decree” existed against the village. With cold predictability, the government was quick to issue such a decree against the Iqrit evacuees. In 1953, it blew up the houses of Biram, too, leaving only the churches of the two villages standing. Two years later, the theft was completed: the land of the two villages - 16,000 dunams (4,000 acres) in Iqrit and 12,000 dunams (3000 acres) in Biram - was expropriated for establishing Jewish settlements, which are there today:            Even Menahem, Shlomi, and Shtula.

I’d read about this before; Israel coldly and ruthlessly destroyed about 350 Palestinian villages and turned close to 700,000 Palestinians into homeless refugees during the Nakba. I had visited Suhmata, another such village, already, so I was prepared for what I expected to see.

Nothing stopped the flood of goose bumps, though, when my cousin whispered: “Here it is. The village starts here.”

Iqrit

“The village” that she was referring to “started” as a small pile of rubble by the roadside. Maher was quick to point to the church atop a hill in the distance. “That’s Iqrit,” he said.

I experienced the same sickening disbelief I’d felt when an old relative had pointed to a tree-covered hill and told me: “Here it is. This is Suhmata.”

In fact, it is completely surreal: all you see are shrubs and trees, thick greenery as is characteristic of the wilderness of Galilee. The small piles of rubble dotted periodically around are the only small reason to believe that those speaking to you are not deranged or delusional.

Iqrit's Cemetery
As we climb up the winding road in Maher’s car, I notice piles of fresh rubble by the side. He says: “We put asphalt on the road a few years ago, just to be able to drive up to the cemetery because the old people can’t walk up this far. But the Jewish settlers came and tore up the road. You can see the piles every few meters.” Such is the refusal and phobia of Israel that Palestinians may exercise their right of return to their stolen homes: even a simple road to get to a cemetery is torn apart, lest it become a precedent

Commemoration Stone of those who staged sit in to Return to Iqrit.

We reach the cemetery and walk in with flowers and candles to pay our respects. I notice a large stone at the entrance with these words on it: “We remember and will not forget - This stone was erected in memory of our fathers and mothers who staged a sit-in in Iqrit Church, in the hope of returning alive, as the highest judicial authority in the country deemed, to rebuild what the hands of decision makers have destroyed. But the policy of rights abuses and land confiscation did not allow them to do so, and they died refugees in their own land.”

I start to read the names that follow… Elias Yousef Daoud, Atallah Mousa Atallah, Elias Diab Sbeit, Najib Jiryis Khayyat, and on it goes… Eighteen names of people who tried desperately to undo the cruel fate that they had been dealt by Israel and return to their homes, but whose efforts were in vain, until they could only return as dead to be buried in their village.

In fact, such was not even the case: from the time Iqrit was ethnically cleansed in 1948 until 1972, its scattered residents were not even allowed to bury their dead in the village. This posed a serious problem, for they had to rely on the kindness of the people of Rama to give them a space in its cemetery. Suddenly, a death was not only cause for mourning but for logistical worry as well. In a sad story that Maher told me, a group of young men once decided to break the rule and took the body of one of their dead for burial at night in Iqrit. Israeli soldiers heard of the matter and followed them, then forced them to dig the ground again, retrieve the coffin and take it to be buried elsewhere.

Life for the living wasn’t much easier. The people of Iqrit settled in Rama in harsh conditions. With the sudden influx of refugees, daily living was crowded and difficult, and jobs were scarce. The pain of having just lost, overnight, everything that they owned was compounded by this new and harsh reality. Maher, for example, was the grandson of the mukhtar, or head of the village, of Iqrit. His grandfather was very well off, owned a shop and an olive oil press, and traded in tobacco. The shock of losing all that he owned - his home, lands, and businesses - and being turned into a homeless, penniless refugee overnight was overwhelming. Maher’s father lived in denial. “For years, all the time that I was growing up, my father refused to paint the house or do any badly needed renovation to it. Why? Because he feared that in doing so, he would be seen as acclimatising to his new home, having forgotten Iqrit or his hope of returning.”

The people of Iqrit proved themselves in Rama, taking menial work and enduring difficult conditions to support their families. Eventually, the next generations moved to Haifa and elsewhere in search of work.

Do they feel a connection to Rama, now, as their surrogate home? I pose the question to Maher and he says, “Sure, I was born in Rama and grew up there, I have memories there and feel some belonging. But I’m not from Rama. I’m from Iqrit.” He tells me that the people of Rama also add to this feeling; when he asked for directions to someone’s house, for example, the man in the street responded with: “Oh! The man from Iqrit…” before giving him directions. This was despite the man in question having lived in Rama for more than sixty years.

For the Expected One, by Ismail Shammout
Maher was sorely reminded of this misfit when he decided to build a house for himself and his family. His father had no land in Rama. When Maher got married, he rented a flat in Kfar Veradim, a Jewish locale near the Palestinian village of Tarshiha where he works, and lived there for a number of years. Then, with rent becoming too high for him, he moved to Mi’ilya, another nearby Arab village, where he bought land to buy a house. He then faced a problem that he had never thought of: some residents of Mi’ilya did not want him. He was labelled a stranger, and an uproar ensued on his owning land in the village, including threats and slander against him. Maher comments bitterly: “If I were still in Iqrit, my grandfather’s land would have been more than enough. I would not have needed to beg anyone for a corner to live in with my family!”

“Every day, I feel that I’m a living testimony to the injustice that was done to us,” he continues. I ask him how he reconciles, internally, living in Israel, alongside the people who took away his village and committed this injustice. “It’s a huge contradiction,” he says painfully. “They are the ones who did this to me, to us, yet they are my customers in my hummus shop; I need them to survive.” He finds it emotionally difficult to separate work from the personal, though. Sometimes, he enters into political discussions with Jewish customers, but is frustrated because he can’t say everything he wants. He cites an incident that took place when he was living in Kefar Veradim. One of his neighbours had come to his shop to buy food and inquired, “So, what’s it like living in our place?” Maher quickly looked at her and replied, “Actually, you’re the ones living in my place. You’re the guests in this country, and unwanted ones at that.” The customer did not return.

Iqritians renovate church of Iqrit (Iqrit Community Association 2010)

The people of Iqrit are remarkably tight-knit and steadfast in their resolution to return to their village. Six decades after they were ousted from their homes and lands, they still pray in their church, bury their dead in Iqrit, and hold summer camps there annually for their children, to teach them about their village. A famous poet from Iqrit, Aouni Sbeit, was once quoted telling a reporter, during a demonstration of the people of Iqrit in front of the Israeli prime minister’s office: “If you put your ear to the belly of a pregnant woman from Iqrit, you will hear the baby saying that we shall return!”

Powerful words, but whether they will ever come true for these internal refugees is anyone’s guess. Despite an on-going legal battle, Israel will not allow them to return, lest it set a precedent for the return of other Palestinian refugees to their homes. Despite the fact that, in 1998, then-justice minister Tzachi Hanegbi recommended to the Netanyahu government that “no obstacles should be placed in the way of the return of the evacuees,” the final settlement offered to them in 1995 and 1996 was that Iqrit and Biram be re-established as community settlements on the basis of long-term land leases. In other words, the residents would have to “rent” their own lands from the state. Not surprisingly, they refused. The case has since been at a stalemate. Maher remarks bitterly: “How many articles have been written about Iqrit… How much material circulated… And we still can’t go home.”

The story of Iqrit, though, illustrates the power of home and belonging. No one, not even Israel, can take that away. Palestinians have been connected to this land for generations; it’s not a connection that they can sever or replace. They know no other home and ask only for their basic human right: to return to this home that they were so cruelly ousted from. “My father has lived a temporary existence for sixty-four years,” Maher says. “Because, for sixty-four years, he’s been sitting on his suitcase, waiting to go home.”

Sign showing site of home in Iqrit

International Herald Tribune - BEIT IJZA, West Bank — One of the first statements under oath that I took for Al Haq, a human rights organization I helped establish, was from Sabri Garaib, a farmer from Beit Ijza, a Palestinian village ten miles northwest of Jerusalem. I remember sitting on the porch of his house overlooking the garden and the low, undulating hills planted with wheat and barley that spread out on all sides. All 112 acres, I was told, were in danger of being expropriated by the new Jewish settlement of Givon Hahadasha.

It was 1982. In the many years since then Sabri repeatedly fought the settlers in order to hold on to his land. He would go to the Military Objection Committee to counter claims challenging his ownership. He would appeal to the Israeli high court, using every recourse available. He would go to jail for fighting off settlers who tried to stop him from farming or for removing fences they’d put up. But the settlement kept growing all around his house, claiming his land one acre at a time.

Sabri died on April 18. He was 73. It had been several years since I’d gone to his house, and when I visited recently to pay my condolences to his family I was appalled by what I saw. The house was hemmed in on three sides, with only a few yards of space left for a garden between the house and a gigantic steel fence. To get to the front door, I had to pass through a metal gate that is operated from the army camp nearby and walk down a narrow walkway lined with more steel fencing. Two cameras placed by the army monitor all movement through the gate.

Sabri never expressed political views. He had inherited this land from his father and as an only child was determined to pass it on to his 10 sons. This emboldened him. A short stocky man with piercing dark eyes, he would force his way into whatever government office and declare: “I am Sabri and this is what I need.”

He ended up doing better than most. He did lose much of his farmland, but he kept his house. And the last battle he fought, he won. He had opposed the planned construction of the a separation wall, which would have placed his house on the side of the settlement and separated it from his village and the homes of his sons. The wall did get built but along a different path.

For me, Sabri’s death marks the end of an era when it was possible to believe that law could save Palestinian land from Jewish settlers. An Israeli court would never enforce the principle of international law that says all settlements built in the occupied West Bank are illegal. But at first Israel justified its settlement projects by claiming to be using only public land, and we thought we could safeguard the homes and fields of some Palestinians by proving they were privately owned.

But no. An official Israeli government study published in March 2005, the Sasson Report, revealed that at least 150 communities in the West Bank were established with no permits or incomplete ones. And the very government that commissioned the study has taken no corrective action. A 2007 report by the Israeli NGO Peace Now found that 24 percent of the land on which settlements stand is privately owned by Palestinians.

After I left Sabri’s house, I drove back to Ramallah, riding through tunnels burrowed under the highways that connect Jewish settlements to the rest of Israel. There’s no escaping the new geography of this land, I thought.

And then another thought struck, perhaps one even bleaker. Israel may have won the battle of settling into the West Bank, but it has lost the war of making peace with its closest neighbors, the Palestinians. And they are Israel’s only hope of gaining acceptance in the Middle East.

Raja Shehadeh, a lawyer and writer living in Ramallah, is the author of “A Rift in Time: Travels with my Ottoman Uncle,” “2037: Le Grand Bouleversement” and “Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape,” which won the Orwell Prize in 2008.

Wall Writings - By a vote of 558 to 367, a strong majority of lay and clerical delegates to the United Methodist General Conference called this week for a boycott of Israeli companies operating in Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT).

The resolution denounces the Israeli occupation and the settlements in a sweeping indictment.

It calls for “all nations to prohibit the import of products made by companies in Israeli settlements on Palestinian land.”

The resolution was focused specifically on the settlements, not on the state of Israel. It states:

“The United Methodist Church does not support a boycott of products made in Israel. Our opposition is to products made by Israeli companies operating in occupied Palestinian territories.”

That was not an easy vote. It also was an important victory for anti-occupation forces in Tampa since it calls attention to one of three actions in the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that Palestinians have adopted as a non-violent way to attack the occupation.

The vote on a resolution calling for the UMC to divest its pension funds from three US Corporations, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard and Motorola Systems, was brought to the floor on Wednesday afternoon.

That resolution was a long shot from the outset. It lost after a series of votes that  ended in a final 685 to 246 decision that the UMC would continue to finance the occupation.

One loss and one victory will prepare the United Methodist Church to take the next step in ending United Methodist support for the occupation. Like the segregated church it was until 1964, the United Methodist church can change.

In 1964, a United Methodist layman, W. Astor Kirk, demonstrated how that change can happen. His life story was distributed by United Methodist News Service after his death eight months ago. The full story may be found at the end of this posting.

Kirk and his fellow activists led Methodism out of the darkness of the “go slow” attitude which Martin Luther King, Jr., deplored.

Kirk suffered setbacks in his struggle against segregation within Methodism. Looking back on 1964, after a church union commission voted to continue the segregated conference for African Americans, Kirk wrote:

On the morning of May 5, 1964, when the Church Union Commission made its report … I was completely dumbfounded. My emotions ranged from deep anger to almost uncontrollable outrage to profound sorrow. I could not believe that as late as 1964 … the Church Union Commission would be so ethnically insensitive to the feelings of United Methodist Blacks that it would offer a repetition of the tragic mistake of 1939 [when the denomination adopted a segregated structure].”

This sense of outrage and anger is currently being felt by a new generation of United Methodists activists like Kirk as they proceed in 2012 to win some battles and lose others. They are planning for a long, and ultimately successful battle.

The United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, which Kirk once directed, and which is now under the direction of Dr. Jim Winkler, came to the 2012 Conference armed with resolutions from six difference annual conferences.  They came prepared.

These UMC anti-occupation leaders coupled a boycott resolution that lacked specificity, with a divestment resolution that named names. They hoped to win on both resolutions, but they knew they could lose one or both.

The boycott resolution passed, while the divestment resolution lost. But the open discussion that followed the introduction of both resolutions exposed the issue to the wider church and to the secular public in ways that Israel does not appreciate.

None of this is really a political debate over money. It is a media war with a moral bite, a public image struggle which Israel is desperate to win and which they most certainly lost in Tampa, in spite of all the spinning by Israel’s US allies.

A boycott is a recommendation to members and churches and a moral call to the larger public. Divestment, even in the comparatively smaller sums involved in the national church’s investment funds, is the greater danger to Israel’s image. Think apartheid and South Africa.

During the heated debate over the UMC pension divestment from three corporations, speakers defending Israel warned that the Methodist church might be subject to law suits for choosing to move funds from one company to another.

That is patently false, of course, but political speeches in secular and religious circles are the same; they are designed to deceive and distort. And Methodists do like to protect the bottom line.

Then there is the matter of finally voting on a resolution. Delegates arrive at the every-four-years gathering after being elected  to represent their regional conferences; they sit together under the watchful eye of their presiding bishop, men and women with the power to transfer preachers to larger–or smaller–churches once a year.

Lay delegates also arrive after achieving personal standing in church affairs back home. Unofficial racial and age  categories are in play, though unlike the Democratic political conventions, the categories are not mandated.

But these lay delegates do reflect the perspective of the communities where they live. Imagine an attorney from a small Georgia town returning home to tell his clients he just voted to endorse same-sex marriage.  You get the picture.

The divestment vote was always a long shot.  Consider the regions–annual conferences they are called–that sent the original divestment resolutions to the General Conference: California-Pacific, Minnesota, Northern Illinois, West Ohio, New England, and Baltimore-Washington.

None of these are from what became known after the 2008 General Election as “red states”. They are all from the eastern, mid-western and far western, sections of the country, states that were called “blue states” after the election of Barack Obama.

The United Methodist Church is not a monolithic body. It is a collection of small units of churches, organized by states or sections of states, ruled over by a bishop.

The rest of the assembled 600-plus representatives backed down from supporting a strong resolution that would have divested the church’s pension funds from three US corporations, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard and Motorola Systems, each of which is deeply involved in supporting Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem.

That resolution failed after an afternoon of heated passionate speeches, and a set of parliamentary maneuvers that never gained more than 372 votes from the almost 1,000 delegates present.

By a resounding victory of 685 to 286, the Conference endorsed the UMC’s financial committee resolution which was the final shameful expression by the heirs of John Wesley that wanted to continue to embrace Israel’s theft of the land promised them back in the dim days of biblical history.

I checked with several attorneys. They assured me that there is not court of law in the United States that would honor a biblical promise as a legal claim.  But there they were, the occasional UMC delegate, embracing that concept and voting against divestment.

Of course, not every vote against divestment came from biblical literalists. But at least one literalist got on to the floor during the debate and embraced the promise as a reason to support the occupation.

Wednesday would have been a dark day for Methodism, except for the smart move by anti-occupation delegates to add a boycott resolution to the Conference docket. The side favoring the end of occupation won one, a step forward in what is still a long journey.

Organized religion is, by definition, slow, cautious and distressingly slow. Consider the Catholic Church, still ruled by a Pope in Rome, with rules that bar female clergy and beliefs that are far behind progressive views of human sexuality.

But as this General Conference proved, progress is possible, even in slow-moving established church bodies. Eight years ago the occupation would not have been part of the floor debate. And eight years ago, resolutions counter to the conventional and cautious attitude toward Israel would have been relegated to the final hours of the Conference where time demands would have rushed through meaningless substitute resolutions.

In 2012, a boycott resolution prevailed. A small number of church leaders and conference lay and clerical delegates found a far more receptive gathering of 1000 delegates than has ever been the case in previous General Conferences.

This slowly moving decision-making body has begun to listen to those willing to defy the majority.

All of which calls to mind an earlier United Methodist layman, and a friend of mine, W. Astor, “Bill”, Kirk, an African American church leader who made himself a courageous agitator until the Methodists finally broke the shackles of institutional racial segregation.

His story is that of a Methodist hero who saw evil for what it was and would not give up until his church agreed with him.

Bill Kirk was 89 when he died on August 13, 2011. He had served as a director of the public affairs department of the Board of Church and Society of The United Methodist Church from 1961 to 1966 and as the board’s interim top executive in 1987 and 1988.

It is this board, now directed by Jim Winkler, which was a sponsor of the divestment resolution that was presented to the 2012 General Conference just eight months after Kirk died.

In a story prepared for United Methodist News after Kirk’s death , the Rev. Dean Snyder wrote,”Bill Kirk played an historic role in ending institutional segregation in The United Methodist Church.”

Kirk’s story is that of an African-American layman determined to teach and lead his fellow Methodists to understand the evil of racial segregation.

His story, as it is told by Snyder, needs to be read in full as the 2012 United Methodist General Conference adjourns. Keep in mind that the US Supreme Court unanimously declared segregation illegal on May 15, 1954, in Brown vs. the United States.

In 1960, while serving as a professor at Huston-Tillotson College in Austin, Texas, [Kirk] was elected secretary of the Committee of Five, a group established by the Central Jurisdiction of the Methodist Church with a mandate to end racial segregation within the denomination. The Central Jurisdiction was a structure created in 1939 to segregate African-Americans within the Methodist Church.

Overcoming discrimination was a fight he knew well. He had earned a doctorate in political science at The University of Texas at Austin — the university’s first Ph.D. awarded to an African-American.

Kirk wrote numerous papers and studies for the committee analyzing the history of segregation within the denomination and recommending strategies for ending it.

He took a decisive step against institutional racism during a discussion concerning the merger of the Methodist and Evangelical United Brethren denominations at the 1964 General Conference of the Methodist Church.

Kirk, serving as an alternate delegate, moved an amendment to the proposed plan of merger, which included the continuation of the segregated church. Kirk’s amendment asked that “the Central Jurisdiction structure of the Methodist Church not be made a part of the Plan of Merger.”

In his autobiography, Kirk wrote: “On the morning of May 5, 1964, when the Church Union Commission made its report … I was completely dumbfounded. My emotions ranged from deep anger to almost uncontrollable outrage to profound sorrow. I could not believe that as late as 1964 … the Church Union Commission would be so ethnically insensitive to the feelings of United Methodist Blacks that it would offer a repetition of the tragic mistake of 1939.”

After lengthy debate, the motion, known as “The Kirk Amendment,” passed 464 to 362, establishing the denomination’s commitment to end institutional segregation.

After the 1964 General Conference, when the chair of the Committee of Five, the Rev. James S. Thomas, was elected a bishop, Kirk was elected its new chair. As chair of the Committee of Five, he helped negotiate the mergers of the Delaware and North Carolina-Virginia annual conferences of the Central Jurisdiction with overlapping annual conferences.

In 1965 when southern church leaders argued before the denomination’s Judicial Council that Jurisdictional Conferences had the right to preserve segregated conferences within their boundaries, Kirk took a three-month leave of absence from the Board of Church and Society to prepare a brief arguing that the denomination did have the authority to end segregated conferences. In his brief and oral argument, Kirk argued that the issue of segregation had become a “distinctively connectional matter.”

The Council’s 1965 Judicial Decision No. 232 states: “We have no doubt that the creation of a racially inclusive church is now a matter ‘distinctively connectional’.

In due course, a future Judicial Council (the church’s “Supreme Court”) will rule that the “issue of funding the occupation is a distinctively connectional matter.”

Bill Kirk would be pleased.

The picture of W. Astor Kirk, above, is from United Methodist News Service. The picture of the UMC General Conference was taken by Edward Linsmier for the New York Times.