Category Archives: Arab-Israeli Conflict

Israelis and Palestinians: Live Long and Prosper

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Film and Video, Israel, Palestine


by Leonard Nimoy, Americans for Peace Now, June, 2011

Dear Friend,

When I was a teenager, I told my dad I wanted to be an actor. In response, he gave me the only piece of advice he ever offered me–“Learn to play the accordion.” And he was serious. He said, “You can always make a living with an accordion.”

Because I ignored his advice, I never found out if he was right. Instead, I’ve lived 80 creative years pursuing acting and photography, and working as a director and poet.

If I had listened to my father, and hadn’t done any of those things, chances are you wouldn’t have recognized my name and you wouldn’t be reading this. Now that you are, I’d like to ask you to consider what I have to say. I reach out to you as someone who is troubled to see the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians continue apparently without an end in sight.

In fact, there is an end in sight. It’s known as the two-state solution–a secure, democratic Israel as the Jewish State alongside an independent Palestinian state. Even Israel’s nationalist Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, has come to see this as the shape of the future. The problem is how to reach that end point. It’s something we should be concerned about–not only as world citizens, but as Americans. Continue reading Israelis and Palestinians: Live Long and Prosper →

Doomed to Disappoint

"Arab Spring", Arab-Israeli Conflict, Obama Administration, Palestine


John J. Mearsheimer

by John J. Mearsheimer, Pink Tank, May 19, 2011

Barack Obama gave a major speech on the Middle East today and it is clear from the subsequent commentary that he impressed few people. The main reason is that he did not say much new or indicate that there would be any serious changes in US policy in the region. It was essentially more of the same with the some tweaking here and there. Nevertheless, he did manage to anger some people. For example, Israel’s hard-line supporters were outraged that he said, “Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” For them, the 1967 borders are “Auschwitz borders” and thus can never serve as a basis for negotiations.

Many Palestinians, on the other hand, did not like Obama’s assertion that it made little sense for them to go to the UN General Assembly this September and win recognition for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. Surely they also noticed that shortly after saying that “every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself,” the president said that the Palestinians would have to be content with “a sovereign non-militarized state,” which means that they will not be able to defend themselves against Israel or any other state for that matter. Hypocrisy appears to be wired into the DNA of American foreign-policy makers. Continue reading Doomed to Disappoint →

What Syrians want …

"Arab Spring", Arab-Israeli Conflict, CyberOrient, Syria


What do we want?

by Amina A., A Gay Girl in Damascus, May 9, 2011

The regime claims that they have no idea what we in the opposition want. I find that hard to believe … haven’t they been watching us, listening to our slogans, reading what we write? Do they have facebook? Seriously, it’s spelled out there: “The solution is simple: Stop shooting at demonstrators, allow peaceful demonstrations, remove all your photos and those of your father, release all political prisoners, allow political pluralism and free elections in six months.”

And for Asad? “You will be the pride of contemporary Syria if you can transform Syria from a dictatorship into a democracy. Syrians would be grateful for that, and it is possible to do”
But maybe they do not get it. Maybe it is too simple. Didn’t Emma herself claim in that awful Vogue article that they practice democracy inside the royal household?
Well maybe more specifics would help …

We want an end to dictatorship. We want free and fair elections. We want freedom. Continue reading What Syrians want … →

The Middle East’s oldest dictatorship

"Arab Spring", Arab-Israeli Conflict, Israel, Palestine


Israel’s resolute occupation of Palestinians in not just historic Palestine, but in the West Bank and Gaza Strip specifically, can be considered the oldest quasi-dictatorship in the Middle East, Bishara argues [GALLO/GETTY]

by Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera, April 21, 2011

As the conventional wisdom goes – especially in the West – Israel is the “only democracy” in the Middle East. And that is so, particularly for its Jewish citizens. However Israel has been anything but democratic for the indigenous people of the land, the Palestinian Arabs.

By nature and precedence, foreign military occupation is temporary. Colonialism on the other hand, and more precisely civilian colonisation, is a socio-political system of ruling over another people.

Since its inception at the end of the 19th century, Zionism preached self-determination for the Jewish people in “their” homeland. In reality, Israel has directly or indirectly driven Palestinians out of their homeland, confiscated their properties, rejected their right to return to their homeland despite UN resolutions, and occupied and colonised the rest of their homeland for the last four decades.

Throughout, Israeli military and security services ruled over another people against their will. They oppressed, tortured, exploited and robbed the Palestinians of their land, water and most importantly, their freedom. There has been more political prisoners in Israeli jails than any of its neighbours.

In denial over their predicament, Israeli leaders have taken shelter in the illusion of surplus morality. Continue reading The Middle East’s oldest dictatorship →

The Arab Spring

"Arab Spring", Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bahrain, Egypt, Ethics, Islamophobia 101, Libya, Orientalism, Tunisia, Yemen

By Rashid Khalidi, The Nation, March 21, 2011 and Institute for Palestine Studies, March 3, 2011

Suddenly, to be an Arab has become a good thing. People all over the Arab world feel a sense of pride in shaking off decades of cowed passivity under dictatorships that ruled with no deference to popular wishes. And it has become respectable in the West as well. Egypt is now thought of as an exciting and progressive place; its people’s expressions of solidarity are welcomed by demonstrators in Madison, Wisconsin; and its bright young activists are seen as models for a new kind of twenty-first-century mobilization. Events in the Arab world are being covered by the Western media more extensively than ever before and are being talked about positively in a fashion that is unprecedented. Before, when anything Muslim or Middle Eastern or Arab was reported on, it was almost always with a heavy negative connotation. Now, during this Arab spring, this has ceased to be the case. An area that was a byword for political stagnation is witnessing a rapid transformation that has caught the attention of the world.

Three things should be said about this sea change in perceptions about Arabs, Muslims and Middle Easterners. The first is that it shows how superficial, and how false, were most Western media images of this region. Virtually all we heard about were the ubiquitous terrorists, the omnipresent bearded radicals and their veiled companions trying to impose Sharia and the corrupt, brutal despots who were the only option for control of such undesirables. In US government-speak, faithfully repeated by the mainstream media, most of that corruption and brutality was airbrushed out through the use of mendacious terms like “moderates” (i.e., those who do and say what we want). That locution, and the one used to denigrate the people of the region, “the Arab street,” should now be permanently retired. The second feature of this shift in perceptions is that it is very fragile. Even if all the Arab despots are overthrown, there is an enormous investment in the “us versus them” view of the region. This includes not only entire bureaucratic empires engaged in fighting the “war on terror,” not only the industries that supply this war and the battalions of contractors and consultants so generously rewarded for their services in it; it also includes a large ideological archipelago of faux expertise, with vast shoals of “terrorologists” deeply committed to propagating this caricature of the Middle East. These talking heads who pass for experts have ceaselessly affirmed that terrorists and Islamists are the only thing to look for or see. They are the ones who systematically taught Americans not to see the real Arab world: the unions, those with a commitment to the rule of law, the tech-savvy young people, the feminists, the artists and intellectuals, those with a reasonable knowledge of Western culture and values, the ordinary people who simply want decent opportunities and a voice in how they are governed. The “experts” taught us instead that this was a fanatical people, a people without dignity, a people that deserved its terrible American-supported rulers. Those with power and influence who hold these borderline-racist views are not going to change them quickly, if at all: for proof, one needs only a brief exposure to the sewer that is Fox News. Continue reading The Arab Spring →

Review of “The Jew Is Not My Enemy”

Anthropology/Sociology, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bible and Holy Land, Israel, Judaism


The following is a review of The Jew Is Not My Enemy: Unveiling the Myths that Fuel Anti-Semitism by Tarek Fatah, published by McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 978-0-7710-4783-1 (0-7710-4783-5). The review is written by Ivan Davidson Kalmar and published in the Literary Review of Canada, March, 2011.

As Tarek Fatah, the author of this provocative book, puts it, “By all rational standard, Muslims and Jews should have been, and could be, partners. Their faiths are very similar (…). There were even times when Muslims and Jews prayed together around the tone covered today by the Dome of the Rock [in Jerusalem].” Certainly in the imagination of western Christians at least, Muslims and Jews were for centuries regarded as two of a kind.

From the medieaval theologians through to Hegel, Islam was considered to be a revival of Judaism (which Christians thought should have died with Christ). Though the attitude to both Jews and Muslims has generally been hostile, it was not always so. For example, Jews and Muslims were both admired by nineteenth century romantics as possessors of an eastern spirituality that inspired and could continue to inspire the Occident.

When Jews and Arabs were both classed as members of the same “Semitic” race, “Semite” was at first often meant as a compliment. It was partly in reaction to romantic accounts of the Semites that the term “anti-Semitism” was invented by a new breed of Jew-haters. And it was, in turn, largely a reaction to modern anti-Semitism that the old idea of “returning” the Jews to the Orient took hold in the form of modern Zionism. Zionism led to a long and still ongoing, bloody conflict between Jews and Muslims over the holy land of Israel/Palestine. Continue reading Review of “The Jew Is Not My Enemy” →

Winners and Losers in a Post-Mubarak Arab World

"Arab Spring", Arab-Israeli Conflict, Egypt, Israel, Journalism and Media, Palestine

By Yousef Munayyer, Palestine Center, The Jerusalem Fund, February 14, 2011

Thirty years ago the Soviet Union was at the beginning of a long campaign in Afghanistan, the average person was lucky to have an advanced recording technology called a “VHS tape,” and Mohammad Hosni Mubarak took control of Egypt, the most populous nation in the Arab Middle East. This week, the last of these beginnings came to an end when millions of Egyptian protestors succeeded in toppling one of the longest standing rulers in the 5,000-year history of Egypt.

But as with all eras, Hosni Mubarak’s established norms, some national and others regional, which have now irreversibly changed. What type of government may take form in Egypt in the coming weeks and months is yet to be seen, however, it is highly unlikely that any new government can afford to repeat the mistakes of the previous regime which eliminated pluralistic political participation in the formulation of both domestic and foreign policy.

Many different global players had an investment in the outcome of the drama that finally concluded in Egypt with Mubarak’s departure. So after this transformational moment, who are the winners and who are the losers?

The Winners

1. The People of Egypt – After only 18 days, the people of Egypt succeeded in removing a ruler who had governed Egypt for three decades. But the victory for the people of Egypt is far greater than the removal of one person like Mubarak or his family. Continue reading Winners and Losers in a Post-Mubarak Arab World →

Dawn

"Arab Spring", Anthropology/Sociology, Arab-Israeli Conflict, Egypt, Terrorism Issue, Tunisia

by Sherifa Zuhur, Sociology of Islam and Muslim Societies, February 1, 2011

I find it very difficult to assemble emotions, memories and impressions to respond to the events in Tunisia and Egypt. I have been responding sharply to others who seized the moment to offer their analysis. Certain characterizations of Egyptians did not sit well with me. I also fear that specific arguments are easily manipulated — that the centers of power who have so deftly dominated the media, huge sums of money and many segments of national elites will thwart the resurgence of popular resistance and demonstration of public will. But since those consulted by Barry and Joe and their “teams” are hard at work, spreading fear of a future Egypt non-compliant with the terms of Camp David, conjuring up the Islamist bogeyman, and (one fears) holding Hosni’s hand, we too should speak.

A group of Tunisian friends joined my Facebook page and share their jubilation and updates with me. Their example has inspired Egypt, however, to attribute events in Egypt to Tunisia, or social media and the impact of al-Jazeera would be wrong. Underlying events are Egyptians’ own lengthy struggles and perceptions that transformation is possible. To some degree, fear of counter-revolution is what froze civil expression in Egypt when the communists, the workers and the Muslim Brotherhood were each treated as intolerable threats to the Nasser government. Student activism became possible again in Sadat’s era, but firm rules were established about the “forbidden topics” (the infitah, peace with Israel, corruption, Saudi Arabia etc.) People complied, or they suffered professional defeat, exile, or worse. Then, for many years, violent attacks – against government officials, against judges, policemen, continued up to the crescendo of the firebombing of buses in Tahrir square and the massacre of tourists at Luxor. When the truce with the Gama’at Islamiyya and then Gihad Islami (Islamic Jihad) were achieved, the detentions, torture, and suspension of civilian liberties could have been lifted, but they were not. This year, I spent some time studying instances of extrajudicial actions versus what is acknowledged as state terror. Perhaps they differ in volume, but not in effect. We are speaking of drowning in cold water, the use of dogs, hanging, beatings, electrocution, and threats to family members. These were the weapons of government and are responsible, at least to some degree for the emergence of figures like Ayman al-Zawahiri. In the 2000’s as new “terror” threats emerged, the Minister of the Interior and his employees arrested thousands in the Sinai and elsewhere, and these tactics continued as well as public beatings and confrontations with demonstrators. The emergency laws were extended again, and again. Continue reading Dawn →