The
polarized nature of American politics often makes it difficult to address
fundamental differences between the country’s two main political rivals,
Republicans and Democrats. As each side is intent on discrediting the other at
every opportunity, unbiased information regarding the two parties’ actual
stances on internal and external issues can be difficult to decipher.
Regarding
Palestine and Israel, however, both parties’ establishments are quite clear on
offering Israel unlimited and unconditional support. The discrepancies in their
positions are, at times, quite negligible, even if Democrats, occasionally,
attempt to present themselves as fairer and even-handed.
Judging
by statements made by Democrat presidential candidate, Joe Biden, his running
mate, Kamala Harris, and people affiliated with their campaign, a future
President Biden does not intend to reverse any of the pro-Israel political
measures adopted by the Donald Trump Administration.
Moreover,
a Democrat administration, as revealed, will not even consider the possibility
of conditioning US financial and military support to Israel on the latter’s
respect for Palestinian human rights, let alone international law altogether.
“Joe
Biden has made it clear … he will not tie US security assistance to Israel to
political decisions Israel makes, and I couldn’t agree more,” Harris, who is
promoted enthusiastically by some as a ‘progressive’ politician, was
quoted as saying in a telephone call on August 26. The
call was made to what Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, termed as “Jewish
supporters.” The Jerusalem
Post and the Times
of Israel referred to this crucial constituency as
“Jewish donors.”
Although
the view of the party’s rank and file has significantly
shifted against Israel in recent years, the Democrat’s
upper echelon still caters to the Israel lobby and their rich backers, even if
this means continuing to mold US foreign policy in the Middle East so that it
serves Israeli interests.
Republicans,
on the other hand, have cemented their support for Israel, but no longer around
geostrategic issues pertaining to Israel’s ‘security’ or US interests. The
speeches made by Republican leaders at the Republican National Convention
(RNC), held in
Charlotte, North Carolina last month, were all aimed at reassuring ‘Evangelical-Christian
Zionists’, who represent the most powerful pro-Israel constituency in the US.
The once relatively marginal impact of Evangelical-Christian Zionists in
directly shaping US foreign policy has morphed, over the years, to define the
core values of Republicans.
Regardless
of the nature of the discourse through which Republican and Democrat leaders
express their love and support for Israel, the two parties are decidedly
‘pro-Israel’. There are many recent examples that corroborate this assertion.
On
November 18, 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that Washington
would no longer consider Jewish settlements illegal or a violation of
international law. That position was later cemented in Trump’s so-called ‘Deal
of the Century’, published on January 28.
Democrats,
however, continue to perceive illegal Jewish settlements as, indeed, illegal.
“This decision harms the cause of diplomacy, takes us further away from the
hope of a two-state solution, and will only further inflame tensions in the
region,” Joe Biden’s campaign said in a statement,
in response to Pompeo’s declaration.
Although
markedly different, it is hard to imagine a Democrat administration upholding
the above position, while simultaneously refraining from reversing previous decisions
made by the Trump administration. It can only be one or the other.
One’s
cynicism is fully justified, as we recently learned, that the Democrat
establishment has refused to even use the
word ‘occupation’, with reference to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, in their
party platform released on July 15. According to Foreign Policy, the
decision “followed heavy last-minute lobbying by pro-Israel advocacy groups.”
On December 6, 2017, the Trump administration made one of the boldest
pro-Israel decisions, when he formally recognized Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel. A few months later, on May 14, 2018, the US
embassy was
moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a brazen violation
of international law.
The
legal foundation of Trump’s decision was the Jerusalem
Embassy Act of 1995. This Act was the outcome
of bipartisan efforts, bringing together Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
Interestingly, leading Democrats, such as Joe Biden and John Kerry, were the main
cheerleaders of the embassy move, back then. Only one Democrat senator, the
late Robert Byrd, voted against the
Bill. In the House of Representatives, only 30 out of 204 Democrats voted ‘no’.
Even
though many Democrats rejected the timing of Trump’s implementation of the
Jerusalem Embassy Act, their criticism was largely political, primarily
motivated by Democrats’ attempts to discredit Trump. The fact that the Biden
campaign, later on, made it clear that the decision will
not be reversed should he become president,
is a further illustration highlighting the moral bankruptcy of the Democrat
establishment, as well.
The
truth is, US unconditional backing for Israel is a common cause among all
American administrations, whether Democrat or Republican. What they may differ
on, however, is their overall motive and primary target audience during
election time.
Political polarization and misinformation aside, both Democrats and Republicans head to the November elections with strong pro-Israel sentiments, if not outright support, while completely ignoring the plight of occupied and oppressed Palestinians.
All
over the Middle East, the problems caused by the US shall remain, despite a lip
service to show otherwise. It was announced on September 9
that the U.S. Administration would reduce troop numbers in Iraq from 5,200 to
3,000 by the end of the month. The commander Central Command,
General McKenzie, said the withdrawal was to take place because of “the great
progress the Iraqi forces have made” and that the “ultimate goal” was having
local forces who were capable of preventing a resurgence of Islamic State in
the country.”
In
April 2003 the U.S. invaded Iraq in a wave of exuberant militarism that amongst
other things was intended to stabilize the Middle East. As one means
of achieving stabilization the deposed ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was tried
by a kangaroo court in 2006 and hanged in a disgusting travesty of justice,
which summed up the direction in which Iraq was headed.
The
Washington administration of the era, headed by the pathetic oddball George W
Bush (he of ‘Mission
Accomplished’), was responsible for initiating the chaos which
fell on the region, and no occupant of the White House has managed to achieve
stability in the Middle East — or anywhere else, for that matter. The policy of
the times was encapsulated by Vice-President Cheney, a truly foul person who
will be best remembered for his lip-curling malevolence. Six months
before the invasion he declared that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction, a downright lie that was enthusiastically embraced
by a wide spectrum of gullible idiots, including present presidential contender
Joe Biden, who said America’s war
on Iraq would be part of “a march to peace and security.”
Cheney
went much further, with the mainstream media lapping up his bizarre
predictions, especially when he forecast that “Regime change in Iraq would
bring about a number of benefits to the region” and that after the war, “With
our help, a liberated Iraq can be a great nation once again . .
. Our goal would be an Iraq that has territorial integrity, a
government that is democratic and pluralistic, a nation where the human rights
of every ethnic and religious group are recognized and protected.”
The
results have been starkly contrary to everything predicted by Cheney and all
the other war-slavering savages who helped plunge Iraq and the region into
chaotic carnage. The country’s territorial integrity is threatened by
nationwide instability and, for example, as the UK Foreign Office states, “Turkey conducts
regular military action in the north of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and,
occasionally, further south. There is particular risk in mountainous areas . .
. and near the border with Turkey.”
The
government in Baghdad is hardly democratic, because under the quota
system “the president comes from the Kurdish minority,
the speaker of the parliament from the Sunni Arab minority, and the prime
minister from the Shiite majority. Influential ministry posts are divided among
the country’s religious groups” — but not, of course, of religions that are at
variance with Islamic theocracy. The Council For Foreign Relations noted in August that
“experts say the system contributes to entrenched corruption in Iraq, which
ranks as one of the most corruptcountries in the
world,” and the regular summation in the Iraq Daily Roundup by
Margaret Grifis of Antiwar is indicative
of the ever-increasing carnage and chaos in that stricken land.
As recorded by Associated
Press, there are many militias, some being strongly supported by the loony
leaders of Shia Iran and none of which contribute to “recognition and
protection” of ethnic or religious communities which even under the tyrant
Saddam Hussein were indeed treated in such a fashion. The Israeli
newspaper Haaretz reported that the Jews
had constituted “a privileged group, protected and left to worship as they
wished.” So far as is known, there are about
five Jews left in Iraq.
As
for Christians, the Archbishop of Irbil, the Right Reverend Bashar Warda, said in London last
year that since the US invasion the Christian community had fallen from around
1.5 million to just 250,000. He asked if “a peaceful and innocent
people [will] be allowed to be persecuted and eliminated because of their
faith? And, for the sake of not wanting to speak the truth to the persecutors,
will the world be complicit in our elimination?” But there has been
no answer to that, and no comment from the Bush people who started the war, or
any of those who followed it up with their stupid “surge” and other futile
fandangos. And not a word from the Trump or Biden electioneering
merry-go-round.
Trump
is the supposed Christian Believer who announced in February
that “In America, we don’t punish prayer. We don’t tear down
crosses. We don’t ban symbols of faith. We don’t muzzle preachers .
. . In America, we celebrate faith, we cherish religion, we lift our voices in
prayer, and we raise our sights to the Glory of God.” Biden believes that
“Personally for me, faith, it’s all about hope and purpose and strength, and
for me, my religion is just an enormous sense of solace.”
Unfortunately
they are both hypocrites.
Trump
is a hypocrite about religion because he doesn’t believe in anything but money
and power, and it is significant that his bible-brandishing charade in June was described
by the former Archbishop of Canterbury as “an act of idolatry . .
. In a context where racial privilege itself has long been an
idolatry, where long-unchallenged institutional violence has been a routine
means for the self-defense of that privilege, the image of the President
clinging to the Scriptures as if to an amulet is bizarre even by the standards
of recent years.” Biden, on the other hand, appears to be a genuine
Believer, but cynically uses religion to
attract votes in his campaign to be president. For example, he was a
longtime supporter of the Hyde Amendment that forbade use of government money
to pay for abortions, but when it looked as if he was going to lose votes by
that stance he performed what the Brits call a reverse
ferret and joined the majority.
It
is apparent that the Iraq policies of Trump and Biden don’t rest on religious
belief or indeed any sort of conviction, and that both are prepared to change
course as the voting breezes might blow. Trump’s order of troop
withdrawal from Iraq is nothing but a public relations ploy and Biden’s declaration on September 10
that he “supports drawing down the troops” was entirely negated by his
follow-up that he would keep a “small force”
in the Middle East to “prevent extremists from posing a threat to the United
States.” What garbage.
Nobody
knows what the long-term U.S. policy might be for the country that Washington
destroyed, and neither presidential candidate has the courage, conviction or
ability to produce one.
Reports by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are depressing in their descriptions of the situation in Iraq, and it is obvious that Iraq is going further down the drain while Washington is incapable of preventing the slide that will ruin the lives of even more Iraqi citizens. Whether it’s Trump or Biden in the White House next year, Iraq too is doomed. As well as Yemen, and Syria, and Lybia, etcetera, etcetera.
PALESTINA
Palestine
can never be truly understood through numbers, because numbers are
dehumanizing, impersonal, and, when necessary, can also be contrived to mean
something else entirely. Numbers are not meant to tell the story of the human
condition, nor should they ever serve as a substitute for emotions.
Indeed,
the stories of life, death – and everything in-between – cannot be truly and
fully appreciated through charts, figures and numbers. The
latter, although useful for many purposes, is a mere numerical depository of
data. Anguish,
joy, aspirations, defiance, courage, loss, collective struggle, and so on,
however, can only be genuinely expressed through the people who lived through
these experiences.
Numbers,
for example, tell us that over 2,200 Palestinians were killed during the
Israeli war on the Gaza Strip between July 8 and August 27, 2014, over 500 of
them being children. Over 17,000 homes were completely destroyed, and thousands
of other buildings, including hospitals, schools and factories were either
destroyed or severely damaged during the Israeli strikes.
This
is all true, the kind of truth that is summarized into a neat infographic,
updated occasionally, in case, inevitably, some of the critically wounded
eventually lose their lives.
But
a single chart, or a thousand, can never truly describe the actual terror felt
by a million children who feared for their lives during those horrific days; or
transport us to a bedroom where a family of ten huddled in the dark, praying
for God’s mercy as the earth shook, concrete collapsed and glass shattered all
around them; or convey the anguish of a mother holding the lifeless body of her
child.
It
is easy – and justifiable – to hold the media accountable for the
dehumanization of the Palestinians or, sometimes, ignoring them altogether.
However, if blame must be apportioned, then others too, including those who
consider themselves ‘pro-Palestine’, must reconsider their own position. We are
all, to an extent, collectively guilty of seeing Palestinians as sheer victims,
hapless, passive, intellectually stunted and ill-fated people, desperate to be
‘saved.’
When
numbers monopolize the limelight in a people’s narrative, they do more damage
than merely reduce complex human beings to data; they erase the living, too.
Regarding Palestine, Palestinians are rarely engaged as equals; they persist at
the receiving end of charity, political expectations and unsolicited
instructions on what to say and how to resist. They are often the fodder for
political bargains by factions or governments but, rarely, the initiative
takers and the shapers of their own political discourse.
The
Palestinian political discourse has, for years, vacillated between one
constructed around the subject of victimhood – which is often satisfied by
numbers of dead and wounded – and another pertaining to the elusive Fatah-Hamas
unity. The former only surfaces whenever Israel decides to bomb Gaza under any
convenient pretext at the time, and the latter was a response to western
accusations that Palestinian political elites are too fractured to constitute a
potential ‘peace partner’ for Israeli rogue Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
Many around the world can only understand – or relate to – Palestinians through
their victimization or factional affiliation – which, themselves, carry
subsidiary meanings relevant to ‘terrorism’, ‘radicalism’, among others.
The
reality is, however, often different from reductionist political and media
discourses. Palestinians are not just numbers. They are not spectators either,
in a political game that insists on marginalizing them. Soon after the 2014
war, a group of Palestinian youth, together with supporters from around the
world, launched an important initiative that aimed to liberate the Palestinian
discourse, at least in Gaza, from the confines of numbers and other belittling
interpretations.
‘We
Are Not Numbers’ was launched in early 2015. The group’s ‘About Us’ page reads:
“numbers don’t convey … the daily personal struggles and triumphs, the tears
and the laughter, the aspirations that are so universal that if it weren’t for
the context, they would immediately resonate with virtually everyone.”
It
is inspiring to hear young, articulate and profoundly resolute Palestinians such
as Issam Adwan, the Gaza Project Manager, speaking a language that transcends
all the stereotypical discourses on Palestine. They were neither victims nor
factional, and were hardly consumed by the pathological need to satisfy western
demands and expectations.
“We
have talents – we are writers, we are novelists, we are poets, and we have so
much potential that the world knows little about,” says Issam.
Khalid
Dader, one of the Organization’s nearly 60 active writers and bloggers in Gaza,
contends with the designation that they are ‘storytellers.’ “We don’t tell
stories, rather stories tell us … stories make us,” he told me. For Khalid, it
is not about numbers or words, but the lives that are lived, and the legacies
that often go untold.
Somaia
Abu Nada wants the world to know her uncle, because “he was a person with a
family and people who loved him.” He was killed in the 2008 Israeli war on
Gaza, and his death has profoundly impacted his family and community. Over
1,300 people were also killed in that war. Each one of them was someone’s
uncle, aunt, son, daughter, husband or wife. None of them was just a number.
“‘We
Are Not Numbers’ made me realize how necessary our voices are,” Mohammed Rafik
told me. This assertion cannot be overstated. So many speak on behalf of
Palestinians but rarely do Palestinians speak for themselves. “These are
unprecedented times of fear, when our land appears to be broken and sad,” Mohammed
said, “but we never abandon our sense of community.”
Issam reminds me
of Arundhati Roy’s famous quote, “There’s really no such thing as the
‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced, or the
preferably unheard.”
It was refreshing to talk to Palestinians
who are taking the decisive step of declaring that they are not numbers,
because it is only through this realization and resolve that Palestinian youth
can challenge all of us and assert their own collective identity as a people.
Indeed, Palestinians do have a voice, although silenced and unheard by Western mainstream media. And it is a strong, resonating voice at that.
INTERACTIVE: Palestinian Remix
Palestinian Center
for Human Rights
International Solidarity
Movement – Nonviolence. Justice. Freedom
Defense for
Children
Breaking the Silence
BRASIL
AOS
FATOS: As declarações de Bolsonaro, checadas
