Op-ed by Peter Beinart originally published in The Atlantic, March 6, 2018
But in their DNA, the two groups are utterly different. The NRA thrives on culture war. It produces videos attacking “lying member[s] of the media,” “Hollywood phon[ies],” and “athletes who use their free speech to alter and undermine what our flag represents.” Last week, at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, NRA head Wayne LaPierre warned of “socialists” who seek “to deny citizens their basic freedoms.”
Many of the progressives who loathe the NRA loathe AIPAC, too. But you’ll never find AIPAC’s leaders at a CPAC conference. That’s because while the NRA feeds off of ideological and partisan polarization, AIPAC fears it. While the NRA can maintain its influence via hardcore partisanship, AIPAC can only succeed by working with whoever is in power.
AIPAC fears polarization because its mission requires wielding influence inside both parties. The NRA doesn’t need to work with Democratic presidents. It needs merely to mobilize its largely Republican congressional allies to block any gun-control measures a Democratic president might push. AIPAC, by contrast, is constantly massaging the relationship between Washington and Jerusalem. That requires good relations with the members of Congress chairing the Foreign Affairs and Armed Services committees. It requires constant contact with the Pentagon over U.S. arms sales and military exchanges, with the State Department and National Security Council over diplomatic initiatives, and with the Treasury Department over sanctions against common adversaries like Iran.
But AIPAC doesn’t only fear polarization because it could undermine its influence. It also fears polarization because it could split the organization in two. Unlike the NRA, which according to a 2017 Pew Research Center poll boasts a membership that is more than three-quarters Republican, AIPAC’s members are likely split fairly evenly between the two parties. When Vice President Mike Pence praised Trump on Monday night, around half of the AIPAC attendees stood up to applaud.
AIPAC’s problem is that younger American Jews are less likely to bifurcate their views in this way. They are less likely to have personally experienced anti-Semitism. They are less likely to know relatives who survived the Holocaust. And they are less likely to have witnessed events like the 1967 and 1973 wars, when Israel’s existence appeared to be in peril. To the contrary, they have come of age seeing both American Jews, and the Jewish state, as privileged and powerful.
Thus, they are more likely to inherit their parents’ progressivism than their parents’ Zionism. The same concern for human rights and equality that informs their general political outlook makes them unsympathetic to Israel’s policy of holding millions of Palestinians under military occupation, without basic rights, in the West Bank. Which puts them at odds with AIPAC. They are also generally more assimilated than their parents, which means that—irrespective of their politics—they care about Israel less. Which means they’re less likely to join AIPAC.
It’s not that AIPAC doesn’t attract young people. It does. But those young people are disproportionately Orthodox. Orthodox Jews are rising as a share of the American Jewish population. And younger modern Orthodox Jews—many of whom attend intensely Zionist yeshiva day schools and spend a year studying in Israel between high school and college—generally feel a stronger connection to Israel than their non-Orthodox counterparts.
Younger Orthodox Jews aren’t bifurcating either. The same emphasis on security, nationalism, and traditional religious morality—the same tendency to see the world in zero-sum, us-versus-them terms—that makes them hawkish on Israel makes them comfortable inside the GOP. You can see the ideological effects of this growing Orthodox influence in the smaller Zionist Organization of America, which has hosted Steve Bannon, endorsed Trump’s travel ban, and fought to keep Black Lives Matter out of public schools. And you saw it in Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, which developed an entire Orthodox fundraising strategy. Were AIPAC to surf these demographic and ideological trends, it would become heavily Orthodox, overwhelmingly Republican, and more and more openly hostile to the American left—a pro-Israel version of the NRA.
AIPAC is conducting a remarkable experiment. It’s doubling down on bipartisanship and ideological diversity even as tectonic shifts in American politics and culture make that harder and harder. It’s doing so even though it could alienate its rising base on the right, who might defect to groups like the ZOA. Indeed, the ZOA slammed Kohr’s endorsement of the two-state solution, as did Breitbart.
It’s fascinating to watch, and it’s likely to fail. It won’t fail because younger liberals can’t find things to admire in Israel. They can. It will fail because the thing about Israel that young liberals admire least is its half-century long policy of denying Palestinians in the West Bank basic rights like free movement, due process, and citizenship in the country in which they live—and entrenching that denial by building settlements where Jews enjoy rights that their Palestinian neighbors are denied. Kohr’s endorsement of the two-state solution notwithstanding, AIPAC remains the most powerful force in American politics opposing pressure on Israel to end the occupation. Thus, young liberals can only embrace AIPAC if they place their support for Israel ahead of their opposition to its occupation.
That’s not likely to happen. To the contrary, young American Jewish liberals are more aware of—and more disturbed by—the occupation than their elders. That’s partly because young, non-Orthodox, American Jews are less likely to excuse Israeli behavior in the name of Jewish survival. And it’s partly because the United States contains a growing population of American-born Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims who speak fluently the language of the American left. These young Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Americans find it easy to frame their criticisms of Israel in terms that other people of color find compelling. Thus, on college campus after college campus, progressive activists unite in fierce opposition to Israel’s policies, if not its very existence. Progressive Jewish students respond by either embracing that critique, ignoring it, or combatting it, which tends to push them into the arms of the right.
AIPAC understands these trends well. And it’s desperate to counter them, to find a message that keeps progressives in the tent. But, at the end of the day, most young liberal American Jews don’t think AIPAC has a message problem. They think it has a moral problem. AIPAC, in their view, is asking progressives to support Israel’s right to deny to one religious-ethnic group the rights it guarantees to another. Which means that AIPAC, as they see it, is asking progressives to not really be progressive at all.
Op-ed by Lara Friedman originally published in the Forward, January 31, 2018
The recent Pew Poll reporting a decline in Democratic support for Israel sparked much hand wringing, debate and critical analysis. Some dissected the poll’s weaknesses. Others examined the partisan issues in play. Still others focused, correctly, on American progressives’ substantive objections to the policies of the Israeli government and the values they embody.
But too many are still unwilling to talk about the key related factor causing the estrangement of Democrats, and American progressives in general, from Israel: the gradual redefinition of “pro-Israel” to mean support for extremist, anti-democratic policies not just in Israel, but in the United States as well.
This trend, which pre-dates President Trump, sees the growing use of “pro-Israel” advocacy as a weapon to undermine fundamental American values and rights protected in our own Constitution, and bafflingly, sees such efforts supported and defended by leaders who otherwise claim the mantle of champions of progressive values.
The clearest example of this trend is ongoing and energetic efforts to quash free speech in America, in the name of defending Israel. These efforts have come in the form of bipartisan legislation at the federal and state level, designed to curb and even criminalize criticism and activism targeting Israel and its policies, or to define such speech as “anti-Semitism.”
Such legislation has already been adopted in more than 20 states (in 3 states by Executive Order). The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights, and National Coalition Against Censorship, and others have challenged such efforts as unconstitutional (the ACLU has cases pending against the laws, so far, in Kansas and Arizona; in the Kansas case, a federal judge this week sided with the ACLU in issuing a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the law).
Yet AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, and most Jewish community organizations remain fully on-board in supporting and promoting such legislation, along with many progressive politicians.
Indeed, despite the court challenges and opposition from free speech watchdogs, the legislative campaign shows no signs of abating. Since January 1, new anti-free speech legislation has been introduced already in at least 6 states.
Moreover, recent weeks saw the opening of a new front in this battle, one that puts these illiberal forms of defending Israel directly at odds with broadly defined human rights values
On January 11, 2018, the New Orleans City Council adopted a resolution calling for a review the city’s investments and contracts. The goal of this review was to bring the city in line with its values, laid out in the resolution: New Orleans “has social and ethical obligations to take steps to avoid contracting with or investing in corporations whose practices consistently violate human rights, civil rights or labor rights, or corporations whose practices egregiously contract efforts to create a prosperous, educated, healthy and equitable society.”
It was no secret that activists concerned with Palestinian rights, including those advocating for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, supported or even drafted the New Orleans resolution. And because of that, and despite the fact that the resolution in no way singled out or even mentioned Israel, the resolution was swiftly denounced as a “stealth” attack on Israel. Groups like the Anti-Defamation League pressured the Council to rescind it, and prominent New Orleans Rabbi Ed Cohn alleged that the resolution “cleverly masqueraded as a high-minded civic statement designed to prevent human rights abuses…It sounded so good. It took no time, however, to see the deception.”
This reaction highlights a painful truth: any call for the defense of human rights, if applied universally, will today inevitably raise questions about Israel, and especially the policies associated with Israel’s 50-year long occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the settlement enterprise that they support. The only way to insulate Israel from such questions is to either kill such calls outright, or to explicitly exempt Israel from the same rules and standards that apply to the rest of the world.
American defenders of Israel have often condemned critics, and especially BDS advocates, for unfairly singling out Israel for special scrutiny or holding it to a higher standard than other countries. Ironically, many of these same defenders of Israel condemned the New Orleans resolution for doing precisely the opposite. They are arguing, in effect, that when talking about human rights, it is unfair to subject Israel to the same scrutiny as the rest of the world; they are suggesting that failing to hold Israel to a different, lower standard than the rest of the world when it comes to human rights is a new form of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic behavior.
On January 25th, the New Orleans City Council gave in to pressure and rescinded its human rights resolution. In so doing, it acquiesced to a definition of “pro-Israel” that demands the sacrifice of respect for universal values, the rejection of global standards of human rights, and the delegitimization of international law.
With U.S. values and rights hanging in the balance, self-described progressive politicians and groups like the ADL are betraying their own values and principles when they embrace illiberalism-in-defense-of-Israel, leaving them standing with the likes of Christians United for Israel, the Zionist Organization of America, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and hardline Israelis, and standing against the ACLU, MoveOn.org, and CREDO, not to mention J Street, Americans for Peace Now, IfNotNow and, of course, Jewish Voice for Peace. In so doing, they are contributing to the diminution of support for Israel among Americans who are repulsed by the notion that support for Israel demands the sacrifice of the values and rights that are at the core of what it means to be a progressive.
Op-ed by Lara Friedman originally published in The Forward, January 9, 2018
Over the weekend, in a decision redolent of the repressive policies of the old Soviet Union, the Israeli government blacklisted 20 international organizations, officially barring entry to these groups’ officials and activists expressly for their peaceful opposition to the Israeli government’s policies.
It would be bad enough – for all who cherish progressive democratic values like free speech – if Israel were merely a sovereign government blocking access to its sovereign territory by people it doesn’t like, as the blacklist’s defenders are arguing in unison. But this blacklist is something far more sinister. As an occupying power, Israel is using this blacklist as a powerful weapon in its increasingly muscular arsenal of repressive occupation policies – this one designed to further control and isolate the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.
This same time period has also seen Israel’s greater embrace of tactics geared toward shielding Israel’s actions in the occupied territories from international scrutiny, delegitimizing international criticism and calls for accountability, and cutting Palestinians off from outside sources of moral, political, diplomatic, and even humanitarian support.Such tactics have included, for example, barring entry and access to prominent religious officials, journalists, United Nations officials, foreign charity workers, an EU parliamentary delegation, and representatives of major human rights organizations . Just last week, Israel expelled a Norwegian aid worker during the visit to Israel of Norway’s new Foreign Minister.
Importantly, Israel has not been alone in its efforts to shield the occupation from criticism. Over the past two years, and continuing to today, there’s been a parallel explosion in U.S. legislation, both at the state and federal level, that sacrifices free speech of U.S. citizens in order to protect and promote settlements and occupation. There have likewise been efforts – ongoing through the present day – to quash free speech and activism on American college campuses, all for the goal of insulating Israel from criticism and pressure.
For those trying to understand the blacklist – its background and implications – the question isn’t merely whether Israeli officials and fellow travelers in the international community are sowing and exploiting over-wrought fears of boycotts to slander and discredit activists (they are). Likewise, it isn’t whether it is an historical irony and outrage for Israel to ban entry to Jews because they disagree with Israeli government policies, especially while welcoming foreign visitors who have links to Nazi-affiliated groups (it is). Nor should the question simply be whether it is a shocking betrayal of Jewish values and history to bar entry to a Quaker organization that helped rescue Jews during the Holocaust (it is). And it certainly isn’t whether Israel’s longstanding discrimination against American citizens of Palestinian descent trying to visit their families and ancestral homeland – regardless of peaceful political activism – is racist and undemocratic (it absolutely is).
Rather, with Israel increasingly open and unapologetic in its embrace of authoritarian policies, not for the sake of Israel, but for the sake of the Greater Israel agenda of increasingly normalized zealots, the questions this blacklist provokes should be: how much of the slippery slope toward authoritarianism is left before Israel hits the bottom? How fast Israel is sliding? And will more Americans who profess to care both about Israel and progressive, democratic values now finally take a stand? Because this blacklist – and the suffocating stench of repression that it carries – is not illiberal Israel’s first challenge to Americans’ values of free speech and peaceful protest, and it will certainly not be the last.
Op-ed by Lara Friedman originally published in the Huffington Post, January 5, 2018.
Last month, President Donald Trump granted a cherished wish of American and Israeli hardliners, taking Jerusalem—an issue that the Oslo Agreement stipulated would be resolved only in permanent status negotiations—“off the table.” Now, only weeks later, American and Israeli hardliners are again trembling with anticipation at the possibility that Trump will fulfill another long-held desire: destroying or crippling the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN agency that supports Palestine refugees across the Middle East.
Many are now arguing, correctly, that undermining UNRWA will threaten an already fragile status quo in the West Bank and Gaza (not to mention Jordan and Lebanon), and thus would be bad for Israel and would have serious humanitarian implications for Palestinians. For these and other reasons, some suggest that the attack on Palestinian aid is a tactical “misstep” by the Trump Administration. These arguments miss the point: with this new approach to UNRWA, undermining the status quo is a feature, not a bug.
The Trump Administration has tied its attack on UNRWA to UN and Palestinian reactions to Trump’s Jerusalem policy shift. Taking to Twitter this week, Trump railed about Palestinian ingratitude for U.S. funding (which is a tiny fraction of what the U.S. provides Israel). U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said that funding would be suspended until the Palestinians “return to the negotiating table” – suggesting a new peace framework predicated on blackmailing the Palestinians into accepting Israeli and American diktats.
In reality, the threat to de-fund UNRWA has nothing to do with any of those things, except in an opportunistic sense. What it is really about is further shattering the terms of reference established by the Oslo Agreement and removing from the negotiating agenda another sensitive and explosive permanent status issue. In short, this attack is about taking Palestinian refugees, like Jerusalem, “off the table” – consistent with the view articulated by U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, writing in October 2016, when he referred to Palestinian “so-called ‘refugees.’”
The effort to erase Palestinian refugees by gutting UNRWA is nothing new. Dating to the late 1990s, reactionary voices in Israel and the United States (for examples, see the Gatestone Institute and Middle East Forum)—often joined by fellow travelers in Congress—have been making the case that the “solution” to the Palestinian refugee issue should be found not through negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, but through unilateral action by the United States to re-define Palestinian refugees out of existence.
As I observed previously, this approach won’t work. Palestinians’ self-identification as refugees is grounded in their own experiences, history, and narrative, not permission from UNRWA or anyone else. Dissolving UNRWA or compelling the UN to re-define millions of Palestinians to no longer technically qualify as refugees won’t change that self-definition an iota. Moreover, like Trump’s Jerusalem move, doing so not only won’t make reaching a peace agreement easier in the future, it will make it harder, dictating new terms of reference that are wholly disconnected from the actual issues at the heart of the conflict and that actively obstruct any chance for a resolution.
What of the argument, made sincerely by some and patently insincerely by others, that for the sake of both Palestinian refugees and peace, it would be better to dissolve UNRWA and treat Palestinian refugees like refugees from any other conflict, under the authority of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR)?
Answering this question is a matter of reviewing the options available to UNHCR to resolve the plight of refugees, as helpfully laid out in detail by former UNRWA spokesman Chris Gunness in a 2011 interview. Briefly, UNHCR’s preferred option is returning refugees to their home countries. This option is, of course, wholly off the table for Palestinians, because Israel won’t permit it. UNHCR’s second option is settling refugees where they are currently located. This option, too, is off the table for Palestinians, as key host countries like Jordan and Lebanon have political and demographic considerations of their own which powerfully mitigate against formally or permanently absorbing Palestinian refugees. It’s also worth remembering that the West Bank and Gaza, where many Palestinian refugees are located, have been under Israeli occupation for 50 years, and absent a two-state agreement there is no avenue for turning these refugees, or any residents of the West Bank and Gaza, into citizens. UNHCR’s third option is voluntary resettlement of refugees in third countries. This option, too, is not a solution, as Palestinian refugees cannot be forced to re-settle.
What about the argument that UNRWA perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem by conferring refugee status on descendants of those who lost homes in 1948 and 1967? The resounding answer can be found in today’s news, which reports that 50,000 Rohingya babies are expected to be born in refugee camps this year. All of these babies will have refugee status under UNHCR.
One final note: the political agenda inherent in the efforts to undermine UNRWA is highlighted by the case of another set of self-identified Middle East refugees: Jews who fled or were kicked out of Arab countries during the 20th century, mainly in connection with the birth of the state of Israel. Many of these individuals and their descendants—despite being citizens of Israel (which is, in the words of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “the nation-state of one people, the Jewish people, and no other”), the U.S. or various other countries—today still identify as refugees. Like Palestinians who lost homes in what is today Israel, these Jews don’t rely on the UN to give them permission to do so, or to authorize their claims of dispossession (which, like Palestinian claims, are well-documented) or to approve their right to demand recognition and compensation.
While anti-peace hardliners in the U.S and Israel have constantly attacked Palestinian refugees—as is happening again today—many, including in Congress, have embraced the cause of Jews from Arab lands. Ironically, this embrace has for the most part had nothing to do with bringing justice to Jews from Arab lands; rather, like the attacks on UNRWA, it has been about exploiting them as a tool to—you guessed it—take Palestinian refugees off the table.
Op-ed by Lara Friedman originally published in the Huffington Post, December 27, 2017.
Last week, on December 21st, the United States took off the gloves at the United Nations. With the General Assembly poised to vote on a resolution rejecting President Donald Trump’s policy shift regarding the status of Jerusalem, Nikki Haley, the United States’ Ambassador to the United Nations, warned:
“the president will be watching this vote carefully and has requested I report back on those countries who voted against us. We will take note of each and every vote on this issue.”
Since then, innumerable pundits and politicians have weighed in about the outcome of that vote and what it says about the international community’s views on Jerusalem and Trump’s Middle East policy. A close look at the data, however, reveals that much of the conventional wisdom is contradicted by the facts.
Most people are by now familiar with the most basic fact: just 7 nations joined the United States and Israel in voting “no” on the Jerusalem resolution – the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, and Palau (representing a combined total of just over 200,000 people), along with Togo, Honduras and Guatemala (whose president has since announced that its embassy would be moved to Jerusalem).
That list should surprise nobody: it comprises the core group of tiny island nations that reliably opposes such resolutions, plus-or-minus a short and ever-changing list of other nations. Looking at votes since 1999 on routine Israel-Palestine resolutions – that is, resolutions brought periodically before the General Assembly – the number of “no” votes is strikingly consistent both in composition and in numbers, ranging from a low of 1 (Israel alone) to at most (and rarely as high as) 10.
What about non-routine resolutions against which Israel and the United States lobby intensely, like the December 21 Jerusalem resolution? The last such vote was in 2012, when the topic was the status of Palestine at the United Nations. In that case, too, only seven nations stood with the United States and Israel in voting “no”: the same four island nations, plus Canada, the Czech Republic, and Panama.
Some pundits suggest that the important number to focus on from last week’s vote is not the “no” votes, but the fact that 35 nations elected to abstain. That number, however, is only meaningful if compared to other UNGA votes on Israel-Palestine. A review of such votes just over the past year reveals that this number is indeed significant, not because it is large but because it is small. By way of comparison: on three routine (and routinely contentious) General Assembly resolutions this year dealing with the Palestinians, the number of abstentions was much higher: 77, 57, and 59. Back in 2012, on the vote determining the status of Palestine at the UN, 41 nations abstained.
Drilling down deeper, was there anything significant about how specific nations voted last week? Absolutely. Take, for example, Canada, which over the past year voted “no” on 13 out of 14 General Assembly resolutions related to Israel-Palestine, and which was one of just seven nations that voted “no” on the 2012 resolution. Yet, despite this track record, and despite the very real possibility of negative repercussions for ongoing negotiations around the North America Free Trade Agreement, Canada elected to abstain on the Jerusalem resolution.
Also notable: China and India, two heavy-hitter countries in which Israel has invested huge diplomatic and economic efforts, voted in favor. Russia, despite strong ties to the Trump Administration and warm relations with the Netanyahu government, did so as well. The same goes for Greece, a country with which Israel has been strengthening relations for years. And despite intense courting of Sunni states by the Israeli government and Trump Administration, and notwithstanding analyses suggesting a readiness on the part of many these states to give up supporting the Palestinians in order to build a coalition against Iran, neither Saudi Arabia nor Bahrain – nor, indeed, any Sunni-majority nation — abstained.
Then there is Europe. Some have suggested that with last week’s vote, Israel and President Trump succeeded in breaking European Union unity on Israel-Palestine. The facts suggest the opposite is true. In last week’s vote, just 6 out of 27 EU member states abstained (Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Poland, and Romania), with all others voting “yes.” Compare this to 2012, when 11 abstained (Bulgaria, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) and a twelfth, the Czech Republic, voted “no” (Croatia, not yet a member of the EU, also abstained). Clearly, EU voting on important Israel-Palestine resolutions in the General Assembly was already dis-unified before last week’s vote; Trump policies on Israel-Palestine appear to have made it less so.
Looking at the votes of official U.S. allies suggests, similarly, a consensus rejection Trump’s Israel-Palestine policy and a declining readiness to line up behind the United States and Israel in the General Assembly. In the 2012 vote on the Palestine resolution, 14 out of 29 NATO member states abstained and 2 voted “no”; last week, only 6 NATO nations abstained and not a single one voted “no.” Similarly, out of the 16 nations designated by the United States as major non-NATO allies, none (other than Israel) voted “no” on this latest resolution, and only 3 abstained.
Does the data show a shift in votes that would suggest, in any category, an increased alignment with Israel and Trump? Possibly, but any such shift is (so far) incremental, likely utilitarian (grounded in political and economic quid-pro-quos), not necessarily durable, and wholly limited to African and Latin American countries. Specifically, on the Palestine resolution of 2012, not a single African nation voted “no,” 5 abstained, and 3 didn’t vote on the Palestine resolution. Last week, one voted “no” (Togo), 8 abstained, and 7 didn’t vote. Likewise, not one Latin American country voted “no” on the 2012 resolution and only 4 abstained; this time around, 2 voted “no,” 7 abstained, and one didn’t vote.
Finally, did Ambassador Haley’s threat change the votes of recipients of American financial assistance? The votes suggest it did not: Eight out of ten of the top recipients of United States aid– Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Ethiopia – all voted “yes.” Only one – Israel – voted “no,” and only one, Kenya, elected not to vote.
In short, last week’s vote on Jerusalem in the UN’s General Assembly was a repudiation of the view, increasingly voiced by Israeli and American officials, that the world no longer cares about Israel-Palestine. It likewise revealed increasing, not decreasing, unity among key nations and groupings of nations in opposing Israeli and American policies in this arena. Perhaps most clearly, it was a powerful defeat both for Trump’s new Israel-Palestine policy and his leadership in the international arena — a defeat all the more resounding given the heavy-handed tactics employed by the Trump Administration to try to avert precisely such an outcome.
Op-ed by Lara Friedman originally published in the The Forward, December 20, 2017.
The video is striking — no pun intended. A 16 year-old Palestinian girl in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh grapples with Israeli soldiers in full combat gear and armed to the teeth. Despite the fact that she swats and kicks at them, the soldiers, likely hardly older than their tormentor, show admirable restraint, doing nothing to escalate the situation from a scuffle into something much worse. Days later, more video emerged, this time of the IDF raiding Nabi Saleh in the middle of the night to pull this same teenager, Ahed Tamimi, from her bed and arrest her. Since then, her mother and a female cousin have also been arrested.
In Israel, and among defenders of Israel, two questions dominate the debate: How could any Palestinian have been permitted to abuse and humiliate the IDF in this manner? And what can Israel do to ensure that it doesn’t happen again?
Israel’s Minister of Education, Naftali Bennett and Defense Minister Avigdor Leiberman, both of whom support pardoning an Israeli soldier who was caught on video killing a Palestinian who no longer posed any threat, have ideas. Bennett called for Ahed and those who joined her in the attack to be jailed for the rest of their lives. Leiberman threatened ominously: “Everyone involved, not only the girl but also her parents and those around them, will not escape from what they deserve.” Knesset member Oren Hazan, from the Likud party, suggested that the soldiers’ failure to react with force was a mistake: “Restraint is a failed and dangerous policy. Next time it must end differently.” Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich, of the Jewish Home party, called on the IDF Chief of Staff “to order that every encounter or friction between the enemy and our troops end with a painful and decisive outcome.”
All of these reactions gloss over the key question: How did Israeli soldiers come to be grappling with this Palestinian teenager in the first place? Were they minding their own business, taking care of the security of Israel or Israelis, when Ahed and her relatives suddenly turned up to “provoke” them? Or rather, since the action in the video takes place in the front yard of Ahed’s house, were the soldiers in Nabi Saleh at the Tamimi residence to arrest someone, hunt for weapons or foil a planned attack against Israel?
The answer to all of these questions is: no. The reason IDF soldiers are regularly in Nabi Saleh, and regularly haunt the Tamimi family — week after week, for nearly the past decade — has nothing to do with the security of Israel. It is because the inhabitants of this village, in existence since long before the establishment of the modern state of Israel, refuse to submit quietly to the Occupation. They refuse to cease protesting against an authority that over time has taken their lands and resources for the benefit of settlements, and has seen soldiers, year after year, arrest, injure and kill village residents and especially Tamimi family members as they engage in unarmed protest.
To be clear: this isn’t just about Nabi Saleh. What is happening in this one village encapsulates the ineluctable and self-defeating logic of Israeli occupation. According to this logic, all Palestinian protest, including unarmed protest, is intolerable, undermining the IDF’s absolute authority and its deterrence. Consistent with this logic, quashing Palestinian protest is a top priority of the IDF, not because such protest threatens Israel’s security, but because occupation requires that the Palestinians never forget who is in charge. In support of this logic, Israel maintains laws in the West Bank that render virtually all Palestinian protest illegal and permit Israel to impose heavy penalties on those who refuse to submit. And as a consequence of this logic, unarmed or non-violent protest — including by young Palestinians like Ahed Tamimi — represents in many ways an even greater challenge to the IDF than armed attacks; as one senior Israeli defense official admitted, “We don’t do Gandhi very well.”
If Israel continues to seek military solutions to quash Palestinian resistance to the occupation, the results will be predictable and tragic. While Israeli leaders worry about the political costs of videos showing soldiers abusing, or being abused by, Palestinian children, Israelis as a whole will continue to pay the ever-growing costs — moral, financial, social, security, and diplomatic — imposed on them by governments that prioritize occupation over virtually all else and undermine the humanity of the nation’s own sons and daughters by sending them on missions the sole purpose of which is to humiliate, subjugate, and break the spirit of fellow human beings.
And as the costs to Palestinians continue to be measured in blood — deaths and injuries — and time lost in Israeli jail, Palestinian grievances will only deepen, and the determination to resist will only grow stronger. In short, Nabi Saleh and villages like it are where Israel’s occupation logic hits a wall (no pun intended): there is no military answer to Ahed Tamimi or others of her generation, who see that they have no hope and no future under Israeli rule. The only solution is an end to occupation.
Op-ed by Lara Friedman originally published in LobeLog.com December 11, 2017.
Since well before Election Day, Donald Trump and his key advisors made clear that a Trump administration would blow-up longstanding U.S. policy on Israel-Palestine. Whether talking about moving the U.S. embassy, renouncing any commitment to the two-state solution, or adopting a policy of at best agnosticism, at worst outright support for settlements, this administration deserves credit for maintaining consistent positions from the 2016 campaign through its first 11 months in office.
Op-ed by Lara Friedman originally published in Times of Israel, December 6, 2017.
One memorable night in August 1993, I went to sleep in a city inhabited by two peoples who saw each other exclusively in terms of enmity and suspicion, and awoke the next morning to a world in which those same two peoples suddenly began, tentatively but with palpable relief and guarded optimism, to imagine a future in which they could live together in peace. A few days later, I watched in wonder as a huge crowd of Palestinian youth peacefully gathered outside Damascus Gate, unmolested by Israeli police who seemed both confused and pleased to allow the youth to hoist Palestinian flags, symbols that Israeli at the time still considered illegal. And I quietly wept – with hope and happiness – as I watched those same crowds of youth make way, awkwardly but politely, for ultra-Orthodox Jews passing through the gate on their way to the Western Wall.
Not long after, I visited a shop in West Jerusalem in the company of a Palestinian friend from Nablus. The shopkeeper, hearing us exchange a few words in Arabic, looked at my friend with undisguised curiosity and asked in heavily accented English, “are you Pal-est-in-ian?” The way he slowly sounded out the syllables made clear this was a word that rarely if ever had crossed his lips. With that information confirmed, he nodded and said gruffly, in the manner of a man struggling to hide a strong emotion, “you are welcome; all we want is peace.”
I gather these memories about me as a blanket, not a shroud, as I write these words: The peace process that began in 1993 is dead. Its demise is marked, definitively, by the trifecta of new policies that, over the past two weeks, have fundamentally re-defined America’s approach to Middle East peace. Effectively downgrading the status of the Palestinians in Washington, changing U.S. policy on Jerusalem, and moving forward with legislation that will implicitly define the Palestinian Authority as a body that supports terror – each of these new policies, on its own, would be sufficient to cast profound doubt on the commitment of the United States to a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, consistent with the paradigm of the past 24 years; collectively, they send an inescapable message that the Trump Administration and many in Congress are no longer interested in maintaining even a credible pretense of commitment to such an outcome.
I arrived in Jerusalem in November 1992 for a two-year tour in the U.S Consulate in Jerusalem, and much of that time was spent tracking settlements and meeting with settlers. Nearly 25 years later, some memories are as painfully fresh as if they happened yesterday. The settler child who ran up to me in the (then tiny) settlement of Beit El and proudly proclaimed in Hebrew, “Arabs out! Kill Arabs.” The trip with Congressional staff to visit Hebron, where settlers with American accents surrounded our cars and berated us until we drove away. Long meetings in Kiryat Arba with a settler my colleagues nicknamed the “prophet of doom and gloom,” who explained to me that U.S. policy didn’t matter because God wants the Jews to have all of the land. The Arabs have no future here, he told me more than once. Maybe, he told me, we’ll bribe them to leave. Maybe they’ll leave on their own. Maybe God will send a virus that only makes Arabs sick. No matter, he said, in words that stick with me to this day: “God will sort it out.”
Not long after the signing of the Oslo Accords, I traveled with a colleague to meet a settler leader at his office in the settlement of Psagot. The world may have its peace process, this man argued, but we, the settlers, have concrete plans that will prevent it. He showed us map after map depicting bypass roads and massive infrastructure that would enable the settlements to continue growing, and connect settlements to each other, and connect all of this seamlessly with Israel proper. One day soon, he argued, settlements will be so much a part of Israel that nobody will be able to talk about giving up land to the Arabs. My colleague and I drove away shaking our heads, marveling at this man’s ability to operate in such a deep state of denial about political realities. In retrospect, I marvel today at the very long game he and his fellow travelers, both in the United States and Israel, were playing, and their incredible success.
I don’t pretend to know where things go from here, nor can I pretend to mourn the death of the Olso process. That process, in truth, was moribund for a long time, and in its dying state had become all-process, no-peace. Worse still, it had evolved into a political trap that simultaneously enabled the non-stop march of new Israeli facts-on-the-ground, on the territory that was to have become a Palestinian state, while preventing the Palestinians from seeking recourse through any other options. But until now, there was still a sliver of hope that this process could be the seed for a future agreement, if only political will and courage – in short supply since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 – could be restored. That hope is now gone, replaced by concrete fears of the consequences, intended and not, that this president’s reckless new policies could unleash.
All of this brings to mind another memory: On the eve of the Iraq War, I brought a former senior Israeli diplomat to meet with Congressman Tom Lantos. Unapologetically hawkish on Israel and the Middle East, Lantos lectured us on why waging war on Iraq would be good for Israel and for the region. In words that chill me to this day, he explained that the Middle East “is like a kaleidoscope.” If you just pick up a kaleidoscope and look through it, he observed, you don’t see anything special. But if you shake it and then look through it again, you see something more beautiful than what was there before. I recall those words today, knowing that while some may rejoice and others will lament the end of the Oslo era, nobody knows what will happen now. However, we do know, from painful experience, that “shaking up” the kaleidoscope of the Middle East does not generally turn out well, for anyone.
Op-ed by Lara Friedman originally published in the Huffington Post, December 7, 2017.
Back in February 2016, a New York bankruptcy lawyer named David Friedman published an opinion piece in a far right wing Israeli outlet, entitled “End the two-state narrative.” Friedman postulated that the two-state narrative is “an illusion that serves the worst intentions of both the United States and the Palestinian Arabs. It has never been a solution, only a narrative. But even the narrative itself now needs to end.” He argued that Palestinians don’t want peace, but use the two-state process as “a masterful game of extortion played out on the world stage.” He averred that “Fostering a Palestinian middle class is the solution of the 21st century and it has nothing to do with two states.”
Thirteen months after he wrote that article, Friedman was confirmed as the new United States ambassador to Israel – the first ambassador nominated by President Trump. He headed to Israel with a status unlike any ambassador who preceded him. Representing a president known to rely on advice from a handful of advisors who, over the course of years, had proven their loyalty, Friedman arrived vested with Trump’s personal trust, confidence and authority. More than that, as the primary voice of the Trump campaign on Israel-Palestine, Friedman had already laid out, with great candor, his ideas and intentions for how U.S. policy needed to change, with the tacit approval of Trump, who had previously demonstrated little interest in or knowledge of the issues.
Today, 10 months into the Trump Administration’s tenure in office and six months after David Friedman took up his post as U.S. ambassador to Israel, things are going exactly as one should have expected, if one had taken seriously both Friedman’s special role and his extensive record of policy statements made over the course of the 2016 campaign and in the years preceding it. Consistent with Friedman’s views, the Oslo agreement and the peace process it inaugurated have been eliminated as touchstones of US foreign policy. American commitment to a two-state solution has been replaced by a vague promise to support whatever the parties agree on. Fealty to core U.S. positions, like respecting the volatility and sensitivity of Jerusalem by leaving its formal status untouched until there is a peace agreement, is gone. And without any fanfare, U.S. policy has shifted 180 degrees on settlements, both at the symbolic level – starting with Ambassador Friedman’s attendance at a wedding in a West Bank settlement in May 2017 and inviting settler leaders to the Embassy’s July 4th party – and at the concrete policy level, with the U.S. remaining virtually silent as the Netanyahu opens the settlement floodgates in both the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
As for the Palestinians, back in August 2016, Friedman told an Israeli reporter:
“I personally think putting the Israeli leadership on a common level with Abbas is a mistake. In one case you have a sovereign nation that is democratic, and in the other case you have a leader who is hanging on by a thread, who does not have an actual mandate and who funds stipends to pay to families of terrorists while they are in jail. These are difference [sic] types of governments — if you even want to call the Palestinian leadership a government.”
True to this view, today the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington has been reduced to beggar status, its existence no longer a reflection of the Palestinians’ position as a people with international legitimacy, but rather explicitly conditioned on whether the Palestinians play ball with whatever “peace initiative” the Trump Administration proposes. In this context, the United States’ commitment to negotiations as the sole means to resolve the conflict appears to have disappeared, replaced by an strategy of coercing the Palestinians back to talks that will be based on terms divorced from previous agreement and imposed on them by Trump and Netanyahu. Should that fail, the region is abuzz with gossip of plans, cooked up by the United States and Saudi Arabia, for a peace process that bypasses the Palestinians. And in parallel, Congress is moving ahead with legislationthat will, in effect, label the Palestinian Authority a body that supports terror.
This is the reality under the Trump Administration, and it should surprise nobody. Anticipating the direction this Administration would take on Israel-Palestine was not a matter of reading tea leaves, or straining to hear dog whistles. Perhaps more than with any policy issue during the Trump campaign, the plans for Israel-Palestine were explicitly laid out for all to see by Friedman and his fellow travelers, before, during, and after the campaign. Expecting anything different could only have been the result of wishful thinking; believing things were not already going very much in this direction, well before Trump’s Jerusalem decree, could only be the result of selective hearing and seeing.
What will replace the Oslo paradigm – which was no doubt deeply flawed – remains to be seen, but the outlines are already becoming clear. Trump believes, or is being led by people close to him to believe, that he can “Make America’s Middle East Peace Efforts Great Again” through his favored strategy: elevating far right-wing ideologues and sycophants over competent professionals; blowing up all the policies that came before him; and adopting new policies that all rational experts and historians warn won’t work and will likely backfire. It is impossible to predict where this will all lead, but historically speaking, injecting chaos into a volatile foreign policy arena does not tend to produce good outcomes. The last time the United States tried this approach in the Middle East was with the invasion of Iraq — the United States, and the world, are still reckoning with the far-reaching and devastating unintended consequences it unleashed.
Op-ed by and Khaled Elgindy & Lara Friedman, originally published in LobeLog, November 29, 2017.
The Trump administration’s recent decision to allow the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) mission in Washington—the de facto embassy of the Palestinians—to remain open, despite a law that demands its closure, has led many to conclude that the latest drama on the Israel-Palestine front has been resolved. This is false. The crisis was not defused but merely delayed, with new conditions imposed by the Trump administration that make the status of the mission even more precarious than before.
Moreover, this crisis points to an increasingly unavoidable conclusion: where in the past U.S. laws and policies were designed to keep the Palestinians out of any peace process, based on the view that Palestinian participation was anathema to Israel, today that logic has largely been reversed. American policy now seems to be aimed at locking the Palestinians in a peace process, more or less indefinitely, that severely limits the Palestinians’ diplomatic options and independent decision-making. In both cases, the overriding objective has not been conflict resolution but shielding Israel from pressure.
As has been covered already in numerous articles, the crisis over the PLO office is grounded in one of the many anti-PLO policies put in place by the United States following the 1967 war. What has received less attention is the fact that most of these measures came about not in response to major acts of terrorism but to political and diplomatic initiatives by the PLO. Indeed, virtually all were aimed at preventing the Palestinians from gaining international legitimacy or being permitted to participate in any Middle East peace process.
The first came in September 1975, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger signed a secret memorandum of agreement (MOA) with Israel, pledging that the United States would not “recognize or negotiate with” the PLO until it recognized Israel’s right to exist and accepted UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. Kissinger’s pledge, made less than a year after the United Nations recognized the PLO as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, included no mention of terrorism, despite the PLO having been linked to high-profile terror attacks in years prior.
It was not until August 1985, when the MOA was codified into law, that Congress added a third condition requiring the PLO to “renounce the use of terrorism.” Here, again, the new law was not in response to a spike in PLO terror, but to the Reagan administration’s willingness to consider an indirect role for the PLO in a new peace process.
In 1987, shortly after the outbreak of the first intifada, or uprising, Congress passed a new law for the first time defining the PLO as a terrorist organization and, in a provision President Reagan deemed unconstitutional, barring it from virtually any presence or operations in the United States. The PLO met the U.S. conditions for engagement in December 1988, allowing the Reagan administration to launch an official dialogue with the PLO, prompting Congress to place new restrictions on U.S.-PLO contacts.
Following the 1993 signing of the Oslo “declaration of principles” between Israel and the PLO—a diplomatic breakthrough in which the United States was not involved—American lawmakers shifted their focus: not to supporting the peace process, but to circumscribing Palestinian actions and options in the diplomatic and political arenas. Instead of rescinding the existing corpus of anti-PLO legislation, Congress granted presidents authority to temporarily suspend or waive specific provisions, only as necessary for the peace process to continue and subject to congressional oversight. At the same time, Congress passed new laws restricting Palestinian diplomatic activities outside the confines of the U.S.-led peace process. Efforts by the PLO to join or upgrade its status in international bodies became a red line in Congress, starting with a 1994 law requiring the de-funding of UN agencies, and potentially the UN as a whole, for admitting Palestine as a full member.
Congress doubled down on this red line in 2011. After Palestine was admitted to UNESCO, forcing the Obama administration to cut off all UNESCO funding, Congress passed a new law conditioning the president’s waiver of the 1987 ban on the PLO operating in the United States on his certifying that the Palestinians had not joined any other UN agencies. After the Palestinians joined the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2015, sparking fears that Israeli soldiers and generals could be prosecuted for their treatment of Palestinians, Congress did the same thing. It passed a new law further restricting the president’s waiver authority of the 1987 ban by linking it to a certification that the Palestinians are not supporting “any action” against Israel at the ICC—and leading to the recent crisis over the fate of the Palestinian mission in Washington.
The step taken by the Trump administration to keep the PLO mission open is telling. The Trump administration did not, as many have suggested, “walk back” its decision to decertify PLO compliance with the ICC condition. Rather, in effect it asserted, like Reagan, that Congress does not have the authority to direct the president in such matters, and articulated its own, new policy vis-à-vis the PLO mission. This new policy, consistent with its legal forebears, explicitly ties the future of the PLO office to a presidential determination that “the Israelis and Palestinians are engaged in serious peace talks.”
The repeated failures in the peace process have many authors. But the history of U.S. law and policies suggests that, unless something changes, an “American-led peace process” is fast becoming an oxymoron. If the peace process continues to be used as a vehicle for controlling or tying the hands of Palestinians politically, rather than a means for resolving the conflict or ending the occupation, it is only a matter of time before Palestinians conclude that they have more to lose by staying in the process than by walking away.