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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 4 years ago

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Doubting the Story of Exodus

By Teresa Watanabe Los Angeles Times religion writer April 13, 2001

It’s one of the greatest stories ever told: A baby is found in a basket adrift in the Egyptian Nile and is adopted into the pharaoh’s household. He grows up as Moses, rediscovers his roots and leads his enslaved Israelite brethren to freedom after God sends down 10 plagues against Egypt and parts the Red Sea to allow them to escape. They wander for 40 years in the wilderness and, under the leadership of Joshua, conquer the land of Canaan to enter their promised land. For centuries, the biblical account of the Exodus has been revered as the founding story of the Jewish people, sacred scripture for three world religions and a universal symbol of freedom that has inspired liberation movements around the globe. But did the Exodus ever actually occur? On Passover last Sunday, Rabbi David Wolpe raised that provocative question before 2,200 faithful at Sinai Temple in Westwood. He minced no words. “The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all,” Wolpe told his congregants. Wolpe’s startling sermon may have seemed blasphemy to some. In fact, however, the rabbi was merely telling his flock what scholars have known for more than a decade. Slowly and often outside wide public purview, archeologists are radically reshaping modern understanding of the Bible. It was time for his people to know about it, Wolpe decided. After a century of excavations trying to prove the ancient accounts true, archeologists say there is no conclusive evidence that the Israelites were ever in Egypt, were ever enslaved, ever wandered in the Sinai wilderness for 40 years or ever conquered the land of Canaan under Joshua’s leadership. To the contrary, the prevailing view is that most of Joshua’s fabled military campaigns never occurred—archeologists have uncovered ash layers and other signs of destruction at the relevant time at only one of the many battlegrounds mentioned in the Bible. Today, the prevailing theory is that Israel probably emerged peacefully out of Canaan—modern-day Lebanon, southern Syria, Jordan and the West Bank of Israel—whose people are portrayed in the Bible as wicked idolators. Under this theory, the Canaanites who took on a new identity as Israelites were perhaps joined or led by a small group of Semites from Egypt—explaining a possible source of the Exodus story, scholars say. As they expanded their settlement, they may have begun to clash with neighbors, perhaps providing the historical nuggets for the conflicts recorded in Joshua and Judges. “Scholars have known these things for a long time, but we’ve broken the news very gently,” said William Dever, a professor of Near Eastern archeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona and one of America’s preeminent archeologists.

Dever’s view is emblematic of a fundamental shift in archeology. Three decades ago as a Christian seminary student, he wrote a paper defending the Exodus and got an A, but “no one would do that today,” he says. The old emphasis on trying to prove the Bible—often in excavations by amateur archeologists funded by religious groups—has given way to more objective professionals aiming to piece together the reality of ancient lifestyles. But the modern archeological consensus over the Exodus is just beginning to reach the public. In 1999, an Israeli archeologist, Ze’ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University, set off a furor in Israel by writing in a popular magazine that stories of the patriarchs were myths and that neither the Exodus nor Joshua’s conquests ever occurred. In the hottest controversy today, Herzog also argued that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, described as grand and glorious in the Bible, was at best a small tribal kingdom. In a new book this year, “The Bible Unearthed,” Israeli archeologist Israel Finklestein of Tel Aviv University and archeological journalist Neil Asher Silberman raised similar doubts and offered a new theory about the roots of the Exodus story. The authors argue that the story was written during the time of King Josia of Judah in the 7th century BC—600 years after the Exodus supposedly occurred in 1250 BC—as a political manifesto to unite Israelites against the rival Egyptian empire as both states sought to expand their territory. Dever argued that the Exodus story was produced for theological reasons: to give an origin and history to a people and distinguish them from others by claiming a divine destiny. Some scholars, of course, still maintain that the Exodus story is basically factual. Bryant Wood, director of the Associates for Biblical Research in Maryland, argued that the evidence falls into place if the story is dated back to 1450 BC. He said that indications of destruction around that time at Hazor, Jericho and a site he is excavating that he believes is the biblical city of Ai support accounts of Joshua’s conquests. He also cited the documented presence of “Asiatic” slaves in Egypt who could have been Israelites, and said they would not have left evidence of their wanderings because they were nomads with no material culture. But Wood said he can’t get his research published in serious archeological journals. “There’s a definite anti-Bible bias,” Wood said. The revisionist view, however, is not necessarily publicly popular. Herzog, Finklestein and others have been attacked for everything from faulty logic to pro-Palestinian political agendas that undermine Israel’s land claims. Dever, a former Protestant minister who converted to Judaism 12 years ago, says he gets “hissed and booed” when he speaks about the lack of evidence for the Exodus, and regularly receives letters and calls offering prayers or telling him he’s headed for hell.

At Sinai Temple, Sunday’s sermon—and a follow-up discussion at Monday’s service—provoked tremendous, and varied, response. Many praised Wolpe for his courage and vision. “It was the best sermon possible, because it is preparing the young generation to understand all the truth about religion,” said Eddia Mirharooni, a Beverly Hills fashion designer. A few said they were hurt—"I didn’t want to hear this,” one woman said—or even a bit angry. Others said the sermon did nothing to shake their faith that the Exodus story is true. “Science can always be proven wrong,” said Kalanit Benji, a UCLA undergraduate in psychobiology. Added Aman Massi, a 60-year-old Los Angeles businessman: “For sure it was true, 100%. If it were not true, how could we follow it for 3,300 years?” But most congregants, along with secular Jews and several rabbis interviewed, said that whether the Exodus is historically true or not is almost beside the point. The power of the sweeping epic lies in its profound and timeless message about freedom, they say. The story of liberation from bondage into a promised land has inspired the haunting spirituals of African American slaves, the emancipation and civil rights movements, Latin America’s liberation theology, peasant revolts in Germany, nationalist struggles in South Africa, the American Revolution, even Leninist politics, according to Michael Walzer in the book “Exodus and Revolution.” Many of Wolpe’s congregants said the story of the Exodus has been personally true for them even if the details are not factual: when they fled the Nazis during World War II, for instance, or, more recently, the Islamic revolution in Iran. Daniel Navid Rastein, an Encino medical professional, said he has always regarded the story as a metaphor for a greater truth: “We all have our own Egypts—we are prisoners of something, either alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, overeating. We have to use [the story] as a way to free ourselves from difficulty and make ourselves a better person.” Wolpe, Sinai Temple’s senior rabbi, said he decided to deliver the sermon to lead his congregation into a deeper understanding of their faith. On Sunday, he told his flock that questioning the Jewish people’s founding story could be justified for one reason alone: to honor the ancient rabbinical declaration that “You do not serve God if you do not seek truth.” “I think faith ought not rest on splitting seas,” Wolpe said in an interview. “For a Jew, it should rest on the wonder of God’s world, the marvel of the human soul and the miracle of this small people’s survival through the millennia.” Next year, the rabbi plans to teach a course on the Bible that he says will “pull no punches” in presenting the latest scholarship questioning the text’s historical basis. But he and others say that Judaism has also traditionally been more open to nonliteral interpretations of the text than, say, some conservative Christian traditions. “Among Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews, there is a much greater willingness to see the Torah as an extended metaphor in which truth comes through story and law,” said Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles. Among scholars, the case against the Exodus began crystallizing about 13 years ago. That’s when Finklestein, director of Tel Aviv University’s archeology institute, published the first English-language book detailing the results of intensive archeological surveys of what is believed to be the first Israelite settlements in the hilly regions of the West Bank. The surveys, conducted during the 1970s and 1980s while Israel possessed what are now Palestinian territories, documented a lack of evidence for Joshua’s conquests in the 13th century BC and the indistinguishable nature of pottery, architecture, literary conventions and other cultural details between the Canaanites and the new settlers. If there was no conquest, no evidence of a massive new settlement of an ethnically distinct people, scholars argue, then the case for a literal reading of Exodus all but collapses. The surveys’ final results were published three years ago. The settlement research marked the turning point in archeological consensus on the issue, Dever said. It added to previous research that showed that Egypt’s voluminous ancient records contained not one mention of Israelites in the country, although one 1210 BC inscription did mention them in Canaan. Kadesh Barnea in the east Sinai desert, where the Bible says the fleeing Israelites sojourned, was excavated twice in the 1950s and 1960s and produced no sign of settlement until three centuries after the Exodus was supposed to have occurred. The famous city of Jericho has been excavated several times and was found to have been abandoned during the 13th and 14th centuries BC. Moreover, specialists in the Hebrew Bible say that the Exodus story is riddled with internal contradictions stemming from the fact that it was spliced together from two or three texts written at different times. One passage in Exodus, for instance, says that the bodies of the pharaoh’s charioteers were found on the shore, while the next verse says they sank to the bottom of the sea. And some of the story’s features are mythic motifs found in other Near Eastern legends, said Ron Hendel, a professor of Hebrew Bible at UC Berkeley. Stories of babies found in baskets in the water by gods or royalty are common, he said, and half of the 10 plagues fall into a “formulaic genre of catastrophe” found in other Near Eastern texts. Carol Meyers, a professor specializing in biblical studies and archeology at Duke University, said the ancients never intended their texts to be read literally. “People who try to find scientific explanations for the splitting of the Red Sea are missing the boat in understanding how ancient literature often mixed mythic ideas with historical recollections,” she said. “That wasn’t considered lying or deceit; it was a way to get ideas across.” Virtually no scholar, for instance, accepts the biblical figure of 600,000 men fleeing Egypt, which would have meant there were a few million people, including women and children. The ancient desert at the time could not support so many nomads, scholars say, and the powerful Egyptian state kept tight security over the area, guarded by fortresses along the way. Even Orthodox Jewish scholar Lawrence Schiffman said “you’d have to be a bit crazy” to accept that figure. He believes that the account in Joshua of a swift military campaign is less accurate than the Judges account of a gradual takeover of Canaan. But Schiffman, chairman of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, still maintains that a significant number of Israelite slaves fled Egypt for Canaan. “I’m not arguing that archeology proves the Exodus,” he said. “I’m arguing that archeology allows you, in ambiguity, to reach whatever conclusion you want to.” Wood argued that the 600,000 figure was mistranslated and the real number amounted to a more plausible 20,000. He also said the early Israelite settlements and their similarity to Canaanite culture could be explained as the result of pastoralists with no material culture moving into a settled farming life and absorbing their neighbors’ pottery styles and other cultural forms. The scholarly consensus seems to be that the story is a brilliant mix of myth, cultural memories and kernels of historical truth. Perhaps, muses Hendel, a small group of Semites who escaped from Egypt became the “intellectual vanguard of a new nation that called itself Israel,” stressing social justice and freedom. Whatever the facts of the story, those core values have endured and inspired the world for more than three millenniums—and that, many say, is the point. “What are the Egypts I need to free myself from? How does the story inspire me in some way to work for the freedom of all?” asked Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben of Kehillat Israel in Pacific Palisades. “These are the things that matter—not whether we built the pyramids.”

Teresa Watanabe Teresa Watanabe covers education for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the Times in 1989, she has covered immigration, ethnic communities, religion, Pacific Rim business and served as Tokyo correspondent and bureau chief. She also covered Asia, national affairs and state government for the San Jose Mercury News and wrote editorials for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. A Seattle native, she graduated from USC in journalism and in East Asian languages and culture.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-apr-13-mn-50481-story.html

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Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Joshua – there is no evidence any of them ever lived

The Divine Principle: Questions to consider about Old Testament figures

Unearthing the True Origins of the Bible   – interview with Dr. Andrew Henry

#Exodus #Moses

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creepingsharia · 5 years ago

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Trump Admin Approves HAMAS-linked CAIR to Train U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Officers

Three weeks after Oussama Jamaal, the Secretary General of the USCMO (US Council of Muslim Organizations, the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood’s political umbrella group), penetrated the White House on 25 September 2019 to attend a symposium led by Vice President Mike Pence, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) allowed Sufyan Sohel, the Deputy Director of CAIR-Chicago, to facilitate a discussion and training session for U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers at their offices near O’Hare International Airport on 15 October 2019.

According to the CAIR-Chicago website, Sohel “…gave an overview of Islamic faith traditions, illustrated the rich diversity of the Muslim community, and delved into the rise of Islamophobia and how bigoted policies, including the Muslim Travel Bans, affect Muslims and other marginalized communities.”

Sufyan Sohel, Deputy Director of CAIR-Chicago

CAIR is the U.S. branch of HAMAS (a designated group on the Foreign Terrorist Organizations list), itself the Palestinian branch of the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. CAIR was named by the Department of Justice (DOJ) as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation (HLF) HAMAS terror funding trial. In 2009, following the 108-count unanimous guilty verdict in the HLF trial, the FBI announced that it was cutting all ties with CAIR.

Unfortunately, neither the DOJ at the supervisory level nor the FBI’s field office in St. Cloud, MN would seem to have gotten the memo. A “hate crimes” event there, originally scheduled for 18 September 2019, eventually was cancelled following protests by local activists, but not before the announcement went out that the FBI would be teaming up with CAIR-MN for the forum…ten years after it was supposed to have cut all ties.

While CAIR presents itself as a civil rights organization, individuals closely associated with it sport a long and well-documented history of engaging in subversive and seditious lines of effort against the USG as reported by the Center for Security Policy (CSP) in its 2015 publication Star Spangled Shariah: The Rise of America’s First Muslim Brotherhood Party. Another red flag for the Trump administration should be the close relationship between Nihad Awad’s CAIR and the pro-HAMAS and openly jihadist Turkish government and Justice and Development Party (AKP) of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which are successfully running foreign hostile influence operations against the USG—on U.S. soil. (See the Diyanet Center of America at https://diyanetamerica.org/ as well as Chapter 2 of CSP’s 2018 monograph, “Ally No More: Erdogan’s New Turkish Caliphate and the Rising Jihadist Threat to the West” for details.)

If the Federal Bureau of Investigation supposedly suspended all formal contacts with CAIR in 2009 due to substantial evidence demonstrating a nexus between CAIR and HAMAS, a U.S. Department of State designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, then why is the Trump administration selecting CAIR to train U.S. CBP officers in October 2019? As the holiday season approaches, how can Americans and other travelers using O’Hare International Airport feel safe and secure, knowing that their CBP officers have been trained by a HAMAS front group, thereby ensuring they do not have an accurate understanding of the Islamic Movement’s enemy threat doctrine or tactics?

The oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, either means something or it does not.

#Legal #Islam #Sharia #Jihad #Politics #News #Military #Immigration

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go-redgirl · 5 years ago

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TLAIB AND OMAR WEREN’T BANNED FOR DISAGREEING WITH ISRAEL-jihad advocacy is far worse than that FrontPage Magazine ^ | August 19, 2019 | Robert Spencer

It is unlikely to come as a surprise to anyone except the most blinkered Leftist ideologue that Ilhan Omar’s response to being banned from entering Israel, along with her fellow antisemitic Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, was outstandingly disingenuous. But she knows, when she retails her outrageous falsehoods, that the establishment media will never call her on them or reveal the true depths of her alliance with jihadis and agitation against Israel.

“The irony of the ‘only democracy’ in the Middle East making such a decision,” said Omar, “is that it is both an insult to democratic values and a chilling response to a visit by government officials from an allied nation.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to restore some realism and honesty to the discussion, saying: “As a free and vibrant democracy,” he said, “Israel is open to critics and criticism, with one exception: Israeli law prohibits the entry into Israel of those who call for, and work to impose, boycotts on Israel, as do other democracies that prevent the entry of people believed to be damaging to the country.”

There’s the rub. Omar and Tlaib are not just Congresswomen with opinions that are critical of Israel. They are not just spokesmen; they are activists. They are active apologists for the jihad terror networks Hamas and Hizballah. The Washington Examiner reported in May that “Rep. Ilhan Omar appeared to take the side of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad Sunday night after terrorists fired hundreds of rockets at civilian targets in Israel this weekend.” Omar tweeted: “How many more protesters must be shot, rockets must be fired, and little kids must be killed until the endless cycle of violence ends? The status quo of occupation and humanitarian crisis in Gaza is unsustainable. Only real justice can bring about security and lasting peace.” About Hamas’ genocidal incitement and celebration of the murders of Israeli civilians she was silent. Nor has she ever uttered a murmur of protest against the fact that Hamas is dedicated to the complete destruction of Israel, which, if it ever happened, would result in the deaths of millions of Israelis.

Tlaib, meanwhile, according to the Investigative Project on Terrorism, “was photographed with an avowed Hizballah supporter in January – just after being sworn in to the U.S. House of Representatives.” When this came to light, “she claimed she didn't know the guy or what he stood for. But just two months later, Tlaib did it again. In a March photograph just discovered by the Investigative Project on Terrorism, Tlaib poses with Nader Jalajel, a Palestinian activist who last year mourned the death of a terrorist who led a shooting attack that murdered a rabbi.”

Hizballah is a wholly owned and operated subsidiary of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and is also dedicated to the complete destruction of Israel.

Both Tlaib and Omar have also spoken at fundraisers for the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR is an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror funding case — so named by the Justice Department. CAIR officials have repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas and Hizballah as terrorist groups. Several former CAIR officials have been convicted of various crimes related to jihad terror. CAIR’s cofounder and longtime Board chairman (Omar Ahmad), as well as its chief spokesman (Ibrahim Hooper), have made Islamic supremacist statements about how Islamic law should be imposed in the U.S. (Ahmad denies this, but the original reporter stands by her story.) CAIR chapters frequently distribute pamphlets telling Muslims not to cooperate with law enforcement. CAIR has opposed virtually every anti-terror measure that has been proposed or implemented and has been declared a terror organization by the United Arab Emirates. CAIR’s Hussam Ayloush in 2017 called for the overthrow of the U.S. government. CAIR’s national outreach manager is an open supporter of Hamas.

In a sane society, fundraising for such a group would be political suicide. But in a sane society, neither Omar nor Tlaib would ever have been elected to Congress in the first place. Their lies would have dashed their political hopes. Tlaib’s would have been done in by her risible claim that her “Palestinian ancestors” worked “to create a safe haven for Jews” after the Holocaust.

In reality, as I show in detail in my forthcoming book The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process, the Muslim Arabs in Palestine actually carried out numerous pogroms against the region’s Jewish residents and new arrivals. No Palestinian Arabs, none, worked to create a safe haven for Jews there or anywhere else.

But the most egregious falsehood that both Tlaib and Omar energetically propagate is the fiction that Israel is an occupying power, and that the Palestinian Arabs are suffering under this Israeli occupation. In reality, there never was a state of Palestine for Israel to occupy, in whole or part. Following the right of self-defense itself that all nations have honored throughout history (until the case of Israel), the Jewish state took control of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) from Jordan and Gaza from Egypt, after defeating the aggressive war of the neighboring Arab Muslim states. No Palestinian Arabs uttered a word of protest against the “occupations” from 1948 to 1967 by Jordan and Egypt of what they claim is their territory. Their rhetoric about Israel “occupation” now is designed to discredit Israel in the court of international opinion, and ultimately destroy it.

It is also worth noting that all the political parties in the “Palestinian territories” are pro-terror and dedicated to the destruction of Israel. This is what Omar and Tlaib support. Those who are comparing their ban with the banning of Pamela Geller and me from Britain are ignoring the fact that we never have called for or justified any violence or terrorism. The same cannot be said of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

TOPICS: Editorial; Israel; Politics/Elections KEYWORDS:

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OPINION: More than likely, these two women of not only Anti-Americans but under cover terrorists! Don’t put it pass them because they are women. Their is no place in our Constitutions that says we must allow anti-americans to be elected to serve in Congress just because they are citizens.

That’s reason enough to expel them for their positions in Congress. We are not obligated to keep these women serving in Congress. In fact, its our ‘obligation’ to have them expelled immediately for their Anti-American movement in Congress On Tax Payers dollars.

They will have the right in court to defend themselves and prove otherwise. But, not on tax payers dollars.

And we will see them in Court as they try to depend themselves.👍

THE ENEMIES FROM WITHIN!

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allianceforisraeladvocacy-blog · 6 years ago

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NEWEST ARENA FOR THE ISRAEL-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT: YOUR STATE?

Supporters of Israel are pushing, even writing bills to blunt Palestinian-led boycott.

The front lines in a bitter debate between Israel’s defenders and critics now lie in an unexpected place: state capitals across America.

Palestinian rights activists calling for people to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel have racked up policy victories over the last 14 years across the globe and in the U.S., particularly on university campuses.

In response, pro-Israel advocates have taken the battle to state legislatures, where their lobbyists have worked with sympathetic lawmakers to shut down an effort they say threatens the very existence of a Jewish state.

A rapid succession of states — 27 in four years — have adopted measures to curb the boycott initiative known as BDS.

These new laws and executive orders have been crafted by activists, then copied from one state to the next, adopted with virtually identical language. Most require tens of thousands of state contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel — or lose their government funding. Other efforts require state pension boards to divest from companies that boycott Israel.

As part of a two-year investigation into copycat legislation in statehouses, the Center for Public Integrity and USA TODAY examined dozens of anti-boycott bills and executive orders and then traced the communication between pro-Israel lobbyists and lawmakers who supported their efforts.

The broader investigation, “Copy, Paste, Legislate,” which also involves The Arizona Republic, shows for the first time how governors and lawmakers across the country allowed a handful of special-interest groups to write public policy word for word.

In Louisiana, emails obtained by the Center show that pro-Israel advocates actually wrote the governor’s anti-boycott executive order and press release.

In Nevada, a pro-Israel lobbyist guided the legislation’s sponsor with detailed and frequent feedback, in one case reviewing and approving statements by a lawmaker who planned to support the bill.

In South Carolina, state Rep. Alan Clemmons called an activist supporting his anti-boycott legislation his “buddy and wordsmith-in-chief.”

A network of pro-Israel Jewish and evangelical Christian advocacy groups have quietly but forcefully pushed the anti-boycott legislation, marketing it as a solution to address a growing trend of anti-Semitic incidents. Among the leaders are well-known organizations such as the Jewish Federations of North America as well as smaller groups such as the Israeli-American Coalition for Action.

The groups pushing the bills are building off goodwill generated from years of courting state officials with — sometimes free — trips to Israel. And the Israeli government then writes to thank state officials instrumental in passing the measures.

Now pro-Israel groups are urging states to enforce the new divestment laws against specific companies, such as Danske Bank and Airbnb, which angered pro-Israel advocates last year when it announced it would remove Israeli rental listings on the West Bank. The groups are also pushing for passage of further measures to undermine pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses.

The anti-boycott movement in state capitals is a strikingly bipartisan initiative at an especially partisan moment in American history. In 2017, all 50 U.S. governors and the mayor of the District of Columbia signed a statement rejecting the BDS movement as an effort to “demonize and delegitimize Israel.”

Some anti-boycott activists have said they took the debate to state legislatures in part to find friendlier waters than universities. “You don’t want to fight on your enemy’s terrain,” said pro-Israel activist Noah Pollak at a 2016 conference. “While you were doing your campus antics, the grown-ups were in the state legislatures passing laws that make your cause improbable.”

Taken together the anti-boycott measures represent a largely successful effort to embed controversial foreign policy into state law, short-circuiting public discourse about Israel, to the detriment, say some, of Americans who would like to do business with their states but also hold deep convictions about Palestinian rights.

The American Civil Liberties Union and Council on American-Islamic Relations have spearheaded a slew of lawsuits over the demands for contractors to disavow Israel boycotts. Among the plaintiffs: a Texas speech pathologist who decided she could not work a tenth year at her suburban school district, a former Maryland state legislator who lost out on a $50,000 state contract, and an Arizona lawyer who had to choose between advising state prison inmates and a zeal to promote justice overseas. Last week a federal judge in Texas ruled the state’s anti-boycott law was likely unconstitutional, joining two earlier federal court decisions in Arizona and Kansas. But another court in Arkansas has disagreed, and it remains to be seen whether a higher court will take up the issue.

Backers say the anti-boycott laws fit with the United States’ longstanding alliance with Israel and clamp down on discrimination against Israelis.

“The BDS movement is an anti-Semitic movement. It discriminates against no one on the planet other than Jews,” said Peggy Shapiro, executive director of the Midwest chapter of StandWithUs, which has advocated for anti-boycott laws. “It’s important for governors and legislatures to speak up and say this is not something our states will invest in.”

The U.S. Senate in February passed federal legislation championed by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., to protect the state laws from legal challenges, though it appears unlikely to pass the House.

Supporters of the international BDS movement argue Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is inhumane, and that the new anti-boycott state laws help insulate Israel from legitimate criticism.

“They’re attacking individuals’ and even companies’ and nonprofits’ ability to engage on this issue through First-Amendment-protected activities,” said Dima Khalidi, director of Palestine Legal, which provides legal support to Palestinian rights advocates. “This movement is about human rights.”

It’s a high-stakes, emotional discussion. The anti-BDS lobbying campaign is pitting Holocaust survivors and their memories of 1930s German boycotts of Jewish goods against activists who, seeing similarities between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and the Jim Crow South, hope to usher in a new era of equality for Palestinians.

The anti-boycott movement in the states has frustrated some American Jews, who in surveys support Israel yet criticize some of its policies.

“Boycotts are a tactic. It’s a neutral tactic,” said Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah, a Jewish human rights group that supports neither BDS nor state anti-BDS laws. “The best way to protect Israel is to fight for the human rights of both Israelis and Palestinians there and not to argue about the tactics.”

THE START OF A MOVEMENT Illinois and South Carolina were the first states to pass anti-boycott measures in 2015, and many of the bills that followed shared their exact wording, from Arizona to Rhode Island and more states in between.

At the ground level, the debates are personal. University of Nevada-Reno junior Matthew Levin showed up to a Carson City meeting room in March 2017 in a suit jacket and tie to urge his state to both turn away contractors that boycott Israel and to disclose any investments in boycotting companies.

Earlier in the semester, Levin’s Jewish fraternity brothers in a Las Vegas chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi found swastika graffiti near their campus, part of a nationwide uptick in anti-Semitic incidents. Attacks on Jews jumped by 37 percent in 2017, according to the FBI, and they’ve since grown deadly. In October 2018, a gunman killed 11 people at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, and just last week another shooter killed one and injured three at the Chabad of Poway Synagogue near San Diego.

“I’m scared to be a Jew for the first time in my life,” Levin told the committee. “And the threats to the state of Israel are not making it any better.”

More than a dozen others supported the bill that day, alongside more than 60 people who showed up to a later hearing, easily outnumbering the handful of opponents who testified, according to video. The show of consensus against the BDS movement was bipartisan, as it had been in other states. The bill passed.

Former Nevada Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison worked closely with a pro-Israel lobbyist, Dillon Hosier, to craft and pass the bill modeled from Arizona’s law, according to emails obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

“I don’t think there’s a First Amendment right to have the government do business with you,” Hutchison said in an interview.

Former Nevada Lt. Gov. Mark Hutchison on a trip to Israel. (Republican State Leadership Committee) Hutchison has traveled to the Middle East at least twice, including on a $15,000 trip in 2013 paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, an affiliated charity of pro-Israel lobbying group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Israel is a common destination for state officials, including some other anti-boycott bill sponsors. At least 21 of the 50 sitting governors have visited or planned to visit the country at least once, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of news reports.

At one point an assemblywoman supporting the bill asked for the lieutenant governor’s thoughts on her planned testimony. His office forwarded the testimony to Hosier, the lobbyist.

“Hits all the right notes,” the lobbyist replied.

Hosier at the time worked for the Israeli-American Coalition for Action, a Los Angeles-based advocacy group that works to strengthen U.S.-Israel ties. A board member of the group, Adam Milstein, said in a 2017 speech that his organization was “spearheading” efforts to combat BDS at the state and federal level, taking credit for passing legislation in California and working to pass it in five other states at the time, according to prepared remarks. The charitable group that created the IAC for Action, called the Israeli American Council, has received more than $60 million in donations from GOP megadonors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson.

But anti-boycott legislation has been a team effort, Hosier told the Center for Public Integrity, saying there was “a core group of organizations that attempted to drive it across the country.”

Republican state representative Clemmons sponsored the first anti-boycott law dealing with contractors in South Carolina in 2015. He said a trip to Israel, paid for with election campaign funds, inspired the legislation and that he received help from multiple groups, including the D.C.-based Israel Allies Foundation.

“We’ve not been a big financial player. It’s just really coordinating the different groups to work together,” said Daniel Williams, a former executive director of the foundation. “And the person that has been driving that is Joe Sabag.”

Clemmons in 2017, in an email obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, called the foundation’s Sabag his “buddy and wordsmith-in-chief.” Sabag, formerly the foundation’s U.S. director who has since moved to the IAC for Action, said he often helps legislators who ask for his expertise.

George Mason University law professor Eugene Kontorovich also helped draft the bill, and went on to assist other states with their anti-boycott measures; he now frequently defends the laws’ constitutionality in the media.

“One man’s boycott is another man’s discrimination,” Kontorovich said.

Also in 2015, Illinois passed a bill forcing state investment funds to divest from companies boycotting Israel, aided by the American Jewish Committee and a local Jewish Federation, according to emails obtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

The Israel Allies Foundation then announced it was combining the South Carolina and Illinois bills into “one piece of model legislation.” Clemmons, the South Carolina state representative, said he also urged lawmakers in other states to copy his bill.

Hosier, who has since left IAC for Action to help start a new Israeli-American advocacy organization, now criticizes some of the model anti-boycott legislation. At least five states passed laws mimicking South Carolina’s prohibition on Israel-boycotting contractors, which he says is unconstitutional.

“This is a kind of house of cards that can be very easily knocked over by one or two federal judges,” Hosier said.

In Louisiana, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards did not write his anti-boycott executive order nor the press release accompanying it. Both drafts were sent to him by Mithun Kamath, a lobbyist for the Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans. In an email obtained in a public records request by the Center for Public Integrity, Kamath said that the draft executive order had been reviewed by AIPAC and Israel Action Network, a group founded by the Jewish Federations of North America to “counter delegitimization” of Israel.

The final executive order and press release were nearly word-for-word what the Federation had delivered.

The Federation also hired powerful Louisiana lobbyist Ryan Haynie, who emailed a pro-Israel speech drafted for the governor, though it’s unclear if Edwards used it.

“No pride of authorship just want to help jumpstart the process for you guys,” Haynie wrote to the governor’s office. Haynie and his mega-lobbyist father, Randy Haynie, are fixtures in Louisiana politics and have represented everyone from tech titan Apple Inc. to tobacco giant Altria Group Inc.

A spokesperson for the governor, Shauna Sanford, said it is common for interest groups to supply the governor with talking points and said about the speech that “there’s no way to know what remarks were delivered” since the event was private.

The Jewish Federation of Greater New Orleans, AIPAC and the Israel Action Network did not respond to requests for comment.

CAMPUS VS. CAPITOL The anti-boycott efforts have built on groundwork laid by pro-Israel lobbyists a decade ago, when at least 17 states passed legislation saying their pension funds would divest from any companies that did business with Iran.

The new push for legislation at the state level has also followed years of campus activism by Palestinian rights advocates, who hope to replicate the boycott movement that helped end South Africa’s apartheid in 1994. Similar to South Africa, they argue, Israel persecutes Palestinians, controlling their movements on the West Bank and overlooking their abuse by soldiers, among other concerns. (Israel’s supporters deny those claims.)

BDS activists take credit for convincing student governments at more than 60 American universities — New York University, the University of Minnesota and the University of South Florida among them — to take up the Palestinian cause by, for instance, urging their schools to cut ties with companies “complicit in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights.” They have also persuaded cities such as Berkeley, California, to divest from companies such as G4S accused by BDS activists of providing services to Israeli prisons where Palestinians are allegedly tortured. (G4S said it sold its business in Israel in 2017, that it did not manage the prisons and that independent reviews have found the company did not contribute to human rights violations.) They’ve pushed mainline Protestant denominations such as the United Methodist Church to boycott products made in West Bank settlements. And they have encouraged American celebrities to “#skipthetrip” when offered free tours of Israel.

The movement has had even more success in Europe, where the European Union now requires goods made in Israeli settlements to be labeled as such.

Many of those who have found themselves harmed by state anti-boycott laws, however, are practicing relatively quiet expressions of BDS activism, such as a Texas poet who boycotts Sabra hummus, partially owned by an Israeli company, or the Mennonite teacher who refuses to buy products from companies operating in Israeli settlements.

Omar Barghouti, a Qatar-born Palestinian resident of Israel and co-founder of the BDS movement, predicts that the statehouse countermovement will backfire and actually strengthen BDS in the U.S.

Israel’s “attempts to muzzle free speech and undermine the U.S. Constitution are decisively and perhaps irreversibly alienating the liberal mainstream, including younger Jewish-Americans,” Barghouti told the Center for Public Integrity in an email.

ISRAELI APPROVAL The Israeli government has congratulated states that passed anti-boycott laws, emails obtained by the Center for Public Integrity show.

“As Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, I have been entrusted with leading the Israeli government’s efforts to counter the discriminatory and anti-Semitic boycott campaign,” Gilad Erdan wrote to Ohio Gov. John Kasich in December 2016 after an anti-boycott bill there became law. “I sincerely appreciate your contribution.”

In 2015, Israel’s Consul General for the Midwest wrote to Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner’s then-chief of staff who had helped pass that state’s anti-boycott bill: “Great job, as always.”

And during a signing ceremony for Kentucky’s anti-boycott executive order in November, Gov. Matt Bevin said that on his trip to Israel earlier in the year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally asked him to work on the issue, according to a report by Louisville’s WFPL radio station.

WHAT’S NEXT Pension fund administrators in some states have opposed anti-boycott bills, concerned about politics muddying their fiduciary duties.

“We believe that these assets are held in trust and belong to the participants of the plan and that they should not be used for ulterior motives including social purposes,” said Keith Brainard, research director of the National Association of State Retirement Administrators, whose members oversee more than two-thirds of the $4.4 trillion held for nearly 25 million current or retired employees of state and local government.

Most states that have passed the anti-boycott pension measures have only come up with a handful of companies to divest from, leading some to think the laws are largely symbolic. But state pension funds are still feeling the anti-boycott pressure.

Milstein, the Israeli-American Coalition for Action board member, has urged Florida and Indiana to divest from certain companies and provided them with research on companies that boycott Israel, according to emails obtained by the Center for Public Integrity. IAC for Action also took credit for New Jersey dropping its investments in Danish lender Danske Bank in 2017.

A spokesman for Danske Bank said the bank does not boycott Israel, but that its responsible investment policy prompted it to cut ties with many companies, including two companies in Israel.

Last year pro-Israel groups unsuccessfully pushed Florida to cancel the singer Lorde’s concerts there after she canceled a show in Israel, and they successfully lobbied state officials to punish short-term rental website Airbnb for deciding to remove listings in Israeli West Bank settlements (a decision the company recently reversed).

New Zealand singer and songwriter Lorde, seen here performing during the Corona Capital music festival in Mexico City in 2018, cancelled a show in Israel, prompting pro-Israeli lobbyists to unsuccessfully push Florida to cancel her concert. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo) Lorde did not respond for comment. A spokesman for Airbnb said it opposes the BDS movement.

More bills to fight the BDS movement may be on the horizon. A pro-Israel Christian evangelical group based in Tennessee, Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, plans to lobby states to define anti-Semitism to include criticisms of Israel that apply “double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” The broad definition, which originated from the U.S. State Department’s “working definition” of anti-Semitism adopted in 2010, could force state universities to treat BDS activism as anti-Semitic.

“That’s one of our goals is to shut down these groups that parade themselves as legitimate clubs on college campuses,” said the Tennessee group’s leader, Laurie Cardoza-Moore.

South Carolina last year became the first state to adopt the broad anti-Semitism definition by including it in a plank of its budget that is only valid for one year. Emails requested by the Center for the Public Integrity show that Sabag and Clemmons again teamed up to urge lawmakers to adopt the definition.

Meanwhile, Proclaiming Justice to the Nations planned bills in Florida, Ohio and Tennessee this year. So far the Tennessee bill has been introduced, and the Florida bill has passed the legislature and awaits the governor’s signature.

“The attorneys are still working on it,” Cardoza-Moore said of the new model legislation in December. “Each state will be slightly different … each draft will be specific to the state legislature that’s introducing it.”

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jewishphilosophyplace · 8 years ago

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Israeli Settlements & International Law (Nathaniel Berman)

This piece by Nathaniel Berman picks apart the argument commonly used by the Jewish right to justify the legality of the settlement project in the occupied West Bank. Professor Berman is the Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture at the Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University. The article appeared just recently here at Tikkun. Berman’s website is here. I have put in bold what to me seems like the crux of his argument. The crux of the crux is the rejection of the principle of terra nullius, replaced by the “recognition of the political rights of non-state peoples, the [sovereign] beneficiary of the trust-like status of occupied territory, in the absence of a legitimate prior [nation-state] sovereign, must be “the people” of the territory” (the interpolations in brackets are my own).

The Settlement Legality Debate by Nathaniel Berman

May 11, 2017

Editor’s Note: The Spring 2017 issue of Tikkun Magazine is entirely devoted to the 50th anniversary of the Six Days War and the beginning of the Occupation of the West Bank by Israel. It includes a wide range of Israeli and Palestinian voices as well as those from the Jewish and Palestinian Diaspora. If you don’t yet subscribe, do so now at http://ift.tt/19OwQwi. If you do subscribe,or are a member of the Network of Spiritual Progressives at the $50 or more level (http://ift.tt/1IHhQws) or you havdonated $50 or more this year,and have not yet gotten the new issue in the mail, Duke U. Press promises that it is in the mail already sodon’t worry, it’s coming and it’s powerful. If you “read it at the bookstore” and it is not at your local bookstore, please urge them to carry it–speak to the person in charge of ordering magazines and urge them to carry the magazine (they can contact Ingram book distributors which is now taken over by The News Group TNG.com which can be reached at 866-466-7231).

The Settlement Legality Debate: FAQ

Nathaniel Berman

Brown University

I. Why Now?

The resurgence of debates about legality, particularly the legality of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, has become an unexpected feature of public discussion of Israel/Palestine over the past decade. This resurgence has been primarily the work of two kinds of forces. On the one hand, pro-settler advocates have been asserting that the pervasive international view of the illegality of the settlements is simply wrong. Such advocates range from a 2012 Israeli government “Report on the Status of Building in the Region of Judea and Samaria” (the “Levy Commission Report”), to articles published in the right-wing press, to activists relentlessly advancing such views in social media. On the other hand, the illegality of the settlements has been vigorously asserted by those active in international campaigns critical of Israel, especially the BDS movement. This article will primarily focus on the pro-settler use of the legality argument, evaluating its soundness and considering the contextual significance of its resurgence.

The revival of the legality debate is surprising because it seems, at first glance, at odds with current global developments. To be sure, there was a period, roughly between 1990 and 2003, when international debate about the use of force was pervaded with legal argumentation. In retrospect, it is astonishing how much of the debate about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August, 1990 and the US-led military response in January, 1991, was framed in terms of legal argument. The decade that ensued was something of a golden era for public international lawyers. The conviction that the end of the Cold War meant that the international law governing the use of force could “finally” be implemented, that the Security Council could “finally” play the role for which it was intended, became quite widespread. Even as such hopes became tarnished as the decade continued – most egregiously by the international failure to stop the 1993 Rwanda genocide – international legal discourse remained a key shaper of world opinion about the use of force. Every intervention – or lack thereof – was accompanied by fierce debate about its legality. The 1999 NATO invasion of Kosovo, despite – or perhaps precisely because of – its questionable legality, produced volumes of creative legal discussion.

That period now seems long past, though it may not be possible to identify the precise moment of its demise. Kosovo played a role, as did the decision of the US not to seek Security Council approval for the invasion of Afghanistan. Nevertheless, both of these actions could be plausibly (if not uncontroversially) justified under longstanding doctrines (humanitarian intervention in the former case, self-defense in the latter). But it was the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent, if grudging, acquiescence to it by much of the world, that signaled that international norms about the use of force had lost their power to shape international policy. With the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, both of the erstwhile “superpowers” had firmly demonstrated their contempt for such international norms. To be sure, many condemned that invasion in terms of its blatant illegality, but such terms seemed out of touch with the new discursive character of international debate.

In the Israel/Palestine conflict, legal debate has long played a central, if intermittent, role. While I cannot rehearse the entire history here, suffice it to say that the conflict has been decisively shaped by the debate over, and adoption of, such international instruments as the 1922 Mandate for Palestine, the 1947 Partition Resolution, the 1967 Security Council Resolution 242, and so on. But there have been periods when questions of legality seemed more or less irrelevant to ongoing political developments.

In my view, it was the 1993 Oslo agreements and their aftermath that largely encouraged the most recent (if temporary) sidelining of the core legal issues of the conflict, such as the legitimacy of the State of Israel, the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, legality of the settlements, and so on. The twin recognitions of Israeli statehood and Palestinian peoplehood by Rabin and Arafat in 1993 promised to set aside zero-sum debates over rival, totalizing legal claims. In their stead, Oslo seemed (however briefly) to augur a focus on pragmatic adjustment of interests, the establishment of complementary Palestinian and Israeli societies, and the gradual oblivion of incommensurable claims over the land and its history.

The death of Oslo had both its sudden and gradual dimensions, with causes far too complex to discuss here. The second intifada sealed its demise – even though some of its formal structures persisted, and indeed continue to persist. Yet, this demise was not initially accompanied by a revival of the centrality of the legal debate. This was partly due to the accompanying violence: it seemed that neither legal principles nor pragmatic interests would henceforth be relevant, but only brute force.

However, as ever in this conflict, brute force has not decided matters, and zero-sum ideological battle has again become the order of the day: on one side, the de-legitimation of Israel as such; on the other side, the de-legitimation of any Palestinian claims to the land. Or, to use common shorthand: the advocates of a “one-state solution,” whether that state be Israel or Palestine, have seemed to be gaining the upper hand in shaping international debate, employing legal argumentation to advance irreconcilable claims.

II. What is the Law?

I turn to an overview of the legal issues relevant to the settlements, beginning with the basics. A full legal discussion would take an entire volume (or more); I have striven here to deal with the most central questions.

Israel is a State (in the international law, not the American, sense – i.e., an independent country). Its statehood has been recognized by most other States, and, most importantly, by its status as a Member State of the U.N. If any other State were to use force against its “territorial integrity or political independence …, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations,” it would be violating Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, one of the most sacred norms of post-World War II international law. At a formal legal level, such issues as the “legitimacy” of Zionism, Jewish historical claims to the land, and so on, are simply irrelevant to the legal status of the State of Israel.

The Palestinians, for their part, have been recognized as a “people” with the right to “self-determination” by the U.N., most States, and the International Court of Justice [the “ICJ”, a.k.a, the “World Court”]. Under General Assembly Resolution 2625 (1970), most of whose norms are considered by international legal authority as binding, the right to self-determination can be implemented in one of three ways: “the establishment of a sovereign and independent State, the free association or integration with an independent State, or the emergence into any other political status determined by a people.” As a “people,” the Palestinians thus possess the right, as yet unimplemented, to choose one of these three options. There is a strong international preference that the right to self-determination be implemented through independent statehood, as expressed in state practice during decolonization and in General Assembly Resolution 1514 (1960), the predecessor to 2625 and the seminal document in the ripening of self-determination into a general international legal right.

The territorial dimension of Israeli statehood and Palestinian self-determination requires discussion of at least two additional legal issues. The first concerns the status of the “Green Line,” the border defining Israel under the 1949 Armistice Agreements between Israel and its neighbors, particularly Egypt and Jordan. The Agreements explicitly declared that they were not decisive as to the parties’ legal claims, including territorial claims. Nonetheless, the years after 1949 saw a growing international recognition, at least de facto, of the Green Line as the border of the State of Israel. The precise moment when this de facto recognition acquired legal stature may be hard to pinpoint, though it seems to have largely occurred. Thus, in its 2004 decision on the Israeli security wall, the ICJ implicitly assumed the de jure status of the Green Line – particularly in its proclamation that the Geneva Conventions’ provisions for occupied territories apply to “Palestinian territories … east of the Green Line,” implicitly declaring them inapplicable to territories west of the Green Line because they lay within the sovereign territory of Israel.

This statement by the ICJ brings us to the legal term, “occupation.” Recent pro-settler advocates insistently deny that this term can be applied to the West Bank. They contend that “occupation” only applies when territory is wrested by one sovereign State from another sovereign State. The West Bank has not had an internationally recognized sovereign since the long defunct Ottoman Empire. The British, who succeeded the Ottomans in ruling Palestine, were merely a “Mandatory Power,” a kind of trustee, administering the territory on behalf of the League of Nations. Jordan, which conquered the West Bank in the 1948 war, was widely condemned for its subsequent annexation – an annexation recognized formally only by Britain and perhaps, at an informal or de facto level, by the U.S. The annexation was initially condemned as illegal by the Arab League, which nearly expelled Jordan over the issue.

In 1968, Yehuda Blum, an Israeli international legal scholar and diplomat, offered what was perhaps the first, and most influential, legal argument for an Israeli claim to the West Bank: the theory of the “missing reversioner.” Under this theory, the full set of international rules governing “belligerent occupation” did not apply due to the absence of a legitimate prior sovereign to which the territory could “revert.” Blum, however, did not go so far as to deny that the term “belligerent occupation” applied. Rather, the “missing reversioner” meant that only those rules “intended to safeguard the humanitarian rights of the population” applied, and not those “protecting the reversionary rights of the legitimate sovereign.” Current proponents of the Israeli claim, however, have assertively taken the step from which Blum refrained: the denial of the very existence of an “occupation.”[1]

In any case, the relevance of the “missing reversioner” to the international law of occupation has been soundly rejected by the International Court of Justice in its 2004 decision (as well as by almost all other authorities), as I have noted above. The ICJ based its rejection on the purpose of the relevant provisions of the Geneva Conventions, the travaux preparatoires (records of discussions among the parties to the Conventions), subsequent confirmation by the views of the parties to the Conventions, and many Security Council resolutions – the standard methods used to determine the meaning of a treaty’s provisions. Moreover, as I show below, the Court’s declaration that all the Geneva Conventions provisions governing belligerent occupation apply to the West Bank is amply supported by the overall policies underlying those provisions, as well as other legal developments, above all the right of self-determination.

(I note that I do not have the space here to discuss the legality of the occupation as such, but only that of the legality of settlements in any occupied territory. A plausible argument could be made that the inception of the occupation was legal in 1967 as an exercise of the right of self-defense, but that, as Aeyal Gross has recently shown, the question remains as to whether it has become illegal due to the manner in which it has been conducted.[2])

The core argument for the illegality of the settlements is based on one of the primary goals of the rules governing belligerent occupation: the obligation of the occupier not to change the character of the occupied territory beyond that which is required by strict military necessity. This goal underlies the basic rule about occupation codified in Article 43 of the Hague Regulations of 1907: the requirement that the occupying State “take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.” This policy also informs the prohibitions on forcing the inhabitants to swear allegiance to the occupying State (art. 45) and on the confiscation of private property (art. 46), as well as the rules about public property: “The occupying State shall be regarded only as administrator and usufructuary of public buildings, real estate, forests, and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile State, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties, and administer them in accordance with the rules of usufruct” (art. 55). Articles 46 and 55 leave no land upon which an occupier could build any civilian settlement, let alone one of a permanent character.

To be sure, the 1907 Hague Regulations seem to assume the existence of a sovereign “reversioner” and to see the role of the occupying State as a kind of trustee for that sovereign until the negotiation of a peace treaty. The “missing reversioner” theory would declare all provisions informed by this assumption to be inapplicable to the West Bank. And, indeed, one might very well ask: for whom is the occupying State a trustee in the absence of a legitimate sovereign, for whom is it obligated to observe the rules of usufruct in relation to public property, on behalf of whom is it forbidden to impose its own legal framework – and, in general, whose rights is it supposed to safeguard?

The answer under current international law is clear: the beneficiary of all these rules is the population, or rather, “the people” of the occupied territory. Recall that even Blum affirmed that, in the absence of a legitimate prior sovereign, those rules designed to safeguard the “humanitarian rights of the population” are applicable to the West Bank, thus acknowledging that the absence of a “reversioner” did not entail the absence of a beneficiary of at least some of the rights granted by the law of occupation. To be sure, Blum distinguished between such “humanitarian rights” and political claims – the latter, under his theory, inapplicable by virtue of the absence of a legitimate prior sovereign. And Blum’s position would have been plausible in 1907.

But Blum’s distinction is no longer valid under current international law, due to the right of self-determination, recognizing the political rights of “peoples” not yet organized into a sovereign State, and the infusion of international law generally with the values it embodies. Under this recognition of the political rights of non-state peoples, the beneficiary of the trust-like status of occupied territory, in the absence of a legitimate prior sovereign, must be “the people” of the territory. It is on its behalf that the occupying State must govern the territory, refrain from unnecessary legal changes, safeguard public property, and so on.

The pro-settler (and indeed pro-annexation) argument – that the absence of a legitimate prior sovereign makes the territory available for appropriation by the occupier – thus completely ignores the gradual emergence into international law of the right of political self-determination. While the self-determination of peoples may have only fully ripened into a general international legal right after 1960, the principle informed much of the post-World War I redrawing of the boundaries of Europe. Woodrow Wilson gave it one of its earliest and most eloquent formulations in his 1918 “Four Principles” speech, when he declared that “peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels and pawns in a game” – a principle which runs directly counter to the “missing reversioner” theory.

Indeed, the concept of pre-20th century international law that the right of self-determination directly rejects is the close ancestor of the “missing reversioner” theory: that of “terra nullius,” land that belongs to no one and therefore available for appropriation. This notion had a long and ignoble career in the history of imperialism, whose phases were sketched by ICJ Judge Ammoun in the 1975Western Sahara Case:

(1) Roman antiquity, when any territory which was not Roman was nullius.

(2) The epoch of the great discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during which any territory not belonging to a Christian sovereign was nullius.

(3) The nineteenth century, during which any territory which did not belong to a so-called civilized State was nullius.

The ICJ thoroughly rejected the notion of terra nullius in the Western Sahara Case, declaring that “territories inhabited by tribes or peoples having a social and political organization” cannot be regarded legally as terrae nullius. Since all “tribes” and “peoples” have “social and political organization,” the Court effectively declared that only uninhabited territory could possibly be nullius. The “acquisition of sovereignty” over any inhabited territory, therefore, cannot be “effected unilaterally through ‘occupation’” but, rather only through “agreements concluded with local rulers,” whether or not such local rulers were the representatives of States.

I now turn to the key legal rule specifically governing settlements, Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention: “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” The meaning of this provision has been fiercely contested in the West Bank context. Pro-settler advocates argue that it refers only to forcible transfers of population, and relate it to the mass Nazi deportations to concentration camps. This interpretation treats the two terms, “deport” and “transfer” as synonymous. The authoritative 1958 commentary on the Geneva Conventions by the International Committee of the Red Cross [“ICRC”], however, gives a very different reading:

It is intended to prevent a practice adopted during the Second World War by certain Powers, which transferred portions of their own population to occupied territory for political and racial reasons or in order, as they claimed, to colonize those territories. Such transfers worsened the economic situation of the native population and endangered their separate existence as a race.

In the words of the ICJ in 2004, the provision prohibits “not only deportations or forced transfers of population such as those carried out during the Second World War, but also any measures taken by an occupying Power in order to organize or encourage transfers of parts of its own population into the occupied territory.” This interpretation, endorsed by the ICRC, the ICJ, and most international lawyers, is consistent with the overall policy framework of the law of occupation, which is that the occupying State must refrain from taking steps to change the character of the occupied territory – and attempts to alter its demographic character through settlements, and a fortiori any unilateral steps toward annexation, run directly counter to that policy.

III. What about San Remo?

One of the most surprising features of recent pro-settler legal argumentation is its preoccupation with three, nearly century-old, texts culminating in the establishment of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine: the Balfour Declaration (1917), the San Remo Resolution (1920), and the Mandate for Palestine (1922). These documents are of variable legal significance. The British Balfour Declaration, which “view[ed] with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” was a unilateral declaration of policy by a State engaged at that time in a military struggle for the control of Palestine. Standing alone, it had no international legal significance. The San Remo Resolution was an agreement between four States (Britain, France, Italy, and Japan), declaring their intention to accept certain terms to be incorporated in the Mandates for Palestine, Syria (apparently including Lebanon), and Mesopotamia (soon to be called Iraq). The four States agreed that the Mandate for Palestine would be granted to Britain which would be “responsible for putting into effect the [Balfour] Declaration.” Again, the Resolution was a statement of policy by four States, but had no independent legal significance. Finally, the Mandate for Palestine, a binding international treaty between Britain and the League of Nations, adopted the Balfour Declaration in its preamble and provided for a number of detailed provisions for its implementation. Of these texts, only the Mandate, an international treaty, was legally binding – making the current emphasis by pro-settler advocates on the Balfour Declaration and the San Remo Resolution rather inexplicable from a legal point of view.

In any case, even the Mandate has lost all current legal relevance. The Mandate and its precursor texts were written in a radically different time, before a vast array of radical factual and legal changes in the international and regional situation. Above all, these texts were adopted before the establishment of the internationally recognized State of Israel. The establishment of the State did more than fulfill the goal of the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”: it over-fulfilled it – since the vague term “national home,” a term with no precise legal meaning in 1917 or any prior or subsequent time, was chosen precisely to avoid promising Jewish statehood. A comparison of the Palestine Mandate with all other post-World War I treaties make this clear: when the intention was to guarantee independent statehood to peoples, the texts said so explicitly.

One could quibble further about the language of the Balfour Declaration (for example, it seems to promise only that the “national home for the Jewish people” will be somewhere “in Palestine,” rather than providing for the constitution of Palestine as a whole as a Jewish national home). However, the establishment of the State of Israel, with its over-fulfillment of the “national home” policy, suffices to render the related provisions of the Mandate obsolete. Under a long-established rule governing international treaties, “rebus sic stantibus,” a “fundamental change of circumstances” that alters the basic conditions under which treaty provisions were adopted nullifies their binding character.

Two other provisions are often mentioned by pro-settler advocates. The first is the provision in the Mandate calling for Britain to “encourage … close settlement by Jews on the land.” Again, with the lapse of all the “national home” provisions by operation of rebus sic stantibus, this provision, too, is obsolete. Indeed, the establishment of an internationally recognized State of Israel renders the obligation of a foreign Mandatory Power to “encourage … close settlement” a bit absurd.

The second provision is Article 80 of the U.N. Charter. Article 80 is part of Chapter XII of the Charter, providing for the establishment of an International Trusteeship System to replace the League of Nations Mandates. Article 80 provides that “nothing in” Chapter XII “shall be construed in or of itself to alter in any manner the rights whatsoever of any states or any peoples or the terms of existing international instruments.” Pro-settler advocates, drawing on an article written by Eugene Rostow in 1978, view this provision as maintaining all the provisions of the Palestine Mandate in relation to any part of the territory that has not been “allocated” – a term they use to mean territory not yet granted to an internationally recognized sovereign.

This argument fails on at least two grounds. First, the operation of rebus sic stantibus, rendering obsolete the Mandate’s Jewish national home provisions, is not a result of Chapter XII, and thus the restrictions of Article 80 are simply not pertinent. Second, the ripening of self-determination into an international legal right has not only changed the legal situation (reinforcing the rebus sic stantibus argument) but also signifies that the territory cannot be considered “unallocated” simply because there is no recognized sovereignty over it. In any case, all such arguments have been implicitly rejected by the ICJ, almost all international lawyers, and the international community of States.

IV. What about Resolution 242?

Another old debate which pro-settler advocates have resurrected concerns the meaning of Security Council Resolution 242, adopted in November, 1967. Among other things, the resolution calls for “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied” during the Six Day War. Pro-settler advocates argue that the absence of a definite article before the word “territories” signifies that the resolution did not require Israel to withdraw from all the territories occupied during the war and that this provision could be fulfilled by withdrawal from any of the occupied territories – for example, by the withdrawal from Sinai under the 1979 Camp David Accords. Such arguments often involve comparison of the French and English texts, fine points of English and French grammar, and statements by various people involved in drafting the resolution. The pro-settler advocates also argue that the resolution thus legitimates Israeli settlements.

These arguments are rather baffling. Even if the grammatical point is correct (which is by no means certain), the resolution must be interpreted in light of general international legal rules about occupied territory. Under these rules, territory occupied during war cannot be unilaterally annexed. This prohibition is, indeed, stated in Resolution 242 itself, whose second preambular paragraph “Emphasiz[es] the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war…”. Even if the pro-settler interpretation of “territories” is correct, the resolution would simply be stating that in a negotiated resolution of the conflict, the parties would be free to consent to changes to the pre-war boundaries. This reading renders compatible the second preambular paragraph and the (controversial) interpretation of the word “territories.” I also note that the resolution makes no mention of settlements at all.

In any case, the resolution must be interpreted in light of later legal developments, above all, by the near-universal recognition of the Palestinians as a “people” with a right to self-determination. The resolution makes no mention of Palestinians, who appear only as anonymous “refugees.”

IV. What about Howard Grief?

One of the frustrating features of the pro-settler legality arguments is their seeming indifference to the basic rules governing the determination of the state of international law. They repeatedly point to the existence of a small number of legal writers who have argued for the legality of the settlements, ignoring the thousands who have held the contrary view, as well as the authoritative decision-makers who have also so held (almost all States, the U.N., the ICJ, the ICRC, etc.). They argue for the superiority of the arguments of their chosen writers and contend that, at the very least, the issue is “disputed” and that illegality cannot be viewed as conclusively established.

The pro-settlement legal writers cited are a heterogeneous group – they include some recognized international lawyers, as well as legal scholars in other fields who dabbled to some extent in international law; the careers of some included official Israeli government positions. One of the latter prominently mentioned by pro-settler advocates is Howard Grief, an otherwise obscure Canadian-born lawyer who advised a cabinet minister during the Shamir government, who seems to be responsible for their obsession with the San Remo Resolution. Almost all are individuals clearly identified with the right-wing or even far-right of the political spectrum – including Howard Grief, whose petition to the Israeli Supreme Court to declare the illegality of the Oslo Accords was summarily dismissed as “a political position.”

Whatever the variable credentials of this group, ad hominem arguments are beside the point. International law is not a natural science in which something may be objectively true even if the vast majority of authorities fail to recognize it as such. Nor is it a moral inquiry in which (at least according to some moral theories) a value may be superior to others despite majority thinking. Nor is it concerned with a religious inquiry into the divine intent of a holy scripture. On the contrary, international law defines itself as concerned with consent of States, consensus or near-consensus of scholars, and authoritative institutional interpretations of texts. According to the widely accepted categorization (codified, among other places, in the Statute of the International Court of Justice), the sources of international law are: 1) treaties ratified by states; 2) “customary international law” – widespread State practices that “ripen” into legal rules by virtue of their acceptance as such by most States (the latter known by the Latin phrase, “opinio juris”); and 3) “general principles of law” – principles of the domestic law of States that are so widespread they become transformed into international legal rules.

Moreover, since many of the disagreements here concern the interpretation of treaties, we should note that the principle governing the formation of customary international law – which may be summarized in the formula, “practice + opinio juris” – reappears in only slightly different form in relation to the interpretation of potentially ambiguous legal texts. As stated in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties:

There shall be taken into account, together with the context:

(a) any subsequent agreement between the parties regarding the interpretation of the treaty or the application of its provisions;

(b) any subsequent practice in the application of the treaty which establishes the agreement of the parties regarding its interpretation;

The contention of the wrongness of the overwhelming consensus about the illegality of settlements – shared by States, Courts, and the vast majority of international lawyers – thus misunderstands the nature of international law. One may, of course, oppose international law in whole or in part. But to treat it as though it had a timeless truth, which a lone observer or small group of observers could discover independently of such a consensus is simply a misunderstanding.

V. The Debate as a Tragic Symptom … and One Last Canard

As I noted at the outset, my general view is that this strange resurgence of the legal debate is a symptom of a growing loss of faith in a possible resolution of the conflict within a framework that would give at least partial expression to each of the competing nationalist aspirations. But it also reflects an even more disturbing phenomenon. As many observers have pointed out for years, the two-state solution – which still seems to many, including me, to provide the only framework that could plausibly bring about a peaceful and just resolution of the conflict – is belied by a “one-state reality” for which it serves as an alibi. Moreover, as the occupation looks ever-increasingly permanent, the legal category begins to look increasingly detached from reality, because permanence is the very condition the legal rules intend to obviate. And, yet, for all the reasons pointed out above, once “occupation” becomes obsolete, the alternative is not legitimate Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, as the pro-settler advocates claim. Rather, it can only be replaced by terms like “colonialism” and “apartheid,” historical categories that describe systems of governance in which settlers and the majority population are governed by two legal systems, and in which only the former have citizenship and civil and political rights. In the context of a “one-state reality,” the campaign against the applicability of the legal descriptor “occupation” is thus chilling indeed.

One last, unpleasant canard must be mentioned here. Pro-settler advocates contend that those who think all settlements must be evacuated are calling for the West Bank to be “judenrein,” thus associating opponents of settlements with Nazis. This is wrong, indeed obscene, on so many grounds, and in so many ways, that another essay would be required to express them all. Since my focus here is on international law, I limit myself to one point only. The settlement project may not be honestly described as the effort by individual Jews to rent or purchase homes and whose rights to do so should be protected by something like anti-discrimination law. The settlement project involves the collective movement of portions of the civilian population of a State into territory under military occupation by that State. The project was initiated and remains directed by governmental and non-governmental leaders whose declared intention was, and is, to facilitate the eventual imposition of Israeli sovereignty over the territory in whole or in part. The project was largely (though not exclusively) initiated, and remains largely led, by those guided by a nationalist-messianist ideology, which views the retention of the land by the State of Israel and/or the Jewish people to be mandated by divine will. The project is maintained with the backing of the full might of the Israeli military and by massive governmental expenditure on housing and infrastructure. In short: the core legal issues do not concern housing discrimination or private property – and even less the moral evaluation of individual settlers. If some settlers are violent and racist extremists, and many simply indifferent to the human reality of Palestinians as individuals and as a people, others are ordinary families drawn to the West Bank by governmental economic incentives, some are apolitical spiritual exemplars, and there are even a few, like the late Rabbi Menachem Froman, who are genuine peace-seekers. The legal issues concern the actions of a State bound by international rules governing territory occupied during armed conflict, rules that prohibit moves toward the unilateral imposition of sovereignty on such territory and subordination of its population, of which the settlement project is the most flagrant form.

[1] One should also note that subsequent writings by Blum, published after Oslo, suggest that he no longer maintains the relevance of the theory he advanced in 1968.

[2] Aeyal Gross, The Writing on the Wall: Rethinking the International Law of Occupation (Cambridge, 2017).

http://ift.tt/2ptQACD

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leftpress · 8 years ago

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Steve Cohen’s ‘That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic’

charliethechulo | Shiraz Socialist | March 7th 2017

Steve Cohen (ZT”L) died on 8th March 2009. He had been a member of the Jewish Socialists Group, the International Marxist Group, and a leading campaigner for migrants rights. An outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, he was nevertheless concerned about the prevalence of anti-Semitism on parts of the left and pro-Palestinian movement. Steve was a prolific writer (we tried to rope him into Shiraz towards the end of his life), but by far his most important piece was That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic, which can be read in full on the website devoted to Steve and his great pamphlet, which we reproduce here in memory of a fine comrade:

An anti-racist analysis of left anti-semitism by Steve Cohen (ZT”L), edited ...

by Libby Lawson and Erica Bunnan:

There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

In 1984 I wrote a booklet against anti-Semitism. For this I was denounced as a Zionist.

In 2005 I wrote a pastiche poem criticising Zionism. For this I was denounced as an anti-Semite by some people on the Engage website. What is happening here?

It seems to me that one of the things that is happening is that whatever the fundamental political distinction between anti Semitism and anti Zionism (a distinction I see as absolute) yet on an emotional and existential level the two have become hopelessly intertwined—and this itself is political. Something else which is happening is the confirmation as far as I’m concerned of a political analysis of anti-Semitism which in my naivety, strikes me as obvious but which I’ve never seen articulated anywhere else. This is that the Jewish Chronicle and Socialist Worker are both correct. And incorrect. Zionism is anti racist. And Zionism is racist. I cannot see how Zionism in its triumphant form (the Israeli state) is anything except essentially racist. It was founded on the dispossession of the Palestinians. And it continues on the super exploitation and humiliation of the Palestinians as the “other”. To deny this strikes me as fundamentally immoral. I also happen to think that two states, one of which by definition has to be exclusively Jewish is similarly immoral. I think majoritarianism (the legitimisation of an entity through numbers) is immoral wherever it presents itself—it leads at the very least to forced population movement and at its most extreme to ethnic cleansing and all that implies. I’ll leave open to discussion and personal judgement the point on this continuum that Israel may already guilty and at which a divided state would become guilty.

On the other hand it seems to me equally undeniable that Zionism in its inception was anti-racist. It was a reaction against, a way of dealing with, European anti-Semitism. Maybe as a revolutionary socialist writing in Prestwich in 2005 it would not be my way. However as a Jew of whatever political persuasion in Europe after the coming to power of Hitler in 1933 or the defeat of the revolution in Spain in 1939 I may well have had a different position. And if fascism ever took over here and Jews were barred entry elsewhere then I guess I might take a different position. I empathise with the “bolt hole” theory of Zionism. I appreciate the significance of the remarks by Isaac Deutscher, the Polish Marxist ex-rabbi, who wrote in later life “In this controversy (between socialism and Zionism) Zionism has scored a horrible victory, one of which it could neither wish nor expect; six million Jews had to perish in Hitler’s gas chambers in order that Israel should come to life … If instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jewry to go to Palestine, I might have saved some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers” (Israel’s Spiritual Climate). I take it as axiomatic that any revolutionary of that pre-war period would have fought for the absolute right of Jews to enter Palestine. To have argued otherwise, to have argued for immigration controls, would have meant support for the British Mandate whose army tried to prevent entry. However the tenets of revolutionary socialism (tenets to which I still hold even in these days of Blair, Bush, Sharon and … Bin Laden) would demand that entry into the then Palestine would/should have lead to an attempt to forge an alliance between Jewish workers and Palestinian workers and peasants against the Zionist leadership, the absentee Palestinian landlords and the British soldiery. Of course the task would have been enormous. But the failure of that historic task has lead to what we have today—Israel the perpetual blood bath.

It is because Zionism is both racist and anti-racist that I call myself an anti-Zionist Zionist. It is also because Zionism is racist and anti racist that there is an even more urgent need to rigorously distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism. This itself requires a rigorous definition of both—otherwise how is it rationally possible to ever distinguish the two? I do not think there is ever the question of anti-Zionism discourse “becoming” or “sliding into” anti-Semitism. If a position is anti-semitic then it is anti-semitic in its origins—it does not become so. It is nothing whatsoever to do with Zionism. So, fascistic critiques of Israel are not about Zionism. They are about Jews. And this is the point. Anti-Zionism is about solidarity with the Palestinians. Anti-Semitism is about the Jewish conspiracy. Not all critiques of Israel are based on Jewish conspiracy theories. And anti-Semitism is not going to help progress the Palestinian cause. Just as August Bebel famously described the equation of capital with Jew as the socialism of fools then the equation of Zionism with world domination with Jew is the anti-zionism of fools.

It often feels like the wisdom of Solomon is required to know how to deal politically with this grotesque foolishness. One issue is the actual (the “cleansing” of Jews from Jerusalem in 1948, the suicide bombings of today) or threatened (“drive them into the sea”) repression of Israeli Jews which fuels a fortress mentality and to which sections of the left retain an ambivalent or agnostic attitude. Another issue that should be a matter of concern is that anti-semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism drives away those who would otherwise want to give solidarity to the Palestinian cause. For myself, this is what I found unfortunate in the debate over the boycott of some or all Israeli universities. Whatever the motive of those proposing the boycott (and like Engage I’m opposed to exceptionalising Israel) there is still an imperative need to offer real, material, political support to the Palestinians. I think for myself the best way of dealing with any particular proposed boycott is to come to a decision on whether the boycott would help the Palestinians irrespective of its proposers—and organise independently against anti-Semitism. Which perhaps meaning building a movement that simultaneously is dedicated to Palestinian solidarity and opposition to anti-Semitism.

It is apparent from what I’ve said that I also disagree with what I take to be the dominant position within Engage—namely that in our contemporary world anti-Zionism must inevitably equate with anti-Semitism. Paradoxically I also disagree with Engage’s position that in the modern world the form that anti-Semitism takes is through (foolish) anti-Zionism. I think it is worse than that. Obviously this is one form that is taken by the theory of the world Jewish conspiracy. However it seems to me that this is merely concealing more classic forms—Jew as all-powerful (the “Zionist lobby” running the USA), Jew as financial manipulator (the world being supposedly run by trans-national corporations and not imperialist states), Jew as murderer (take your pick—the blitzing of Iraq comes in there somewhere through its constant equation with the repression of the Palestinians). Jew as the subject of the blood libel (ditto but add the surreal accusation that Jews are responsible for September 11th), Jew as the killer of the first born (double ditto), Jew as poisoner of the wells (the anti-urbanisation of much Green politics—with Jews being the urban people par excellence). These images, these world-views, are powerful enough to split off from any anti-zionist base. And they have begun to split off within sections of the anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist movement. It is here that the anti-Zionism of fools emerges with a vengeance but is still subservient to the classic socialism of fools and also to the pre-capitalist feudalism of fools—the real McCoy of jew hatred. This is because anti-capitalism is shared by socialists who aspire to post-capitalist formations and right-wing organisations who hark back to an earlier pre-capitalist age—which is one of many reasons why genuine socialists have to be vigilant against any equation of capital with Jew.

Anti-Semitism on the left has for too long been a taboo subject—probably since the inception of the socialist project itself. I know because in 1984 I was that taboo! I became for a short period a political pariah in sections of the socialist/communist movement (my movement) for daring to raise the subject. Actually when I began writing my book I had no intention of writing anything on anti-Semitism, left or right. I wanted to write and condemn the (latest) Israeli onslaught on Lebanon. I used the left press as source material—and became horrified by what I was reading. And what I was reading was gross stereotyping of the Jew via the stereotyping of Israel as the most powerful force in the universe. All this was redolent of all the old-time European, Christian imagery—just stopping short it seemed of accusations of desecrating the wafer. So I did some research and quickly realised that this left anti-Semitism did not spring from nowhere but unfortunately had a long and dishonourable tradition—going back at least to the successful agitation for immigration controls against Jewish refugees and the 1905 Aliens Act. As it so happened, I was at that time thinking of writing another book just on this agitation—but Pluto Press told me that “Jews don’t sell”. To which I replied that I thought this was what we’ve always been accused of doing too much of. To show Pluto they were not being true Marxists I quoted Marx’s own piece of self-hatred from his On The Jewish Question: “What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling”. And then bizarrely I started to come across references and allusions (illusions) in parts of the left press to the wealth and power of Jews, of Jewry, all in the service of Israel—or maybe Israel was in the service of Jews and Jewry. Who knows? It was all rubbish anyway—but extremely dangerous rubbish.

And without managing (with the support of some comrades in the Jewish Socialist Group—the JSG) to keep fixed in my head the absolute distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, I guess I could have gone schizophrenic. There were two great successive nights when I was evicted from a mosque then a shul. I’m always sorry I never made the hat-trick of our common enemy—a church. The mosque incident involved picketing (along with some Asian youth) some local anti-Jewish ayatollah. The shul incident was wonderful. It was in Liverpool. I went with other members of the JSG to picket a meeting that was being held in support of the invasion (a shul supporting a military invasion? This really was Old Testament stuff). What we didn’t know was that the guest speaker was some Israeli General—we should have recognised him by his ripped jeans and tee shirt. As we were being lifted horizontally, face downwards, out of the shul by the stewards I looked down on a face looking up at me. The face looking up said “Weren’t we at Oxford together?”. To which I replied “I think so—were you at Trinity?” That to me is a classic example of tribalism. Mea culpa. I always regret not screaming out “Let my people go!”.

That’s Funny You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic did create ripples. It managed to split the JSG whose then dominant leadership thought it might offend the Socialist Workers Party. It resulted in some pretty dreadful correspondence over many weeks in journals like Searchlight and Peace News. A pamphlet was written denouncing me as a “criminal”. There was a particular review—in Searchlight—one sentence of which I will never forget. Every Jew on the left will know that terrible syndrome whereby, whatever the context and wherever one is, we will be tested by being given the question “what is your position on Zionism?” Wanna support the miners—what’s your position on Zionism? Against the bomb—what’s your position on Zionism? And want to join our march against the eradication of Baghdad, in particular the eradication of Baghdad—what’s your position on Zionism? And we all know what answer is expected in order to pass the test. It is a very strong form of anti-Semitism based on assumptions of collective responsibility. Denounce Zionism, crawl in the gutter, wear a yellow star and we’ll let you in the club. Which is one reason why I call myself an Anti-Zionist Zionist—at least that should confuse the bastards. Anyhow this particular review, noting that my book actually did attack Zionism, said “It is not enough to trot out platitudes, as he does, about being against Zionism and in support of the Palestinian struggle”. So I’m not allowed into the club even though I fulfil the entry requirements. I’m not allowed in because I recognise and oppose the existence of anti-Semitism on the Left—and this therefore renders all support for Palestinians a “platitude”. Well it ain’t me who’s here confusing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

An accusation greeting the publication of That’s Funny was that even if anti-Semitism existed, it was trivial compared to other forms of oppression—not least that being inflicted on the Palestinians. I find this argument abhorrent. The struggle for communism is not about establishing some equitable scale of oppression and exploitation. It is about smashing all such oppression and exploitation. Switch to Germany 1925—”Comrades why are you harping on about anti-Semitism? It’s trivial. If it ever became significant we will deal with it. Honest”.

But there were positives back in 1984. There were allies out there—for instance the then Manchester and Liverpool branches of the JSG. I discovered that a similar political battle was going on within the feminist magazine Spare Rib and a kind of informal alliance was formed here. I remember that a large debate was organised in the Peace Studies department at Bradford University—where I shared some dope with a member of the PLO. It was Lebanese! And then the three of us who had published the book (we called ourselves The Beyond The Pale Collective) organised a biggish conference in Manchester. And Pluto Press was wrong—we sold a lot of books. We sold enough books to publish another one—on Holocaust Denial by Gill Seidel. This had been accepted by Pluto but then pulped after it had been typeset! I guess this was part of their reality denial.

As far as I’m concerned I’m still prepared to stand behind most of what I wrote those two decades ago. However there is one issue where my position has somewhat changed. And there is a second where I think I missed the plot entirely. First I think the book was, in its critique of assimilation, far too uncritical of the concept of “Jewish culture”. In fact I think it was implicitly far too generous towards Bundism in this respect (though I still support the Bundist championing of political self-organisation). I no longer see Jewish (or any) culture as monolithic. It is fractured and determined by issues of class. I have been in too many situations where the need to fight racism (racist attacks, immigration controls, fascist mobilisations) has been counter-posed by some suggestion about having an “ethnic” evening with “ethnic” clothes and “ethnic” food. It’s got to the stage where, to paraphrase Goebbels, whenever I hear the word multiculture I want to reach for my gun. In particular I am now ruthlessly opposed to denominational schools—be they Jewish, Muslim, Catholic or Church of England. Some of this has been informed by the racist admission practices of the Jewish School in Manchester (no Jewish mother no entry). However the substantive point is that as a militant atheist I am opposed to the state subsidising the garbage of religion—any religion. And anyhow, I’m for the unity of people of all ages not their division. At the same time I’m equally opposed to the (political) drive towards assimilation—I don’t see incorporation into the norms of imperialism as a step forward for humanity. The latest example of this drive towards incorporation is the suggestion by the Home Office Minister, Hazel Blears, following the London underground bombings that ‘minorities should be described as, for example “Asian-British” rather than simply as “Asian”‘. (Times 8 August 2005). The idea of the labelling and re-labelling of human beings as a method of protecting the citizenry of London is as ludicrous as all other justifications used for restricting the free movement of the same human beings. In the past slaves were branded—literally and with fire. Under the modern market economy it is people. This commoditisation of the alien reduces her or him to a piece of capital, to a new form of enslavement – the enslavement of a forced identity within a hostile society ever ready to deport and expel.

Second I come to missing the plot. This is not about what I wrote. It is about what I did not write. In fact it was what I explicitly refrained from writing. So I said “The book says nothing about socialist or liberation movements in the third world, deliberately so, because countries in the third world have not historically been within the grip of Christianity, and thus have no tradition of conspiracy theories. For example within Islam both Jew and Christian were seen as infidels—and certainly there was no constant mythology of universal Jewish domination. If notions about Jewish power entered the third world, then that is a product of imperialistic and Christian penetration”.

Looking back on this from today’s realities it clearly is inadequate. For instance I cannot see any basis for conspiracy theories (i.e. classic anti-Semitism) within Islam historically, however badly Jews (usually alongside Christians) were sometimes mistreated. I guess for this we have to be thankful we never bumped off Mohammed as well as Jesus. However it would be a matter of interesting political investigation to see precisely how conspiracy theories have subsequently entered the Muslim world—to see how they have become the Islam of fools. Moreover whatever the significance today of Left anti-Semitism, its influence and social weight is insignificant compared to that within Muslim communities (an anti-Semitism which is possibly matched by racism within the Jewish community). So the Elders of the Protocols of Zion is a best seller in Arabic speaking countries. So I’ve read how Islamicists blame “world Jewry” for both the New York and London underground bombings. And this junk needs to be challenged. And it needs to be challenged by the Left—and it isn’t. In fact it is encouraged—if only obliquely.

It is encouraged by Israeli exceptionalism—by the constant depiction and caricaturing of Israel as somehow being the pre-eminent world imperialist power. Inasmuch as I might be for some boycott of Israeli universities then I’m equally in support of a boycott of British universities because of their collusion in the institutionalised apartheid of immigration controls—that is either collusion by their silence or by their active co-operation with the Home Office in developing controls (which appears to be the case with University College London). It is encouraged by the emergence on demonstrations against the American invasion of Iraq, of the denunciation of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank—as though there was some intrinsic connection between the two which is not shared with other imperialist interventions. It is encouraged by the sycophantic, uncritical relationship that the SWP/Respect has towards the Muslim leadership as organised, for instance, around the mosques—these Muslim machers are as right-wing and often as anti-Semitic as their Jewish macher counterparts organised around the shuls are anti-Islam. In the beginning was the Board of Deputies? Today there is the Muslim Association of Britain. Macherism, the political reliance on a self-appointed leadership (the macherites) is a political disease which needs to be challenged and destroyed—instead sections of the Left are cultivating it at its most dangerous points.

Is there any way out of this mess? Particularly is there any way out of this mess for socialists in this country trapped politically between the existential linkage of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Is there a wisdom of Solomon? In all humility I think so. Of course we can all have our own politics on the way forward as regards Israel/Palestine. My own vision is of a federated secular and socialist middle east. This maybe is utopic but so is socialism. So is the revolution. So is all meaningful change. However there is going to be no way forward without a recognition of the fundamental block towards any change whatsoever—namely the world wide antagonism between Jews and Muslims. The international nature of this cleavage is central. Only joint and grassroots solidarity between the players in the game can possibly open up any dialogue. In Israel/Palestine this means between the Jewish and Palestinian masses. For instance let there be a march of a hundred thousand Israeli peaceniks into the occupied territories—and let them stay until the Israeli army and the settlers march out (or co-operate with the Palestinians in the sharing of resources—including the opening up of the new townships to Palestinians). Let Engage encourage this with its co-thinkers in Israel!

In this country it means joint activity between Jews and Muslims (and socialists) with the Jewish and Muslim communities. And what this boils down to is joint activity against fascism and racism. I suggested above the necessity to start to develop a movement simultaneously based on struggle for Palestinian rights and against anti-Semitism. This is presently an abstraction. However another real movement does exist against racism which can draw the two communities together in struggle. This is the disparate movement against immigration controls—for whom the Jews were the first and Muslims the latest victims. Of course controls need to be challenged in their own right—not just as a device for unity. However the challenge can also forge a unity which presently seems a million miles away. What is more the history of the last thirty years of struggle by migrants, immigrants and refugees against controls shows something that SWP/Respect have utterly missed. This is that real, meaningful, progressive political activity within the Muslim community (and all third world communities) comes from the grassroots either by by-passing or defeating the community machers. Let Engage become involved in these struggles both because of their intrinsic political importance and as part of its commitment to challenging left anti-Semitism by building meaningful alliances!

It could begin by supporting the campaign of Samina Altaf and her two children to fight deportation. Samina’s is just one of countless stories—though I guess more immediately poignant. Having fled Pakistan to avoid repeated domestic abuse she was refused asylum here. Like all asylum seekers she is outside of the welfare state and has been forcibly dispersed into Salford by the so-called National Asylum Support Service (NASS—a wing of the Home Office). And now as a failed asylum seeker who is refusing to return “voluntarily” to the country from she fled she is being threatened by NASS with eviction onto the streets. And I forgot to mention this—Samina is disabled with rickets. And her children are crippled with rickets. Get involved with the campaign! Write a letter of support to her constituency MP—Hazel Blears that well known re-labeller of third world identity and warrior against international terrorism (address House of Commons, Westminster, London SW1). Blears happens to be a Home Office MP—so terrorise her with letters of support. And invite a speaker from the campaign to one of your meetings—whilst sending money to the campaign (address Samina Altaf Defence Campaign, c/o Bury Law Centre, 8 Banks St, Bury BL9 ODL).

Finally I think that not one iota of the above can ever be resolved through communalism, through tribalism, through uncritically supporting Jews as Jews or Muslims as Muslims. My religion right or wrong! And all due to an accident of birth. I guess I recoil when I read on the Engage website the reflection on being Jewish—”frankly I can’t get enough of it”. Jewish identity as an addiction is not much of an advert for clarity of political thought. I was shocked by a news report I read a few years ago. It is a story that deserves creative fictionalisation. It concerned a guy who was raised in a highly Zionist family (I guess High Zionism is the Jewish version of High Church). He was raised as a conscious racist towards the Palestinians. Dirty Arabs! Until he discovered he was one of them—He was an adopted son. His biological parents were, I think, Libyan. Overnight (or maybe it took a little longer) he became a vehement anti-Zionist—and Jew hater. Dirty Jews! I was struck by two very powerful televisual images during the recent eviction of the Gaza settlers by the (Orwellian entitled) Israeli Defence Force. One was that of Israeli soldiers crying. The Israeli army in tears? One of the most powerful militaries in the world! Why no tears when the Palestinians were evicted? The second image was just bizarre in its tribalism. This was that of the settlers being evicted and the soldiers evicting them temporarily desisting from their civil war and praying together on shabbos—with the evictions resuming as soon as shabbos ended. Compared to this crazy chauvinism the legendary Christmas Day football match in the trenches of World War One between German and British soldiers was a genuine act of internationalism. However there can be no genuine internationalism, no genuine international solidarity, no meaningful working together of ordinary people wherever tribalism or communalism dominates. And at the moment it is precisely these reactionary formations that dominate both Muslim and Jewish communities—and the tragedy is they are hardening. It would be good if Engage put its energy into helping soften them.

Steve Cohen 2005

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That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic

Obituary for Steve Cohen (ZT”L)

There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

Why is this book different from all other books ?

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Socialism of Fools

The Socialism of Fools

Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism without Jews

Left Anti-Semitism

Socialism, Anti-Semitism, Thatcherism and Fascism

Chapter 2: The Anti-Semitism of English Socialism”s Formative Years

The Background

Immigration Controls

English and Jewish Opposition to Controls

Rich Jew, Poor Jew: The Conspiracy Theory in Practice

Anti-Alienism or Anti-Semitism

#leftpress #Anti-Racism #anti-semitism #From the archives #good people #Human rights #internationalism #israel #Judaism #left #Middle East #palestine #zionism #news #resistance #politics

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marymosley · 5 years ago

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GW Students Petition To Remove Interim Dean Due To BDS Support

We have been discussing the rising intolerance for free speech and academic freedom at colleges and universities from course material to social media postings to political speech to jokes. As speech codes and microaggression rules are enforced, various groups are calling for the silencing or removal of those with opposing views. The latest is at my school where pro-Israeli students are calling on the university to reconsider the appointment of anthropology and history professor Ilana Feldman as the interim dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs. The sole reason is that they disagree with Feldman’s support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The effort is being assisted by Canary Mission which maintains of list of any academic and student that it considers to be anti-Israel as well as GW for Israel. The Canary Mission criticizes Feldman for her criticism of Israeli security actions and the conditions of Palestinian areas. It declares “Ilana Feldman is an activist in the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Feldman’s scholarship has demonized Israel and camouflaged the detrimental effect of Palestinian terrorist groups on Palestinians and Israelis.” The students insist that Feldman is a “fervent supporter” of the BDS movement, and “[w]e find it highly problematic that the university selected an individual who has worked to hinder international dialogue and exchange to head ESIA.”

The students want Feldman canned simply because she holds an opposing view. There is no evidence that Feldman has ever imposed her views on other faculty or students. Moreover, she has no authority to unilaterally adopt a BDS position for the faculty.

Having opposed speech codes and microaggression rules for many years, this response is unfortunately neither unique nor surprising. There is a diminishing respect for free speech and academic freedom. There was a time when those were the touchstones of the educational academy. Ironically, some of the BDS supporters on campuses have been advocates for silencing others in the imposition of speech codes and barring speakers. It is equally ironic that those who oppose this boycott movement want to effectively block or boycott those intellectuals who hold opposing views. This move shows how speech intolerance is like Saturn . . . it eventually devours its own.

Here is the petition.

GW Students Petition To Remove Interim Dean Due To BDS Support published first on https://immigrationlawyerto.tumblr.com/

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daniellehumanbean-blog · 7 years ago

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US anti-BDS law legitimizes illegal Israeli occupation

In recent months, the US congress has advanced a so called “Israel anti-boycott act.” The bill, which expresses the “opposition of the United States to actions to boycott, divest from, or sanction Israel”,[1] has been widely understood as an attack on the free speech of Palestinian rights advocates in the US. The ACLU has claimed that the bill’s “impacts” would go against principles of free speech,[3] and constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald spoke out against the bill on similar grounds.[4] Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, whose work has been censured under state-level bills containing language mirroring the congressional legislation, described the law as “draconian” and “McCarthyite.” [5] Even conservative commentators have questioned the constitutional legality of a specific provision in the bill which would make requests for “information” about a boycott illegal.[2]

While the bill’s impact on free speech poses serious concerns, other significant elements of the bill have been less discussed. Crucially, there has been little mention in the US of how the congressional anti-boycott bill subtly legitimizes the Israeli occupation of Palestine— which is virtually universally regarded as illegal under international law. The bill in question is the latest in a slew in recent years to have effectively treated the Israeli military occupation of Palestine as part of Israel under US federal law. That the US congress is recognizing the legitimacy of the illegal conquest of one country by another is a troubling development for those in the US who are concerned about the US role in promoting military aggression in the world.

The congressional bill effectively recognizes the legality of the Israeli occupation by not distinguishing legally between territories Israel occupies in Palestine, and Israel proper. For the purposes of the bill, entities operating in occupied-Palestine and those in Israel proper are the same, whereas it explicitly states that a US federal ban on ”actions to boycott, divest from, or sanction Israel" refers to Israeli organizations both “in Israel or in Israeli-controlled territories.” The bill cites a UN Human Rights Council resolution as an example of such a boycott against “Israel”-- despite that the resolution cited clearly distinguishes between Israel and the occupied territories, and doesn’t call for any action against Israel itself, or businesses within its borders.[6]

The current bill is the latest in a host in recent years to have legitimized the Israeli occupation under US law by treating the occupied territories as part of Israel. In 2015, for example, the US budget passed by Congress included a provision which required US aid to Palestine to be restricted in proportion to Palestinian government pensions to “individuals who are imprisoned after being fairly tried and convicted for acts of terrorism.“[7] The law did not distinguish between trials in Israel—where there is a semblance of due process—and those in occupied Palestine, where there is martial law.[8]

In 2016, a similar law was proposed, halting US aid to Palestine until its government “[took] credible steps to end acts of violence against United States and Israeli citizens that [were] perpetrated by individuals under its jurisdictional control”[9]. Again, the language of the bill did not distinguish between those acts prosecuted under legitimate Israeli courts, and those under martial law in occupied Palestine. New versions of this bill introduced earlier this year[10] were passed through Senate committee several weeks ago.[11]

The language in these bills is neither coincidental nor derived from some selective reading of US Public Law. It consists with explicit calls from members of Congress for US recognition of Israeli sovereignty over Palestine. US legislators have repeatedly called for the US embassy to be moved to Jerusalem— part of which is in occupied Palestine— since the passage of the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act. This bill described the illegal Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem as a “reunification,” and affirmed “congressional sentiment that Jerusalem must remain undivided—” with Palestinian East Jerusalem under Israeli administration—in violation of international law.[12] Some representatives have gone as far as to call for the Israeli annexation of the entire West Bank, claiming that Israel ought to “hold the high ground” for “defense purposes.”[13]

None of this is to mention the unconditional military support which congress has provided Israel for decades, despite the country’s violations of basic principles of international law, dating to the beginning of the illegal Israeli occupation 50 years ago. As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote earlier this year: “Aid to Israel in Congress and the pro-Israel community has been sacrosanct, and no president has seriously proposed cutting it since Gerald Ford in the mid-1970s.”[14]

The Israeli PM has described Congress as “the most important legislative body in the world.”[15] Virtually no other legal organ in the world outside of Israel recognizes Israeli sovereignty in Palestine to any extent. Even the Israeli High Court of Justice maintains that Israel holds the West Bank under “belligerent occupation.”[16] The International Court of Justice, the UN General Assembly, and the UN Security Council all consider Israel an “occupying power.”[17][18][19] As recently as last year, the UN Security Council specifically advised governments to “distinguish, in their relevant dealings,” between Israel and the occupied territories.[20] The commitment of the US State Department to this international consensus was maintained by US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at his confirmation hearing, where he described a two-state solution according to the internationally-recognized Israeli-Palestinian borders as “the dream.”[21]

The precedent being advanced by the Israeli Anti-Boycott Act clearly threatens this dream. Unfortunately, Congressional support for illegal Israeli policy in the bill has been largely ignored in the US media. A handful of articles in publications like the Forward and the Minnesota Star Tribune have mentioned the implicit US recognition of the Israeli occupation following from the Anti-Boycott legislation.[22] Meanwhile, the recent passage of the Taylor Force Act through a US Senate committee was met with virtual silence. Two congressional budget hearings on the State Department’s compliance with Palestinian budget restrictions[23][24] were also ignored—despite that they received some international coverage.[25] Certainly, knowledge of these congressional efforts to-- as the op-ed in the Star Tribune put it-- “create the fait accompli of an Israel that effectively includes territories seized in the Six Day War in 1967,″ ought be disseminated more widely, so the US public understands the acts of miliary aggression which are being legitimized and supported in its name.

Nevertheless, there have been alternative currents advanced recently in Washington, even in the midst of this congressional bellicosity. In a recent interview with The Intercept, for example, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) described the US as “complicit” in the Israeli occupation of Palestine through its military aid to the country. He expressed his inclination to reduce this aid in favor of humanitarian aid to the Palestinian city of Gaza— which the UN recently described as “unlivable”[26], following a decade of siege and several wars waged by Israel— and advocated investment in some sort of ‘regional’ environmental infrastructure project. Sanders also defended the international institutions under scrutiny from his congressional colleagues via legislation like the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, and questioned the prevailing wisdom in US foreign policy circles of “unilateralism,” whereas, as he said, “the belief that we can simply overthrow governments that we don’t want… has got to be re-examined.”[27]

The international legal principles of multilateralism and the inadmissibility of aggression sketched in these comments could form the basis for a new US federal law in which—contrary to recent legislation like the Israel Anti-Boycott Act— recognition of the legality of the occupation of Palestine and unconditional military aid to Israel are unequivocally rejected, and subsequent US aid to Israel is conditional on Israeli compliance with international law-- particularly insofar as it proscribes any unilateral Israeli annexation of Palestinian territory.

Of course, these principles would need to be backed up by some form of disciplined, concerted, grassroots action, in which members of congress who genuinely believed in these sort of principles were put into office by a highly-organized anti-war movement. After all, US federal law already technically bans military aid to countries with bad human rights records[28]— but this has never been enforced with regard to countries like Israel[29], or Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, that these ideas have entered the US public discourse to any extent is a welcome respite from the prevailing congressional spirit of aggression and hypocrisy toward the Palestinian people. And--if the US people desire it-- it could very well inspire the sort of action from the US public urgently needed to end both the US complicity in the crimes committed against the Palestinians, and the illegitimate threats to the free speech of advocates for Palestinian rights in the US.

[1] “Israel Anti-Boycott Act.” S. 720. 115th US Congress. 1st Session. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/720/text?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22Israel+Anti-Boycott+act%22%5D%7D&r=1

[2] Volokh, Eugene. “There’s no First Amendment right to engage in anti-Israel boycotts — but there is a right to call for such boycotts.” Washington Post. 25 July 2017. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/07/25/theres-no-first-amendment-right-to-engage-in-anti-israel-boycotts-but-there-is-a-right-to-call-for-such-boycotts/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.51508f878fb6

[3] American Civil Liberties Union. “ACLU letter to the Senate opposing Israel Anti-Boycott Act.” 17 July 2017. Web. Accessed 9 September 2017 https://www.aclu.org/letter/aclu-letter-senate-opposing-israel-anti-boycott-act [4] Greenwald, Glenn, and Ryan Grim. “US lawmakers seek to criminally outlaw support for boycott campaign against Israel.” The Intercept. 19 July 2017. Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/07/19/u-s-lawmakers-seek-to-criminally-outlaw-support-for-boycott-campaign-against-israel/ [5] Waters, Roger. “Congress shouldn’t silence human rights advocates.” The New York Times. 7 September 2017. Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/opinion/roger-waters-congress-silencing-advocates.html?mcubz=0

[6] 19 USC 4201. “Trade negotiating objectives.” Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:19%20section:4201%20edition:prelim) [7] “Consolidated and further continuing appropriations act, 2015.” US Public Law 113-235. 113th US Congress. 16 December 2014. US Government Publishing Office. Web. Accessed 11 September 2017. https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/83/text [8] “Administrative Detention.” B’Tselem. 1 January 2011. http://www.btselem.org/administrative_detention. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. [9] “Taylor Force act.” S. 3414. 114th US Congress. 2nd session. 28 September 2016. Web. Accessed 11 September 2017. https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/senate-bill/3414/text [10] “Taylor Force act.” HR 1164. 115th US Congress. 1st session. 16 February 2017. Web. Accessed 11 September 2017. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/1164/text [11] Magid, Aaron. “After amendment, Booker now supports Taylor Force Act.” Jewish Journal. 8 September 2017. Web. Accessed 11 September 2017. http://jewishjournal.com/news/nation/224185/amendment-booker-now-supports-taylor-force-act/ [12] “Jerusalem Embassy Act.” US Public Law 104-45. 104th US Congress. 8 November 1995. US Government Printing Office. Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-104publ45/html/PLAW-104publ45.htm [13] Harkov, Lahav. “Members of Congress call on Trump to move embassy to Jerusalem.” Jerusalem Post. 25 May 2017. Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Members-of-Congress-call-on-Trump-to-move-embassy-to-Jerusalem-493923 [14] Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Bernie Sanders to Friedman: Should some Israel funds go to Gaza?” Jerusalem Post. 2 March 2017. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. http://www.jpost.com/American-Politics/Bernie-Sanders-to-Friedman-Should-some-funds-for-Israel-should-go-to-Gaza-483093. Quoted in Hasan, Mehdi. “Bernie Sanders To Democrats: This Is What a Radical Foreign Policy Looks Like.” The Intercept. 22 September 2017. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/09/22/bernie-sanders-interview-foreign-policy/ [15] Netanyahu, Benjamin. “The complete transcript of Netanyahu’s address to Congress.” Washington Post. 3 March 2015. Web. Accessed 11 September 2017. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/03/03/full-text-netanyahus-address-to-congress/?utm_term=.e5fdce797dee [16] Israeli High Court of Justice. Beit Sourik village council v. The government of Israel. 2 May 2004. Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. http://elyon1.court.gov.il/Files_ENG/04/560/020/A28/04020560.A28.pdf . Quoted in Wikipedia. “Israeli-occupied territories.” Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories [17] International Court of Justice. “Legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the occupied Palestinian territory.” 9 July 2004. Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. http://www.icj-cij.org/en/case/131 . Cited in Wikipedia. “Israeli-occupied territories.” Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories [18] United Nations General Assembly. “Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Syrian Golan.” A/Res/66/78. 12 January 2012. Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/UNISPAL.NSF/47D4E277B48D9D3685256DDC00612265/C2A00B6E6E1C02CF8525798E00578F75 . Cited in Wikipedia. “Israeli-occupied territories.” Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories [19] United Nations Security Council. S/Res/478. 20 August 1980. Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/DDE590C6FF232007852560DF0065FDDB . Cited in Wikipedia. “Israeli-occupied territories.” Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli-occupied_territories [20] United Nations Security Council. S/Res/2334. 23 December 2016. Accessed 9 September 2017. Web. http://www.un.org/webcast/pdfs/SRES2334-2016.pdf [21] US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Hearing on the Nomination of Rex Tillerson to be Secretary of State.” 11 January 2017. Web. Accessed 12 September 2017. http://www.thisweekinimmigration.com/uploads/6/9/2/2/69228175/hearingtranscript_senateforeignrelationstillersonconfirmationhearing_2017-01-11.pdf [22] Goldberg, J.J. “No, the Anti-BDS Bill Doesn’t Threaten Free Speech. But What It Does Might Be Worse.” Forward. 4 August 2017. Web. Accessed 11 September 2017. http://forward.com/opinion/politics/379109/no-the-anti-bds-bill-doesnt-threaten-free-speech-but-what-it-does-might-be/

Schwartz, Eric. “Israeli-occupied territories: Legislature musn't overreach on Mideast boycott.” Star Tribune. 25 January 2017. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. http://www.startribune.com/israeli-occupied-territories-legislature-musn-t-overreach-on-mideast-boycott/411810136/

Hager, L Michael. “Legitimating the settlements.” Foreign Policy Journal. 12 February 2016. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2016/02/12/legitimating-the-settlements-another-congressional-bow-to-israel/

[23] US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Rex Tillerson answers questions on 2018 State Department Budget.” Youtube. 13 June 2017. 1:23:35--1:26:30. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzmXbV2hF4k

[24] US Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Sec. Rex Tillerson testifies on State Department budget.” Youtube. 29:15--32:47: 14 June 2017. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U5dtkHDoV8

[25] Sawafta, Ali. “Despite Tillerson reassurance, Palestinians not stopping 'martyr' payments.” Reuters. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-palestinians-attackers-payments/despite-tillerson-reassurance-palestinians-not-stopping-martyr-payments-idUSKBN19519Q

[26] The United Nations country team in the occupied Palestinian territory. “Gaza— Ten Years Later.” July 2017. P. 2. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. https://unsco.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/gaza_10_years_later_-_11_july_2017.pdf [27] Hasan, Mehdi. “Bernie Sanders to Democrats: This is what a radical foreign policy looks like.” The Intercept. 22 September 2017. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/09/22/bernie-sanders-interview-foreign-policy/ [28] “Limitation on assistance to security forces.” 22 U.S. Code § 2378d. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/22/2378d

[29] Lazare, Sarah. “Here's What Happens When a U.S. Senator Calls for Israel to Be Held Accountable for Atrocities.” Alternet. 4 April 2016. Web. Accessed 24 September 2017. http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/heres-what-happens-when-us-senator-calls-israel-be-held-accountable-atrocities

#us congress #leahy law #palestine #israel #boycott #free speech #occupation #foreign policy #middle east

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