Mustafa Malik

Category: Donald Trump

Exodus 2.0?

JAKE SULLIVAN’S MARATHON mission to Saudi Arabia to normalize Saudi-Israeli relations is also intended to revive the “two-state solution” to the Palestinian-Israeli imbroglio. Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman was reported to have been indifferent to the Palestinian issue, but reports from Jeddah indicate that the Saudis are now insisting on the revival of “the Arab Peace Initiative,” the 2002 proposal from the late Saudi King Abdullah that called for the creation of a Palestinian state in return for the recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia and other Arab states.

It reminds me of Haider Abdel Shafi. In 1991 Abdel Shafi had led the Palestinian delegation to the U.S.-mediated peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis, held in Madrid, Spain. I was interviewing him the following year on his visit to Washington to follow up on those talks.

I asked the Palestinian physician-turned-politician if he thought the Israelis would “allow you to have a state of your own.”

“They should,” he said, tartly, “unless they want to stay as pariahs in the Arab world for ages and ages.”

“Jack Khazmo told me,” I replied, “that you are wasting your time with the Israelis.” I quoted the editor of the Arabic-language Jerusalem weekly Al-Bayadir al-Siyasi as saying that “the Jews will not return an inch of our land until we make them truly miserable.”

Khazmo, a Palestinian Christian, was also a valiant activist in the Palestinian struggle for independence. I used to meet him on my visits to Jerusalem.

“Doesn’t being a pariah make you miserable?” Abdel Shafi said.

Abdel Shafi died in 2007. Meanwhile, four Arab states have established diplomatic relations with Israel and the Biden administration is now trying to help normalize Israel’s relations with a fifth, Saudi Arabia. If the veteran politician from Gaza were alive today, I would have asked if he still considered Israel a pariah state.

President Biden has been pretty insensitive to the horrible Israeli brutality to the Palestinians and Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Yet he also hates Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right administration. And his relations are severely strained with bin Salman, the Saudi kingdom’s effective ruler. All the same, the American president has been trying tenaciously to help formalize the Saudi-Israeli relations.  You wonder why.

The question haunts you, especially, as bin Salman has put forward a stiff price tag for the American initiative. He wants a NATO-like defense treaty with the United States, which would oblige Americans to come to the kingdom’s defense if it’s attacked by an adversary, conceivably Iran. In addition, the Saudis want America to let them have a “peaceful” nuclear program. And bin Salman wants to see the “two-state” formula for the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict revived, mostly for the consumption of the anti-Israeli Arab public.

Biden has taken on a daunting task. The U.S. Congress or the American public would have a hard time agreeing to go to war to defend the repressive and obscurantist Arab kingdom. They would be reluctant, too, to allow Saudi Arabia to have a nuclear program, which may not remain peaceful and could one day trigger a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Also, Netanyahu’s the far-right ministers, dominating his government, are bent expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank to absorb the territory within a Greater Israel. Persuading them to concede a Palestinian state would be next to impossible.

Biden’s gambit

Actually, Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, has been assigned a task that is irrelevant to the reality on the ground. Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies have been cooperating for years. The Saudi government uses Israeli intelligence and tools to track internal dissent. Riyadh has allowed Israeli aircraft to use its air space. It’s courting Israeli investments and is talking about allowing Saudi investments in Israel. If they feel the need, the Saudis and Israelis could formalize their relationship without outside help. About the only reason the monarchy isn’t embracing Israel publicly is the everyday Saudi citizens’ loathing for Israel, mainly because of the Jewish colonization of Palestine and the daily Jewish atrocities toward Palestinians.

“If it weren’t for [Saudi] public hostility toward the [Israeli] Jews, bin Salman would have jumped into Netanyahu’s bed,” a Saudi businessman told me this off-color joke last summer in Arlington, Virginia, on condition of anonymity. As Abdel Shafi said 31 years ago, Israel remains a pariah state to most Arabs, Saudis included.

An Arab Barometer poll has shown that support for the recognition of Israel by Arab states is 5% in Egypt, 5% in Jordan, 6% in Palestine, 14% in Iraq, 17% in Lebanon, 7% in Libya, 11% in Tunisia, 4% in Algeria, and so on. And an Israeli public opinion survey has found 35% of Saudis support the normalization of their kingdom’s relations with Israel, but only 24% of them accept Israel’s right to exist and 88% insist on the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Biden’s widely publicized interest in normalizing Saudi-Israeli relations is plainly opportunistic and cynical. Donald Trump, his predecessor as president, started the normalization of Israel’s relations with Arab states through what is called “Abraham Accords,” which is one of the few foreign-policy issues supported by most Americans, Democrats and Republicans. Democrat Biden sees Republican Trump as his likely rival for the presidency in next year’s election.  By engaging publicly in the talks to help Israel formalize its relations with a key Arab state, Biden is trying to steal the popular issue from his potential Republican rival. Well, even if he fails, American voters and America’s powerful Israel lobby would remember his efforts.

I didn’t mention to Abdel Shafi the history of Jewish communities living as pariahs among Europeans, Egyptians, Romans, Assyrians, Babylonians, and so forth. The problem, however, is with living within a modern nation-state with a growing and increasingly assertive Palestinian population.

I see Palestinian resistance to the Israeli occupation and atrocities increasing progressively, prompting ever more brutal Jewish reprisal. But I don’t believe that the 21st century will be putting up with this grave injustice for very long. With prospects for a separate Palestinian state almost non-existent, Palestinians, Israelis and the world will be forced to deal with the reality of a single state between the Jordan River and the sea. In this state  Jews are 6.5 million and Palestinians 6.41 million. The Palestinian birth rate is 4.1 children per woman, compared to the Jewish 3.1 children. Greater Israel is going to be a Palestinian-majority state pretty soon.

In April 2016 Biden, then U.S. vice president, said the continued expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank was creating a “one-state reality,” and that Jews won’t remain the majority in such a state. Earlier, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Israeli daily Ha’aretz that without a separate Palestinian state, which is now practically impossible to create, Israel would face “a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights” in which case “Israel [would be] finished.”

But would the “one-state solution” be a real solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute? Ray Hanania, a Palestinian-American journalist, says that the idea of Jews and Palestinians living peaceably together in a Muslim-majority state is “fundamentally flawed.” He asks: “Exactly where do Jews and Christians live in the Islamic world today side-by-side with equality?”

Many among the Israeli intelligentsia see themselves face to face with this challenge. Benny Morris, the famed Israeli historian, says Jews won’t be able to live in a Palestinian-majority state in “stifling darkness, intolerance, authoritarianism.” He predicts that most Israeli Jews would eventually migrate to Western countries, with only those unable to do so for practical reasons and Ultra-Orthodox Jews staying behind.  The late Steven Plaut, a writer and economist at Haifa University, agreed. He referred to the “one-state solution” as the “Rwanda Solution.”  He warned that an Israeli-Palestinian state ruled by a Palestinian majority would eventually lead to a “new Holocaust.”

Palestinians won’t, of course, be doing to the Jews what the Nazis did to them, but life for modern, high tech, affluent Jews among a religiously conservative Muslim majority with memories of many Jewish injustices would be, to repeat Khazmo’s expression, “truly miserable.”  Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg writes that a Muslim-majority Israel would just collapse economically. Like Morris, he says the Jewish intelligentsia won’t be able to cope in it, and that most of them would emigrate to the West.

You can call that Exodus 2.0, reminiscent of the biblical Hebrew Exodus from Egypt, led by Moses.

~Mustafa Malik, the host of the blog After the Clash, worked 32 years as a reporter, columnist and editor for American newspapers. In the 1990s he conducted fieldwork on American foreign policy options in Israel and five Arab countries as a researcher for the University of Chicago Middle East Center.

Biden’s war on racism nets UK war hero

ONE OF THE TOP items on President Biden’s agenda is fighting racism. So upon entering the White House on Wednesday he removed – again – the bust of the racist British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the Oval Office. President Barack Obama had put away the bust from the room but Donald trump, his successor, brought it back.

Told about Biden’s action, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he had no quarrel with the new American president decorating his “private office … as he wishes.”

But when Obama had removed the bust from the Oval Office, Johnson, then mayor of London, was furious. He fumed that the black Obama’s action had shown “the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire.”

Johnson’s conciliatory gesture toward the 46th American president may reflect, in part, the Britts’ desperate need for good trade relations with the United States after their foolish breakup with the European Union.  The Conservative British prime minister was wrong, however, to assume that Obama disliked Churchill because of Churchill’s or Britain’s legacy of imperialism, which doubtless was brutal and dehumanizing. Many people in the East – and now in the West – despise Churchill mainly for his rabidly racist views of non-white people and societies. He called them “barbaric nations” and “savages” whom he considered “a menace to civilized nations” in the West.

Churchill ardently believed in Social Darwinism, superiority of white races, and argued over and over that they have the inherent right to subjugate, dispossess and persecute non-whites. Intriguingly, Churchill considered Jews a white people and as British colonial secretary in the 1920s, he defended, strongly, the expulsion of Palestinians from the lands belonging to them for centuries by Jewish refugees from Europe. Churchill thought of brown-skinned Palestinians as some kind of beasts who had no right to challenge their dispossession by fairer-skinned European Jews.

“I do not admit,” he explained, “that the dog in the manger has the final right to the manger, though he may have lain there for a very long time.”

The British leader who led his nation to victory in World War II held the same view about Anglo-Saxons uprooting dark-skinned people from the United States and Australia and occupying their land. “I do not admit,” he said. “that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been to those people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race or at any rate a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”

Churchill’s view of non-whites being subhuman made him disregard the usefulness of their lives. A glaring example it was his role during the 1943 famine in the Indian region of Bengal, where I grew up and made my debut as a journalist. In other times when a food shortage had occurred in Bengal or any other part of British India, rice, and sometimes wheat, was rushed in from elsewhere to feed people. But in 1943 Britain was fighting a bitter war with Germany and, ignoring the Indian administration’s warnings about the approaching famine in Bengal, Prime Minister Churchill decided to divert food supplies for Bengal to British and other troops in Europe. The result was mass starvation of Bengalees, millions of whom perished from it. William F. Buckley Jr. called it a slaughter of “genocidal proportions.”

Finest Hour is a quarterly publication put out by the International Churchill Society. In an editorial (Nov. 18, 2008) entitled “Media lying over Churchill’s crimes,” an editor of the journal, Gideon Poyla, wrote: “Churchill is our hero because of his leadership in World War 2, but his immense crimes, notably the WW2 Bengali Holocaust, the 1943-45 Bengal Famine in which Churchill murdered 6-7 million Indians, have been deleted from history by an extraordinary Anglo-American denial.”

Reliable estimates have put the death toll from the famine at about 3 million.

In India, Churchill was the most hated British prime minister in history. He earned that infamy with his racist contempt for Indians (He called Mahatma Gandhi “a half-naked fekir,” or beggar), which he gushed out off and on and which was reflected in his disdainful rejection of Indians’ repeated pleadings and demands for autonomy or independence. As World War II began, many Indian, realizing that they won’t get their independence from the Churchill government, prayed for Hitler’s victory, which they hoped would dissolve the British empire and liberate them from British colonial rule and racist domination.

The Allied victory over Nazi Germany was a pyrrhic one for Britain. The war wrecked the British economy and military power so much so that within two years the Britts – who were never impressed by Gandhi’s non-violent mantra or tactic – were forced to concede the independence of India and Pakistan, which was followed in quick succession by the independence of other British colonies around the world.

Today even many Britts see Churchill as among the most notoriously racist leaders in their history. Last June protests over the killing of African-American George Floyd by a white American police officer spread to Britain.  Soon the Churchill statue at London’s Parliament Square was found spray-painted with the words: “Was a Racist.” Sadiq Khan, then London mayor, got the statue boarded up to protect it from protesters’ rage. Undaunted, some of them wrote in big black letters on one of the walls around it: “Watch out! Racist Inside!”

America is going through a revolution to stamp out racism from its social fabric and has done away with statues, busts and pictures of most of its confederate heroes who used to defend racism. It’s crazy to try to have an arch-racist from abroad enshrined in the American political pantheon. Well, Trump was craziest of American presidents.

  • Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of this blog, is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

Biden’s pursuit of LBJ legacy

“Our long national nightmare is over!”

So declared Gerald R. Ford on August 9, 1974, from the East Room of the White House. He was making his maiden speech to the nation as the 38th president of the United States. By ending the “national nightmare” the new president meant that his pardoning of his predecessor, the disgraced President Richard M. Nixon, was going to help heal the deep wounds that Nixon’s Watergate scandal had inflicted on America.

Two days ago I remembered watching Ford’s comment live from Frederick, Maryland, as I was reading Joe Biden’s victory speech on the Internet. A bit more modestly than had Ford, the president-elect said his victory over President Trump had ushered in a “time to heal” America’s wounds, caused by Trump’s disastrous presidency.

A mediocre politician without ingenuity or a vision, Ford did not accomplish much as president before he was defeated by Jimmy Carter in the 1976 elections. Biden, too, is not known for political insights or vision, and his long career as a lawmaker and vice president has not left much of a footprint on America’s political landscape.

Can he do better as president?

He can and I am hopeful that he will, mainly because of the need of the hour and the progressive political and social climate he has inherited. Trump has vandalized America’s economy, fractured its race relations and brutalized its relations with most of America’s allies, except the murderous crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman; and the colonialist Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has turned the Palestinian territory into an open-air prison and Israel into an apartheid state. America will be grateful to its 46th president if he can just start mending the economic and racial injustices at home and the alarming fissures in foreign relations that Trump has brought about.

I am a card-carrying “Berniecrat” who worked his tails off campaigning for Bernie Sanders’ unsuccessful presidential candidacy in 2016 and this year. (I still flaunt two “Bernie for President” stickers from 2016 on my car bumper.) I am still not a fan of Biden’s. I used to call him a standard-bearer of “the Republican wing of the Democratic Party” and a flunky of Wall Street, which has contributed lavishly to his presidential campaign.

Biden opposed school desegregation in the 1970s; befriended Strom Thurmond and other arch-racists; voted to trim welfare programs; overturn the Glass-Steagall law, deregulating banking and making many Wall Street banks too big to fail; pass the 1994 “tough on crime” bill, dumping many, mostly black, innocent and small-time offenders into prisons; launch the catastrophic Iraq war; and so on. In fact Biden did not face a war he did not support.

Yet I voted gladly for Biden on Tuesday, hoping that he would be able to do much of the mending I have just mentioned. Besides, Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s ultra-progressive presidential campaigns and a progressive surge in the Democratic Party and the country have moved much of America to the left, which was reflected in the platform on which the former vice president has been elected president. The platform’s embrace of Medicare-for-all, a Green New Deal, police reforms, and high tax on wealth accumulation, etc., prompted Trump to call Biden a “socialist.” Waheed Shahid of Justice Democrats has called the Democratic platform “the most progressive any Democratic nominee in the modern history” had campaigned on. On the stump Biden has also promised to quadruple federal spending on low-income housing subsidies; triple K-12 school aid in poorer areas; double Pell Grants for students and make community colleges free. Additionally, he has proposed to invest $100 billion in an affordable housing trust fund, $10 billion of which would be reserved for transit projects in high-poverty areas. It all is breathtaking, echoing, to some extent, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. It remains to be seen how much of this highly ambitious progressive agenda Biden can translate into reality.

In 1970 I was covering a public meeting of the would-be Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto for the Pakistan Observer newspaper at Liaqat Bagh park in Rawalpindi. The populist, theatrical politician promised to make pullers of rickshaws – tricycles carrying passengers – owners of their vehicles. Most rickshaw pullers rented their rickshaws. Bhutto also promised to impose heavy taxes on corporations piling up “unconscionable” wealth; have a law passed increasing the minimum wage for factory workers; “try my utmost” to see that “no Pakistanis go to bed hungry”; and so forth. In a fit of excitement, he threw away his jacket, which landed on a child’s head, making him cry. The crowd was ecstatic and chanted deliriously: “Bhutto Zindabad!” Long live Bhutto.

The meeting over, I hired a rickshaw to return to my nearby hotel. “Bhutto Zindabad,” the man pedaling the rickshaw yelled, punching the air with his fist. I asked the shabbily dressed middle-aged man if he owned his rickshaw, and he replied that he had rented it.

“Do you think Bhutto will make you owner this rickshaw?’’ I asked.

He replied in Urdu, “Nahin, sahib, yeh kabhi nahin ho ga,” no, sir, that will never happen.

“Why are you then so excited by his speech?”

“Sahib,” he said, “woh to mera dil khush kar dia,” sir, he has made my heart happy.

The lanky, middle-aged man added that most other politicians did not talk about bread-and-butter issues with the passion that Bhutto exuded.

I have to see how many of his campaign promises Biden will be able to fulfill. For now, though, his progressive agenda has “made my heart happy.”

Prime Minister Bhutto turned out to be the most progressive statesman in Pakistan’s history who adopted a plethora of anti-poverty, pro-worker and other progressive programs that no other Pakistani prime minister, let alone military dictator, has dared to attempt to this day.

If Biden can deliver on half the promises he has made to America, he will turn out to the most progressive American president since Lyndon B. Johnson, also known as LBJ.

  • Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog Community, is a political commentator in Washington.