Mustafa Malik

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Category: Israel

Exodus 2.0?

Mustafa Malik August 4, 2023

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.

Bennett to stick with apartheid?

Mustafa Malik June 13, 2021

THE SWEARING-IN of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of Israel’s pseudo-fascist Yamina party, and his Cabinet inaugurates an era for Israel without Benjamin Netanyahu in power. 

Many Israelis think that this chimera of an ultra-rightist-centrist-liberal-Arab government is going to crumble soon over policy differences. If it doesn’t, what kind of an era that Bennett and the real architect of the government, Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid party, are going to usher in?

Four of the eight political parties in the coalition government are rightist or religious. They don’t believe in equal rights for the Palestinians, who make up 20 percent of the Israeli population.  The Palestinians are, in fact, living under an apartheid system under Israeli occupation. Is this regime going to restore real democracy in Israel? Or is it going operate as the last colonial power in the Middle East? And that in the 21st century?

In 2015 when the Bennett was education minister, his policy of immersing science students in Torah and Mishna education prompted Haaretz writer Uri Misgav to warn Israelis that their country was “on the road to theocracy.”

Israel’s problem, he wrote, “is that religion is not separate from government, and over the years it has also become less and less separate from right-wing West Bank settler politics,” which at one point was spearheaded by Bennett.

Israeli society and politics have since been soaking deeper in ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox Judaism. Are Bennett and other right-wing politicians in the coalition going to step back and let the four centrist and liberal parties restore democracy and sanity in Israeli public life? Can they, given their rightist and fundamentalist constituencies?

Israel had started out as a secular crypto-socialist state in 1948 under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Religious surge in the Israeli public life began three decades later under Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. That, in fact, coincided with the Shiite Islamic revolution in Iran, the rise of Hindu nationalism in India and Islamist movements in many Sunni Muslim countries. More recently, Buddhist religious politics have been swirling in several South and Southeast Asian counties.

The renewed religious pursuit in politics worldwide reflects, partly, a deepening crisis in of liberalism. Liberalism and the attendant rational inquiry promoted science, technology and the pursuit of amenities for happiness and comfort. That spurred a centuries-long orgy of production and consumption of material things for individual happiness, downgrading people’s moral and human obligations to societies. We all are beneficiaries of it, but it has also triggered a dog-eat-dog scramble for material goods, warfare and violence.

Disillusioned by the liberal materialistic paradigm and the disruption of families and communities, people are grasping at their moral roots, usually inhering in ethnic communities and religious traditions and cultures. Many Western philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists have come to recognize this as a logical trend. The late Peter Berger, a foremost American sociologist who had been a devotee of secularism for decades, woke up to a “de-secularization of the world” and attributed it to a “cultural revolution” he saw sweeping Muslim societies for a century and a half. The famed Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has been writing about “post-secular” societies. And the celebrated German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, who like Berger, used to dismiss the intrusion of religious values in the public sphere, now and vouches for the legitimacy of religious concerns and viewpoints in the public space.

Voters in most of the countries undergoing religious revival have had the sense not to turn their governments over to religious parties. Except for Iran and briefly for Egypt, no Muslim country has had voted for an Islamic government. That includes the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Indian Hindus have, of course, kept a Hindu nationalist government in power for seven years, but its governance has more to do with Muslin-bashing than setting up a Hindu theocracy.

Israel seems to an exception so far. I can see two obvious reasons for that. One is the blind American support or tolerance for Israel in its subjugation, dispossession and persecution of Palestinians. Under the superpower protection, Israeli rightists and Jewish supremacists have not yet had to face an accounting for their faith-based apartheid system and subjugation and persecution of Palestinians. We saw that, again, three weeks ago when President Biden blocked four U.N. Security Council calls for a ceasefire the Israeli-Hamas conflict, slaughtering 254 Palestinians and 12 Israelis.

Secondly, the Jewish religion basically doesn’t recognize the rights or dignity of non-Jews.  The Talmud and Halakhic laws don’t permit “even temporary presence” of Gentiles in the midst of Jews except “when Jews are in exile, or when the Gentiles are more powerful than the Jews.” The Halakhah requires Jews to utter curses while passing by non-Jewish cemeteries, and while passing by a Gentile home, ask God to destroy it.  All these are reflected in Israeli culture and right-wing political parties’ attitudes and policies toward the Palestinians. Albert Einstein turned down an invitation to become president of Israel, complaining that Israel’s Herut party was “closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.”

For Israel to function as a normal state it needs to reform the extreme features of its religious laws, at least as they relate to politics. I am glad that Netanyahu, who stoked religious bigotry for political purposes, is out of his job now. It’s about time Israel had its own Martin Luther, whose Protestant Reformation pulled Christianity out of its age of bigotry and unfreedom into the era of religious tolerance and social progress.

  • Mustafa Malik, the host of this blog, worked for decades as an American journalist and researcher. He’s now an international affairs commentator Bangladesh.

Can Palestinians bypass Biden’s blind spot?

Mustafa Malik May 18, 2021

PRESIDENT BIDEN’S UNSWERVING defense of Israel’s relentless bombing of the Gaza Strip reminds me of my last meeting with a friend and colleague at the Hartford Courant newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut.

On a spring day in 1985 my op-ed on the killing of several Palestinians by Israeli troops had appeared in our newspaper. Robin Frank pinched me on my left arm as I was editing a story.

“Dinner at Gianni?” she asked, as I turned around and looked at her.

“Sure,” I said.

“At 7.”

Frank was a leftist Jew and a staunch Zionist. At our meetings at the Courant café and other places, we used to trash then-President Ronald Reagan’s latest dig at welfare programs, extol socialist leader Michael Harrington’s portrayal of poverty in America, Karl Marx’s pitch for ultimate freedom in his German Ideology, and so forth.

That evening, as we sat across a table at the Gianni restaurant, I was taken aback.

Frank’s eyes were burning with rage.

“I didn’t know that you hate Jews,” she said.

In the article I had criticized Israel’s “colonial occupation” of Palestinian territories and “brutal” treatment of Palestinians, etc.

Did I know, my friend asked, that Palestine had been “the land of the Jews for ages” but had been occupied by “nomads and yahoos” before the establishment of Israel?

I realized that Frank’s knowledge of Jewish and Palestinian history was based more on Jewish propaganda than facts. I told her that both Jews and Palestinians inhabited the same land since ancient times and lived peaceably together in the hills around Jerusalem.  “I don’t hate Jews, Robin,” I said. Both Jews and Palestinians, I continued, were nomads before they settled down as peasants and artisans. “But your calling Palestinians yahoos seems to me to reflect your racial bias toward them.”  

Robin stood up. “You called me a racist!” She exploded. She picked up her purse and stamped away, paying the bill at the cashier’s counter.

I wondered if Frank had invited me to the meal for a dressing down and wanted it to be our parting dinner. Later, I tried twice to have a conversation with her, but she didn’t have the time.

In any case, I still think that staunchly progressive on many issues as she was, Frank’s attitude toward Palestinians was tinged with racial prejudice. I bet I have prejudices of my own, which I am not aware of.

Joe Biden, a centrist-turned-progressive Democrat, has been known for his blind support for Israel, which I have been following since the 1970s, when he was a senator from Delaware. During the current conflict between Israel and Hamas, he has been the only world leader to offer a blanket defense of Israel’s bloody and devastating bombing of Gaza. In the 15-member U.N. Security Council the United States, under his orders, was alone in blocking two attempts at issuing a statement calling for an immediate end to the Israeli-Hamas hostility. He obviously wanted Israel to continue its slaughter and destruction in Gaza. Biden’s first public comment on the Israeli bombing of civilian targets in Gaza was, “Israel has a right to defend itself.” He did not answer Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y.) question if “the Palestinians have a right to survive.”

After the Netanyahu government had slaughtered more than a hundred Palestinians, including children and women, the American president proclaimed that Israel had not “significantly overreacted” to Hamas rockets, which had killed eight Israelis. In all this, Biden did not mention, even once, the Israeli raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque and its worshipers in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Neither did he comment on the Israeli initiative to expel Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem to make room for Jewish settlers. The two events had prompted Hamas to start firing rockets and missiles into Israel. When Biden was compelled by domestic and international pressure to try to stop the bloody Israeli aggression, he said he “support(ed) a ceasefire” between Israel and Hamas. He did not call for, let alone demand, a cessation of hostilities.

Biden’s utterly callous attitude toward the havoc Israel is wreaking in the abysmally impoverished enclave blockaded by Israel and Egypt flies in the face of his widely publicized human rights rhetoric and otherwise admirably progressive agenda. Biden plans to lower the eligibility age for Medicare; forgive federal loan debt for those making less than $125,000; raise $2 to $4 trillion in taxes to pay for progressive plans and programs; levy a 95 percent excise tax on pharmaceuticals if the industry doesn’t accept price controls, and so forth. His $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief law is probably the most progressive piece of legislation enacted by Congress since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. 

In fact Bien’s strong support for black civil rights and other issues promoting black interests have made him quite popular in that community, which was pivotal to his winning the Democratic presidential primary against Bernie Sanders. But racial tolerance and empathy is selective in America. Many Americans, disabused of prejudice toward blacks, can be, and have been, hostile toward Arabs, Muslims and Asians. A brown-skinned Muslim, born in India, I have encountered racial gibes and taunts from progressive colleagues and acquaintances. (Where did I park my “camel”? Did I have a second wife tucked away in my “old country”? It was a reference to polygamy practiced by some Muslim men. How could I learn to write English so well? And so on.)

The Democratic Party, until the early 1970s, was honeycombed with anti-black racists. (Republicans by and large are racists.) The Democratic Party used to be the party of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, and segregationists. And many Democratic presidents, including the otherwise progressive ones, were diehard racists. Woodrow Wilson, who promoted freedom and the right of self-determination for peoples abroad, was an anti-black racist pig at home. He mandated racial segregation of the federal workforce, reversing the gains the blacks had made following Reconstruction. His segregation order hurt blacks most at the Post Office, in which 60 percent of workers were black; and the Treasury Department, which employed the second-largest number of blacks.

Monroe Trotter, the black editor and publisher of the Guardian newspaper, published from Boston, had campaigned for Wilson’s election. A brilliant Harvard scholar and civil rights leader, Trotter led a black delegation to the president to complain about his segregation order. Wilson argued that racial segregation would “prevent any kind of friction between the white employees and the Negro employees.” Trotter protested the president’s argument, citing “the established fact … that for 50 years white and colored clerks have been working together in peace and harmony and friendliness.” The 28th president replied that he had been “offended” by the civil rights leader’s insolence and ordered him out of the White House.

FDR is widely considered the most progressive among American presidents, and yet he was among the most racist of them. His internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II is widely known. Less known is his staunchly anti-Semitic attitude and policy. He persistently refused to allow Jews from Nazi Germany to immigrate to the United States. He suggested that they be resettled in Venezuela, Ethiopia or West Africa.  He even opposed plans to resettle fleeing German Jews in the Dominican Republic or U.S. Virgin Islands because of those countries’ proximity to the United States, which, he feared, could enable them to infiltrate into America. When the passenger ship St. Louis with nearly 1,000 German Jews fleeing Hitler’s persecution headed toward the United States, Roosevelt did not respond to telegrams requesting that it be docked on the U.S. shore. The State Department forced it to return to Antwerp from where many of them were herded into concentration camps. In the end, wide circulation of the news of the Holocaust forced Roosevelt to admit some Jewish refugees. Historian Rafael Medoff wrote that Roosevelt’s anti-Semitism stemmed from his belief “that America was by nature, and should remain, an overwhelmingly white, Protestant country; and that Jews, on the whole, possessed certain innate and distasteful characteristics.”

Harry S. Truman was another innately racist Democratic president. He recognized Israel because Jews were among his ardent campaign activists. But he brushed aside reports of the harrowing ethnic cleansing of the new state of Israel of its Palestinian inhabitants. Jews, mostly from Europe, expelled 700,000 Palestinians (some of them were displaced by war) from their ancestral homes and lands. Truman also opposed interracial marriage. He often used racial slurs and told racist jokes. He accused civil rights activists of being masterminded Communists and called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a troublemaker.

The Democratic Party has shed much of its anti-black racism, thanks to the struggle and sacrifices of many blacks and whites in the Civil Rights Movement. Anti-black and anti-Semitic comments today are unacceptable in America. But anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Asian racism remains alive and well in American society. And in the halls of Congress, which strikes you when you listen to the comments of Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), or Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) on the floors of the House and Senate.

But the tide is turning. Last week, for the first time in American history, the floor of the House of Representatives vibrated with biting criticism of an American president’s defense of Israeli aggression against Palestinians. Many critics of Biden’s and America’s callousness toward Palestinian dispossession, subjugation and persecution under Israeli occupation saw it as anti-Arab racism and likened it to racism against blacks.

“The Black and Palestinian struggles for liberation are interconnected,” tweeted Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), “and we will not let up until all of us are free.” 

  • Mustafa Malik, editor and publisher of this blog, lives in Bangladesh.

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