Tag: Israel

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.

Is Democratic Party festering in a rut?

Mustafa Malik June 28, 2019

AS I WAITED yesterday for the second Democratic presidential debate, I tossed out a question to Facebook. Could Joe Biden “get up before the referee counts to 10”? Some friends liked it, but none offered a response.

I had thought that the former vice president, so far the clear front-runner in the polls, would get a knockout punch from Bernie Sanders. The “democratic socialist” from Vermont is running second to him in the polls. I thought – and hope – that the Democratic Party has started loosening its embrace of Wall Street and social conservatives, coddled by Bill and Hillary Clinton and the now dormant Democratic Leadership Council. The Barack Obama presidency, despite Obama’s progressive rhetoric, was basically and extension of that era.

Biden did get a crushing blow during the debate. He was pummeled over his professed pride in working with racist lawmakers, opposition to school busing, insensitivity to the plight of immigrants, dillydallying on the abortion issue, vote for the Iraq war, and other right-wing positions. And CNN declared him a “direct loser” of the contest.

But it was mostly the foxy Kamala Harris, not Sanders, who gave him most of the thrashing. And most of the post-debate analysts in the news media anointed Harris winner of the encounters.

Sanders’ main problem with many Democrats has been his no-holds-barred blitzkrieg against the established, if corrupt, political and economic order and his call for a revolution to trash it. Many centrist and right-of-center Democrats have been leery about it. His push for Medicare of all, a free college education and elimination of all student debts, ending all foreign wars, and so forth, also rattle many Democrats for whom the established order is akin to religion.

Mainstream media, most of them owned by mega corporations, have been rankled by Sanders’ anti-corporate, anti-capitalist programs and rhetoric. Salon dismissed his political surge as “more about anti-Clinton sentiment than actual Bernie fever.”

On foreign policy, the mainstream media have traditionally followed the American flag, largely because of their thin grasp of foreign affairs. The late Andy Kohut of the Pew Research Center told me in 2008 that “more than 60 percent of our [Middle East] correspondents have no grounding in the dynamics of societies across the Mediterranean.”

Much of the media and many Democrats appear to be leaning toward Harris and Elizabeth Warren, who appeared in last night’s debate. These two high-energy, combative senators are progressive enough to tear the last Democratic vice president into pieces and revile the exploitative neoliberal economic establishment, while not threatening to dismantle that establishment. Harris is also popular with pro-Israeli Democrats, a substantial chunk of the party, because of her Jewish husband and hobnobbing with Benjamin Netanyahu and other right-wing Israeli politicians.

The primaries are a barometer of the Democratic Party’s center of gravity. I will be watching them to see how much of the party has broken loose of its corporate, right-wing tether. Are enough of them ready to jump into Sanders’ revolutionary bandwagon? Would they settle, instead, for a more conventional but still progressive candidate like Harris or Warren? Or do too many of them remain too invested in the Clintons-Wall Street economic order to abandon Biden, who seems to be running for a third term for Obama?

Last night’s was just the first of six primary debates that the Democratic National Committee plans for the party’s presidential candidates, the sixth is scheduled for December. We probably won’t know until the new year whether the bulk of party has moved past the Clinton-Obama era or is still staggering in a rut.

-Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

Modi, Bibi, Trump & liberal order

Mustafa Malik April 12, 2019

Narendra Modi was the first foreign leader to congratulate Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday on his reelection as Israeli prime minister. India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister has been one of the closest allies of the Israel’s right-wing racially inspired one.

Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, has offered a piece of good news to Donald Trump, the racially motivated American president. Trump, too, is going to win re-election next year, “absent some decisive factor to upend the logic of it,” Cohen predicted. What’s the logic behind Netanyahu’s re-election and Trump’s anticipated one? They both have succeeded in putting together a “structural majority of the right,” composed of religious and racial groups.

What’s the logic behind Netanyahu’s re-election and Trump’s anticipated one? They both have succeeded in putting together a “structural majority of the right,” composed of religious and racial groups.

Cohen’s piece reminded me of John Mearsheimer’s latest book, The Great Delusion, which I finished reading last week. The international relations scholar says America’s “liberal hegemony” in the world is about to end partly because liberalism is failing. Liberalism, the ideology of the Enlightenment, wanted rational individuals to build peaceable, humanist societies around the world. Protagonists of the ideology believed that people’s religious and ethnic prejudices had kept them from building such societies and hence these thinkers wanted men’s and women’s affiliations with religious and ethnic systems replaced by their allegiance to institutions of liberal states, which would uphold the liberty and promote good life.

Mearsheimer says individuals “using their critical faculties, reach different conclusions about what constitutes the good life.” This has happened because Enlightenment philosophers ignored the fact that cultural systems, created through living in communities, “shaped how individuals think and behave.” If we follow the political scientist’s logic, liberalism is failing because it failed to recognize people’s affinity with religion, race and ethnicity, which have produced Netanyahu, Trump and Modi. Well, Mearsheimer is kind of echoing the thinking of a host of powerful minds from Isiah Berlin to Reinhold Niebuhr to our own Martha Nussbaum.

Mearsheimer says, correctly, that Americans’ commitment to liberalism has always been “flexible.” Religion never really left the American public square. Neither has race, as shown by the malignant episodes of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and now Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s crusade against Hispanic immigration. Would Trump have been so obsessed with building a wall along the Mexican border if the immigrants from the south were whites from Britain, France or Germany?

The case is not fundamentally different in Europe. Western and Northern Europe have, of course, succeeded in banishing religion from public and private spheres. But racism? It lay dormant for several decades after the Holocaust and has now revived with a vengeance. My direct encounter with European racism occurred during 1998-1999, when I was researching the outlook for Turkey’s accession to the European Union as a fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. My inquiries about the issue drew negative responses throughout the five EU countries in which I conducted the fieldwork. In France, Germany and Austria – part of the white cultural monochrome (with largely suppressed Muslim subcultures) – discrepancies in “cultural” and “democratic” institutions were cited as the main reasons Turkey wouldn’t fit into the EU. In Britain and the Netherlands, avowedly “pluralist” democracies, I was told that Turkey’s relatively poor economic performance and also “slow progress” toward a full-fledged democracy would “create problems” if Ankara were to join the bloc. These were the general lines of feedback from my unscientific samples, with exceptions, of course.

In reality, Turkey has outpaced the economic performance some of the countries that have joined the Union since, e.g. Slovenia, Croatia and Lithuania. Its democratic evolution, with the inevitable blips of an emerging democracy, is more striking than that of some of the bloc’s latest members, especially the post-Communist ones. Poland and Hungary are virtual autocracies. Yet Turkey’s chances of accession to the EU is more remote today than was two decades ago when I investigated the question.

Turkophobia of the “white-Christian club,” as the former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu once described the EU to me, dates back to Ottoman Turks’ conquest southeastern Europe and march to the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Race and culture, informed by the values of Western Christianity, remain a stumbling block to the bloc’s acceptance of brown-skinned Muslim Turks’ membership application. Racism in Europe has reached the highest levels since the Holocaust mainly because of an influx of Muslim immigrants with different shades of brown skin tones. Muslims make up 6 percent of the European population. Islamophobia is but a new incarnation of anti-Semitism, which raged in Europe for many centuries.

Britain, viewed as a model of racial and religious tolerance, is a case in point. In no other Western country would you see so many brown Muslims and black Caribbeans serving proudly in public offices from the government ministry to Parliament to city councils. Much of it, however, reflects the traditionally pragmatic Britons’ acceptance of the demographic reality. Non-whites make up 13 percent of the British population of 64 million. Actually, race consciousness remains endemic to British psyche and has been heightened by the growth of non-white communities. Polls have shown that fear of Muslim immigration has been a key driver of the Brexit campaign. One poll put out last November by The Independent newspaper found that 31 percent of white Britons feared that “Muslim immigration is part of a bigger plan to make Muslims a majority of this country’s population.”

If race is eating away at liberalism in Europe, religion and ethnicity have kept it from taking root in most of the rest of the world. The concepts of church-state separation and rights of the rugged individual are among the basic principles of liberalism. But these ideas have been alien to Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Pashtun, Palestinian, Kurdish, Balinese, Hutu, Tuareg, Mulatto, and Zambo communities. Many people in these religious and ethnic groups would sacrifice their individual well-being, and sometimes lives, for communal solidarity and interests.

We need a new world order that safeguards the cultural, economic and political interests of autonomous religious and ethnic communities. Netanyahu must be barred from continuing to dispossess and subjugate the Palestinians, Modi from suppressing the freedoms of Kashmiri and other Indian Muslims, and Trump from trampling the rights of Hispanic immigrants and would-be immigrants at the Mexican border. An American citizen, I am voting for Bernie Sanders who, as president, would promote these cherished aspirations of mine, along with others.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

What about Israel-first Americans?

Mustafa Malik March 11, 2019

Among the latest antagonists of Ilham Omar is Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times. The well-known columnist has attacked the Muslim congresswoman for suggesting, in his words, “that American politicians who support Israel are guilty of dual loyalty.”

McManus does a great job of repackaging received knowledge and is one of many, many Americans, especially in the political and media establishments, who have ganged up on the Democratic congresswoman for her so-called “anti-Semitic” comments. She had mentioned the “dual loyalty” of American citizens promoting Israel’s interests. She also had said that she could serve well her constituents in the fifth congressional district of Minnesota without having to show “allegiance to a foreign country,” meaning Israel.

The Somali-American lawmaker didn’t voice any concern, but I often do, about the many Americans – politicians or not – whose primary loyalty seems to lie with Israel, not the United States.

Despite Omar’s transparently correct description of the nature of some Americans’ loyalty to Israel, nearly dozen pro-Israel groups wrote to House speaker Nancy Pelosi demanding that Omar be stripped of her membership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Harshest among her attackers are the Jewish chairpersons of three House committees – Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Eliot Engel and Nita Lowey. They also pushed for a House resolution denouncing the lawmaker’s remarks as “anti-Semitic.” Pelosi and other establishment Democrats in the House of Representatives were about to introduce such a resolution but got dissuaded by fierce opposition from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party on Capitol Hill and were forced to settle for one that criticized all forms of bigotry. Omar has suffered vicious Islamophobic attacks from a lot of other Americans as well.

I would point out that Omar didn’t impugn any Americans’ loyalty to the United States. She just maintained that some Americans’ allegiance isn’t confined to America but also extends to Israel. I would go a step farther. I would ask where lay the primary loyalty of Democratic Jewish Senators Chuck Schumer and Ben Cardin; or Democratic Jewish Representatives Ted Deutsch, Engel and Lowey, when they voted against the Iran nuclear deal. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as it’s officially known, was fiercely opposed by Israel but negotiated and signed by the Democratic president Barack Obama and approved by a Senate majority.

What about Haim Saban, a major financial backer of Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns, who says publicly and proudly, “I am a single-issue American, and my issue is Israel”? Which country claims the preponderant loyalty of the Jewish Americans who don’t enlist in the American military but join the Israeli armed forces to fight Israel’s wars? They included, among many American Jews, a son of the New York Times columnist David Brooks, and a former colleague of mine at an American newspaper. Where lies the primary loyalty of the tens of thousands of Jewish American citizens who uprooted themselves from America and have settled in Israel, more than 60,000 them in illegal West bank settlements? What about the Americans, including President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who have shown little interest in homeless Americans but have spent millions of dollars in helping build illegal Jewish settlements in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories?

If I were an Israeli Jew, I would worry about Israel’s friends like these, who have created a false sense of Israel’s security. I would note the attitudes of the younger generation of Americans and Westerners – including Western Jews such as in J Street – who are becoming fed up with Israeli colonialism and Israel’s subjugation and oppression of the Palestinians. And I would ask myself: How long can Israel manage to live by the sword in the increasingly hostile world? This question – not lham Omar, or Hamas, or Iran – has become Israel’s existential challenge.

Mustafa Malik, host of this blog, is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

Saudi betrayal of Palestinians

Mustafa Malik November 11, 2017

AS I NOTE the Saudi, Israeli and American governments coming together on the same platform to confront Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah, I wonder how my father would’ve reacted to the event.

Mohammad bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, has been prodding Israel to go to war with the pro-Iranian Hezbollah organization, apparently to divert the Saudi public’s attention away from the regime’s badly botched interventions in Yemen and Syria. Ofer Zalzberg, a researcher at the International Crisis Group in Jerusalem, reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has so far been wary of taking on the powerful Hezbollah. Netanyahu, though, has hyped his propaganda blitz against Iran and Hezbollah, apparently to throw a smoke screen around the serious corruption charges he and his wife face in Israeli courts. And Iran-phobia, among other things, has driven Donald Trump, America’s Christian president, to join the anti-Iranian alliance of the Muslim crown prince and Jewish prime minister.

I don’t recall a time since the early seventh century when governments from all three Abrahamic faiths forged an alliance against a common adversary. My late father was an Islamic scholar in the Indian state of Assam and what is now Bangladesh. He used to say that in the Arabian town of Medina, in the early 620s, the Islamic community, or umma, consisted of all three Abrahamic faiths groups: Muslims, Christians and Jews. Eventually, that community split into three. “Baba,” as I called my father, was steeped in the orthodox Islamic version of Muslim history. He blamed the split on Jewish and Christian “betrayal” of Muslims, which included a Jewish attempt to kill the Prophet Muhammad.

The Americans and Israelis have been joined at the hip for decades, while the Muslim world – including Saudi Arabia – viewed Israel as its archenemy because of its occupation of Palestine and ethnic cleansing and persecution of Palestinians. The House of Saud was especially vociferous about its support for Palestinians because most Palestinians are Muslims and it claimed its legitimacy to its service to Islam, which was born in what is now Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi and other Arab autocracies used to be on pretty good terms with Iran during the decades it was also was under an autocracy. The Arab autocracies became wary of Iran after its Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the repressive pro-American monarchy of Shah Muhammad Riza Pahlavi, and replaced it with a populist Islamic government. The Arab monarchs and dictators feared that Islamic populism might spill over to their societies, threatening their despotic rule.

The fear of populist and democratic “subversion” also prompted Arab monarchies to oppose the Arab Spring of 2011-2012 and rally behind the military putsch in Egypt that overthrew that country’s democratically elected government of President Mohammed Mursi. Mursi belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, the leading Islamic movement in the world. Many Muslims had long questioned the House of Saud’s claim to Islamic legitimacy. Now its hostility toward the Muslim Brotherhood eroded that claim further.

Apologists of the Saudi monarchy have had a hard time defending its Islamic credentials. They included Walid Arab Hashim, an economics professor at King Abdul Aziz University in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. During a research trip to the kingdom in 1991, Hashim told me about many activities of the monarchy to promote Islamic causes and institutions around the world.

I told him about many un-Islamic activities I had known members of the Saudi royal family to have indulged in during their visits to the United States. I also asked if hereditary rule could be justified by the teachings of the Quran or the traditions of the prophet of Islam.

I didn’t expect him to give forthright answers to these questions to a foreign journalist, which would likely have cost him his job, and he didn’t. He told me that his country’s ruling dynasty was “a biped animal.” One of its two legs rested on Islam, as its founder, King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, had come to power in the 1920s in alliance with the Wahhabi Islamic movement. The monarchy remained “dedicated to the service” of Islam, he added. Its other leg, he said, rested on Arab tribalism, which historically had supported dynastic rule.

“Which leg does it first put forward,” I asked the professor, “Islam or the dynasty?”

He laughed, without giving me an answer.

I thought I got the answer in July 2013 when the House of Saud ganged up with the Egyptian army General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi to get Mursi’s Islamic government toppled and replaced by Sisi’s brutal military dictatorship. Later that year I ran into an official of the Jeddah-based World Muslim Congress (Motamar Al- Alam Al-Islami) who was visiting Washington. The organization is funded by the Saudi government and carries on Islamic outreach and charity work in different countries. I asked the gentleman about the rationale behind the Saudi government’s campaign against Egypt’s Mursi government and support for the military dictatorship that overthrew it and also it’s increasing hostility toward Iran.

He told me on condition of anonymity that both the Brotherhood and Iran had posed “a threat” to the monarchy. Echoing Hashim, the professor in Jeddah, he said the Saudi government had been funding and supporting “many very important programs for Muslims and Islam” around the world. Among them he mentioned Saudi Arabia’s financial and diplomatic support for Palestinians and other “oppressed” Muslim groups. He claimed that the Saudi-led Arab decision to “ostracize Israel in the Middle East has kept Israel from annexing the West Bank and Gaza.”

I recalled his comment as I observed the the Saudi crown prince lurch into the embrace of Netanyahu, while Israel continues to occupy Palestine and expropriate Palestinian lands by building and expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Except for Iran and perhaps Qatar, other Persian Gulf states are hopping into the Saudi train to Israel. I wonder what incentive, except the Palestinians’ own fighting spirit, would ever persuade Israel to concede the Palestinians’ right to self-determination.

I guess if Baba were alive today he wouldn’t have called the Saudi-Israeli-American entente against Iran and Hezbollah a reunion of Abrahamic faiths. More likely, he would’ve branded bin-Salman’s genuflection to Netanyahu a betrayal of the Palestinians and the umma, most or which remains morally committed to the liberation of Palestine from Israeli colonial occupation.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington, who hosts this blog.

No ‘cakewalk’ to Pyongyang, please

Mustafa Malik September 17, 2017

ON WEDNESDAY I was about to head out to a seminar on cyber security at Wilson Center in Washington when I peeked into the Internet to check the latest news.

“U.S. quietly plans to occupy North Korea after war,” a banner headline in London’s The Sun newspaper screamed at me. I remembered that President Trump and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had said, too, that military action against North Korea is a possibility.

The story led to a Newsweek link. Clicked, it opened a piece in which German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel was quoted as saying that a war between the United States and North Korea “could be deadliest conflict in history,” more catastrophic than the Second World War.

The seminar was about security threats from North Korea, China and Russia. James Lewis, vice president of Center from Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, talked about a “deterrent” against cyber threats from Pyongyang.

I told him that North Koreans had been saying that their nukes are meant to be “a deterrent against American invasion.” I also mentioned that I had heard Sunni Arab leaders in Iraq lamenting that if Saddam Hussein had a few nuclear weapons he could’ve “deterred the U.S. invasion” of 2003, sparing both Iraq and America the “unnecessary and catastrophic war.”

Lewis nodded, apparently signaling that he was aware of it.

Continuing, I inquired if Iranians wanted to have “a couple of nukes,” which they insisted they never did, won’t those warheads also serve as a deterrent against Israeli or U.S. military action? I couldn’t conceive, I added, of Iranians wanting to “commit national suicide” by initiating a nuclear conflict with Israel or the United States.

I asked the CSIS executive what he thought of Kim Jong-un’s reasoning for a nuclear deterrent against a U.S. invasion.

The panelist didn’t answer my question, but warned, instead, that North Koreans “would be deluding themselves” if they thought that a few nukes “would give them immunity” against the U.S. military power. The United States could “get rid of the problem” posed by Kim, regardless of his nukes.

Was he hinting at a possible regime change in North Korea? I wondered.

Explaining the reason America was determined to prevent North Korea and Iran from acquiring nuclear arms, Lewis said, such weaponry could tempt those countries “to evade their responsibilities under international law, to violate international law,” and threaten their neighbors and international security.

I thought of asking him the obvious question of whether the United States and other nuclear powers weren’t potentially violating international law over and over because they sat on nuclear stockpiles. Nuclear arsenals have given them the ability to commit illegal aggression against non-nuclear countries. Also, they have equipped them with veto powers at the U.N. Security Council, practically shielding them against accountability for violations of international law. But I didn’t want to get into an argument with the panelist.

Martin C. Libicki from the U.S. Naval Academy, another panelist, picked up on my comment about Iran. He said Iranians would be “right to think that Israel can do things with its [nuclear] capabilities that its neighbors can’t.” But the Israelis needed that capability for their national security, added the professor of cyber security studies.

Their comments reminded me of a complaint that my Pakistani mentor had made to me several times in the early 1970s. Nurul Amin was prime minister and later vice president of Pakistan, and I worked as his press aide. He would lament to me about America’s “blatant and illegal” military interventions, and often regime change, in Iran, Lebanon, Vietnam, Congo, Ghana and elsewhere. “Independence from colonial rule lets us [Asian and African nations] have our own brown and black rulers,” he would say, “as long as we toe their lines.”

On the subway train back home from Wilson Center, it occurred to me that Nurul Amin’s comment of the Cold War era doesn’t quite apply to the new world we live in. Yes, in 1953 the CIA under the Eisenhower administration could have Iran’s democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq easily overthrown in a military coup. But by 1979 Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries bundled out the brutal pro-American monarchy of Muhammad Riza Pahlavi, whom the Americans had installed in Tehran.

In 1958 the Iraqi army overthrew the pro-Western monarchy in Iraq while Muslim insurgents in neighboring Lebanon rose up against the pro-Western Christian minority government of President Camille Chamoun. Chamoun asked for U.S. help, and the Eisenhower administration immediately rushed some 14,000 troops to Lebanon. The Muslim insurgents ran for cover and the invading American troops hit the beaches in Beirut.

“We drank a lot,” as the U.S. Marines corporal Thomas Zmecek would recall later. “We were provided with swimming trunks and swam with the daughters [of Christian hosts] and had a grand time.”

Twenty-five years later a U.S.-led multinational force was stationed in Lebanon to intervene in a brewing civil war between the Israeli-backed Christian forces and Syrian-backed Muslim and Druze activists. When opposition forces threatened the presidency of Maronite Christian Amin Gemayel, the Reagan administration, prodded by the Israelis and Secretary of State George P. Schultz (against the strenuous objection of Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger) ordered an American contingent to rush to West Beirut to protect the Gemayel regime. But the new Lebanese generation didn’t go into hiding as had their parents and uncles in 1958. They were infuriated by the America intervention in their internal affairs and began to mobilize to resist it. But one of them, a Shiite Muslim, spared them a prolonged fight. He went on a suicide mission, piling up explosives onto a truck and detonating it at a U.S.-French Marines barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American and 58 French servicemen. That led to the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Lebanon.

American politicians and bureaucrats have had difficulty grasping the changed social ethos and worldviews of contemporary generations of post-colonial societies. Many people who grew up under European colonial rule or in the shadow of the colonial era were tolerant of Western military interventions and hegemony. Their children are not. Born in independent countries and exposed to Western values of freedom and democracy, disseminated by myriad communications media, they’re mostly allergic to foreign domination and presence of foreign troops on their lands.

American neocons and Cold War retirees who planned the Iraq war were ostriches with their heads buried in the sand, without having a clue about the dynamics of the Muslim youth of the day. During the run-up to the war neoconservative security expert Ken Adelman proclaimed he was “reasonably certain” that the Iraqis would greet invading U.S. troops “as liberators.” He probably was musing over Lebanese Christians reveling at the arrival of U.S. troops in 1958. Or maybe images of Koreans hailing U.S. Marines under Gen. Douglas MacArthur after their heroic victory in Battle of Inchon was flashing back on his mind.

But in 2003 Iraq had a fiercely independent-minded breed of Arabs who, despite their sectarian feuds, were deeply hostile to foreign domination, as I had observed during three trips in previous years. Their resistance to the U.S. invasion led to the rise of the Islamic State, sectarian blood-letting, unraveling of the Iraqi state, and the security of America and the West.

I’m not sure that the United States can launch a successful invasion of North Korea. Unlike Iraq, that Communist country is believed to have between six and 16 nuclear weapons, most or some of which are in locations unknown to Americans. “It is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, [intelligence] collection nations that we have to collect against,” Daniel Coats, the director of national intelligence, told Congress in May. Even if America can succeed in taking out all of Kim’s nukes before an invasion, which is extremely unlikely, I doubt that North Koreans would hail American invaders as “liberators” anymore than did Iraqis. North Koreans are extremely xenophobic people, usually suspicious of foreigners. A U.S. occupation force would very likely get bogged down in the Hermit Kingdom for years, which the war-wary American public is unlikely to accept.

If the Trump administration blunders into an invasion of North Korea, I’d be as concerned about the catastrophe it would spawn for Americans and Koreans as is Gabriel, the German foreign minister.

– Mustafa Malik, an international affairs columnist in Washington, hosts this blog.

Kushner: The son-in-law also rises

Mustafa Malik January 18, 2017

DONALD TRUMP HAS told The Times of London that Jared Kushner will be trying to negotiate a peace deal between Israel and Palestinians.

“Jared is such a good lad,” explained the new president, “he will secure an Israel deal which no one else has managed to get. You know, he’s a natural talent, he is the top, he is a natural talent.”

No one would dispute Trump’s description of his son-in-law as “a good lad,” or “a natural talent.” The problem is that the 36-year-old billionaire businessman has no government experience. Peacemaking is a diplomatic job, and Kushner never had a diplomatic stint. He has little familiarity with the Middle East or the actors involved in the long and knotty conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Kushner is reported to be talking with Henry Kissinger about his impending debut in diplomacy, but chatting with an old celebrated diplomat isn’t the same thing as juggling adroit belligerents and pulling off a diplomatic breakthrough in, of all places, Israel and Palestine, the graveyard of hundreds of peace projects, undertaken by wizards in the field through decades past.

Moreover, Kushner is unlikely to have any credibility among the Palestinians. A practicing Orthodox Jew, Kushner identifies with right-wing Israeli causes such as building Jewish settlements in Palestinian land and moving the U.S. Embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

The depth of the Jewish businessman’s commitment to his faith showed when he broke up with his then fiancée, Ivanka Trump, because she was unwilling to convert to Judaism, and didn’t marry her until she agreed to do so. On Jewish Sabbath, Orthodox Jews aren’t supposed to drive. Hence Kushner and his wife have bought a $5.5 million home in Washington’s Kalorama neighborhood within walking distance of the local Chabad synagogue.

Kushner is reported to be Trump’s most trusted adviser, who has been the main – if not the only – reason the incoming president made his pledge to relocate the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The son-in-law drafted the speech that the father-in-law gave last March at the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In it Trump declared that, if elected president, he’d “move the American embassy to the eternal capital of the Jewish people, Jerusalem.”

Israel occupied Jerusalem during the Six-Day War and its annexation of the city violates international law. Palestinians plan to make Jerusalem capital of the state they have been struggling to create. Which is why no country, including the United States, has yet recognized Israel’s annexation of Jerusalem and none, including the United States, has set up its embassy there.

Kushner, too, is reported to have been behind Trump’s appointment of David M. Friedman, an ultra-right American Jewish lawyer, as the next U.S. ambassador to Israel. Since long before Trump announced his plans for move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Friedman has pushing for it.

Kushner has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to projects to build Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. These settlements are illegal under international law and intended to block the creation of any Palestinian state. Kushner and his wife also belong to the powerful Orthodox Jewish movement Chabad-Lubavitch, which has been a major sponsor of West Bank settlements.

Chabad views Orthodox Jews as the only true Jews. The movement’s literature says that it is Orthodox Jews’ “duty to exterminate [Jewish infidels] with one’s own hands.” Chabad’s founder and spiritual leader, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, proclaimed that the “bodies” of Jews and non-Jews “should be considered completely different species.”

“An even greater difference exists,” he said, “in regard to the soul … a non-Jewish soul comes from three Satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.” A Jewish soul being divine, “a Jew was not created.”

Rabbi Schneerson and his followers always supported Israeli wars and opposed Israel’s withdrawal from any of its occupied territories. They believe that divine favors attend Jews who occupy and settle lands which, the Bible says, was once inhabited by Hebrews.

Allan Brownfeld, editor of the American Council for Judaism’s periodical, Issues, says that “thousands of [Schneerson’s] Israeli followers played an important role in the election victory of Binyamin Netanyahu” as Israeli prime minister. “Among the religious settlers in the occupied territories, the Chabad Hassids constitute one of the most extreme groups. Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer of Palestinians, was one of them.” Schneerson died in 1994, but his followers adhere to his beliefs and zealously pursue his projects.

Palestinians are worried about Kushner’s appointment as Trump’s senior adviser, his peacemaking stint, and his affiliation with Chabad. They suspect that his anticipated initiative to engage them in peace talks with Israel is intended to be a smokescreen behind which the Trump administration would be helping Israel to tighten its grip on the West Bank.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts the blog ‘Muslim Journey’ (https://muslimjourney.com).

‘Islamic bomb’ scare, again!

Mustafa Malik November 8, 2015

“Persuading Pakistan to rein in its nuclear weapons program should be an international priority.

“The major world powers spent two years negotiating an agreement to restrain the nuclear ambitions of Iran, which doesn’t have a single nuclear weapon. Yet there has been no comparable investment of effort in Pakistan.”

– The New York Times Editorial Board

HERE AGAIN is an ‘Islamic bomb’ alert! And the scaremongers this time aren’t some Islamophobic American politicians, but the editorial board of America’s greatest newspaper.

We just saw that American and European governments get struck by amnesia when someone asks about Israel’s formidable nuclear arsenal of 200 or more nukes, but they did not rest until quarantining Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.

The same way they and the “free press” in the West have been scaring the Westerners about Pakistan’s ‘Islamic bomb’ for four decades. They have been doing so ever since Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto regime felt compelled to begin exploring a bomb after India had detonated its first nukes in 1974. Three years earlier, the Indira Gandhi government in New Delhi had invaded and dismembered old Pakistan. Pakistanis – not just politicians and generals, but everyday workers and shoppers – were scared to death of India getting nuclear bombs, besides having conventional military forces that were three times bigger than Pakistan’s. To allay the widespread panic, one evening Z.A. Bhutto went before TV cameras to assure his nation that he would do all he could to counter Indian nukes.

“We shall eat grass,” he paraphrased an earlier comment in his innately colorful language, “and make the bomb, and fight India for a thousand years.”

The phrase “eat grass” was meant to show how hard it would be for impoverished Pakistanis to spare their meagre resources to build a nuclear deterrent against the India, but that after India had once broken up their old country, people in what was left of Pakistan had no choice but pursue the bomb.

Yet the Times editorial board is mum about India’s nuclear weapons stockpile, and wants Pakistan to unilaterally disarm!

It reminds me of the late Pakistani statesman Mahmud Ali, who had been angered by Henry Kissinger’s brutal pressure on Z.A. Bhutto to dismantle Pakistan’s nascent nuclear program. In his August 1976 meeting with Bhutto in Lahore, the U.S. secretary of state even warned that the Pakistani prime minister would “make a horrible example of yourself,” if he defied the American instruction. (The quote is from Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography, Daughter of Destiny). Ten months later Gen. Ziaul Haq overthrew the enormously popular Pakistani prime minister and hanged him in 1979, despite intense international pressure to spare the life of the democratically elected prime minister.

Meanwhile, about two months after the fateful Kissinger-Bhutto meeting, Mahmud Ali, a former minister in the Z.A. Bhutto Cabinet, had told me on the phone from Islamabad about Bhutto’s decision to brush aside “the enormous American pressure to terminate our nuclear program.”

“See,” added my political mentor, “Christians can have the bombs. Jews can have them. The Hindus can have them, too. And Russian and Chinese Communists also can. No problem. If only a poor Muslim country tries to have a couple of them to defend itself against a mortal enemy … skies would be coming down.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/opinion/sunday/the-pakistan-nuclear-nightmare.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

God help Israel

Mustafa Malik October 27, 2015

I SUSPECT that you can still make a buck selling snake oil to folks at the Wall Street Journal.

The newspaper laments that John Kerry’s plan to install cameras on Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount in East Jerusalem wasn’t working. Palestinians and Israelis were still fighting and dying.

Surprise! Surprise!

Apparently Rory Jones, the writer, and his desk editor and the copy editors at the Journal who put out the story believed that monitoring visitors to the Al Aqsa compound would defuse Palestinians’ anger at encroachment on the mosque site. I bet others do, too. Al Aqsa is one of Islam’s holiest shrines. It’s adjacent to ruins of the historic Jewish temple.

Palestinians youths erupted in anger after a rush of marauding Jewish extremists and other Jews to Al Aqsa and its vicinity. They attacked a number of Jews with knives. Some of the victims died. Israeli security forces responded by killing five times more Palestinians.

Just about everybody in Israel and Palestine knows that the new wave of Palestinian unrest has been spawned by Israel’s continued occupation of Palestine, the unremitting construction of Jewish settlements on Palestinians’ lands, and the abandonment of the peace process by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“There will not be calm without political prospects to definitively end the occupation,” Nabil Shaath, a prominent Palestinian leader, said the other day.

Kerry knows it all too well. Before and after his recent trip to Israel and Jordan, he said, in coded words, that the new flare-up of violence between the Israelis and Palestinians stemmed from Israel’s continued settlement construction in the West Bank and Palestinians’ despair from the collapse of the peace process. Why, then, has he orchestrated the camera gimmick? Does it make sense?

Well, it does. The sad fact is that Kerry and his boss, President Obama, just don’t have the spunk to tell the glaring truth to the Israelis that it’s past time they wound up their anachronistic colonial enterprise. That it’s fast driving them to the precipice.

I miss Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Dwight Eisenhower. Though a light-weight leader, Bush senior had the guts to face down AIPAC and Israel’s powerful allies in the American political establishment, and tell the recalcitrant Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to stop gobbling up Palestinians’ lands, and head out to Madrid to talk peace with them. On 30 October 1991 the former head of the Jewish terrorist gang Irgun tucked his tail between his legs and marched on to Madrid.

Carter paid dearly for his moral stand on the Palestinian issue. In 1978 his prodigious efforts got then Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to sign a peace treaty at Camp David. In the following months the American president realized that Begin was going back on his commitments regarding the Palestinians. Those commitments included full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories, cessation of Jewish settlement construction in those territories, and improvement of Israel’s human rights record in Palestine. Israeli persecution and suppression of Palestinians, he said, were “one of the worst examples of human rights abuse I know.”

So on 10 March 1979 the president flew in to Jerusalem, hoping to get the Israeli prime minister make good on at least some of his promises about the Palestinians. Realizing that his host was stonewalling him on every Palestinian grievance he had raised, Carter exploded and gave Begin a piece of his mind. As the deeply disappointed president was heading for the airport for his return flight, a New York Times reporter asked an assistant to Begin’s if Carter was flying straight to Washington or would be stopping at Cairo to brief Sadat on his talks with the Israeli leader.

“We haven’t decided whether to send him to Washington or back to Georgia!” replied the Begin aide.

Carter knows that AIPAC’s all-out campaign against his reelection was a key reason he lost the 1980 presidential race. Though a one-term president, he will shine as one of the moral titans in American history.

Eisenhower’s dealings with David Ben-Gurion, during his second tour as Israel’s prime minister – and with the British and French governments – were a high watermark of America’s moral standing and global leadership.

Ike was incensed by the Israeli-British-French occupation of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula following the 1956 Suez War. The Israelis and their European allies were retaliating against the nationalization of the Suez Canal by Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. They wanted to use Sinai as a bargaining chip to force Nasser to relinquish Suez. The American president wouldn’t put up with their bullying. He issued a diktat of sorts to Ben-Gurion, British Prime Minister Anthony Eden and French President Rene Coty, demanding they pull their troops out of Sinai. They all complied, without a whimper of protest.

President Obama is a good man and a true patriot. But he’s just cut out of different cloth than those presidents were made of. It was so sad to see our president endure meekly all the taunts, vitriol and humiliation that Netanyahu, the leader of a client state, was dishing out to him year after year. All of that while the Obama administration was flooding Israel with more arms, ammunition and economic aid (Can you believe it’s now $4.5 billion a year!) than any other in history.

All the same, if you look at the faces of Palestinian youths jeering and throwing stones at the heavily armed Israeli troops occupying their land, you can see they aren’t very impressed by Israel’s military might. From my conversations over the years with Palestinian intellectuals and politicians – in Israel/Palestine and the United States – I was struck by a sense of history and optimism exuded by some of them.

Some of my Palestinian interlocutors recalled the sacrifices other peoples had to make to liberate themselves from European colonial subjugation. Jack Khazmo, then editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem newsmagazine Bayadir al-Siasi, described Israeli colonialism as “the last gasp of Charles Darwin.” The ideology behind European imperialism and colonialism derived from Darwin’s thesis of the “survival of the fittest.” The fittest here happened to be, as you have guessed, the white races. Imbued with the idea of their racial superiority, European invaders roared into impoverished and mostly defenseless countries of Asia and Africa; colonized and brutalized their inhabitants and looted their resources, saying the invaders were there to “civilize” those inferior races.

Many European, i.e. Ashkenazi, Jews who built and dominate Israel added to that superiority complex the notions of their being God’s “chosen people.” Some quote the Bible to justify their claim to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean:

“Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.” (Genesis 15: 18)

I was surprised to hear two atheist Russian Jews who had immigrated to Israel alluding to the “promised land” concept to claim that the old Palestine (Israel, the West Bank and Gaza) belonged to the Jews. One of them was a Ph.D., looking for a teaching job. At one point he ridiculed ultra-Orthodox Jews’ “obsession” about religious praxis and customs. I was traveling with them on a bus from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

A few days later I related that conversation to a Palestinian businessman in Amman, Jordan. Moneif Hijjeh pointed out that Jews, Christians and Muslims worsted the same God and followed the “Abrahamic tradition.” He asked me if God had given all of Palestine to Abraham’s descendants, didn’t the Arabs, the children of Abraham’s son Ishmael, inherit it as well?

“Come on, Moneif!” interjected a Moneif’s business associate Khalil Awad, who had joined us for lunch at the restaurant of Amra Hotel in Amman, where I was staying. “They don’t need to justify stealing our land, where we have been living since Abraham migrated there. Did the Nazis need to justify cleansing Germany of Jews and Gypsies?”

The racial or ethnic hubris betrayed by many Israeli Jews seems associated more with colonialism than God’s pledge to Abraham. Israeli Jews – a majority of them atheist, socialist, or otherwise secular – justify their colonization of Palestine the same way many Indian Hindus – also mostly secular – defend discriminating against Muslims and justify the demolition of the historic Babri Mosque in northern India. God Rama, they argue, was born on the spot where Muslim Emperor Babur built the mosque in 1527. Those Hindus don’t need any historical or archaeological evidence (in fact there is none) to prove that God Rama descended on earth in human form, let alone being born on the mosque site.

Haider Abdel Shafi, who had led the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, attributed the Jews’ claim to a Jewish state in Palestine to “their purely colonialist mentality.” On a visit to Washington the following year the leftist Palestinian leader told me that he was “hopeful, but not sure” that the Israelis would concede a Palestinian state, as the Palestinians were expecting them to do. If the Israelis tried to “perpetuate their occupation [of Palestinian territories],” he warned, “colonialism can become their nightmare. I hope they are reading the history of colonialism”

If the history of colonialism has any lesson, it’s that hegemonic powers’ military and economic might usually don’t impress people struggling for freedom from their colonial subjugation. If it could, my parents’ generation wouldn’t have been able to throw British colonialists out of the Indian subcontinent. In the 1940s Great Britain was the greatest military power and the largest empire on earth on which the sun never set, while Indians were among the world’s poorest and most backward peoples. Winston Churchill, then British prime minister, dismissed the rising tide of independence movements in British colonies as some miscreants’ “subversive activities.” He berated Mahatma Gandhi as a rabble-rousing “half-naked fakir,” or beggar. India and Pakistan won their independence in 1947. Other British colonies followed suit in quick succession.

Abdel Shafi’s foreboding flashes on my mind as bloodletting between Palestinians and Israelis takes an ominous turn. If a “nightmare” actually befalls Israel, the Obama administration, along with other American administrations, and Israel’s gung-ho supporters on Capitol Hill can’t shirk their responsibility for it. Americans’ blanket support for Israel, regardless its behavior, has emboldened the Israelis to go on settling the Palestinian lands ever more impudently, illegally and in the face of global protests.

I can see clouds darkening on Israel’s horizon. If I were an Israeli Jew, I would worry about my children’s future in Israel. But I see that most Israelis are a lot braver than me. They apparently have decided to live by the sword. God help them and their children.

Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts the blog Beyond Freedom (https://beyond-freedom.com).

Declare Middle East nuke-free

Mustafa Malik May 15, 2015

Persian Gulf monarchies are petrified by the anticipated Iran nuclear deal, being negotiated in Geneva. Last week Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates threatened to try to acquire nuclear weapons technology if they didn’t get one of two things from the Iran deal.

One, they wanted the Islamic Republic’s uranium enrichment program shut down completely. Iran would never agree to that. Secondly, if the program is allowed to continue, albeit at a reduced level, the United States should sign a security pact with them. In practical terms, that would mean insuring the security of their thrones from external and internal threats. These Arab rulers know that the Iranians have better things to do than lurch into a military adventure. On the other hand, domestic threat to their regimes has heightened since the Arab Spring.

The Obama administration knows that too, and the president recently said so publicly. He said the real security threat facing the Gulf Arab monarchies could come from their disenfranchised and “alienated” public. In recent weeks the administration let the Gulf Arab governments know that while America would be willing to defend their countries against external aggression, it wouldn’t intervene in their domestic feuds and unrest. The message left the Arab royals mopey and grumpy.

The White House had invited all six monarchs of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to meet the president on Wednesday to discuss the Iran deal and their security concerns. Led by the Saudi King Salman bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud, four of the six kings declined the president’s invitation, sending in their surrogates, instead. Obama apparently ignored the snub and made the best of the occasion. He reiterated to his guests America’s “ironclad” commitment to defend their countries against any “external” aggression.

Meanwhile, some American media pundits and others have voiced concern about the possibility of Saudi Arabia following up on its vow to seek the nukes. If it does, the Pakistanis would find themselves in a thorny dilemma. The Saudis underwrote Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program with the apparent understanding that Islamabad would supply them with the nuclear technology if they need it. Moreover, the kingdom has been a generous benefactor to Pakistan for decades. In fact, because of the late Saudi King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, the current Pakistani prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, is alive today. Then Pakistani military dictator Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who had overthrown then Prime Minister Sharif in a 1999 military coup, was bent on killing him. Fahd pressured Musharraf into sparing Sharif’s life and sending him to exile in Saudi Arabia.

On the other hand, it would also be very hard for Islamabad to defy the inevitable American pressure against sharing its nuclear knowhow with the Saudi kingdom. The Sharif government’s – and top Pakistani generals’ – decision to let the Americans kill Osama bin Laden inside Pakistan showed the efficacy of Washington’s clout over Pakistan. (The United States demanded Pakistani cooperation in the U.S. Navy Seals raid on the bin Laden compound after a Pakistani intelligence officer had tipped off the CIA station chief in Islamabad about the Al Qaeda chief’s whereabouts in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad.)

All the same, the whole brouhaha about nuclear proliferation in the Middle East is a smokescreen around the root cause of the bugaboo: the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Americans would let Israel hold on to its more than 200 sophisticated nukes and then try to keep Arabs and Iranians from pursuing nuclear weapons capability. America’s prodigious exercise to keep Iran from approaching a nuclear “breakout” is meant to deprive the Iranians of a deterrent against Israeli nukes, if they wanted one.

Iranians and Arabs have long been calling on the international community to declare the Middle East a “nuclear-free zone.” That would be the best and most effective nonproliferation program for the region. But Israel and America wouldn’t heed their call because such an arrangement would require Israel to abandon its nuclear weaponry.

It’s about time Americans reviewed their perilous policy on the Israeli nukes to forestall the danger of proliferation in that increasingly unstable region. Washington should get the U.N. Security Council to designate the Middle East a nuclear-free zone.

Mustafa Malik, a columnist in Washington, hosts the blog ‘Beyond Freedom’ (https://beyond-freedom.com).

Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.