In the back and forth between the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, I generally have had little to say. It is only today, with Clinton’s sneaky remarks about the so-called “controversy” regarding Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that I feel impelled to write about one way race has entered this campaign. It is only now, with Reverend Wright’s comments in the spotlight and the associated discomfort most Americans feel upon hearing them, that we are finally beginning to recognize what it means to potentially have a president who is different. More accurately, it is a clarification of the real nature of that “difference” that so far has not been properly appreciated, having been relegated to the mere fact that Barack Obama has black skin. [Read more →]

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A peculiar phenomenon plagues many political engagements in this world, and talk about, from, and within Israel and Palestine is certainly no exception. Here I am referring specifically to the dumbfounded gaze many people are guilty of giving, perhaps unwillingly, when they are confronted with an incident in which the wrong people have–rather inconveniently–died. [Read more →]

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Update: This article was also published by The Electronic Intifada.

Ishmael Khaldi has been all the rage amongst Israel advocacy groups in the United States, especially the liberal-minded San Francisco Bay Area. An Arab bedouin who embraces his Israeli citizenship and has worked for the Israeli police as well as Israel’s occupying army, he was a dream come true for the Israeli consulate, which decided to hire him as Deputy Consul to San Francisco in December 2006. The timing and destination could hardly have been more opportune given growing efforts by activists in the Bay Area to bring awareness to the apartheid realities of Israeli state policies within and without the 1967 borders. What better way for the Israeli government to prove that it’s not racist than by having an Arab with an Israeli passport denounce the claim, in an official capacity? [Read more →]

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One of my favorite attitudes expressed in political discussions regarding Palestine is the moderately liberal approach that the central issue regarding Palestine is that the “cycle of violence” must be stopped. This argument is often invoked when somebody is approaching the issue with the intent of resolving it without knowing anything about it. Anybody who might list other political reasons is met with the accusation that they are “part of the problem” and that their priority should be “stopping the cycle.” Usually, these people are extremely frustrated that the “cycle” of “senseless” violence continues despite their noble efforts to end it, leaving them with a self-vindicating sense of helplessness and powerlessness. [Read more →]

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My younger brother Waseem Salahi is a Co-Editor-in-Chief of his high school’s newspaper, “The Smoke Signal.” As is standard with almost all high school newspapers, the administration “reviews” the paper before it goes to press every month. This month, the administration called Waseem into the office 1-2 hours before deadline, where he was met by the principal and three vice principals. The administration made it clear to him that the article needed to be “changed,” ostensibly to avoid creating “division” on campus. However, while Waseem was talking to administrators, the journalism adviser told students to replace the article with an advertisement, and the publication was sent to press while Waseem was still arguing with the administration. [Read more →]

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Background
Throughout the spring of 2006, students from the Israel Action Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Berkeley were filmed while organizing their activities. Many individual members of each group were interviewed by the documentarians, who had said they were making a documentary for the “America at a Crossroads” series about campus activism related to Israel and Palestine. That documentary ended up with the name “Campus Battleground,” airing tonight, Monday Nov 26, on PBS for the first time.

That spring was the first that Students for Justice in Palestine had existed on campus during my time at Cal. At the end of my first year, a group of us had decided to bring the organization back to campus. There are, of course, a few things you learn along the way, intellectually, personally, politically, practically, tactically, etc, even over the course of what is now only about a year and a half, so it is safe to say that the organization, myself included, has matured in all these ways over time. Those differences only become so clear with the ability to refer back to this taped record of the past.

In writing about this documentary, I want to be clear that I am not responding out of anger in opposition to it. I am not angry at all. I want to be clear, though, that I am not wholly comfortable with the way I or the various issues raised in the documentary have been portrayed. I don’t feel that I have been slighted or manipulated, though I do feel that the political message that this documentary advances is not in line with my own political views. I will touch more on this after laying out a few of my main objections.

The Demonization of Religion
No Palestinians
Superficial Understanding of ‘Otherness’
The Jewish-Arab Battlefield

[Read more →]

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On Wednesday evening, the ASUC Senate, in a vote of 11-7-2, narrowly passed SB75, a resolution “affirming the US-Israel relationship.” Among other things, the resolution suggested that the “relationship” between the US and Israel was based on “shared ideals” including “commitments to freedom, equality, and tolerance for all people.” The resolution, void of any mention whatsoever of the occupation of Palestinian land and of the actual nature of that mystical “relationship,” further stipulated that the ASUC Senate supports a “diplomatic relationship” while it does not support any “specific policies” of Israel.

Some Senators rushed through the bill to celebrate Halloween. Scary, huh?

While the resolution was heard for about two hours, it would be a mistake to say that the issue was discussed comprehensively. It was disheartening to see many senators itching to get out of their seats so they could drop by the various Halloween parties that were happening around campus–it was even worse to see those who didn’t care to pay due attention to the issue at hand decide to vote yes rather than to abstain. One gets the impression that there is a general sense of apathy on one side of the senate chambers, a sense which, besides being irresponsible for any elected official, also seems to imply that some senators don’t recognize the gravity of their decisions. If not for them personally, then for others on campus, in the wider community, and around the world.

Out of Berkeley on Wednesday night, the imagined progressive capital of the US, the ASUC Senate passed a regressive and reckless resolution that ignored the realities of the US-Israel relationship. That relationship is not about “shared ideals,” but about the billions of dollars in aid and military supplies that go from the United States to Israel every year. Click to continue reading…

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What would happen if a venue told a group like Rage Against the Machine or Public Enemy that it could not perform unless it allowed the US Military Band to open for it?

I doubt the request would be met with much support, or that any venue would ever impose such restrictions on its performing artists, and yet that is precisely what happened to Lebanese composer and musician, Marcel Khalife, at the Ray and Jon Kroc Corps Community Center in San Diego. Khalife, on a tour in the United States, was informed by the venue that his show was to be canceled because it was “divisive” and “unbalanced,” and that the only remedy would be to have an Israeli perform on the same day.

What “divisive” and “unbalanced” mean in this context is a mystery, but they are definitely no strangers when it comes to art about the Palestinians. Just recently, a similar campaign was conducted against a mural depicting the apartheid wall in San Francisco made by artists in the youth community organization, HOMEY. Before a hearing at the San Francisco Arts Commission, the HOMEY artists were forced, due to a lack of resources, to enter into a “compromise” that the wall would be made to look less realistic, like the ominous symbol (and reality) of separation and disunity that it is, and more like a happy place surrounded by flora and hope. They were also asked to remove the kuffiyeh from one of the characters.

Increasingly, symbols that assert the Palestinians’ right to resist the brutality and violence of Israeli hegemony are being demonized and censored. Artwork and poetry that denounce Israel’s project of separating Arab from Jew in historic Palestine are called “divisive” and “unbalanced,” whereas actual instances of physical, ideological, and institutional separation–look, for example, at the apartheid wall, or at the separate lower schooling systems for Arabs and Jews in Israel, or more generally at the Zionist ideology of the state–are rationalized away, somehow escaping this label of “divisive” when that is exactly what they do, explicitly and unabashedly: divide and separate. Somehow, Israel has managed to twist this separation into a step towards peace, but just as other cases in history have shown, Palestinians and Israelis will never be separate but equal, and as long as they are not equal, there will likely be no lasting or meaningful peace.

The strange logic that supports this system of censoring all who recognize the Palestinians on equal terms goes beyond “divisiveness,” though. It’s directly related the idea of “bias” when it comes to any discussion that has to do with Israel. Even with strong evidence and reasoned analysis, anybody who concludes that Israel’s policies are unjust or discriminatory is treated as a “biased” party, and calls are made for “both sides” to be given a voice. The “other side” is always somebody whose line matches that of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Imagine if a venue hosting an engagement for a speaker against the war on Iraq was criticized for not presenting “both sides,” the other side being the now discredited position of the Bush administration.

That is what we need to accept, as well, when it comes to Israel and Palestine: that not all “sides” (and I speak here of rhetorical sides, more like analyses and opinions, not of any primitive ’sides’ like ‘the Israeli side’ or ‘the Palestinian side’) are equal. These are not sides relating to values that can never be reconciled, like when it comes to non-legalistic debates surrounding things like abortion and gay marriage. They are sides that relate directly to the world around us, and to our political interactions with it. They cannot all be true (though all of them can impart some useful information, usually not about what they intend).

Just like the Bush administration’s side in the Iraq war debate has been discredited, it is time to accept the fact that the Israeli government’s side on the Palestine issue has been equally discredited, and that repeatedly airing that side is not a matter of being “fair to both sides,” but rather, of sheer naivety and idiocy.

Khalife has found himself in the middle of this because he has elegantly and beautifully put earlier poetry of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish to music. But it is especially strange to see him in the middle of this because music, and art more generally, has never been perceived as a field of dispassionate objectivity where one can be accused of being “unbalanced” or “biased.” The arts are traditionally considered a place for hyper-subjectivity, a place of independent and honest expression, a place where the only “side” is one’s own. Is it that those who have shut down his show wish to see the stunning limits of faux objectivity in other fields, extended to the arts? I would hope not. The objectivity of those fields is untrue anyway: we should be seeking the opposite. That is, the authenticity of the arts should subsume the rest of our existence, and we should totally abandon the harmful idea that we can exist in ‘objective’ worlds.

Marcel Khalife is playing in San Francisco on October 10. For more information, check out the tour schedule.
[Read more →]

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Hussein Ibish, above, believes he will single-handedly free Palestine with his American passport.

In his column of September 14, 2007, Hussein Ibish made one telling statement: “Any successful approach to pro-Palestinian advocacy in the United States should therefore emphasize the benefits to the United States, and indeed to Israel, of freedom for the Palestinian people.”

This suggestion comes at a time when the vast majority of Americans in decision-making circles are convinced of the exact opposite: that Israeli hegemony over the Palestinian people, and Israel’s status as a regional superpower, is in fact one that benefits the United States. It is nearly impossible to suggest otherwise considering the substantial cooperation between the militaries, intelligence communities, economies, and governments of both countries. Hell, an Israeli firm is contracted to train the campus police all the way at my California school. If Israel is good enough friends with the University of California, then we have a long way to go before making a convincing argument that Israel is not good enough for “US interests”–the same interests that have a history of spreading war, overthrowing democratic governments, and installing puppet leaders around the world. Contrary to Ibish’s thinking, “US interests” are not defined by the Arab love he thinks will follow a US-sponsored Palestinian state.

This small fact aside, we should also be troubled by anybody who views the Palestinian people instrumentally, as either beneficial or detrimental to so-and-so’s interests. In this problematic thinking, which was instrumental in bringing about the Israeli state in the first place, whenever Palestinian freedom is not beneficial to the United States or to Israel (like today, yesterday, and every day in at least the past 60 years: the existence of the Palestinians is in fact quite inconvenient for Israel, and this will always be the case until Israel changes its state ideology), Ibish loses all justification for supporting the Palestinian people in their just cause. The truest, most persistent, and most promising support for the Palestinian people is that which rests on ethical principles, not on opportunism and self-interest.

Ibish, who entertains the idea that he is not a supporter of “ethnic nationalism,” concludes that those “serious” about peace must work for a “Palestinian state alongside Israel.” In other words, Ibish’s idea of “serious” peace is that which results in a state defined for Jews and another defined for Arabs. Putting aside the question of whether or not this is practically possible, we should ask: is there a grosser example of “ethnic nationalism” than Ibish’s suggestion, anywhere, and can any of the academics Ibish smears (who actually call for one state defined by neither ethnic identity) actually be guilty of this? The truth is that Ibish himself is guilty of what he accuses his opponents. This paradox, which even Ibish himself may not have picked up on, is quite typical for those who believe they can achieve liberation by collaborating with the same people who are in the business of dominating them.

It is no coincidence that Ibish is especially shocked by the idea that some might blame “other Palestinians and Arabs” for the criminal situation in Palestine. Ibish’s “lament” in this regard is most striking, especially for somebody who opposes “ethnic nationalism” while espousing liberal values that might be believed to be antithetical to the implications of this “lament.” While communal solidarity is important in the fight against apartheid, it would be a grave mistake to believe that every single Palestinian is equal in that fight: indeed, there are those Palestinians, and especially those Arabs, who have benefited in material and political terms precisely because of the occupation, and precisely because of their participation in the never-ending “peace process,” which time is showing us is actually a process of destroying Palestine piece-by-piece.

The most troubling part of Ibish’s vision for a Palestinian state is that it will be unsustainable. If it is to rely on never-ending “international backing,” which itself is an impossible goal, then that state will disappear with that support. Not even the Zionists relied so carelessly and so exclusively on “international support” to establish their state. It is also difficult to imagine what kind of Palestinian state can occur if a group with such pervasive social roots as Hamas is one that can simply be discarded and ignored by his strangely exclusionary idea of democracy. Does Ibish think a state of any form can actually be formed without that segment of Palestinian society playing any role whatsoever? That state will not last: it has already failed, as recent events have shown.

What we need is not defeatism, as Ibish is proposing. Neither is it the redemptive approach that Ibish suggests of Americans wielding their passports to save the Palestinians, who Ibish appears to take for granted will never have a chance of helping themselves. We should be working to empower those who are leading the authentic struggle against the apartheid system, whoever they may be. This cannot happen by “engaging the political system” in the way Ibish thinks we should: not because of some irrational obstinacy on our part, as Ibish the Rational imagines, but because of the very nature of that political system. The only way we can “engage” the political system, is if we engage it in on contrarian terms. In remaining outside of the system while actively opposing it, we will shape it. The other alternative is Ibish’s: that we attempt to oppose the system by participating in it. But if we follow that path, it is our shape that will change.

Immortal Technique said it more gracefully: “The problem with always being a conformist is that when you try to change the system from within, it’s not you who changes the system; it’s the system that will eventually change you. There is usually nothing wrong with compromise in a situation, but compromising yourself in a situation is another story completely.”

The mural above, in San Francisco at 24th and Capp, illustrates the spirit of resistance common to struggles against external domination around the world. It is currently under attack by the censors of the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council. Click on the image for more information on how to help.

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Update 8/13/07: Shirts in lighter colors and with lower prices are now available at the online store. There are also jerseys, hoodies, sweatshirts, and other apparel.

Who is afraid of the Arabic language?

Enough people to drive Debbie Almontaser, aspiring principal of a new Arabic-themed public school in New York, out of her job. Almontaser was loosely “connected” (read: she shared office space) to a group that produced a benign t-shirt with the words “Intifada NYC” on them.

To certain anti-Arab organizations and individuals, “intifada” is something to fear. It is violent, it is terrorizing, and it is, apparently, unacceptable even to mention the word. In recent times the word has been connected to the Palestinian uprisings of the late 1980s and early 2000s, which have taken many different forms: cultural, artistic, literary, musical, political, military, violent, non-violent.

What these people do not understand, however, is that intifada, even while politically charged, is not necessarily a violent concept, nor does it come exclusively out of the ongoing Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid. In 1977, for example, Egypt saw what was termed the “bread intifada” in response to measures taken by then President Anwar Sadat to drastically increase the price of basic commodities. It was over a decade later that the term was commonly held to refer to the Palestinian uprising of the late 1980s.

While to those looking on from a distance “intifada” might only refer to the images seen on television, to those on the ground, its meaning has roots in an inspirational attitude and positive outlook that seeks to overturn an oppressive situation. It is the very essence of giving “power to the people,” of allowing the people to act when their interests are threatened. From that perspective, only those who fear change and justice are afraid of intifada, the concept. Fear of this concept, however, means fear of the American revolution, fear of the anti-slavery movement, fear of the civil rights movement, fear of the Vietnam era anti-war movement–in short, fear of everything that has ever helped change America for the better.

Intifada, as a concept, is one that has deep roots in oppressed sectors of American society. It is only when we call it by its Arabic name that we encounter these hysterical xenophobic attitudes. We should not pretend, anyway, that this current controversy is simply about the word “intifada.” In doing so we would be ignoring the fact that the Arabic language itself has become something worth fearing in the United States. Just last year, an Iraqi man was kicked off of a JetBlue flight (remember the name, boycott it) for wearing a t-shirt with the words “We will not be silent” in Arabic. It should not be difficult to see, then, that this is an affront to Arabs and the Arabic language as a whole, rather than the word “intifada” exclusively.

It is here that we step in to protect intifada, the concept, as well as “intifada,” the word. If intifada is something that can inspire youth in this country to organize within their communities in order to force the political system to work for them (for us), then intifada is something that we encourage in every corner of the United States. Furthermore, we will not call it dissent, we will not call it protest, and we will not call it activism–even though it encompasses all of these things. To resist the efforts by the right-wing and the popular media to demonize Arabs, Muslims, and other immigrants, we will call it by no other name: intifada it is, and in every community in this country, it will be.

The best way to achieve our political goals of pushing people to action, as well as our cultural goals of fighting fear of the Arabic language, is to increase both our political and cultural visibility. We have designed the t-shirt below with those goals in mind.

On the front, it reads:

“shake off the system that oppresses you!
(intifada in Arabic)
intifada u.s.a
act now for your community”

On the back, it reads:
“in*ti*fa*da (n)
an arabic word for ’shaking off,’ politically it refers to popular movements that seek to rectify an unjust situation, whether it be for affordable bread or equal political rights. the civil rights movement might have been called an intifada, if it happened on the other side of the world. is that so bad?”

These t-shirts have been designed with our overall project in mind and as such, proceeds will go towards funding our new publication, the a-Rab. To order this t-shirt, please follow this link to the same posting on the a-Rab’s website and follow the instructions at the bottom of the post (there are also larger versions there). If you agree with us, please share this post and this t-shirt with your friends. If you have suggestions for other ways of selling these t-shirts, please feel free to contact us at admin@a-rab.net.

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