Politics

Ben Norton

Salon.com

The Bernie Sanders camp continues its push for Palestinian rights.

Two of the members of the Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee who were appointed by Sen. Sanders have criticized Israel and called for a more even-handed approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict, The New York Times reported.

Cornel West, the renowned scholar and activist, and James Zogby, a longtime pro-Palestinian advocate and president of the Arab American Institute, condemned Israel’s illegal nearly five-decade-long military occupation of the Palestinian territories on Wednesday.

Both argued that the Democratic Party is increasingly out of touch with its rank-and-file supporters, more and more of whom oppose the Israeli government for its crimes against the Palestinians.

“Justice for Palestinians cannot be attained without the lifting of the occupation,” West said in an interview cited by the Times.

He stressed that the Democratic Party platform needs to bring more balance to “the plight of an occupied people.”

West also accused Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of war crimes. Leading human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have said the Israeli military committed war crimes in its 51-day assault on the densely populated Gaza Strip.

Zogby similarly called for a more balanced approach. “Any honest assessment would say that the debate on this issue has shifted over the last 30 years and the platform has reflected that but lagged slightly behind, and it’s now time to catch up,” he said in an interview. “Clearly most Democrats agree. But we will see what happens.”

Support for Palestinians is growing among Americans, particularly among progressives and the youth, according to a poll published by Pew earlier this month.

Liberal Democrats and supporters of Sanders are now more likely to support the Palestinians than Israel, Pew found. Just 33 percent of liberal Democrats would support Israel in a dispute, while 40 percent would back the Palestinians.

Among supporters of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, 39 percent back the Palestinians, while 33 percent support Israel.

Sanders has helped change the discourse on Israel-Palestine in the U.S. He has publicly criticized Israel’s 2014 bombing campaign in Gaza, echoing human rights organizations and the U.N., which accused the Israeli military of carrying out disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks that amount to war crimes, as even the U.S. State Department has acknowledged.

Source: www.salon.com

In a new foreign policy study released by Pew Research recently, the results have shown the lowest amount of support for Israel among American millennials than ever before. According to the Pew study, only 43% of American millennials support Israel, while 27% sympathize with Palestinians. Millennials have the most support for Palestine than any other … Continued

Saif Alnuweiri
National Memo

A key foreign policy advisor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Walid Phares, has reportedly been dispatched to Muslim communities around the nation to rally support for the sole presidential candidate to explicitly promise to ban their coreligionists from entering the country.

Like most of Trump’s heavy-handed approaches to dealing with minorities, it’s unclear how this latest overture will significantly change the fortunes of the Republican Party among American Muslims.

“These people know what they want – they’re concerned about the well-being of their communities and believe that Trump has the right economic and social agenda,” Phares said in an interview with The Hill. “But they’re trying to get a handle on how he’ll deal with the Middle East.”

However, according to polls performed by the Council on American Islamic Relations, how Trump, or any presidential candidate, handles the Middle East ranks low on the list of issues that concern American Muslims. “Foreign affairs issues” — which would presumably include “how he’ll deal with the Middle East” — was the most important issue for just 6 percent of poll respondents. Islamophobia, which Trump has fanned, and the economy, which he would surely drive into the ground with his proposed policies, which were the biggest concerns to Muslim voters.

Equally as important, the majority of American Muslims aren’t from the Middle East, according to a study done by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. Only 18 percent of respondents identified as Arab. Meanwhile, 25 percent described themselves as Asian and 24 percent described themselves as black.

But lumping all Muslims together as Middle Easterners is to be expected from Phares. He has repeatedly appeared on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and other conservative media outlets as a “terrorism expert,” though he has close ties with several known Islamophobes who espouse simplistic views and circulate out-of-context readings of the Quran as proof that Islam is fundamentally at odds with the West.

His own rhetoric shows that such company isn’t an accident. “Jihadists within the West pose as civil rights advocates, interested solely in the ‘rights’ of their immigrant communities,” he claimed in his book Future Jihad, effectively writing off any Muslim civic group as a potential front for religious extremists. But that doesn’t mean he won’t attempt to downplay the extremism of the side he represents.

“Right now the ban is just a few sentences in a foreign policy announcement and a tweet, it’s not like he’s written books or published articles or delivered lectures on this,” he said, attempting to assuage fears that Trump’s ban wouldn’t be that bad. “He’ll continue to add context and distinction to his position as he gets new information.” It’s unclear what new information would lead to Trump changing any policy based on the premise that “Islam hates us.”

Even back in 2011, when Mitt Romney first brought on Phares to advise him in his presidential run, numerous foreign policy experts were confused as to why Romney even hired him, other than to engage in dog-whistle politics. “I’m more confused than anything else, given what I know about the types of initiatives Phares has been involved in,” said Andrew Exum of the Center for a New American Security, to New Republic. “When you have a lot of credible scholars and practitioners within the Republican Party, why would you select as co-chair of your policy committee someone who is widely viewed as an extremist?”

At the same time, As’ad Abu Khalil, a well-known Lebanese American professor and author of the Angry Arab blog, recorded any mention of Phares in Lebanese newspapers during the Lebanese Civil War. He discovered that Phares, who generally tries to avoid discussion of his past, was a “[m]ember of the Command Council of the Lebanese Forces, [and] head of the Lebanese Immigration Apparatus in the Lebanese Forces,” a Lebanese Christian militia that believed in the creation of a Christian Arab homeland in Lebanon, partially through the ethnic cleansing of Muslim enclaves in Christian majority areas. Phares was also a close advisor of its current leader, Samir Geagea, the only militia leader to be imprisoned for crimes committed during the civil war.

Perhaps Trump thought that sending a man with an obviously Arab-sounding name would dupe Muslim voters into thinking that he had reneged on his promises to bar Muslims from entering the country and registering the ones who remained. After all, Trump failed twice in a single interview to push back against the notion that Phares was a Muslim. Perhaps he was hoping they would do the same.

Source: www.nationalmemo.com

The Hill By Brad Parker The Palestinian population is incredibly young. Children under 18 years old now represent 46 percent of the 4.68 million Palestinians living in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. They have grown up living  in a situation of prolonged military occupation where Israeli forces enjoy near complete impunity for … Continued

By George S. Hishmeh, Special to Gulf News
Published: 17:01 May 18, 2016

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Once again, Israel has managed to escape scrutiny — thanks to a last-minute American intervention from the United States Secretary of State John Kerry, who has said that the date of the upcoming meeting is not convenient for him.

For many weeks, the French President, Francois Hollande, has been calling for an international conference, due to be held later this month in Paris, to relaunch peace talks between the Palestinians and Israelis. But the key participants from the high-ranking officials of some 30 countries will not include any official from the Palestinian National Authority or Israel in order to launch guidelines for a peace settlement between the two warring parties of more than five decades.

Unlike the Palestinians, the Israelis were not supportive of this expanded undertaking. And now at the last minute, Kerry has reportedly told his French hosts that the timing is not convenient for him, raising curiosity about his last-minute response before the May 30 meeting in the French capital.

The French government has reportedly grown frustrated over the absence of a movement towards a two-state solution since the collapse of the US-brokered talks in 2014 and letting the status quo prevail, prompting fears that the region is on the brink of additional turmoil. More to the point, Israel has repeatedly declared it is not willing to support an expanded international conference, probably for fear of international condemnation and hopes of grabbing additional Occupied Palestinian Territories, where some half a million of illegal Israeli colonists have moved into the West Bank without any effective condemnation from key western powers, especially the US.

But the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, who visited Israel and the Palestinian government last week, raised slight hopes in saying that the conference will take place “in the course of the summer”.

The Israeli government is against the projected meeting and particularly recent French actions; its support of a Unesco resolution that did not acknowledge Jewish ties to occupied Jerusalem and of Palestinian membership in Unesco.

The potential participants in the upcoming meeting will include the Middle East Quartet (US, Russia, European Union and United Nations), Arab League, the UN Security Council and about other 20 other countries.

In turn, the Palestinians remain hopeful that the projected French conference will bring about new “parameters for the promised talks”, Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah declared. He cited the case of the international community when it came together before. “A peaceful settlement was found for the Iranian issue. Why not Palestine?” he said.

But what remains troublesome is the approaching American presidential election, where the two presumptive candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are hard-nosed supporters of Israel. Trump, the Republican front-runner, is on record as supporting Israel build colonies in the West Bank, while Hillary said: “We need steady hands, not a president who says he is neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday and who knows [not] what on Wednesday, because everything is negotiable”. She added: “Well, my friends, Israel’s security is not negotiable.”

What has been more rattling lately is Israel’s expectations regarding US financial aid that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hopes to sign before January 2017 when US President Barack Obama’s last term in office expires, although crucial disagreements remain unresolved. His concern is that signing the deal with Obama, a Democrat, will assure all that Israel is supported by both Democrats and Republicans, fearing that Trump will be the next president.

The current deal, valued at $30 billion (Dh110.34 billion), expires at the end of 2018. Obama is willing to give Israel $40 billion on condition that Israel will not seek more financial assistance over the next 10 years. Aid from the US equals to a quarter of the Israeli military budget.

But a contradictory turnaround that may influence a new America administration was revealed by the Pew Research Centre. Democrats are more than four times as likely as Republicans to say they sympathise more with the Palestinians than with Israel, and sympathy for Palestinians among Americans is growing.

The empathy for Palestinians, according to the survey published in the Times of Israel earlier this month, “is up most sharply among the youngest American adults, growing threefold over the last decade”. It added that “some 27 per cent of millennials say they are more sympathetic to Palestinians than Israelis. In 2006, the figure was 9 per cent, but the share of those favouring Israel has held at 43 per cent”.

The survey also shows that “there is more optimism among Americans that a two-state solution can be achieved by the Israelis and Palestinians than scepticism that it cannot”.
George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com

Source: gulfnews.com