11 July 2022
“Were I a Jew I would be a Zionist. My father pointed out to me I did not need to be a Jew to be a Zionist. For I am. Israel is essential to the security of Jews world-wide.”
Joe Biden, 2016.
“A prominent but polarizing director of Jewish theatre has been fired from his long-time perch at the Jewish Community Center in Washington after several productions that raised challenging questions about Israel.”
Michael Paulson, “Ari Roth, Director of Jewish Theatre, Is Fired”, New York Times, 19 December 2014.
لا تكتب التاريخ شعرا، فالسلاح هو
المؤرخ. والمؤرخ لا يصاب برعشة
الحمى اذا سمى ضحاياه ولا يصغي
الى سردية الجيتار. والتاريخ يوميات
أسلحة مدونة على أجسادنا. "ان
الذكي العبقري هو القوي".
محمود درويش، لا تكتب التاريخ شعرا.
Introduction
Joe Biden’s visit to the region is said to relate to soaring oil prices given the war in Ukraine and building on Donald Trump’s aggressive Sheldon Adelsonian diplomacy in generating policies against Iran. He will visit Mahmoud Abbas, occupied with countering critics and popular challengers to his under-apartheid authority such as the imprisoned political leader Marwan Barghouti, but will not attempt to assist in resolving Israel’s continuous violations of Palestinians’ rights. As the former Israeli-American Jewish prison guard during the first intifada and current American reporter Geoffrey Goldberg triumphantly said in one of his American interviews during the Obama administration: the Palestinian issue is off the table.
Palestinians should express sorrow at Biden’s visit, to Ramallah and regionally, and welcome the fact that the Americans are unable to resolve any issue pertaining to Palestine, mainly because there is no Palestinian public opinion that would accept clearly American biased approach legally, diplomatically, and militarily. Biden should be greeted with the common Arabic say “Hell Anna Yakhi”.
Joe Biden’s Palestine Policy: Zionism
Joe Biden’s Zionism is instrumental and ideologically mythological. With no serious political weight, despite developments in the recent few years, to confront the American Jewish community’s influence and impact in American politics, Biden as an average American politician may state any declaration that would help him survive in the repetitive American political arena and its rather peculiar ‘culture wars’. Biden’s statements in support of Zionism and Israel are decades old commencing long before there was any understanding, including on American campuses and among international human rights organizations, what is the nature of Israel and how the Question of Palestine had been formed.
Biden’s principled commitment to Zionism is akin to Joseph Lieberman’s which is not totally detached from Pat Robertson’s pursuit of the metaphysical idea informed by cultural representations such as Suprebook, The Flying House, and the 700 Club. Biden’s thorough advocacy for Israel and Zionism was crowned in November 2016 with the Herzl Prize bestowed on him by the World Jewish Congress in New York, presented personally by no other than Henry Kissinger.
An average American reader, including a progressive one, may raise an eyebrow at the possible problematic generalization by using the term ‘American Jewish community’ to denote a single political position, mood, or environment and to be categorized as Zionist. Yet, with notable individual exceptions, and having absorbed Norman Finkelstein’s theatrics, American Jewish organizations and many influential individuals adhere to and do not oppose their characterization as Zionist. They prefer to maintain the pure imagined portrayal of it though. Alas, that may have been possible in the past, less so today.
While the main American Jewish organizations from all American political strands are known, we should note influential individuals who define themselves as Zionists and consider Israel central to their mental and emotional well being. These include Sheldon Adelson’s possession of the Republican party since the mid – 1990s probably lasting after his death; mediocre technocrat Supreme Court judge Elena Kagan; Ben Gurionest New York Times foreign affairs pundit Thomas Friedman; ruthless investor George Soros and his odd oligarch son; the encyclopedic jurisprudential expert but Zionistly inattentive Michael Walzer; and laughable but scarcely funny Bernie Sanders' supporter Sarah Silverman.
Mild shock, even for the experienced, often defines meeting North American or Anglo-American Jews, from various political beliefs and religious formations, who arrive to Israel via the exclusively Jewish path of immigration. Packing their identity with them, they leave their original countries’ mode of governance behind but insist that Israel is the same, in good and bad. Usually their blinding identity is stuffed with endless charges of anti-Semitism’s victimhood. If you try to explain or hint about the problematic nature of their privileged presence in the country, they seem unconvincingly surprised. It is therefore futile to initiate with such individuals any rights-based conversation, let alone explain Palestine not Zionistly. They are practically apathetically ignorant beings.
Israeli constitutional law expert Ruth Gavizon used to ignore these groups and the rights they enjoy by a supremacist Israeli legal framework. She opted to blame Palestinians in Israel for advocating for two Palestinian states, one in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza, and another in Israel, simply because they demanded the basic right of equal protection under the law, as citizens and a group, coupled with a genuine grasp of their repression historically. Gavizon’s supremacist Zionism, insisting on a Jewish state or a State of the Jewish People, is typical in the Israeli academy and would sound bizarre elsewhere. Adding her negation of the historical effects on the contemporary treatment of Palestinians in Israel, Gavizon becomes an academic in the service of a debunked ideology. We can only express our amusement when she is celebrated at Noah Feldman’s research center at Harvard as an authoritative figure for his understanding of Israel. Palestinians in Israel will have to further understand their underclass condition as an integral part of Israel’s apartheid and Zionism. Judging from the level of dependence and contained consciousness this community suffers from, particularly epistemologically among marginalized academics, this process may take longer than deserved.
It is heartening that others are available for a conversation which in the context of this essay is captivated by Israel’s and Zionism’s historically illegitimate political right in Palestine. In contemporary terms, Israel has demonstrated its constant violations of basic rights situating itself as a criminal and worthy of delegitimization regime. But historically is no less important than the present. Reasonable and informed Palestinian Arab historical consciousness demands advancing the idea that Zionism is reprehensible, irredeemable, and abolitionable concept as well as practice. No amount of persecution and suffering far away from Palestine could justify generating a political right for Zionism. Israel’s establishment upon ethnically cleansing more than two thirds of Palestinians constituting its founding engagement in severe international law violations reinforces the logical conclusion about Zionism. It is not a necessary fact to counter Zionism’s claim for a political right in Palestine. Biden’s visit to Yad Va-Shem is therefore typically opportunist and manipulative, by both parties to the infatuated ritual.
American political understanding of Palestine has suffered from constant dominance of American Jewish influence in the American public sphere as well as within the American diplomatic corps. Until the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, Palestine and the Palestinian people were considered as a non-issue ought to be represented or resolved by neighboring Arab states, as was the case with the 1978 Camp David agreements between Egypt and Israel. The American diplomatic wisdom, shared mostly by the British, particularly in its Tony Blair’s version, has been that the Palestinian side can be pressured by allied Arab regimes to accept the dictates of Israel and its ally the United States. Given the Palestinians weakness militarily and economically, what options do they have?
Indeed, that was the introduction and rational for signing the Oslo Accords by Arafat redeemed only by his justified perseverance against the diplomatic propaganda of being offered the most generous proposal by an Israeli government at Camp David in 2000. Nevertheless, given the Palestinian Authority’s total dependence on foreign aid, including American financial assistance and policing equipment, there are key individuals within the Palestinian Authority that do not shy from accepting less than minimal of what their people are entitled for. They would not have a problem acting as Bantustans under apartheid. Israelis overwhelmingly prefer to relinquish any Palestinian presence in their midst, and absolve themselves of any legal and financial obligation towards Palestinians in the 1967 occupied territories (OPT). But their 1917 Balfour Declaration understanding of their right in the entirety of Palestine has crippled this quest.
Morality and applicable legal standards do not engage the Israeli authorities and the public sphere, from the Supreme Court down, when Palestinians are concerned. Yossi Beilin, who writes an op-ed in the popular daily Yisrael Ha-Yom, provides a towering argument in the Israeli political arena in favor of the Oslo rational of separation with no sovereignty for Palestinians in the 1967 OPT, while maintaining total Israeli domination: in the past we paid for Palestinians’ cost (he probably means the need to patrol Palestinians cities and the cost of the occupation authorities’ salaries that have been restructured), now the international community does. Genius.
As most American politicians, governmental agencies, aid organizations, philanthropies, and human rights organizations, Biden is also silent about his country’s persistent destructive role in foreign affairs, including regarding Palestine.[1] A role that defines the American mode of governance and captured by its popular and high cultures ranging from the athletic to the aesthetic. Clear indication of this regime’s nature is the title of one of Samantha Power’s books “Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide”. Another book of Power’s, a United Nations centered one, hints at additional destructive incident of American behavior in international relations repeated in various locations in the world. The specific context of this activity and the broader circumstances in which it took place should be explored with a historian’s patience and the passion of an anti-American foreign policy advocate.
Informed by his National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Foreign Secretary Antony Blinkin, two long-time hawkish Biden loyalists, the American president is pursuing the same agenda regarding Palestine as his predecessors since 1993. Pressuring enclaved Palestinians in Gaza and disregarding Israel’s war crimes there, generate an impression of communication between Palestinian and Israeli officials, mainly regarding purported security cooperation, and avoid the rights of the Palestinian people as understood by large segments of this population and guaranteed by international law.
Some of the Palestinian 1970s vocabulary opposing Israel and American foreign policy may sound outdated and strange for readers in diffirent continents. That is a hearing problem in the receiving locations more than anything else. However, other political agendas and oppositional spirit from that era against the two countries remain relevant to this day at any setting.
The Iranian Issue
Israel does not want to integrate in the region as normal country, which requires acknowledging Palestinians’ rights and its persistent role in violating them. Rather it prefers to have superior military capacity and whatever relations with neighboring Arab countries. The United States wholeheartedly shares Israel’s perception of its location in the region. It turns a blind eye at Israel’s military nuclear arsenal, and supports barring any other nuclear capacity in the region, even for peaceful purposes.[2] Iran signed and ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1968 and 1970 respectively. To this day Israel declines to join the treaty backed by the United States in its defiance to the nuclear international order:
US President Joe Biden signed a letter reaffirming the US commitment to decades-old strategic understandings with Israel over its alleged nuclear arsenal, according to a Wednesday report.
The move came during a visit by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to Washington last week, during which he discussed several bilateral issues with Biden, an unnamed Israeli official told Walla news.
The White House and Prime Minister’s Office declined to comment on the report.[3]
The various agreements reached during the Trump administration between Israel and several Arab States should not generate the excitement unleashed by Israel’s supporters in the United States. They were first and foremost an attempt to isolate the Palestinians given their obvious opposition to Trump’s officials’ ludicrous proposals which were followed by several international law violating measures: acknowledging East Jerusalem as capital of Israel; announcing that establishing settlements are not illegal under international law; and exerting economic pressure targeting humanitarian agencies that provide services for the Palestinian population. Iran – Gulf States tensions were a convenient diverting diplomacy.[4]
In the case of Morocco and Sudan, it was not difficult to introduce economic incentives to lure the two governments towards an agreement with Israel (it has been done with Egypt in 1979). Morocco also gained another troubled and international law violating acknowledgment from the Trump administration regarding the Western Sahara. As to the Gulf countries Bahrein and UAE, previously existing relations cantered on Israeli military exports have been formalized in public. In 2021 the two countries’ imports of Israeli weapons formed 7% of the total Israeli arms exports which reached $11.3 billion, following countries from Europe (41%), the Asia -Pacific region (34%), North America (12%), and Africa as well as Latin America (3% each).[5] Israel’s arms trade has been more than problematic and damaging.[6]
In 2015 Iran reached an agreement regarding its nuclear program with six international powers: United States, Britain, France, China, Russia, and Germany that regulated international monitoring and changes were introduced to some of its substantive aspects in return for lifting crippling economic sanctions. The Trump administration motivated by its main mega donor Sheldon Adelson,[7] who together with his Israeli wife owns the most popular Israeli (free) daily Yisrael Hayom, retracted from the agreement,[8] reintroduced sanctions,[9] and almost instigated a war with the country.[10]
Iran gained an injunction against the American measures issued by the International Court of Justice in October 2018 based on a 1955 treaty between the parties to which the American Foreign Secretary Mike Pompeo responded by cancelling the treaty.[11] Sanctions against Iran have had substantial humanitarian cost on the country’s population rendering their stated objective illegitimate,[12]and could constitute a flagrant violation of international law.[13]
Initially, the Biden administration which is mindful of the various forces at play within American politics[14] entertained the possibility of returning to the 2015 diplomatic agreement with Iran, and even appointed a special envoy for this purpose, who aspires for an imagined diplomatic role within the broader scheme of American foreign policy. Iran wanted guarantees from the United States that returning to the international diplomatic agreement would not be abolished by a future president repeating Trump's performance, but the Americans failed to provide this safeguard. Iranian officials ignored the justifiably unreliable American envoy and preferred to negotiate with representatives from European and other countries.[15]
However, the dynamics within the American administration shifted. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan dominated the Iran file, and opted for an aggressive approach synonymous with the Israeli perspective. Sullivan was not keen to reach an agreement with Iran already as an adviser to Vice President Biden during the Obama administration.[16] Biden’s ideological and blind commitment towards Israel facilitated Sullivan’s advice. The tight collaboration with Israel resulted in illegally imposing further American sanctions against Iran,[17] and participation in Israeli drills to attack there.[18]
As the military’s commander in chief according to the American constitution, Biden is and would be the one ordering military and para-military actions against Iran. In his case, it is premised on the advice of the National Security Adviser Sullivan. Although the role of this adviser is not regulated by American law, its contours are well documented in interdisciplinary literature as well as cultural representations and is not difficult to extract for the purpose of assigning international criminal culpability.
America’s Iran policy is illegal, harmful, and dominated by domestic ideological, mythological, and personal considerations. Opposing it is a requirement.
American President Joe Biden
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan
[1] David Rose, “The Gaza Bombshell”, Vanity Fair, 3 March 2008; Ian Black, “Palestine papers: Mohammed Dahlan”, The Guardian, 25 January 2011.
[2] Julian Borger, “The truth about Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal”, The Guardian, 15 January 2014; Peter Beinart, “America Needs to Start Telling the Truth About Israel’s Nukes”, New York Times, 11 August 2021.
[3] TOI Staff, “Biden reportedly reaffirms pact not to push Israel on its alleged nukes”, Times of Israel, 1 September 2021.
[4] See Michael Gordon et al, “U.S. Held Secret Meeting with Israeli, Arab, Military Chiefs to Counter Iran Air Threat”, Wall Street Journal, 26 June 2022. Saudi Arabia is the largest importer of American weapons and has been engaged in the ongoing conflict in Yemen.
[5] Emanuel Fabian, “Israeli arms sales hit new record of $11.3 billion in 2021 – with 7% to Gulf”, Times of Israel, 12 April 2022.
[6] See Siemon T. Wezeman, “Israeli Arms Transfers to Sub-Saharan Africa”, SIPRI Background Paper, October 2011; TOI Staff, “Israeli arms sales to Africa mark steep rise in past year”, Times of Israel, 24 May 2015; Chaim Levinson, “Israel’s Top Court Just Ruled About Arms Sales to Myanmar. But We’re Not Allowed to Tell You the Verdict”, Haaretz, 27 September 2017; Amos Harel, “Arming Dictators, Equipping Pariahs: Alarming Picture of Israel’s Arms Sales”, Haaretz, 19 May 2019.
[7] On Sheldon Adelson’s influence in American politics see Connie Bruck, “The Brass Ring: A Multibillionaire’s Relentless Quest for Global Influence”, New Yorker, 23 June 2008; Jason Zengerle, “Sheldon Adelson is Ready to Buy the Presidency”, New York Magazine, 7 September 2015; Farah Master, “Republican donor Adelson says met ‘charming’ candidate Trump, discussed Israel”, Reuters, 18 December 2015; Sheldon Adelson, “I endorse Donald Trump for President”, Washington Post, 13 May 2016; Jeremy Peters, “Sheldon Adelson Sees a Lot Like in Trump’s Washington”, New York Times, 22 September 2018; Christina Binkley, “Meet Dr. Miriam Adelson: the record-breaking Republican donor driving Trump’s Israel policy”, The Guardian, 7 January 2019; Alex Isensradt, “The $30 billion woman: Megadonor Miriam Adelson leaps back into politics”, Politico, 7 November 2021.
[8] Mark Landler, “Trump Abandons Iran Nuclear Deal He Long Scorned”, New York Times, 8 May 2018; Julian Borger et al, “Iran deal: Trump breaks with European allies over ‘horrible, one sided’ nuclear agreement”, The Guardian, 9 May 2018.
[9] “Trump administration to reinstate all Iran sanctions”, BBC, 3 November 2018; John Hudson, “Trump administration imposes crushing sanctions on Iran in defiance of European humanitarian concerns”, Washington Post, 8 October 2020; Humeyra Pamuk, “U.S. imposes new sanctions on Iranian foundations in last days of Trump term”, Reuters, 13 January 2021.
[10] Peter Baker et al, “Seven Days in January: How Trump Pushed U.S. and Iran to the Brink of War”, New York Times, 11 January 2021.
[11] Marlise Simons et al, “International Court Orders U.S. to Ease Some Iran Sanctions”, New York Times, 3 October 2018; Edward Wang et al, “U.S. Withdraws from 1955 Treaty Normalizing Relations With Iran”, New York Times, 3 October 2018. For the Court’s injunction see Alleged Violations of the 1955 Treaty of Amity, Economic Relations, and Consular Rights (Islamic Republic of Iran v. United States of America), Provisional Measures, Order of 3 October 2018, I.C.J. Reports 2018, p.623.
[12] Dario Laudati & M. Hashem Pesaran, “Identifying the Effects of Sanctions on the Iranian Economy using Newspaper Coverage”, CESIFO Working Papers, 27 July 2021, Kolja Brockmann & Keith Preble, “Mitigating Humanitarian Impact in a Complex Sanctions Environment” – The European Union and the Sanctions Regime against Iran”, SIPRI, September 2021; HRW, “Maximum Pressure” – US Economic Sanctions Harm Iranians’ Right to Health, October 2019.
[13] OHCHR, Iran Sanctions are Unjust and Harmful, Says UN Expert Warning Against Generalised Economic War, 22 August 2018; Julia Schmidt, “The Legality of Extra-territorial Sanctions under International Law”, 27(1) Journal of Conflict and Security Law, pp.53-81 (2022).
[14] See, for example, “Maximum Pressure on Iran Has Failed”, New York Times, 10 April 2021.
[15] Sanam Vakil, “JCPOA Talks: Deal or No Deal?”, Chatham House, 19 January 2022.
[16] See Conversation with Jake Sullivan, Dartmouth College, 28 January 2015, (a year after he left the Obama Administration where he was Biden’s National Security Adviser).
[17] Julia Schmidt, “The Legality of Extra-territorial Sanctions under International Law”, 27(1) Journal of Conflict and Security Law, pp.53-81 (2022).
[18] See Phil Stewart, “Exclusive: U.S., Israel to discuss military drills for Iran scenario”, Reuters, 9 December 2021; Emanuel Fabian et al, “Report: In 1st, US refuelers to take part in major Israeli drill for strike in Iran”, Times of Israel, 17 May 2022.
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