Educating Our Children About Palestine

According to a recent Gallup Poll, only 17% of Americans sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis, whereas 63% favor Israelis. What’s more, the percentage of neutral individuals is shrinking in favor of Israel. Taking into account the events of the past three years, Operation Cast Lead and subsequent findings of war crimes/crimes against humanity, the attack on the Freedom Flotilla, and the refusal to halt illegal settlement activity even when bribed, how could it be that the number of Americans sympathizing with Israel is at its highest since the beginning of the fruitless peace process 20 years ago? Clearly something is amiss.

Knowing what I know about Palestine, it is hard to understand how anyone could ignore the damage of occupation, siege and dispossession, choosing instead to sympathize with the perpetrators of violence. Even more disturbing are the consequences of these sympathies on Palestinians’ everyday lives. Every year the United States gives Israel nearly three billion dollars in aid, which Israel then uses to continue the systematic abridgment of Palestinian rights. Without losing my faith in humanity, the only conclusion I can draw from Gallup’s findings is that most Americans are simply mis/uninformed. Otherwise, how can it be so difficult to comprehend Palestinian plight? Why can't we understand that apartheid is just as wrong in South Africa as it is in the occupied West Bank? Why do we implicitly recognize the injustice of racism against African Americans but excuse Israel when it characterizes its Arab minority as a demographic threat? Why do we champion our 2nd amendment right to defend ourselves but castigate Palestinian children for throwing stones at the soldiers who come to take their land? I can only hope that the answer to these questions is simply that no one ever thought of things this way. Something must be done to change mainstream attitudes, not so that we care for Palestinians and not Israelis, but rather so that sympathizing with Israel does not come at the expense of Palestinian life.

Within this context, I attended a workshop last weekend aimed at educators and organizers interested in learning effective methods for raising the issue of Palestine with their students and community. Spearheaded by the Middle East Children’s Alliance, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and Rethinking Schools, the half-day workshop focused on techniques to incorporate Palestine into curriculums in a constructive and educational way that also facilitates the development of critical thinking skills.

Due to the highly controversial nature of the Israel-Palestine conflict among other factors, many school districts avoid the subject entirely. This leaves American students without a lens to interpret key historical developments within the Middle East, including our own military involvement. At the same time they are also exceptionally susceptible to Israeli propaganda and mainstream media bias, all of which contribute to the perpetuation of Palestinian suffering. However, the workshop does not aim to equip teachers with the tools to simply indoctrinate students for Palestine or against Israel. Instead, they are instructed on how to create an environment that values justice, equality and factual accuracy where resistance struggles of all types can be understood and identified with.

Naturally, part of the discussion centered on fears of possible backlash from students’ parents.  Two techniques were offered to mitigate these fears. The first was making sure that any lesson that mentions Palestine is perfectly relevant to the unit at hand, so that it can be defended on the grounds that it is an integral component of reaching an educational standard. The second was to implement the paradigm of “dual perspectives.” Various perspectives on a given event are presented, after which they are examined for legitimacy and their conformity to fact. In this way conflicting viewpoints are offered so students do not see a one-sided picture of things, thereby undercutting accusations of bias. At the same time, an emphasis on factual accuracy dictates that the side which best conforms to reality prevails. When developed within a framework that values social justice and equality, this method of appraisal results in a deeper understanding of Palestinian plight. Most importantly, this understanding manifests organically.

For example, Israel offers the perspective that the Separation Wall is necessary for the security of the State whereas Palestinians find it to be an unjust imposition. These positions seem irreconcilable. However, upon further scrutiny one sees that the route of the wall attests more to a land-grab than to improve Israeli security, thus delegitimizing the former point of view.

Instructors were encouraged to draw parallels between the concepts familiar to students and Palestinian history. These included:

• Manifest Destiny and Eretz Israel
• The ethnic cleansing of native Americans and the Nakba
• South African Apartheid and the different legal systems for Israeli settlers vs. Palestinians in the West Bank
• The Civil Rights struggle and the situation for Israeli Arabs
• Water conservation and Israel’s unfair allocation of resources
• Racial profiling and Israel’s system of checkpoints

Teachers also discussed including Palestinian artists, writers and poets in their humanities units to familiarize students with Palestinian culture. Some even suggested putting their students in contact with Palestinian youth by partnering classrooms together and facilitating pen pal programs.

Non-educators found that the most effective way to garner strength for Palestine solidarity was by illustrating common needs and concerns within their communities and those in Palestine. By drawing connections between all social struggles, whether for immigrant rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights, indigenous rights, etc, we can see that the injustice suffered by Palestinians is not something too complex, foreign or removed to understand. Once that barrier is broken, a desire to end the occupation naturally springs forth.

With every day that passes, the occupation of Palestine and the perpetuation of the diaspora cause untold suffering. The United States is complicit in this crime. It is imperative that we do all we can to change the situation. By educating our children and our communities on the values of critical examination, justice, equality, and compassion we move one step forward. We owe it to them to raise this issue, confident in the knowledge that we are on the right side of history.

If you are interested in learning more about how you can incorporate Palestine into your curriculum, the following resources are extremely helpful:

Teaching the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict through Dual Narratives

US-Palestine Youth Solidarity Network

International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network – Study to Action: Reader and Curriculum Guide

Call to Action: Help Raise Awareness about Cast Lead on December 27th

We are coordinating an information campaign to commemorate the second anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, hoping it will call attention to Israel’s continued illegal siege on Gaza. The plan centers on an attempt to trend the hashtag #Gaza2, though we encourage people to use other forms of social media, e.g. Facebook to raise awareness as well.

We want users to tweet facts, stats, pictures, personal messages, links, blog posts, videos… anything and everything that relates to Cast Lead, the Goldstone Report, Gaza’s humanitarian crisis etc.

@AmoonaE from @VEPalestine is spearheading the effort. She’s started a twibe for all participants which you can join here.

Some of you might think this is silly, but it’s a very simple effort, and well worth the time it takes to send a few tweets/status updates should it end up being successful.

If you have any questions or input, you can post them on the twibe’s page, or contact any one of its existing members, myself included (@maggiesager).

Jennifer Peto: Jews, Zionism and Holocaust Education

Jenny Peto

Currently, a controversy has arisen regarding University of Toronto graduate Jennifer Peto’s thesis, “The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education.” According to certain members of the Canadian government as well as Holocaust educators, Peto (a queer anti-Zionist Jew, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor) has produced a “shoddy” piece full of “unsupported” theories which constitute an outrageous form of “anti-Semitism.”

That critics would attempt to silence Peto under the banner of self-hating anti-Semitism is altogether unsurprising. Very few have even bothered to read the work before dismissing it wholesale, else they make superficial criticisms such as the contention that Peto did not defer to mainstream texts on Holocaust education or that regardless of her supporting arguments, questioning Holocaust education in any context is unacceptable.

Beware of sensationalism. Peto does not suggest that all Holocaust education must be done away with, or that all Jews are racists or anything else of the sort. Outside of the apparently controversial idea that Jews possess the capacity for racism, she focuses her thesis on the contention that as a result of various factors (which she discusses at length) Ashkenazi Jews have surpassed the mantle of victimhood in Western society. In the same vein as Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah, using empirically demonstrative data, Peto argues that rampant, entrenched anti-Semitism is all but gone. She then criticizes specific methods of what she terms "hegemonic" Holocaust education  which seek to not only obfuscate this fact, but use invocations of perennial victimhood to excuse various Israeli policies. An example: the March of the Living takes Jewish youths on a week-long tour of Polish concentration camps, and has them "march" down the same path as their murdered ancestors draped in Israeli flags. Peto argues that the march is purposefully constructed this way in order to implicitly suggest that the state of Israel is the only thing standing in the way of another Holocaust, and thus must be shielded from any criticism. She also takes issue with various manifestations of ethno/eurocentricism embedded within particular Holocaust education centers. 

Because the controversy has stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of Peto's arguments and supporting evidence, before judging their merits I encourage you to read the entire work for yourself.
It is my sincere hope that the landslide of negative attention will do more to expose Peto’s ideas to a wider audience, magnifying the impact of her work than it will to tarnish her reputation, thereby mitigating her extremely powerful words.

Again, I encourage you to read Peto's thesis on your own. Nevertheless, I have copied her conclusion below; Judge it for yourself.

__________________________________________

On December 27, 2008 I sat down to finish my thesis. As is my usual habit of  procrastination, I decided to check my email before getting started. My inbox was flooded with messages informing me that Israel had begun a full-scale military strike on Gaza that had killed over 300 people in the first few hours of bombings. Any thoughts of writing my thesis immediately disappeared. I am an organizer with the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid in Toronto and we immediately began planning our response. Within 24 hours, we organized a rally outside the Israeli consulate that had over 1000 people in attendance. By the next week, the demonstration had grown to over 10,000 protesters. The Jewish Defense League, an extremist, right-wing Zionist group organized small counter-demonstrations at each of our rallies. The media coverage of our demonstrations chose to focus on tensions between pro-Palestinian and Jewish groups, often skewing the numbers of protestors on both sides to make the demonstrations appear even in size. The Canadian government ignored demands to call for sanctions against Israel. Instead, they expressed unconditional support for Israel and repeatedly spoke of Israel’s right to self-defense. Although the mainstream Zionist community was late to enter into the public debates over the war on Gaza, they eventually mounted a campaign against Palestinian activists and their allies. The Canadian Jewish Congress held a press conference, alleging anti-Semitic hate crimes had taken place at many of the demonstrations across the country. Their evidence of these claims was merely video footage of protestors chanting in Arabic and burning Israeli flags – activities that are in no way anti-Semitic.

During the first week of the war, I attended an informal meeting of people looking to engage in direct action to bring attention to the war crimes being committed in Gaza. At that meeting, a group of Jewish activists, myself included, decided to occupy the Israeli consulate in Toronto. Our goal was to disrupt the dominant media message that this is an inter-religious conflict and that all Jews support Israeli aggression and violence. We wanted to draw attention to the fact that many Jews oppose Israel’s actions, in order to help neutralize attempts by Zionists to characterize all criticism of the war as anti-Semitic. Our hope was that this action would allow others – both Jewish and non-Jewish – to feel more empowered to voice their criticism of Israel’s violence against Palestinians without fearing accusations of anti-Semitism. On January 7, 2009, eight of us occupied the Israeli consulate for about two hours before being arrested. We were held in the back of a police wagon for about an hour before being released without charges. All the major news networks were at the consulate and many of us were interviewed, but the story never aired on the evening news. Some articles were published in local newspapers, but for the most part, the media in Canada kept the story quiet. Word of the action spread around the world and we received messages of support from across the globe. In the following days there were similar actions in Montreal, Los Angeles and San Francisco. One success of the action was that after the occupation, there has been noticeably more acknowledgement in the media that there is dissent within the Jewish community and that there are Jewish people who oppose Israeli Apartheid. 

In the weeks that followed the occupation of the consulate, I became one of two main spokespeople for the group that was involved. I was asked to speak at rallies, teach-ins and other events about Gaza and Israeli Apartheid. I received a great deal of attention and recognition for having been part of the action, as well as an outpouring of gratitude from my friends and comrades in the Palestinian community. It was an overwhelming experience and it was difficult to maintain perspective given the pseudo-celebrity status that often comes with direct action. Given the magnitude of suffering in Gaza, alongside the on-going brutality of Israeli Apartheid in the West Bank, Israel and for Palestinian refugees worldwide, it felt inappropriate to be receiving so many accolades for having been arrested and held for just over an hour in a police wagon. The whole experience, especially the attention and praise, only made my privilege that much more evident. I began asking myself a lot of questions about the role of allies in solidarity movements and the place of Jewish anti-Zionist activists in Palestine solidarity work. 

This questioning continued after Israel stopped bombing Gaza as I worked with other activists to finalize preparation for Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW). In March 2009, the fifth annual IAW was held in over 40 cities worldwide. Here in Canada, we faced a tremendous backlash for organizing this week of lectures. Members of Parliament, including Liberal leader Michael Ignatief and Jason Kenney, Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, issued statements condemning IAW as a ‘hatefest’. Several Zionist organizations, including B’nai Brith and the Canadian Jewish Congress called on universities to ban IAW from their campuses. The poster for the event was banned at Carleton and the University of Ottawa. Here in Toronto, our posters were vandalized and torn down as quickly as we could put them up. The Jewish Defense League protested outside our events and on at least three separate occasions, their members assaulted our organizers and guests. University security and police forces at Ryerson University, York University and the University of Toronto did little to protect organizers and participants from this violence. 

It was during IAW and the intense protests leveled against us, that I once again saw the importance of anti-Zionist Jewish participation in Palestine solidarity activism. I remain convinced that it is not our role to speak for or about Palestinians and will openly criticize other anti-Zionist Jewish activists when they cross that line. Our role is a supporting one – where possible and appropriate, we can help to open up spaces to talk about Palestine and Israeli Apartheid. We can work to counter the false accusations of anti-Semitism and hate crimes that are being increasingly aimed at events like IAW and other Palestine solidarity activism. As Jews we can use our privilege to put forward the argument that criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, but is actually part of a broader movement towards social justice. We need to fight for and defend the rights of Palestinians and their allies to speak without fear of spurious accusations of hatred and anti-Semitism. It is vital that we constantly recognize our privilege and find ways of being allies without falling into the narcissism that so often comes with white privilege, narcissism that would make us mistakenly believe that this is somehow our movement to lead. All Jewish anti-Zionist activism must start with an understanding that there would be no movement without Palestinian resistance and we must always remember that this is a Palestinian-led struggle, in which we can and should play a supporting role. 

Jewish anti-Zionism must be rooted in genuine solidarity and the desire to fight for justice, but to be sincere in these efforts we need to admit that we as individuals, and the Ashkenazi Jewish community as a whole, have much to gain from the ending of Zionism. I personally come to this work out of a strong commitment to fighting racism and imperialism, but I also have a stake in reclaiming Holocaust memory and taking back the history of my ancestors from the Zionist hegemony that has co-opted it. I believe that we need to find ways of honouring the Holocaust that are focused on healing the Ashkenazi Jewish community and that challenge Zionism and Jewish racism, as well as the oppression and violence that exists within the Jewish community. To do so, we need to express our rage and sadness about the abuse of Holocaust memory for Zionist and racist purposes. We need to openly challenge hegemonic Holocaust memorial institutions, which have become sacrosanct within Jewish and non-Jewish communities. We must demand a drastic change in the ways in which we engage with the violence of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. It is time to end memorials that are meant to traumatize and re-traumatize by forcing generations of Jewish people to try to recreate and relive the horrors. We must force the Ashkenazi Jewish community to face the trauma of our past and admit to the ways in which we have chosen to align ourselves with power in an attempt to ensure that we are not victimized again. We must focus on healing from the trauma of the past so that we can move forward because this morbid focus on victimization and the Holocaust prevents us from understanding the wrongs we commit within the community and against others that are less powerful than we are. 

I am well aware of the controversy that comes with challenging Zionism and the even more intense controversy that can happen when doing so involves criticizing Holocaust memorials and education. I chose to take up these issues because it is my hope that my academic work can be useful in exposing the ways in which Holocaust education and Jewish claims to victimhood are being used obscure Jewish racism, and to garner support for Israeli Apartheid. If my thesis can contribute, even in some small way, to normalizing criticism of Israel and Jewish racism, and if it can open up conversations about the damaging effects of hegemonic Holocaust education I will be satisfied with this academic endeavour.

Israel Gets Away With Murder...Again

This morning the Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli foreign ministry has successfully thwarted an attempted meeting between the signatories of the Geneva Convention which would have convened in Switzerland.

According to the article, foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman was motivated to block the meeting because it “could have resulted in a public statement that Israel has violated the charter during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip during 2009.” The article also credits Lieberman with “preventing the establishment of the victim's compensation fund of those injured in Cast Lead, which was decided by the UN Human Rights Council.” (What a fantastic human being)

Such a development should come as no surprise, as it speaks to the culture of impunity the international community affords Israel with respect to its military operations (among other things). It is almost as if the more egregious Israel is in its violations of international law, the more the country’s leaders are able to shield it from criticism. With each new operation, this list of violations grows longer. According to the Goldstone Report, apart from the Geneva Conventions, Israel has acted in direct contravention of numerous articles of the following international agreements (in no particular order):

• The Hague Regulations; ⁽³⁹⁴⁾
• The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; ⁽³⁹⁵⁾
• The Convention Against Torture; ⁽³⁹⁵⁾
• The Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials; ⁽³⁹⁸⁾
• The Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials; ⁽³⁹⁸⁾
• The Declaration on Human Rights Defenders; ⁽⁴²¹⁾
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights; ⁽⁴⁰⁷⁾
• The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child; ⁽⁴²¹⁾
• The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; ⁽⁴³⁴⁾
• And the 1995 Johannesburg Principles on National Security, Freedom of Expression and Access to Information among others⁽⁴⁹³⁾

Even more frightening, apart from simply breaching these agreements, Israel has so gravely violated international standards as to be accused by Goldstone, the United Nations, and countless reputable human rights organizations of the following war crimes with respect to its three most recent military operations:

War Crimes Committed During Operation Defensive Shield (Palestinian Territories; 2002)

According to a United Nations report:

• Willful killing
• Inhuman treatment
• Unlawful confinement of protected persons
• Extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity and carried out wantonly and destructively
• State and settler terrorism

According to an Amnesty International report:

• Intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population and infrastructure
• Violating the principle of proportionality
• Using methods of indiscriminate attack

War Crimes Committed During the July War (Lebanon; 2006)

According to a United Nations report:

• Willful killing of protected persons
• Violating the principle of proportionality
• Violating the principle of distinction
• Violating the prohibition against indiscriminate attacks

War Crimes Committed During Operation Cast Lead (Gaza; 2008-2009)

According to the Goldstone report:

• Unlawful, wanton destruction which is not justified by military necessity ⁽²⁵⁹⁾
• The use of human shields ⁽²⁹⁹⁾
• Acts amounting to perfidy resulting in death or serious personal injury ⁽³⁰⁰⁾
• The rounding-up of large civilians [which is] a collective penalty on those persons, [amounting] to measures of intimidation and terrorism ⁽³²³⁾
• Outrages on personal dignity, humiliating and degrading treatment…and inhumane treatment ⁽³²³⁾
• Forcing women to endure especially distressing circumstances during their unlawful detention ⁽³²³⁾
• Illegal treatment of unlawful detainees including shackling, severe beatings during detention and interrogation, being held in foul conditions and solitary confinement -actions which violate prohibitions against physical or moral coercion of protected persons ⁽³²⁴⁾
• Torture ⁽³²⁴⁾

Goldstone also found evidence for crimes against humanity as a result of a “series of acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip from their means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country,” ⁽³⁷¹⁾ as well as the “systematic discrimination, both in law and in practice, against Palestinians, in legislation…and in practice during detention, trial and sentence compared with Israeli citizens.” ⁽⁴²²⁾

A well-documented pattern of eviscerating civilian infrastructure, killing a disproportionately large number of protected persons including women and children, barring medical aid, human rights monitors and journalists from entry to military zones, and utilizing extremely destructive weapons such as cluster bombs and white phosphorus in densely populated areas is also evident in all three operations. (None of these remarks should be construed to obfuscate the reality of acts committed by Hezbollah, various resistance movements or Hamas respectively in each operation. However it must be noted that in scope, such abuses pale in comparison, nor do they make Israel any less guilty).  

           

In light of the magnitude and breadth of these violations, the foreign ministry’s ability to disrupt even a possible condemnation is a slap in the face to international standards of justice. Yet once again, through political maneuvering, Israel has managed to shield itself from criticism.

In the face of such repugnant arrogance, is it any wonder that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement “singles out” Israel? No other country with such a despicable human rights record has managed to maintain such flourishing relationships with world super-powers.

Imagine, with all the attention Israel’s continued settlement expansion has received in the past few months (in direct and flagrant contravention of the united international consensus on the program’s inadmissibility)  Lieberman still has the ability to disband a potential meeting of the signatories for the very agreement that makes Israel’s actions illegal. It is absolutely ludicrous.

What Obama Hasn't Changed About the Mid East Peace Process

Forgive my cynicism, but you will not see me holding my breath in anticipation of a comprehensive and just conclusion to the Arab-Israeli conflict, not this time around, not even with Mr. Change himself at the helm of negotiations. To illustrate my point, and for the benefit of all of you following along at home, let me recap what hasn’t changed with the most recent incarnation of peace talks:

The Past: Israel has done its best to extort the United States government in exchange for participation in or acceptance of peace initiatives.

For example, in exchange for Israel’s participation at the 1991 Madrid Conference, the United States was forced to instrument the revocation of UN Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism (the ideological foundation of which presumes that Jews as a distinct ethnic group have exclusive and special rights in contrast with other ethnic groups) with racism (the ideological foundation of which presumes that a distinct ethnic group has exclusive and special rights in contrast with other ethnic groups).

In another instance, President Nixon was only able to persuade the Knesset to formally accept UN Resolution 242, which called for withdrawal from the territories Israel captured in 1967 (and to this day still occupies in part, in contravention of international law) by giving “private assurances that Israel would receive additional US aircraft,” according to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Similarly, “[Israel’s] acceptance of the cease-fire that ended the so-called War of Attrition with Egypt…was bought by a US pledge to accelerate aircraft deliveries to Israel, to provide advanced electronic countermeasures against Egypt’s Soviet-supplied anti-aircraft missiles, and, more generally, to maintain the balance of power.”

In fact, as Mearsheimer and Walt point out:

This pattern continued though the 1970’s, with Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter pledging ever-larger sums of aid in the course of the disengagement talks with Egypt and during the negotiations that lead to the 1978 Camp David Accords and the 1979 Egypt-Israeli Peace Treaty…In much the same way, , the Clinton administration gave Israel increased assistance as part of the peace treaty with Jordan in 1994, and Clinton’s efforts to advance the Oslo peace process led him to pledge an additional $1.2 billion in military ai to Israel to win Israel’s acceptance of the 1998 Wye Agreement [which Netanyahu promptly suspended].

Before being supplanted by Iraq in 2005, Israel was the number one annual recipient of US foreign aid, followed by Egypt and Jordan respectively. It is common knowledge that Egypt and Jordan receive these US funds with the precondition that they maintain peaceful relations with Israel. In this way, the US essentially picks up the tab for Israeli aggression.

The Present: According to Ynetnews among other sources, Israel’s leading Likud party has demanded concessions and guarantees from the Obama Administration in exchange for extending its settlement “freeze,” despite the fact that the entire international community including the United States regards these settlements as completely illegal. Apparently Obama is taking the bait, though the specifics of his pay-off to the Israeli mob are disputed.  The Guardian reports that Obama sent Netanyahu a letter which requests a “60-day renewal of the freeze. In return, Obama guarantees to demand no further extensions, to ensure that the future of Jewish settlements would become part of final status negotiations, and to veto any United Nations Security Council resolution relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the next year, while talks continue. He pledges to support a continued Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley after the establishment of a Palestinian state. The letter also acknowledges Israel’s security needs and the need to upgrade its defense capabilities, and promises to consult Israel and the Arab states on US policy on Iran.” 

The Past: When carrots don’t work, the US has with increasing rarity attempted to use sticks to incentivize Israeli compliance with US policy objectives. In the past 30 years, Israel has come to understand such threats as purely symbolic gestures, as no president has made good on their harsh words.

Case in point: Mearsheimer and Walt point out, “In 1991, the first Bush administration pressured the Shamir government to stop building settlements and to attend  a planned peace conference by withholding the $10 billion loan guarantee, but the suspension lasted only a few months and the guarantees were approved once Yitzhak Rabin replaced Shamir as prime minister.” While Israel agreed to halt construction of new settlements, it continued to expand the existing blocs and the settlements grew at a rate almost 10 times faster than the natural growth of Israel Proper’s population.

The Present: In the first week of January, under the direction of Obama, Middle East Envoy George Mitchell had stern words for the Israeli government, threatening to withhold aid if the country did not make decisive moves toward peace, including making good on its promise to halt settlement construction. However, just as before, Israel called Mitchell’s bluff, holding the moratorium in word more than deed, as new settlement construction only decreased by 50%, existing blocs grew, and Israel continued to seize Palestinian land. Even as the moratorium has expired, directly resulting in the cessation of negotiations, aid to Israel is not in jeopardy.

The Past: In 1975 President Reagan and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were becoming impatient with Israel’s “intransigence to disengage with Egypt” as Mearsheimer put it. Both called for a reassessment of US aid to Israel, but were stymied by an AIPAC-sponsored letter penned by 76 senators concerned with maintaining current levels of military and economic support. Reagan and Kissenger were then forced to pursue other methods of negotiation.

The Present: 87 senators have written a letter to President Obama, whole-heartedly supported by AIPAC, urging him to make sure Abbas does not leave the negotiating table regardless of the resumption of Israeli settlement construction. In response Israel News reports the administration is pressuring Abbas “not to quit the talks regardless of whether Israel extends the moratorium or not.”

The Past: Undermining the US’s stated policy objective of achieving nuclear non-proliferation in the Middle East, Israel is currently the only power in the region known to have nuclear and chemical weapons. President Kennedy eventually relegated on his efforts to have IAEA officials properly appraise Israel’s nuclear ambitions, while President Johnson, confronted with the knowledge that the country had in fact acquired WMD, chose to ignore this reality.

The Present: Last month the IAEA failed to pass a resolution aimed at Israel’s WMD program, with 51 mostly Western countries (spearheaded by the United States) voting against it, citing the possibility that the resolution would undermine peace negotiations. Before the incident, Obama explained his strong opposition to singling out Israel on the issue of non-proliferation. The irony is clearly lost on him.

The Past: In December 1982, during a lame-duck session, Congress attempted to provide a $250 million increase in military aid to Israel in the wake of the invasion of Lebanon, the use of cluster bombs, the illegal use of US weapons for offensive purposes, as well as the IDF’s complicity in the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. Following this move, President Reagan and his new Secretary of State George Shultz reinstituted a 1981 Memorandum of Understanding on strategic cooperation in 1983.

The Present: In the midst of Operation Cast Lead, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians and from which Israel was later found to have committed war crimes as well as crimes against humanity (per the Goldstone Report), on January 16^th, 2009, Congressed signed a Memorandum of Understanding essentially endorsing the operation  and pledging unconditional support for the State of Israel. While vocal on a number of policy issues before his inauguration, Obama said nothing of this development, and has yet to negatively address the MOU.

For those of us concerned with history, it has become increasingly evident that there is nothing new to discuss. Palestinians are still not represented by a competent, unified and truly legitimate leadership. Israel is still employing the same tired tactics. But what’s most disheartening about the latest spectacle is Obama’s handling of the situation. Far from being the beacon of hope and progress he claimed himself to be in Cairo (does anyone remember, “It’s time for these settlements to stop,” or was I just hearing things?), Obama has shown he is no different from his predecessors.