Year: 2015

The United States as a whole – citizens, government, media and academia – broadly has had a difficult time coming to grips with the terrorism phenomenon that struck its shores so traumatically on Sept. 11, 2001. A two-week journey throughout the United States this month left me with the sense that American society is more polarized on the issue.

Some Americans have generated some first-class analysis on why various groups around the world use terrorism more frequently as a means of political expression, resistance or offensive warfare. Others – especially in the media and politicians – have slipped into panic and racism mode. They focus almost exclusively on terror committed by Arab Islamist groups, and wildly tar all Islamist political groups as mortal threats that have stealthily penetrated American society, without differentiating between criminal terror, legitimate resistance, and peaceful political action.

The worst news is in the public arena – at airport and center-city bookshops, in the mass media, and in conversations with officials and ordinary people. Here the prevalent image is of evil Islamic and Arab terrorists who work hard to undermine and destroy American and Western civilization (or “the civilized world, which is contrasted with a supposedly barbaric Arab and Islamic realm).

The proliferation of books and television specials with this theme is particularly worrying. They build expansive, frightening scenarios on the basis of small facts or the deeds of a handful of individuals. Of course, there are individuals and small groups of Arabs and Muslims who speak evil of the United States, and a few have attacked American targets. Rather than being treated as exceptions to the non-violent Arabs and Muslims who make up the vast majority of Middle Eastern societies, these handfuls of freaks and criminals are often blown up into a global conspiracy seen as a direct, immediate, mortal threat to the US.

Such scare-tactics journalism and political nonsense allow otherwise reasonable people and rational institutions to dwell in a manufactured world of fear, ignorance, hysteria and racism. This is not new. The same ugly side of American culture did this in the early 20th century, when the target of their ignorance and hatred was the Jews, who were portrayed as planning to control American society and then the world.

The good news in the US is that more thoughtful individuals and institutions have started to generate some high-quality, accurate research and analysis about terror groups. I was fortunate to absorb some of this at a two-day conference last week at the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University. Excellent papers were presented by a range of mostly American scholars and analysts, including Robert Pape, Peter Bergen, Fawaz Gerges, Steven Simon, Mia Bloom, Ian Lustick, Richard Shultz, John Esposito, Ayesha Jalal, and Sumantra Bose, Asaad Abu Khalil, Hisham Melhem, and others. I mention many of the authors simply to highlight the availability in the US of many good, honest scholars and journalists who can grapple with this important issue.

The main conclusion of their presentations was that there was no single theme or causal reason explaining the different kinds of terrorism around the world. Nuanced, comprehensive and fact-based analyses of the individual, social, and strategic motivations of terrorists provided a clear picture of a movie made up of many individual frames. Understanding the individual frames allowed us to make sense of the entire movie.

Terrorists are variously motivated by many different issues that often mesh together in varying patterns across the world – in sharp contrast to the simplistic, quasi-racist narrative about America-hating hostile Islamic terrorists that dominates popular and political culture in the US.

Some of the motivators of terror groups that emerged from the Tufts conference were: foreign military occupation of their homeland, domestic political repression and humiliation, revenge, religious interpretations, social prestige and status, alienation at home and in Western societies, aggressive foreign policies of Western powers, the “civil war within Islamic societies, charismatic leaders like Osama bin Laden who mobilize their followers, temporal political concerns perceived through the lens of religious obligations, issues of lack of dignity and hopes for a better future, and the weaving together of national, historical and emotional narratives while appealing to domestic, regional, and global audiences simultaneously.

The more honest debate about America’s actions in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East seems now to be joined in places by a deeper, more analytical examination of why terrorism has expanded around the world. Let’s hope the policy-makers in the US, Russia, Israel, the Arab world and Europe read and absorb some of this material, so that we can start to wind down the terror cycle that has only grown in recent years.

Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR.

Israel and the United States have a close and vital strategic relationship that constitutes a pillar of Israel’s security. Israeli leaders are aware that any major new regional policy departure not closely coordinated with Washington is liable to be a non-starter and to cloud American-Israeli relations. Any smart Israeli aspiring to political leadership knows that the Israeli public wants to be reassured that he or she is persona grata in the White House, Congress and among the American Jewish community.

Yet there was a time when Israeli leaders were not afraid to disagree publicly with American leaders and even act against an American policy line if they judged that Israel’s vital interests warranted such a step. Yitzhak Rabin did so in his first term when he took issue with Henry Kissinger’s “reassessment. So, too, did Menachem Begin, declaring that “we’re not a banana republic. Yitzhak Shamir and Benjamin Netanyahu also clashed publicly with American presidents over settlements and the Palestinian issue.

Dissenting from American policy priorities for the Middle East has not always been politically sound for Israeli leaders. Sometimes, however, it has been, and instructively so. Begin and Moshe Dayan s secret initiative to bring Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Jerusalem, and Rabin and Shimon Peres’ clandestine talks in Oslo with the Palestine Liberation Organization, were embraced by Washington once it became aware that Israel had successfully implemented a radically different strategy.

But rightly or wrongly, when Israel takes its distance from American policies, this at least reflects a capacity on the part of the Israeli national security leadership to independently assess and act upon the country’s vital strategic interests. This capacity seems dangerously absent of late.

An obvious case in point is Prime Minister Ehud Olmert s recent assertion that Israel can’t talk to Syria because doing so would betray President George W. Bush’s policy line. It doesn’t matter that the Democratic majority in Congress might lean toward a dialogue with Syria, or that the Iraq Study Group report recommended such a step, or that the beleaguered Bush is a lame duck with whom Israel can risk disagreeing.

Nor does Olmert appear to be influenced by the advocacy of negotiations with Syria by many in the Israeli security establishment. That he actually invoked Bush as his rationale for ignoring Syrian leader Bashar Aal-Assad’s offer to reopen peace negotiations portrays the Israeli prime minister as an amateur on strategic issues.

Olmert’s predecessor, by contrast, was anything but an amateur in Israeli-American relations, and more broadly in dealing with America’s policies in the region. When it came to Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq and to democratize the Arab Middle East from within, Ariel Sharon took a far more sophisticated position. Publicly, Sharon played the silent ally; he neither criticized nor supported the Iraq adventure. One reason for his relative silence was Washington’s explicit request that Israel refrain from openly backing its invasion of an Arab country or in any way intervening, lest its blessing damn the United States in Arab eyes.

But sometime prior to March 2003, Sharon told Bush privately in no uncertain terms what he thought about the Iraq plan. Sharon’s words – revealed here for the first time – constituted a friendly but pointed warning to Bush. Sharon acknowledged that Saddam Hussein was an “acute threat to the Middle East and that he believed Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. Yet according to one knowledgeable source, Sharon nevertheless advised Bush not to occupy Iraq. According to another source – Danny Ayalon, who was Israel’s ambassador to the US at the time of the Iraq invasion, and who sat in on the Bush-Sharon meetings – Sharon told Bush that Israel would not “push one way or another regarding the Iraq scheme.

According to both sources, Sharon warned Bush that if he insisted on occupying Iraq, he should at least abandon his plan to implant democracy in this part of the world. “In terms world is not built for democratization, Ayalon recalls Sharon advising.

Be sure, Sharon added, not to go into Iraq without a viable exit strategy; and ready a counter-insurgency strategy if you expect to rule Iraq, which will eventually have to be partitioned into its component parts. Finally, Sharon told Bush, please remember that you will conquer, occupy and leave, but we have to remain in this part of the world. Israel, he reminded the US president, does not wish to see its vital interests hurt by regional radicalization and the spillover of violence beyond Iraq’s borders.

Sharon’s advice was prescient. The US occupation of Iraq has ended up strengthening Iran, Israel’s number-one enemy, and enfranchising militant Shia Islamists. A large part of Iraq is slipping into the Iranian orbit. Iraq’s western Anbar Province is increasingly dominated by militant jihadist Sunnis who could eventually threaten Syria and Jordan, the latter a strategic partner and geographic buffer for Israel.

All these developments harm vital Israeli interests. This past summer, Israel fought a war against two Islamist movements supported by Iran – Hesbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza – that were enfranchised and legitimized in their countries thanks to Bush’s insistence on hasty and ill-advised democratic elections “in this part of the world.

Had Sharon made his criticism public, citing the dangers posed to Israeli interests, might he have made a difference in the pre-war debate in the US and the world? Certainly he would have poured cold water on the post-war assertions of critics, like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who have fingered Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and pro-Israelis in the administration for instigating the war. Ayalon, incidentally, was directed by Sharon to warn all Israelis visiting Washington not to encourage the US scheme for war in Iraq, lest Israel be blamed for its failure.

There were, of course, neoconservative types in Israel who did encourage the US to occupy Iraq and advocated democratic elections wherever possible in the Middle East. But there were also many Israelis, including me, who spoke out openly and publicly against the American scheme.

Even AIPAC officials in Washington told visiting Arab intellectuals they would rather the US deal militarily with Iran than with Iraq. And pro-Western Arab leaders like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdullah were outspoken in their criticism of Bush’s war plans, even though they could fall back on far less credit and lobbying support in Washington than in Israel.

As a faithful ally of the US, Israel is morally obligated to tell Washington when its policies are not only mistaken but also harmful. Many American Middle East policy initiatives since 2003 have indeed been detrimental to Israeli interests. When Bush ignored his advice about Iraq, Sharon should have found a respectful and friendly way to make his reservations public.

It’s not too late for Olmert to put Israel’s case to Bush – first discreetly, then, if necessary, publicly. He should start with the issue of negotiating with Syria and the harm that Israel will suffer from the emergence of militant Sunni and Shia Islamist states in Iraq following an American withdrawal, unless Washington takes urgent and radical steps to install a tough and friendly regime in Baghdad.

Yossi Alpher, a former adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, is co-editor of the bitterlemons family of online publications. THE DAILY STAR publishes this commentary in collaboration with the Common Ground News Service.

With the release of a highly anticipated document, the “Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel, the Palestinian community within Israel has taken its first steps toward full empowerment.

The document, which lays out a broad, if not comprehensive, map of relations between the state of Israel and its Palestinian Arab citizens, is unique in that it has broad backing within the population and is meant to provide an urgently needed impulse in the discourse currently taking place in the country. Almost 60 years after the state of Israel was created on the ruins of Palestine and its people, the descendents of those who somehow remained on their land have moved toward actively changing their status from “tolerated and overlooked outsiders to becoming an integral part of Israeli society on equal terms.

In order to understand the yearnings articulated in the document, it is important to recognize the mostly silent suffering that Israel’s Palestinians have endured since 1948. Upon the creation of the state, the indigenous population found itself stripped of its rights and land, even the right to protest what was being done to it. Subjected to military rule from 1948 until 1966, Palestinians within Israel were forced to sit by helplessly as every aspect of their lives changed. They had become an enemy in their own land.

This oppression took a heavy toll on those who witnessed the expulsions from and destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages between 1948 and 1950. As the Israeli state was being built, Jewish immigrants were absorbed on the same land, and sometimes in the very same houses, where neighbors and friends had once lived. And, as any minority in the world, Palestinians learned to keep their heads down and hold on to some semblance of dignity in the face of their tormentors.

But this mentality of “not rocking the boat seeped into every action and behavior and the instinct for survival pushed aside the need for dignity, but also feelings of humiliation. As a child, I witnessed this servile behavior even in my father whenever we traveled though Ben Gurion Airport. I, like a majority of Palestinians in Israel, inherited the humiliation from the elder generation and learned to be apologetic toward Israeli Jews and to keep quiet when confronted with racist or biased officials of the state.

Slowly, and in fits and starts, this attitude has changed over the last 20 years. Palestinians have begun taking their rightful place within Israeli society: in universities, as professors or students; in political parties; in the media; in the cultural arena. By interacting with our Palestinian brethren in the Occupied Territories and by feeling proud of their struggle for freedom from Israeli occupation, we also became reacquainted with ourselves. This in turn helped give us the confidence to assert our national identity.

The “Future Vision of the Palestinian Arabs in Israel is a direct result of that growing confidence. It highlights the maturity of the Palestinian community, which is taking a serious initiative to wrestle control over its future back into its own hands. Palestinian citizens of Israel are an integral part of the state and are not about to go anywhere. The document seeks to create debate and discussion and to put the institutions of state on notice that Palestinians are no longer going to accept being second-class citizens in their own country. It expresses the aspirations of a people vis-à-vis a state that gave them citizenship but did not give them equality.

There is a long way to go. The Zionist narrative of Israel as the national homeland for the Jewish people in and of itself negates the narrative of the Palestinian people. Israel, as the product of Zionism, not only ignores the plight of its non-Jewish inhabitants, but staunchly refuses to even recognize that a grave injustice was committed against the Israeli Palestinians. This document is an opportunity to open doors that had been sealed until now.

The initial reaction from the Israeli Jewish establishment has been less than heartening. Soon after the document’s release, a chorus of voices rose to defend the status quo. The influential Council for Peace and Security chairman, Maj. Gen. Danny Rothschild said that, “It is inconceivable to subvert the right of the state to define itself as Jewish and democratic, of our connection to Jews of the world, of demographic hegemony, of territoriality and national symbols. These are the basic elements of the Jewish nature of the state.

Haaretz columnist Zeev Schiff went even further, invoking the Holocaust when he claimed Palestinians in the Occupied Territories want their future state to be “Judenrein, or “free of Jews, and that the Supreme Follow-up Committee of the Arabs in Israel, which authored the document, chose its timing deliberately because Israel was “weak and being attacked.

Missing in this fear mongering was any recognition of the Palestinian story. The Jewish establishment had better get used to the fact that Palestinian citizens of Israel, who constitute around 20 percent of the population, are no longer going to accept being shunted aside. Israeli Jews need to recognize that only when our narrative is taught to Jewish children just as the Jewish narrative is taught in Arab schools, will Israel be on its way to becoming a true democracy. Displaying Palestinian symbols does not negate Jewish symbols; quite the opposite: it sends a strong and true message of mutual respect.

A state based on religious affiliation is archaic in today’s world. When a state affords democratic rights to only some of its citizens it is not democratic. It is my hope that Jewish Israel will see this document not as a threat, but as an opportunity to rectify the wrongs of the past in order to move toward the future. “The only democracy in the Middle East sounds much better than “the only democracy for Jews in the Middle East.

The ball is now in their court.

Amal Helow is from the village of Rama near Acre. This commentary first appeared at bitterlemons.org, an online newsletter.

PETRA: Locals at the Wehdat Palestinian refugee camp used to toss their garbage on the front steps of the town s main day center for the mentally disabled.

Back when the daily activity center opened its doors in 2001, explains social worker Bayan Al-Nimer, this was a way for them to show their disrespect for those in the building; and their displeasure at having a facility caring for the mentally retarded in their neighborhood.

But every day, Al-Nimer tells me, The young men and women of the center would quietly go out and pick up the trash and put it in garbage cans.

Little by little, the locals not only stopped dumping their garbage at the center s door, they started accepting the project s beneficiaries (as they are called at the Wehdat Center) as integral parts of the camp.

The Wehdat Center is one of several projects either entirely or partly funded by the Swedish Organization for Individual Relief (SOIR), a humanitarian group that has been active in Jordan for four decades. The Wehdat facility cares for about 30 young adults with varying degrees of mental disability. The women learn the basics of stitching and cooking. The men learn carpentry. It s something for them to do, says Al-Nimer, or they would be at home all day. The young men, they are in the streets if they don t have a place to go to.

The Swedish Organization has had to fight many battles to reach this point. When its country director Zeinat Abu-Shanab first starting working for the group, she tells me, having mentally retarded children was considered so shameful that parents often locked them away in their homes.

Those children were hidden, nobody could see a handicapped child in the street. she says. They were abandoned, they were unknown.

Over the years, the taboo surrounding mental retardation started to fade and the Jordanian government has passed laws promoting equal rights for the physically and mentally handicapped. But although there has been progress with integrating the physically disabled, mental retardation has been a lot trickier. The stigma is still there and, I’m told, a lack of resources to help those who suffer from intellectual disability.

At the Wehdat day center, I talk to 20-year old Mohammad. Shy and soft-spoken, he hardly looks up when I ask him what he wants to do. It’s difficult not to feel some degree of discomfort asking a 20-year old what he wants to be when he grows up . I want to be a carpenter. Why? Pause. To work. Why? He rubs his index and thumb fingers together. To make money. Sometimes, while on assignment for “Inside the Middle East , it is difficult not to be affected by the sorrows and hardships of the people whose stories we cover.

A few years ago, I remember interviewing a young Sudanese couple who’d fled the violence in Darfur. They’d crossed into Egypt and made it safely to Cairo after a long and perilous trip. They were waiting for the UNHCR to grant them official refugee status.

We interviewed them (the husband was a veterinarian, the wife an engineer) in their temporary home in a slum on the outskirts of Cairo. It was all this vibrant, educated couple could afford. They had no money for even the most basic household items, yet insisted on buying the CNN crew and me sodas from the corner street vendor. I didn’t touch my drink in the hope that they would return it and get their money back.

I then asked the husband if he had brought anything with him from Darfur; something to remember home by (I was thinking TV visuals – what can I film?) He reached into his pocket. “I brought back one thing: a picture of my father and two brothers. They were all killed, he answered.

The memory of this man and the picture of his dead family has stayed with me ever since and I sense that, on some level, the same thing will happen with the images and memories of the Wehdat day center.

At the activity center, social worker Bayan Al-Nimer readjusts her headscarf and smiles warmly at a young woman weaving a coarse blue rug on an old wooden loom.

“It’s very rare employers will take them in, she says with a weak smile. “They don’t trust them with the tools and co-workers sometimes make fun of them.

We stop at a table with four young adult women. Al-Nimer tells me three of them are sisters. She explains that it’s common for siblings to be born with the same kind of mental retardation because of high intermarriage rates in certain parts of the Middle East. Marriage between close relatives, mainly direct cousins, means the likelihood that a gene carrying mental disability will appear is higher if mental retardation already exists in the family.

So preventing the multiplication of these cases in single families requires a massive education campaign and a cultural shift.

Case in point: 12-year old Mohannad, a Downs Syndrome child in the Al-Moustar neighborhood, a low income district in Amman. Mohannad’s mother and her eleven relatives sleep in one room and survive on handouts from charitable institutions, including the Swedish Organization. There are two other siblings with mental retardation in the family.

I often see this in the Middle East: families who can barely afford food continuing to bring child after child into the world. When I ask the parents why they don’t stop at two or three, the wives regularly tell me that their husbands consider a large number of children a testament to their manliness. Changing the way people have children and raise families, social workers tell me, will take time. It’s a generational struggle.

While the crew is filming the young men’s carpentry workshop, I step out to get away from the fumes of the wood varnish. I remember what Al-Nimer told me about how locals would hurl their trash at the Wehdat building. I look around and notice there are bags of rubbish dumped almost everywhere on the street except on the spotless front steps of the day center.

‘Inside The Middle East’ hosted by Hala Gorani, can be seen on Saturday February 3rd at 1930 GMT