President Obama puts his legacy at risk with new war in Middle East

(theGrio)  In light of the threat posed by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, President Obama wants Congress to authorize military force against the Islamist group in the Middle East. Although the president believes a 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) gives him the legal grounds to go to war on his own, he has sent Congress a draft authorization for their approval.

Mr. President, be careful what you wish for. As Colin Powell once said about the consequences of the U.S. war in Iraq, “if you break it, you own it.” Congress should not give the green light to a new, potentially endless war, nor should Obama pursue it. This would be Obama’s war, and he would own it, with a very distinct chance of jeopardizing his legacy. And these wars never turn out well for America, so why would a war against ISIS be any different?

Dr. King Can Help Build the Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance Movement

BBC journalist Jihad Masharawi carries body of 11-month old son Omar in Gaza. (Reuters)

BlackCommentator.com:

There is a straight line linking the human rights struggles around the globe, and the movements of the past with the movements of today. And those who have lived through theU.S. civil rights movement, the teachings of King and Gandhi, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa believe they have much to teach Palestinian civil society and their nonviolent resistance movement in the occupied territories.

Just weeks before the recent violent conflict in Gaza that left 166 Palestinians and six Israelis dead-and more than 1,230 Palestinians injured, mostly women and children - a group of civil rights veterans and a new generation of human rights leaders led a delegation to the West Bank. The delegation came from the Dorothy Cotton Institute in Ithaca, New York, named after the colleague of Dr. King and education director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The institute trains leaders for a global human rights movement, and is building a network of civil and human rights leaders. And it was the first group of civil rights leaders to meet with leaders of the Palestinian movement.

Their goals are to increase the visibility of a nonviolent Palestinian movement that is unknown to many in the U.S., share lessons between the Palestinian and American movements, connect Palestinian leaders with their Israeli allies, and educate the American public about this movement and the need for social justice and change in the region.

In the U.S., the human suffering experienced by the Palestinian people is rarely acknowledged and often ignored, with the victims often dehumanized and scapegoated.

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking via Skype with Kirby Edmonds, one of the members of the delegation in Ramallah. Mr. Edmonds, program director of the Dorothy Cotton Institute, shared what he was witnessing and experiencing in theWest Bank.

“One of the things I’ve been impressed by is their analysis of the situation,” he told me of the sophistication of those he met, also noting the Palestinians have learned lessons from the struggle against Jim Crow and apartheid. “They have made adaptations,” he added.

“They’ve landed on BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions] as a most promising strategy. The mistake they’ve made is not shaping the narrative of who they are, and how important it is they have rights. The idea that they’re thugs and terrorists is just wrong,” Edmonds noted. “Humiliation provokes a violent response.”

Edmonds views the Israeli occupation as a global human rights issue. “The Dorothy Cotton Institute sees the need to put our shoulders to the wheel for a global human rights movement. Because the state involved in it defines itself as democratic, and so there is a great deal of moral ground on which to stand,” he said.

“The other issue is the place is important to two-thirds of the human population.” He concluded that resolving the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis will help resolve conflicts around the world, making the implications much larger than the people who live there.”

And Edmonds characterized the Israeli policy of occupation as a humiliating one, with laws promulgated to justify certain things. And Palestinians are sick and tired, echoing the days of the Jim Crow South or South African apartheid.

“Palestinians are barred from building in certain areas, their houses are demolished,”Edmonds told me from Ramallah. “All the Palestinians in a certain area get an order saying their houses will be demolished and they don’t know when. 2:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning, and they blow the house down. It is clearly a violation of international conventions. And clearly a violation of human rights,” he said.

“The situation in East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem, what exists is a caste system that is more discriminatory than what happened in South African apartheid,”Edmonds noted of the Israeli system of class distinctions. A Palestinian’s citizenship status can be lost when traveling abroad, perhaps if they are studying in the U.S. for 4 years. They have to be able to prove Jerusalem is the center of their lives.

“People in the West bank are barred from entering Israel and East Jerusalem unless they get permits to do so. They have to pass through checkpoints to show their papers,” Edmonds said. “It is an example of policies that seem designed to provoke violent responses. Depending on what checkpoint it might be another 2 or 3 hours to get back home. It is extremely humiliating.”

Even more serious and problematic are administrative detentions, in which Palestinians have no access to lawyers, and are not told why they were arrested - a practice which can be imposed for up to 14 times without charges ever being made.

Then there are the arrests of children, particularly in areas in the West Bank where nonviolent demonstrations take place every week to protest the occupation. “The Israeli army will show up, enter the house and say who they’re after, take the teen out of house, blindfolded, put them in a Humvee, take them to an interrogation facility, and keep them for 4 days,” described Edmonds. “They will do things, they may say they have a right to an attorney, and after the course of hours intimidate the child into a confession. As a result, adult leaders end up arrested. This is a violation of the International Convention of Rights of the Child.”

Moreover, the policies of the occupation are changing the demographics of the area, with the goal of substantially reducing the Palestinian population in certain places. “The goal is reducing the Palestinian population from 30 percent to 12 percent”Edmonds argued.

“The task becomes making life so uncomfortable for people that they just leave, not just in Jerusalem but also in the West Bank. Herd them into four areas so that if there is some closure on the issue, Palestinians are unable to manage their own state. That is the policy behind creating Bantustans. The goal is to make Palestinian life so unbearable they can only live in certain places,” he offered.

Meanwhile, the Palestinians have nearly a century of nonviolent resistance to oppression. “The people we’ve been meeting with are not saying Jews shouldn’t be there,” Edmonds told me. “What the Palestinians are calling for is for people of conscience to put pressure on Israel so that this does not continue. ...It is what gives people hope,” he said.

Ultimately, according to Edmonds, the Palestinian people lack the political strength to do it alone. The Israeli government, he said, is able to behave as it does because it is a client of the U.S. “It is unlikely we can persuade the U.S.government to shift its policy because of civil society. It was civil society in South Africa that made change happen, it was not U.S. policy.”

Through their journey to the occupied territories, Kirby Edmonds and his colleagues are acting in the proudest tradition of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, stayed true to the fight for civil rights at home and spoke out against the war in Vietnam. He railed against the triple, interrelated evils of militarism, racism and economic exploitation, and understood the linkages between violence and oppression in America and our promotion of war abroad.

And just as King condemned the billions spent on burgeoning defense budgets to mutilate and incinerate Vietnamese children - all at the expense of the war on poverty - then surely those who act in the spirit of King today can decry the billions spent on America’s militarization of Israel, the occupation, and the killing of innocent babies.

Of war and violence, King said “The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows. One day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. How much longer must we play at deadly war games before we heed the plaintive pleas of the unnumbered dead and maimed of past wars?”

Meanwhile, in Israel and Palestine, a nonviolent resistance movement seeks peace-and justice. Part of that process includes tearing down the walls that separate people, and building bridges instead.

“Israeli society can no longer see what is happening on the other side of the wall,” Kirby Edmonds said of the current state of affairs. “The narrative that this is a land without people is easy to perpetuate.”

Miral Defies Racial Stereotypes of Arabs In the Media

Over the weekend I saw the new film Miral by director Julian Schnabel (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). I'll start off by saying that overall, it was well done. What was perhaps most noteworthy about the film is that it told a story about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the point of view of a Palestinian girl coming of age, a voice we rarely hear. And to top it off, the film is based on a semi-autobiographical book by author-screenwriter Rula Jebreal, Schnabel's girlfriend.

In reality, Miral is the story of four women: Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass), who opens an orphanage and girls' school for 55 displaced and wandering Palestinian children in Jerusalem in the midst of the Arab-Israeli War; Nadia (Yasmine Al Massri), a woman who faces alcoholism, abuse and imprisonment after punching a Jewish woman on a bus for insulting her; Fatima (Ruba Blal), a former nurse who received three life sentences after attempting but failing to explode a bomb in a movie theater, and Miral (Freida Pinto), Nadia's daughter. Miral is torn between her conservative and peaceful father Jamal (Alexander Siddig), and her love interest Hani (Omar Metwally), a PLO activist.

Unlike most media portrayals of Arab people in the U.S., this film presents Palestinians as everyday human beings, in all their complexities. For example, the children in the film demonstrated the full range of Palestinian diversity, from fair-haired blond to Mediterranean olive to black African. Palestinians and Israelis are known to fall in love with each other and become couples. And sometimes people and their actions are not so cut-and-dried. It is easy to label someone a terrorist, and terrorist acts were committed in Miral. At the same time, such labels become blurred, as they are subject to nuance within the context of a military occupation. For example, it was easy for the main character to teeter on the edge between schoolgirl and terrorist. Those who are oppressed and displaced under occupation view their struggle as one for liberation and self-determination. Some may seek peace and reconciliation -- and land -- in furtherance of their struggle. Others who view the occupier as a military adversary who stole their land may find their answer through the barrel of a gun and act accordingly. That is not to justify violence, it is simply to provide the context for understanding what human beings do when their back is against the wall.

Through its depiction of the Israeli occupation, Miral provided a public service to viewers who are unexposed to it, unaffected and unaware. The daily regimen of humiliating checkpoints, soldiers demanding to see identification, and hostile religious settlers backed by troops are a reality for Palestinians.

Critics have blasted the film as being one-sided, as if that is a bad thing. One heavy-handed critic even called Miral a "slanderous and shameful piece of propaganda." Everyone has a point of view. And people deserve the space to tell their own stories from their own point of view. Each day, media interpret the experiences of groups of people through distorted cultural lenses, without the input or consent of their subjects. Stereotypes result.

When they are not depicted as the hired help, African-Americans and Latinos, not unlike Arabs, are stereotyped as terrorists -- urban terrorists and gangbangers who are a danger to society. Additionally, blacks are depicted as welfare queens, and Latinos are cast in the role of "illegal aliens" who cross the border from Mexico to steal good paying jobs picking oranges and busing tables. Asians become the model minority, or human computers, with Asian women stereotyped as the submissive China doll or hyper-sexualized Dragon Lady.

And rightwing media in the U.S. reduce Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans to shadowy figures, the "other" who would infiltrate society and defile Christian values with their mosques, not to mention blow up our cities. Did I mention that the President might be one of them?

"The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he's the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. This is the press, an irresponsible press," as Malcolm X once said. "If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

America needs exposure to more media images of Arabs and others that are self-depictions, and yes, one-sided representations of their reality. How do we start a dialogue and transform ourselves and our condition when we constantly hear only one side of the story?

I highly recommend Miral, but that is not to say the movie is perfect. For instance, casting Indian actress Freida Pinto of Slumdog Millionaire fame in the role of Miral was at times a mismatch. Moreover, surely an Arab actress was available. Further, the viewer is left wanting to know more, more about what happened to Miral. And although they are capable artists, Vanessa Redgrave and Willem Dafoe seem to serve no substantial role other than the perfunctory Westerners in a film about people of color.

Given the paucity of positive images of Arabs out there, no single film can be all things to all people. And no film by itself can articulate the full breadth of the occupation or the Mideast conflict. But this is a good start.

The Limits of Tyrants Are Prescribed By the Endurance of Those Whom They Oppress

The Food Research and Action Center released a disturbing report about food hardship and hunger in the United States. According to the report, nearly one in five Americans simply does not have enough money to buy food that they and their family need. In 21 states, at least 20 percent of respondents said they did not have enough money to buy food in the past 12 months, while at least 15 percent of respondents in 45 states answered in the affirmative. No part of the country is untouched by this crisis.

And yet, Tea Party-sponsored governors and lawmakers around the country will make no mention of this, as they channel their inner tyrant and slash state budgets at the expense of the poor and working people. Megalomaniacs, they seem to derive pleasure from using their power to make people hurt -- certain people, that is. After all, their talk of fiscal responsibility is selective, as austerity is reserved for the poor. The rich are not being asked to tighten their belt, but rather are being rewarded with tax breaks. In that regard, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is doing exactly what his masters, the Koch brothers, instructed him to do. When America, backward and crumbling, should be investing in infrastructure and technology to create jobs and promote growth, some governors reject high-speed rail projects and wear their ignorance as a badge of honor.

Moreover, the concept of the budget crisis is being used as a subterfuge -- a scam, if you will -- to strip unions of their collective bargaining rights in states such as Wisconsin, Ohio and Indiana. And all the better for the extreme right if they can slip something devious like anti-gay language in the legislation when no one is looking. Because that's what tricksters do.

Unions have lost ground over the years, and not surprisingly, so too have working people, in terms of declining wages and a lower standard of living. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and others would make public unions the new welfare queens, the new bogeyman. And we are supposed to believe that public school teachers are the new millionaires, getting rich at the public's expense and breaking the backs of state budgets with their exorbitant salaries -- if you consider $40,000 or $60,000 a lot, that is. And when nobody is looking, the true millionaires and billionaires are making out like true bandits, taking away most of the nation's wealth.

But people are starting to wake up, which is why they are engaging in nonviolent protest by the thousands in Madison and elsewhere in America. They have much in common with protestors in Tripoli, Cairo and other nations in the Mideast, where the masses are divesting themselves of the mob bosses, potentates and presidents-for-life that have passed for leadership in that part of the world. All they want is to be able to put food on the table, to feed their children. But they are unable to do so.

Like Egypt's Mubarak and Qaddafi, America's Tea Party rulers -- kleptocrats who feign populist tendencies -- are driven by delusions of grandeur and utter contempt for the will of the masses. When the people do not go along with the program, these authoritarian leaders maintain power by brute force, arrests or through the barrel of a gun -- or at least consider it is an option. The primary difference is that the Mideast rulers operate under no pretense of democracy. Politics in the U.S. enjoys at least a democratic veneer. And in a technical sense the electorate, however uninformed and prone to act in their own economic interests, actually cast their ballots for such walking disasters as Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, John Kasich of Ohio, and Walker of Wisconsin. But thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, corporations and wealthy interests have unlimited influence over elections. America really is owned by a handful of individuals, and the electoral system has turned into a tool to do the bidding of the oligarchs. So what is the real difference between an autocrat who holds no elections, or holds a sham election and declares victory, and a plutocrat who purchases an election with cash and utilizes corporate cronies to rule by proxy?

When the poor and working poor cannot afford to feed their families, all bets are off. Faced with rising inequality, oppressive laws and the naked greed of the powerful, people take to the streets. Here in the land of opportunity, wealthy conservative interests are jonesing to destroy the unions, the only thing standing between them and unlimited political and economic power. Who wins depends on how far the common folks are able and willing to take it.

Perhaps Frederick Douglass said it best: "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."

Class Warfare Is Ugly but Necessary to Get Rid of the Bad Blood

Harvard University, my alma mater, has decided that students from low income families -- earning less than $60,000 a year -- will pay no tuition and have no student loan burden. This was a forward-thinking policy decision by a wealthy institution sitting on $27.6 billion, the largest university endowment in the land. Implicit in Harvard's decision is an acknowledgment that things are getting out of hand in higher education, and in society in general. A quality education, often prohibitively expensive and out of reach to many, should not be accessible solely to the wealthy or those who are able to afford it.

Harvard's spirit of equity and fairness should be shared around the country, in the Congress and in state houses throughout the wealthiest nation on earth. Despite what some people would tell you, America is a nation of plenty, the world's largest economy. The only problem is that in the so-called land of opportunity -- not unlike Egypt, Libya, and the various other unraveling countries in the Mideast -- only a few people are actually enjoying the wealth. Here, the bankers received their bailout, a reward for their greed, incompetence and inflated sense of self-worth. Meanwhile, the super duper-rich had their Bush-era tax breaks extended under a Democratic president whose idea of compromise has been to grant Republicans whatever they want.

The Obama budget reflects an acceptance of the conservative narrative that the poor must suffer in the name of austerity and balancing the budget. Wall Street enjoys record profits and bonuses, while the working poor must endure cuts to social programs, home heating assistance programs and access to graduate education. But the talk of deficit reduction is pure grandstanding. After all, the Bush tax cuts are driving the deficit, and significant cuts to America's bloated military behemoth are off the table.

In their quest to shrink government down to nothing, conservatives have found their new welfare queen in the form of public labor unions. Everyday people who are just trying to earn an honest living are suddenly scapegoated, blamed for the nation's financial and fiscal woes. Of course, there is a larger picture at play, which is why thousands of Wisconsin workers have protested against Gov. Scott Walker's plan to strip public employees of their collective bargaining rights. The Democrats in Wisconsin fled the state to deny Republicans the quorum to vote for the union-busting legislation, with Democrats in other states like Indiana following suit, and Republicans locking protestors out of the Ohio Statehouse. The Republican Party wants to remove all vestiges of union power in this country, so that corporations are allowed to roam, unfettered and unchallenged, and trample over the rights of American workers. The Supreme Court has allowed corporations to buy what was passing as democracy, and now Tea Party legislatures and governors would render this a full-fledged nation of serfs and sharecroppers.

In all manner of Talibanic extremism, the unhinged, lunatic rightward fringe is using this opportunity to push all of the foolishness they could imagine when they lived in the political wilderness and were jonesing for power. The lunatics are running the asylum, literally. It is a nasty little sideshow, and there would be some entertainment value in it all if actual lives were not at stake. Congress voted to defund Planned Parenthood. In South Dakota, a bill would sanction the murder of abortion providers as justifiable homicide. A bill in the Georgia legislature would punish miscarriages with the death penalty. A Missouri lawmaker wants to do away with those "over the top" labor laws that prohibit child labor. And Texas could allow college students to wear concealed weapons on campus. After all, what better way to deal with campus gun violence than to recreate the Wild West on campus, in Texas of all places? Meanwhile, the NRA, further revealing its kinship with rightwing extremist groups, advocates the formation of armed militias -- private police forces unanswerable to government authority.

In the midst of all of this, ordinary citizens are waking up, and thousands are taking to the streets in nonviolent protest. Although Glenn Beck would paint the workers marching in Wisconsin as anarchists, socialists and communists, not to mention allies of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, there is a thread which binds the protestors in the Middle East and the U.S. They all know authoritarianism when they see it, and they realize the government, reeking with oligarchy and plutocracy, is working to undermine their interests. As F.D.R. once said, in the words etched in his memorial, "They (who) seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers... call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order."

Class warfare is ugly, but sometimes it is necessary. It can be a liberating thing, and it is the best thing that can happen to a progressive movement that needs a president to "make me do it," as F.D.R. urged A. Philip Randolph. And as they said in The Godfather, "These things have to happen every five, ten years. Gets rid of the bad blood." Getting rid of the bad blood could also mean getting rid of an overreaching GOP living on borrowed time.

Playing both sides of the fence in the class wars, Democrats must choose a side, lest they get swept away, too.

The International Movement That Would Bring Peace to the Mideast

Recent talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians point to a seemingly dysfunctional and hopelessly intractable process. The construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank has not abated, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected calls by defense minister Ehud Barak to share Jerusalem with the Palestinians.

Meanwhile, recent news reports demonstrate that the occupation is both unsustainable and incompatible with democratic principles. For example, Israeli police are arresting Palestinian children as young as five for stone throwing. This, as Al Jazeera and The Guardian just started to release over 1,600 documents on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And recent Wikileaks cables revealed that Israeli officials took bribes to allow U.S. goods into Gaza, requiring American companies to pay up to 75 times more than the usual cost. Wikileaks also learned that Israel has intended to keep Gaza near collapse, just as the Israeli government plans to wage a full-scale war on the territory and Lebanon.

This year, the Palestinians hope to build upon the wave of nations recognizing a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders. There is a strong and ever-growing peace movement that is joined from within Israeli society and the international community. Ultimately, the leaders of this movement want to bring about positive change in the Mideast, and they hope to succeed where the politicians and diplomats have fallen short. And in many ways, they are a nonviolent movement on the lines of the U.S. civil rights and South African anti-apartheid movements. They seek dignity and a respect for human rights for both sides of the conflict, and seek to liberate Israelis and Palestinians from a system that has hopelessly oppressed each.

Two human rights leaders from two different conflicts in different parts of the world found themselves participating in the recent flotillas to break the blockade of Gaza: Mairead Corrigan Maguire, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who lost family members to sectarian violence and fought for nonviolent reconciliation in Northern Ireland, and Yonatan Shapira, a former elite Israeli pilot who decided he could no longer participate in the occupation of the Palestinian people. This unlikely pair of shipmates had a conversation recently, which was hosted and facilitated by Jewish Fast For Gaza, a group founded by Rabbis Brant Rosen and Brian Walt.

Maguire was transformed by a world of violence in Northern Ireland when her niece and two nephews were killed - all little children - and her sister injured on a Belfast street in 1976. “When that happened, myself and two others…we came out for peace, our message was that violence isn’t going to solve our problems, and there’s got to be another way to use nonviolence,” said Maguire.

At that point she cofounded the Community of the Peace People in 1976, and organized weekly marches and demonstrations that attracted over half a million people from across Northern Ireland, Ireland and the UK. “I think we recognized that we had a deep ethnic conflict, but it wasn’t going to be solved through militarism and paramilitarism, and we had to begin to sit down with each other and dialogue and to find a way through our problems.” Along with a colleague, Maguire received the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize for their peace efforts, and she would later broaden her work from Northern Ireland to other places.

Ten years ago, Maguire went with a delegation to Israel. She was invited by a group of rabbis who were fighting for human rights in the territories and against the demolition of Palestinian homes. Relating to her own experiences back at home, she was moved by the suffering on both sides, and inspired to see Israelis and Palestinians finding a way to working together and seek justice.

More recently, Maguire has decided to focus her efforts on Gaza, and has sailed on three humanitarian boats to the territory. Two of the boats were intercepted by the Israeli Navy, and one of them was a part of the Freedom Flotilla that was attacked by Israelis, claiming nine lives on the MV Mavi Mamara. “1.5 million people are living in a prison, cut off from the world, literally,” she said of the conditions in Gaza, of the tremendous suffering she witnessed. “The Palestinian people are really living in a prison and the Israelis are holding all the keys. This is not happening in any other part of the world, and yet we see Israel and the international community remaining silent on it.”

With its ports closed for 40 years, and bombed-out infrastructure, the Gazan population, half of which is under the age of 18, is the victim of a collective punishment, according to Maguire. Her words were echoed by Judge Richard Goldstone, the South African jurist who issued a UN report on Israeli human rights violations during Operation Cast Lead, the military campaign in Gaza that claimed 1,400 Palestinian lives. According to the Goldstone report, “houses, factories, wells, schools, hospitals, police stations and other public buildings were destroyed.” Around 240 of the Gazan deaths were police officers. And the Palestinian Legislative Council and a prison were bombed as well. The report called on Israel to do an independent investigation into Operation Cast Lead, and punish those elements of the IDF who were responsible.

The severity of the Gaza blockade - imposed by Israel following the Hamas victory and takeover - was brought home for Maguire when she appeared in court following her arrest. “When I was at the Supreme Court for the hearing, there was a case up just before me, and the case was a mother and father who had been visiting on the West Bank when the border was closed to Gaza and their young child was in Gaza. They were appearing at the court to ask if after four years they would be allowed to travel from the West Bank to Gaza to see their little boy who hadn’t seen them since the border had closed.”

And while Maguire condemns what she views as violation of international law against the Palestinians, the pacifist condemns all violence, including Palestinian acts of violence on Israeli cities. And yet, the Nobel laureate was hopeful at what she saw in the people in Gaza. “There is a passion among the people of Gaza for peace. They just want to have peace because they suffered so much. So we were hopeful because it reminded me of Northern Ireland when the Peace People started.” When Israel began bombing Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, however, there was a setback in the hopes of peace between Fattah and Hamas, and hopes the Palestinians would have a united voice that could reach out and dialogue with Israel.

Meanwhile, Yonatan Shapira’s introduction to the Mideast conflict came as a member of the Israeli Air Force, an elite Blackhawk helicopter pilot who had flown hundreds of missions over the occupied territories. Upon first glance, this seasoned, eleven-year veteran would appear to be the least likely candidate for a peace activist. But then again, no one knows how he or will she will react after becoming a firsthand witness to suffering and the effects of violence, on the Israeli side in Shapira’s case. “During this time I volunteered with victims of suicide attacks, mostly new immigrants, people who are poor and with less family support in the country. And I got to know Israeli suffering through my military service as a rescue pilot bringing children and soldiers and people to hospital after they were injured and killed, and as a volunteer meeting with the children and families of survivors, and trying to bring them back to society to try to overcome their trauma,” Shapira said.

Then there was a targeted bomb assassination attempt on Hamas leaders that left fourteen civilians dead in Gaza.

“And at some point along this process, I started to realize I am, there is a cycle of violence and I am just a part of this cycle, even if I am not killing anyone directly myself, I am part of a system that is causing huge suffering for people,” he added. Speaking of the Palestinians, he said “For many years I didn’t know their story, their narrative, the way I’ve been brought here up in Israeli society, to just know half side of the history. The first time I knew the word Nakba, the disaster for the Palestinians of what happened in ‘48 was when I was 30-something. And when you realize that you were blind to such a huge part of the history and the present, and there is a circle of violence and you are part of it, it’s a very strong emotional step to overcome, and I think at that point you can decide whether to ignore it, suppress it and continue to fight anyone that brings these issues up, or try to learn more and take responsibility and try to change the situation. And that’s what happened to me and to many of my friends.”

When Shapira found his moment of truth and chose to deal with the “dark side” of his existence, he decided to write a petition of air force pilots who declared they were no longer willing to fly missions over the territories. They would no longer be a part of “illegal and immoral attacks” on the Palestinians. In 2003 - on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year - the pilots placed the declaration on the desk of the commander of the air force. “I think that was the beginning of a new life for me in many, many ways,” Shapira noted.

Shapira founded Combatants for Peace on the assertion that it is not merely enough to say what you are not willing to be a part of. “It’s important to reach out to the other side you’re fighting against, and find people and work together - Palestinians who are rejecting violence and are refusing to be a part of this cycle of violence,” he said.

This IDF pilot made a transition from leader among soldiers to a solidarity leader with the Palestinians. He and other Israelis participate in the call by nonviolent Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions, or BDS. Shapira sees this as a struggle for Palestinian liberation, a process that will also liberate Israelis from being oppressors of a horrible, decades-long occupation. “We don’t wait anymore for Lieberman and Bibi and Barak and other people to bring the solution today. We are calling on the international community, we call on Jews…, and we call on governments all around the world to understand the situation is disastrous, and there is no time to wait for a peace process that is being used just to delay and build more settlements.”

Shapira - who is disheartened by Mairead Maguire’s arrest in Israel - noted that it was his own squadron that dropped commandos on the Mavi Mamara. “It was a double shock because I know the organizers of the flotilla…and to see what the navy and the Israeli army did on the boats and especially this whole ordeal of not showing the whole video, just showing a few seconds of that and manipulating the whole world media. …And the same Blackhawk helicopter that Israel gets for free in billions of aid from the United States, that’s the same helicopter I flew on years back. So it was also very personal for me to decide I need to be on the side of the people trying to symbolically break the siege.”

And so this veteran pilot decided to participate in a flotilla to Gaza, alongside Israeli activists and a holocaust survivor. Shapira said it was sad to see 8 or 10 warships approaching them and violently attacking them, when the only weapons they were carrying to Gaza were harmonicas, musical instruments for the children. “I guess that was too dangerous for the Israeli army to let into Gaza,” he said.

Shapira, who had once been involved in logistics for the Navy, was arrested by the Navy. When the soldiers boarded the ship, they shot him with a stun gun, an electrical shock close to his heart. “My whole body convulsed. Now I also have accusations of attacking the soldiers because my legs were jumping form the shock in my heart, so they also accuse me of attacking the soldiers,” he said. “It is important to understand that if we were Palestinian fisherman, they’d just kill us from a far distance, and maybe Turkish activists we would be shot to death, so it is important to put this in proportion.”

Activists such as Shapira are touching a nerve in Israeli society regarding the occupation, and they are a thorn in the side of Israeli authorities. He sees hope in the Israeli resistance movement, noting that he sees more people attending demonstrations these days, types of people he hadn’t seen in the past. “Maybe with this tendency of this country becoming more and more fascist, and the laws are coming one after another, it may be able to penetrate this thick skin that many people have developed over here. There is a little bit of optimism that when things become so bad and brutal, maybe it helps people to wake up.” Shapira speaks of the ultra-right-Orthodox coalition that currently controls the Israeli government, and the oppressive and racist laws that have come down the pike. Examples include a law requiring non-Jewish Israeli citizens to proclaim allegiance to a Jewish state, a rabbinic ruling forbidding leasing property to non-Jews, attempts to bar Jewish women from the wailing wall, gender segregation in public areas, determining who is not a Jew, and laws forbidding a Jew to marry a non-Jew in Israel.

At the same time, Shapira realizes that his movement is a minority of a minority, albeit with an important role in helping to wake up world Jewry. “It is important not to exaggerate how effective we are here. We are very much hated within the Israeli mainstream, especially when we mention things like international pressure and BDS, it is almost like cursing God in a synagogue or something like that.” Shapira believes the change will come from international pressure, as was the case with South African apartheid. “It is important to remember that no struggle for liberation for equality and for freedom around the world nonviolently succeeded without the mass participation of people around the world. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, all of these heroes would never succeed without huge international pressure.”

Ultimately, Israel must find security through some other means outside of militarism, say these two human rights fighters. “Israel has a right to self-defense, and therefore the first thing for defending ourselves is to stop torturing and killing Palestinians,” said Shapira, who compares Israel to the participant in a gang rape who complains that the victim is fighting back. “When you imprison a million and a half people in a huge ghetto like Gaza, bombing them, what do you expect to happen?” he said. “Since we are committed to nonviolent principles we believe more killing of the other side will just cause you more suffering.”

“We have to move from culturally sanctioned violence wherever we live into building communities based on respect for each other and nonviolence,” said Maguire. She believes the best security the Jewish people can have is to make plans with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors, make friends, and begin to build policies based on human rights and justice. “We’ve got to move away from the idea - and really all of us not just Israelis - this idea that militarism provides our security. We have to move to human based and ecological based security. That’s a huge challenge for the whole human family, and particularly a challenge now in Israel and Palestine to move on to a different kind of security.”

A Campaign To Divest From Mideast Apartheid

People around the world are mourning the loss of life that resulted from the Israeli Navy commando raid on a flotilla of ships bringing humanitarian aid to a blockaded Gaza. Nine activists were killed. Prosecutors have characterized the incident, which occurred in international waters, as an act of piracy and a violation of international law. And top-ranking Israeli Navy reserves officers denounced the attack and slammed the Israeli government for blaming the activists for what transpired. "We do not accept claims that this was a 'public relations failure' and we think that the plan was doomed to failure from the beginning," the officers wrote in a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In many ways, the handling of the flotilla tragedy mirrors Israel's policy of Occupation of the Palestinian territories: inhumane treatment and a disproportionate use of force against those who have been labeled as terrorists. This is a response born of arrogance and hubris, and a disregard for international public opinion. Add to that the confiscation of news cameras and media censorship, and a propaganda campaign perpetuating the notion of perpetual victimhood-- that the Israeli government can do no wrong.

Israel is a prominent nation in the region, but that does not justify apartheid. The nation's historical origins do not give it a pass in acting ethically or in compliance with human rights law. The Occupation must end if democracy is to flourish in Israel, and public pressure can bring about a just and equitable resolution to the conflict. Some Jews of conscience believe that economic divestment--taking the profit out of violations of human rights and of international law- is the way to make it happen.

The group Jewish Voice for Peace just kicked off a divestment campaign. Their focus is on TIAA-CREF, a Fortune 100 financial services company and insurance giant. The company serves 3.6 million people and manages more than 27,000 retirement plans and over $400 billion in combined assets. TIAA-CREF's motto is "Financial Services for the Greater Good," and it proudly calls itself "a global leader in socially responsible investing." And earlier this year, the company divested from four petrochemical companies that refused to stop doing business with Sudan.

JVP seeks to persuade TIAA-CREF to stop investing in companies that profit from the Occupation, such as Caterpillar and Motorola. The former manufactures bulldozing equipment for destroying Palestinian homes, while the latter supplies cell phones to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) for use in the Occupied Territories.

Occupation means profits. A settlement industry of hundreds of companies has been built around the servicing of 562,000 Israelis living in 135 settlements and outposts in the West Bank, Arab Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. These companies enjoy special government support, including tax breaks, lower environmental and labor standards and low rents. And they exploit Palestinian workers, land and resources as they maintain an infrastructure of buildings, walls and checkpoints to keep Palestinians separated and out of the settlements. Many of the companies serve the Jewish settlers, while others exploit the captive nature of the Palestinian population and charge them exorbitant rates. Meanwhile, Palestinians who work in these industrial zones face labor violations and severe restrictions on their movement and right to organize.

Divestment is a time-tested tool to bring about nonviolent social change. The divestment movement against South African apartheid is perhaps the most poignant example of such a strategy. Similarly, a U.S.-led campaign hopes to bring an end to Israeli-Palestinian apartheid.

Israel considers itself a member of the "First World" and the only democracy in the Mideast, as it maintains a forty-three year military occupation. "To maintain the Occupation, Israel uses harsh and often brutal controls that are widely perceived around the world, if not in the U.S., as an apartheid system. The truth is that even within Israel, only Israeli Jews have enjoyed democratic government and equal rights," says Barbara Harvey of Jewish Voice for Peace. "Every person who values democratic freedoms and equality has a personal stake in ending Israeli apartheid, because its continuance threatens to redefine democracy in ways that none of us who live outside Israel accept for ourselves."

Harvey also suggests that Israeli policing practices are having a bad influence in the U.S.: "How many Americans realize that many of our local police forces and even private security forces receive training in Israel, where the Israel Defense Force is taught to dehumanize Palestinians? If the world pretends that Israel's free society for Jews only is a democracy, the unacceptable will inexorably become acceptable beyond Israel's borders, threatening every one of us."

The West Bank consists of a multitude of fragmented enclaves, many of which are connected to adjacent towns only through checkpoints. Settlements, outposts and Israeli military infrastructure place nearly 40 percent of the land out of the reach of Palestinians.

Meanwhile, Gaza is a prison. As Amnesty International has reported, the blockade of Gaza has left nearly 1.5 million men, women and children trapped in a strip of land only 40 km (25 mi) long and 9.5 km (6 mi) wide. The situation in Gaza is one of collective punishment, where poverty, unemployment and food shortages have left four in five people dependent on humanitarian assistance. "Ghetto" is a word associated with pain and deep historical symbolism for both black and Jewish folks. The ghetto is a place where people are packed in and stacked up, by design, and where dreams die and people suffer. Well, Gaza is the ghetto, and one shouldn't have to live in Gaza or be a Gazan to appreciate that suffering. As one Israeli official stated plainly, "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."

Further, Arab Israelis are racially profiled, treated as second or third class citizens, and regarded as a fifth column that cannot be trusted. The efforts to strip an Arab Israeli Knesset member of her citizenship because she participated in the humanitarian flotilla (along with Holocaust survivors, European lawmakers and Nobel laureates) is a prime example of the discrimination Arabs face.

So, this is what the divestment campaign wants to change, so that democracy can come to Israel. Business practices must change, but old mindsets must change as well. Jews who are unhappy with the current state of affairs in Israel should be able to, as a courageous progressive rabbi once said, set limits with the ones they love. They should be able to speak up for Palestinian rights without being branded as self-hating Jews, terrorists or enablers of terrorists. Likewise, non-Jews who come to the table with a love for human rights and a sincere desire to help the situation should not fear accusations of anti-semitism. Displeasure with specific policies of the Israeli government does not equate with hatred towards Judaism or Jewish people. And the rights of Palestinians and Israelis are not mutually exclusive, nor should they be.

Obama's New Path To Mideast Peace?

Sometimes, desperate and difficult circumstances require that we change the game a little bit, shake things up, if you will. If recent reports are true, then President Obama plans to mint his own Mideast peace plan in an attempt to loosen up the gridlock the parties are experiencing in that troubled region of the world.

And this is precisely the type of leadership for which people voted in the 2008 election. Tired of being hated when they traveled abroad -- due to the misguided cowboy diplomacy practiced by George W. Bush for eight long years -- Americans wanted a president that would once again make their country a place that was respected among the community of nations. And with his historic Mideast speech, Obama clearly laid out a new vision for Israel, the Palestinians and the greater Arab world.

"The truth is, in some of these conflicts, the United States can't impose solutions unless the participants in these conflicts are willing to break out of the old patterns of antagonism," the President said last week. A U.S. led plan would address Iran, a big concern of Israel, and involve Arab neighbors as well. "We want to get the debate away from settlements and East Jerusalem and take it to a 30,000-feet level that can involve Jordan, Syria and other countries in the region," in addition to the Palestinians and Israelis. The President knows that incrementalism hasn't worked.

All parties involved in a solution to the problem can afford to look at things in a different way. Israel is led by a right-wing government that has been a thorn in the side of the Obama administration. And realpolitik dictates that empires cannot allow their satellite nations to chump them out. Allowing the construction of additional housing units in East Jerusalem, the presumptive capital of a Palestinian state, Prime Minister Netanyahu does not come to the negotiating table as an honest partner. Self-determination and nationhood are a must for the Palestinians, and actions which show contempt for this reality certainly will not bring anyone peace and security, most of all Israel. True leadership comes when so-called leaders do the unpopular, though it is best for their people. Cowardice is doing the expedient, that which may yield short-term votes, yet fails to address the long-term crisis and only exacerbates it. So, for the purposes of this analysis, Netanyahu is a coward.

For Palestinians, suicide bombers will not bring peace, and a culture of violence will not build a nation. Although Israel has erred in characterizing what is primarily a liberation struggle as terrorism, the Palestinians have been mistaken in believing that killing innocent people will accomplish anything other than continuing the cycle of violence. The people in the occupied territories are suffering plenty, to be sure. The blockade of Gaza is a human rights violation and a humanitarian crisis, part of the greater outrage that is the occupation itself, with its apartheid system of checkpoints, passes and Bantustans. People of all faiths and backgrounds -- including progressive Jews -- choose to protest an unjust Gaza policy by fasting and other peaceful means.

As if to learn a lesson from the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South, many Palestinians are realizing that nonviolent resistance is the path to freedom. They are staging peaceful protests and boycotting goods made in the settlements. The Palestinian prime minister traveled to the West Bank to plant trees and declared that land, not presently under his authority, as part of a future Palestinian state. Gandhi and King surely would be proud.

As far as the U.S. is concerned, a laissez-faire policy of shoulder shrugging has not worked in the Mideast, and neither has the appearance of siding with one party over another. Obama realizes that if there is any hope for stability in the region, he must deal with the Israel-Palestine conflict. Hotheads and peddlers of extremism have a vested interest in the status quo, and would like nothing more than to derail any attempts to transform today's sad state of affairs.

As an aside, somehow, the legendary African-American poet Gil Scott-Heron is caught in the crosshairs of the Mideast conflict. He was involved in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s. And now he is being criticized for his plans to perform in Tel Aviv, which, critics say, would violate the unified call among Palestinian civil society for boycotts, divestments, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel, a call which is "directed particularly towards international activists, artists, and academics of conscience."

Whether Gil Scott-Heron is compromising his ideals by performing in Israel is a question that goes far beyond the scope of this commentary. However, I am reminded of the title of one of his songs, "Home Is Where the Hatred Is." And for people living in Israel and the occupied territories, home definitely is where the hatred is. It is what South African Justice Richard Goldstone called "a situation where young people grow up in a culture of hatred and violence, with little hope for change in the future. Finally, the teaching of hate and dehumanization by each side against the other contributes to the destabilization of the whole region."

Will Obama Save the Mideast from Itself?

By David A. Love, BlackCommentator.com

With his speech at Cairo University, President Obama has laid the groundwork, potentially, for a new era of peace in the Mideast. Israeli officials are now realizing that they will have to accept a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians. Meanwhile, there is an indication that the President’s speech is paving the way for waning animosity towards America in the Muslim world, which would undercut the activities of extremist groups that benefit from continued violence, hostility and death in that region of the world.

Well, it is about time. The past administration, whose name I dare not utter for fear it will reappear, paid nothing but lip service to the Mideast. The former president gave a rubber stamp to the status quo, and endorsed Israeli incursions and military strong-arming in the name of the war on terror. That rightwing faux fundamentalist Christian occupant of the White House from 2001 until this past January—and his constituency for that matter—really cared very little about Jewish people. Little that is, except under the fundamentalist concept of the so-called rapture, or end times, in which Jesus returns and Jews who don’t convert to Christianity will supposedly perish, or so the mythology goes. And that is the nonsense that governed Mideast policy for a decade. But I digress…

The Obama speech was a game changer because he accomplished a number of things: he presented a humbler and more contrite America, one which comes to the Muslim world with respect. With that respect, however, came a stern message. Obama discussed the long history of persecution of the Jewish people. Centuries of anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust, including the network of death camps—including Buchenwald, which Obama recently visited—that murdered 6 million Jews. “Threatening Israel with destruction -- or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews -- is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve,” the President emphasized. 

Addressing Israel, Obama declared that the growth of the settlements in the West Bank must end. To the Palestinians, he acknowledged their “intolerable” suffering, but suggested that violence will not work. Borrowing from the African American and South African experience, he noted that things changed for Black people not through violence, but fighting for and demanding their rights:  

"Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered."

Now, Obama is what some folks would call a real mensch, which is Yiddish for a man of integrity and honor. He laid it out on the table, seemingly without attachments to the way things were done in the past. Surely, he realizes that U.S. policy towards the Mideast must change, and the country must exert some positive leadership. (Whether Obama decides to resist the urge for a Bush-lite policy with empire building in Afghanistan and Pakistan remains to be seen.)  

Palestinians cannot sustain any more of an occupation that crushes the spirit and any sense of civil society, and Israelis can no longer pretend that they will ever feel safe, secure and free as long as they subjugate another people with Bantustans, checkpoints and identity cards. The hardliners, the base of Netanyahu’s coalition government, want nothing less than to keep building the settlements. Will the parties come to their senses and come to the table? Time will tell. “Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed,” as Obama said. “All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear.”  

I decided to take a survey of some of the voices in the U.S. and the Mideast in response to Obama’s Cairo visit. There are many thoughtful voices out there, to be sure, and some not so much. For example, 130 protestors protested at the American consulate in Jerusalem, chanting “20 new 'settlements' by 2010 - Yes We Can!” A rightwing group plans to disseminate a poster around Israel depicting Obama wearing a kaffiyeh, with the caption reading “Barak (sic) Hussein Obama, Anti-Semitic Jew-Hater.” 

Meanwhile, progressive journalists Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana decided to go through the streets of Jerusalem and interview young Israelis and American Jews on their feelings about the President. They were met with racist invective and violently offensive language from these young people in their twenties, many of whom are Americans studying in Israel. Their statements, caught on video, drip with a sense of visceral hatred and entitlement. And Blumenthal is concerned that many American Jews harbor such troubling views about Israeli politics:

• “He’s an asshole and deserves to get shot,” said one young man.
• “White power, f*ck the n*ggers!” said another.  
• “Oh he’s a Muslim for sure! And who even knows if he was born in the United States?” said one young woman, a political science major, who admitted she did not know who Benjamin Netanyahu is. “We haven’t seen his birth certificate yet. Bullsh*t. He’s not from the U.S. He’s like a terrorist. Just what is he doing for this country so far?”  
• Another man put it bluntly: “I just want to smoke a blunt and eat some watermelon with Obama, he’s just another n*gger.”
  

But there have been far more constructive and thoughtful critiques of Obama’s speech, particularly from progressive voices who seek justice in the Mideast. There is a vibrant Israeli peace movement out there, and a network of Jewish American peace organizations that are fighting for change. But they receive little attention in the press, particularly the U.S. media, and they must compete for airtime with the rightwing, pro-war hardliners.  

Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, the Chicago-based Jewish Alliance For Justice and Peace, has an online pledge to support Obama’s two-state solution. According to the organization,

"No previous U.S. administration has been so forthright. President Obama has been firm in his endeavor to facilitate negotiation towards a two state solution. He hopes to leave the Bush Administration's legacy of empty words and no action behind."

Debra DeLee, head of Americans For Peace Now, said 

"This bold speech demands bold action. The President is demonstrating determined, praiseworthy leadership on Mideast peacemaking. He is offering an historic opportunity for Israel and its neighbors. Israeli and Arab leaders must seize the moment. If they fail to so, they will be responsible for blood shed in the future in the region. For Americans who support Israel, this is also an important moment in which to stand squarely with a President who is doing his utmost to bring peace to Israel." 

On the issue of putting a stop to settlements, J Street, the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement, responded with the following:

"Amen. A freeze means a freeze. This is exactly the sort of leadership we need from the President and Secretary of State if we are going to achieve a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - the only way to truly secure Israel's future as a Jewish, democratic homeland.

You can bet the Obama Administration is already hearing from hawkish voices on Israel - urging him to make exceptions, allow for more settlement growth, and to go slow. We've got to make sure the President knows pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans. support his strong line on settlements, for both Israel's and America's sake and security."

Uri Avnery of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom called the President’s speech revolutionary and historic: 

"This world needs a world law, a world order, a world democracy. That’s why this speech really was historic: Obama outlined the basic contours of a world constitution.

WHILE OBAMA proclaims the 21st century, the government of Israel is returning to the 19th.

That was the century when a narrow, egocentric, aggressive nationalism took root in many countries. A century that sanctified the belligerent nation which oppresses minorities and subdues neighbors." 

Tikkun magazine characterized Obama’s address as “an important step in a process of changing consciousness both in the Arab world, Israel and the U.S.” adding that 

"While expansion through natural growth is one of the issues, we recognize that even if Israel were to agree to no further settlements that the lives of Palestinians would not dramatically improve and their suffering would not be diminished by this alone. So there is legitimate concern if this becomes the only or major focus of the U.S. role in the conflict." 

Electronic Intifada provided some poignant commentary as usual, including co-founder Ali Abunimah, who fears that Obama may prove to be a “Bush in sheep’s clothing,” offering an elusive two-state solution that does not safeguard Palestinian rights:

"He lectured Palestinians that "resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed." He warned them that "It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

Fair enough, but did Obama really imagine that such words would impress an Arab public that watched in horror as Israel slaughtered 1,400 people in Gaza last winter, including hundreds of sleeping, fleeing or terrified children, with American-supplied weapons? …Amnesty International recently confirmed what Palestinians long knew: Israel broke the negotiated ceasefire when it attacked Gaza last 4 November, prompting retaliatory rockets that killed no Israelis until after Israel launched its much bigger attack on Gaza. That he continues to remain silent about what happened in Gaza, and refuses to hold Israel accountable demonstrates anything but a commitment to full truth-telling."

And Medea Benjamin, cofounder of Global Exchange and CODEPINK: Women of Peace, echoed Abunimah’s concern over the carnage in Gaza, urging Obama to visit the Palestinian territory:

"But the issue that is really at the crux of the tensions with the United States is the intractable conflict between Israel and Palestine, and what many perceive as a one-sided US policy in support of Israel.

The Obama administration has taken a positive stand on the Israeli settlements, calling for a complete freeze. "[Obama] wants to see a stop to settlements -- not some settlements, not outposts, not 'natural growth' exceptions," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently told reporters.

But the administration has said almost nothing about the devastating Israeli invasion of Gaza that left more than 1,400 dead, including some 400 children. To many in the Middle East, this is an unfortunate continuation of past policies that condemn the loss of innocent Israeli lives, but refuse to speak out against the disproportionately greater loss of Palestinian lives at the hands of the Israeli military."

In a commentary two years ago, I discussed the importance of the Mideast peace movement— not tanks, helicopters or rifles from the U.S.—in helping to bring about change in that troubled holy land where love and even God often cannot be found. And such voices should be sought in playing an instrumental role in a new Palestine and a new Israel, one in which peace and human rights reign supreme.  

Obama made the call, but will they follow? Hopefully they will, because there is no other choice.

The World Needs Dr. King Now More Than Ever

Color of Law
By David A. Love
BlackCommentator.com
January 15, 2009

On this 80th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as I look at the state of human rights in the world I ask myself, “What would Dr. King do?”

Look at the situation in the Mideast, particularly the current bloodshed in Gaza. These attacks, a violation of international humanitarian law, can be described most charitably as a disproportionate use of force by the Israeli Defense Forces. Some have referred to this indiscriminate bombing of Gaza as a case of collective punishment, with the dehumanizing legacy of the occupation as the obvious backdrop.

As Gideon Levy of Ha’aretz, the Israeli daily newspaper noted, Israel’s military commander is now inclined “to kill as many as possible,” adding that “The unbridled aggression and brutality are justified as ‘exercising caution’: the frightening balance of blood - about 100 Palestinian dead for every Israeli killed, isn’t raising any questions, as if we’ve decided that their blood is worth one hundred times less than ours, in acknowledgement of our inherent racism.”

Such are the consequences when the drums of war drown out the voices of peace.

Let me take you to Philadelphia: Rabbi Linda Holtzman represents the best of Dr. King’s philosophy of standing up against injustice and for the rights of all people, particularly when it is unpopular to do so. Recently, she participated in a protest in front of the Israeli consulate. Rabbi Linda, as we affectionately call her, has been a spiritual advisor to my family. She was there for us when my son Ezra Malik was buried, when we sent him off, wrapped in a traditional shroud, to join his ancestors.

And she went to the protest, guided by her convictions, because the attacks in Gaza sickened her, and she could not tolerate what was going on there. To be sure, such a stance does not make Rabbi Linda very popular in some circles. Yet, it is because she exemplifies the teachings of Dr. King that she is one of my heroes.

Drum Major Instinct

As for Dr. King’s antiwar stance, we need not speculate, because he was very clear on the matter. As a key spokesperson for the human condition, King had no choice. On February 4, 1968, only two months before his assassination, Martin Luther King gave a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church titled, “The Drum Major Instinct,” which dealt with the propensity of human beings to want to be superior to others. The concept is important because it linked King’s condemnation of racism, economic exploitation and militarism, the “triple evils that are interrelated.” King, after all, well understood the universality and the interconnected nature of these three forms of oppression, that in order to eliminate one of them, it was necessary to eliminate them all. “And think of what has happened in history as a result of this perverted use of the drum major instinct,” King said. “It has led to the most tragic prejudice, the most tragic expressions of man’s inhumanity to man.”

For King, the world was being led down a suicidal path due to the drum major instinct, and the contest between nations for world supremacy:

“But this is why we are drifting. And we are drifting there because nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. ‘I must be first.’ ‘I must be supreme.’ ‘Our nation must rule the world.’ And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the supreme culprit. And I’m going to continue to say it to America, because I love this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.

God didn’t call America to do what she’s doing in the world now. God didn’t call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I’m going to continue to say it. And we won’t stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.”

For the civil rights leader who stood true to the gospel of social justice, and the Nobel Peace Prize winner who was thrust onto the international stage as a prominent human rights figure, his opposition to war was a natural progression from his platform on racial segregation. He remembered Dante’s admonition that “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a moment of moral crisis seek to maintain their neutrality.”

Letter From Birmingham Jail

And today, when many people, particularly religious leaders, remain silent in the midst of war, oppression, killing and other injustices, I am also reminded of Dr. King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail. King had special criticism reserved for the Southern White moderates who may have disapproved of segregation and the attendant racist policies and brutal treatment of Negroes, yet did or said nothing out of fear of retaliation or social ostracism.

He was particularly disappointed with the White clergy, who disapproved of his desegregation efforts as “unwise and untimely,” and whose otherworldly approach to religion precluded them from taking any action regarding social problems. Under their conservative brand of Christianity, order was (and still is) given preference over justice and freedom. “In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro,” King said, “I have watched white churches stand on the sideline and merely mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.” Sadly, conservative Christianity made many White religious leaders reluctant to acknowledge the equality of humankind under society and the law, just as all people were supposedly equal before God in the spiritual sense.

Civil Disobedience and Unjust Laws

Martin Luther King led a movement which led to the writing of new laws such as the civil rights legislation of the mid-1960s. These laws were written in the blood of those demonstrators who risked, and at times gave, their lives for social justice. Ironically, yet appropriately, Dr. King’s achievements came not merely by challenging unjust and immoral segregation laws, but through disobeying such laws.

His attitudes toward immoral laws were rooted in his religious beliefs, and out of a concern for the effects of the oppressive laws on the oppressed. In King’s eyes, segregation was unacceptable because it denied blacks their self-respect. The segregation laws assigned a false badge of inferiority to African Americans and a false badge of superiority to whites. Laws which degrade human personality, in King’s view, are unjust.

The man who broke unjust laws was responsible for the creation of new laws. To that end, Dr. King demonstrated the true potency of nonviolent resistance. “We made our government write new laws to alter some of the cruelest injustices that affected us,” he said. “We made an indifferent and unconcerned nation rise from lethargy and subpoenaed its conscience to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights.”

China is one country in desperate need of a Kingian-style movement of civil disobedience. On the one hand, that nation’s rate of economic growth has been stunning by any measure. Until the global economic crisis, this world economic power was bankrolling America by holding $1 trillion in U.S. debt.

On the other hand, the 2008 Beijing Olympics proved that police states put on the best shows. While they do everything to try to prove to you how great and perfect they are, for all of their ostentatious displays, never can they hide the truth.

The world gave China - this Communist totalitarian state turned hypercapitalist totalitarian state – a big huge pass by allowing it to conduct business as usual throughout the Olympics. And in the process, the Chinese government was able to show its people that the world respected it, and that it could do what it wanted to them with impunity.

So during the Olympics coverage, one could learn where to find the best Peking Duck in Beijing, or hear about the hottest fashions in China, or admire that nation’s glitzy, ultramodern, high-tech capital city. The biggest scandals reported were the fake, computer enhanced fireworks display during the opening ceremonies, the allegedly underaged gymnasts, and the lipsynching little girl who replaced a singer judged not cute enough for display at the Olympics.

But the world heard nothing about China’s arbitrary laws and unjust punishments. China promised to allow permits to protesters during the Olympics, yet subsequently sentenced two elderly Chinese women to “re-education through labour” for applying for such a permit.

We heard nothing of China’s economic relationship with Sudan’s genocidal regime. No word about China’s oppression of minority groups, suppression of religious freedom, or its policy of cultural genocide in Tibet. No word about forced labor and torture, a socio-economic apartheid system for rural areas, the assaults on freedom of speech, the arrests of journalists, and the imprisonment of critics of the government.

Journalist and documentary filmmaker Kevin McKiernan is in the post-production stages of a film called Bringing King To China. The documentary focuses on a groundbreaking play in China about Dr. King, and a young American woman’s quest to introduce Chinese audiences to Dr. King’s message of universal rights, peace and nonviolent struggle. Perhaps a cross-cultural dialogue about the man’s philosophy could provide the spark that will transform Beijing the way it transformed Birmingham. Time will tell.

But this is certain: the world needs Dr. King more than ever, and although he is no longer with us physically, he has provided us with a blueprint for international peace that will forever endure…if we allow it.