Popular Gaza Band "Watar" (tune) Expresses Hopes of Young People for a Better Life

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News Flash! Christians are now not Arabs! Israel Rearranges its Heirarchy of Citizens and their Different Level of Rights

The Israeli Knesset has enacted legislation that reclassifies Christian Arabs as now just Christians; they are no longer merely Arabs. Until now the state of Israel has listed its citizens as being of Jewish, Druze, or Arab nationality. The term "Arab" is used because this is considered to be a general national or racial classification; Yaweh forbid that they be called "Palestinians!" since that would imply that they are a nationality with some historical rights to the land of their birth and ancestry..we can't have that! Not in the Jewish and democratic state.

Of course the new levels of citizenship don't recognize the existence of Muslims, so the religion of Islam either isn't noticed legally in Israel, or it is something that inherently resides in being an Arab. In Israel all Arabs are Muslims; but are all Muslims Arabs? Try asking this question in Pakistan, Indonesia or Bosnia. This obviously fails the syllogism test (should we conclude that "all men are Socrates?")

If something seems scrambled-up here you are right.

What is this business of creating a hazy melange of religions, supposed nationalities and an actually vague classification of "Arab," which, like "Semite," is not a nationality, or a religion, or, for that matter, really a race? And what does it tell us about Israel and our (USA citizens, or French or Mexican or any other "normal" country) understanding of what citizenship is?

And since when is Christian a nationality?

The only definition of Arab (or Semite) that holds water is that of a language group. Arabs are native Arab speakers. If you compare the people in, for example, Yemen, Lebanon, and Morocco you will see national differences in culture, but they all speak Arabic (but the accents may vary so much that there are areas of mutual incomprehension.) So can you take a Yemeni and put him in Beirut or Cairo and say "it's all the same, Arabs are interchangeable? We have blue eyed fair skinned Arabs and very dark brown eyed Arabs (and then there are Berbers). Can you say it doesn't matter if you take a Chilean from Santiago and put him in a village in Paraguay? They all speak Spanish, right?

If you define all Semites as native speakers of a Semitic language, this group would include some Jews, some Arabs, and speakers of the languages of Ethiopia and Somalia.But this kind of definition is restricted, clear and scientifically correct but not politically useful, so forget about it.

In the USA a person who is born here is a citizen with equal rights (on paper, anyway) to every other citizen. A person who is a citizen of another country can become a US citizen. That's it! No differing levels of legal status, no carrying of internal ID papers designating religion, race or nationality which indicate how the individual is to be treated. This is what we normally think of when the word citizenship comes up.

Israel, being the state of Jews only, has another system. Everyone is not legally equal. Only Jews have an unrestricted right to buy and own land. Arabs can't be in the army, and in a military centered country such as Israel, not having discharge papers can cut you off from benefits and job opportunities. There are several other laws in Israel that specify rights to Jewish citizens that are denied to all other citizens.

This situation may be called many things, but it can't be called remotely democratic (then there's the outright military occupation of the West Bank where non-Jews are subject to martial law).

The premise of Zionism, and Israel, is that Jews are a nation. This idea of a Jewish nation stems from the 19th century European romantic movement that posits an ideal of ethnic purity: one people, one blood, unsullied by alien elements. This concept is disturbingly similar to the Germanic racialist idea of a Volk. In many ways Zionism is a flip-side of European anti-Semitism.

What counts in Israel is nationality. The status of Israeli citizen doesn't give anyone rights--for rights you need to be the correct nationality.

Jews get democracy. The Druze, a small monotheist sect different from the Islamic and Jewish religions has been given a separate status different from Arabs; they have more rights than Arabs, who are at the bottom. Why do this? From the viewpoint of the Israeli state it's simple: divide and conquer. It fosters divisions among the non-Jewish population and makes them more manageable.

Now Israel is trying to separate Christians from their Islamic fellow Palestinians. The government hopes to split Christians away and buy them off with special treatment. Until now Christian and Muslim Palestinians have been equally robbed of their rights and land. Many Christians have participated in protests and support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

Christian leaders in Israel have seen through this rather cheesy ploy. They share the same conditions as their Muslim brothers and sisters and know that Israel's long term campaign of land theft and ethnic cleansing is aimed squarely at them, no matter what questionable changes in status are given to them by their oppressors.

Traveling Through Palestine While Black: A Firsthand Look at a Slow-Moving Annexation Witnessing a brutal occupation, where permanent insecurity and maximum humiliation are the norm.

AlterNet / By Bill Fletcher, Jr.




In the first several days after returning from Israel and Occupied Palestine, I dreamed of Palestine each night. It was never a pleasant dream. While I cannot remember the details, I was always left with a feeling of anxiety and insecurity. In that sense the dreams matched the realities of the Palestinians, be they citizens of Israel or residents of the Occupied Territories. It also corresponded to the emotions raised in a recent trip in which I participated.

Prison

It has become almost a cliché to speak of Gaza, the Palestinian territories on the Mediterranean controlled by Hamas and blockaded by Israel, as the largest open-air prison on the planet. Yet I am not sure I will any longer agree with the limits of that characterization. The Palestinians are all in prison. While Gaza may be a maximum security facility, the West Bank is nevertheless a prison. So little is actually controlled by Palestinians despite the formal notion of autonomy. Israeli military incursions can and do happen at any time convenient for the Israeli government and its military occupation. Palestinians are prohibited from using certain roads. The ominous and illegal separation wall, better known as the apartheid wall, spreads like a disease across the land, dividing the Palestinians not as much from the Israelis as from their own land.

For all of that, it is the sense of permanent insecurity and maximum humiliation that reinforces the feeling one gets of being in a prison. There are checkpoints at seemingly every turn; one is subjected to being stopped at any time. There is an attitude of arrogance and contempt on the part of most of the Israeli military personnel. With their submachine guns and their insistence on using Hebrew in communicating with the Arabic-speaking Palestinians, they invade the space of the indigenous population, always reminding them that there is no such thing as privacy in the Occupied Territories.

An African-American delegation

Within black America there has for decades been an amorphous constituency that, at a minimum, has been interested in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and in many cases has been supportive of Palestinians and their fight for national self-determination and democracy. Yet the issue of Palestine has rarely been one around which African Americans, in any great numbers, have organized and mobilized, or for that matter even spoken out.

It has nevertheless been the case that since the June 1967 Six Day War between Israel and its Arab neighbors, there have been African Americans who have raised questions about the objectives of Israel in its occupation of Palestinian territories and its treatment of its own Palestinian minority. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) offered an historic condemnation of Israel in the aftermath of the June 1967 war, resulting in SNCC losing a significant portion of its white support in the USA. The black radical movement, of which SNCC was part[during the course of the 1970s], frequently linked the cause of the Palestinians with the struggles against colonialism and white minority rule in Africa. And during the 1970s and 1980s, center-left political figures such as Rev. Jesse Jackson began pushing the US mainstream consensus around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, insisting on the legitimacy of the demands of the Palestinian people.

The small African-American delegation of which I was a part of in many ways reflected this internationalist tradition. Though broadly speaking progressive, most of the members of the delegation were under 45 and had little background in the Palestinian liberation struggle. Comprised largely of artists, the members of the delegation were individuals cognizant of but not immersed in international issues at the level of organizing and mobilizing.

Almost universally, delegation members were unprepared for the in-your-face brutality of the Occupation. While it may seem melodramatic, the visit was potentially life-changing for each member of the delegation. The question is whether the overwhelming sense of the criminality of the Occupation will be suppressed inside each of us over time since such feelings compel one to ask several questions, not the least being, how can the USA be so complicit in this horror?

The Middle East’s One True Democracy?

It is clear that it is more than possible to visit Israel and have no sense of the apartheid system that operates both within its borders as well as in the Occupied Territories. Such visits happen all the time. It is not possible, however, to visit the Occupied Territories and walk away with such ignorance intact unless, perhaps, one goes directly from Jerusalem to a settlement in the dead of night and fails to leave the settlement’s confines.

Israel has been an explicit occupying power—by international standards—since the June 1967 war when it seized the West Bank from Jordan, the Golan Heights from Syria and the Sinai from Egypt.1 Almost immediately after the commencement of the Occupation, Israel began to construct a system and program of settlements in the Occupied Territories. What too many people in the USA fail to understand—or do not wish to understand—is that settlements on occupied territory represent a violation of international law. Both Israel and Morocco (in the latter’s occupation of the Western Sahara) are explicitly in violation of international law through their respective colonization projects. The United Nations has been quite clear that Israel should stop settlements, but in large part due to the refusal of the United States to take a serious stand against this practice, Israel has snubbed its nose at the UN and at most of the rest of the world.2

The term “settlement” does not properly convey what one sees in the Occupied Territories. What strikes any first-time visitor is that the settlements can better be described as suburban communities, not unlike the communities of stucco-tiled homes that line the hills along the coast of southern California. The word settlements brings to mind tent cities or other impermanent housing arrangements with neither water nor sewer service out in the middle of nowhere. That is not what one sees in the West Bank.

Much as they did within Israel proper, the Israeli authorities have seized lands owned by Palestinians in order to create, in this case, settlements on the West Bank. This land has been seized in the name of security in some instances, and has been seized in other instances because the Palestinians have allegedly abandoned it. In still other cases, land has been seized because Israeli authorities have proclaimed an archeological find located in the territory inhabited by Palestinians, thus justifying land theft and the removal of Palestinians. There are a host of reasons that are offered, with desperate attempts to find justification within an alleged legal framework.

But here is where the trick unfolds. The Israeli authorities make and then enforce respect for the laws that they need in order to advance their own objectives. Even in situations such as Hebron where the Israeli court has agreed that certain territory should be returned to the Palestinians, the Israeli military refuses to comply and nothing has been done about it.3

The “settlements” begin with what look like camps. Indeed, some of them are called outposts if they're originally built without explicit government approval. They seem innocuous at first, but what is striking is that they are each designed as part of a process of surrounding Palestinian cities. While, for instance, the city of Bethlehem is Palestinian, Israeli settlements have been established around Bethlehem which, in conjunction with the refusal of the Israeli authorities to allow Palestinian expansion, essentially chokes the city itself.

So, for a moment, think about a nice suburban community in the USA. Now, think about several such communities being located on hilltops surrounding a central community inhabited by a different ethnic group that is not allowed to partake in any of the resources of those suburban communities. In fact, residents of that central community are not permitted to use the same roads as the settlers and are not even guaranteed water. It was pointed out that one can tell the difference between Israeli settlements and Palestinian communities by who has water tanks on their roofs. Why? Because the settlers are guaranteed access to water pumped into their homes. Palestinians have to rely on water that is collected over time and stored in water tanks on their roofs.

The West Bank is divided into three zones: A, B and C. “A” are those zones under Palestinian control. “B” is under Palestinian administrative control, but the Israeli military has the final word. “C” is under Israeli military control. Sixty percent of the West Bank is classified as Zone C. These designations, which arose out of the fateful Oslo Peace Accords, have resulted in the interminable squeezing of the Palestinian population. There is no room for their expansion, they control no water and there is the ominous separation wall which disrespects international law by its very existence, cutting through the West Bank and cutting off entire communities from the land that they farm. As one Palestinian explained to me, the Palestinian experience is akin to the legendary Chinese water torture, with the drops of water falling on one’s forehead, slowly driving the person insane. In this case, each drop—each micro- and macro-aggression—is aimed at making the situation so intolerable for the Palestinians that they will abandon their homeland.

You Cannot Run Away From Race

Israel and the Occupied Territories exist within the framework of a particular and peculiar racial hierarchy. During the first three decades of its existence, the world was led to believe that race was not a factor in Israel, discounting, of course, the treatment of the Palestinians. With the appearance of the Israeli Black Panther movement in the early 1970s, all of that changed, and actually introduced complications.

The Israeli Black Panthers originated in the Mizrahi community, that is, Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. They emerged as a militant protest movement challenging an Israeli establishment that was dominated by Ashkenazis (Jews from Europe). Though the movement borrowed the name from the US-based Black Panther Party, in reality the movements had little in common other than addressing, to varying degrees, race. The Israeli Black Panthers were not a particularly left-wing formation and they were not at all sympathetic to the Palestinian people. Instead, they were a movement that challenged racial discrimination and privilege within the Jewish Israeli bloc, but in no way suggested that the very existence of an Israel that marginalized and oppressed Palestinians undermined any intentions or efforts to eradicate racial discrimination.

Thus, the Israeli racial hierarchy exists with the Ashkenazi Jews largely at the top; then the Mizrahi. At that point the hierarchy reformats given that outside of the Jewish Israeli bloc there are three very separate groups: the Palestinians, the Druze (an ethno-religious community), and most recently, African migrants.

There are many people who have been involved with the issue of Palestine who refrain from references to “race” when it comes to describing or analyzing the situation of the Palestinians. Instead, they focus on the “national” aspect of the oppression and the generalized denial of human rights. Yet in walking the streets of Occupied Palestine, and also in walking through Israel-proper, members of our African-American delegation could not escape the feeling that we had seen this before.

The United Nations definition of the "crime of apartheid” from 1973 reads in part: “Inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them." This definition is of critical importance for several reasons, not the least being that it is not limited to the South African or even Southern African context. In other words, as far as the international community is concerned, “apartheid,” as a system, is a category of racist oppression that can exist outside of Southern Africa, though the term itself was coined in South Africa.

The stench of race and the racism perpetrated against the Palestinians is evident throughout Israel and the Occupied Territories, manifesting itself in various forms. The most obvious form surrounds the matter of the “right of return.” Jews, regardless of nationality, are guaranteed a home in Israel. Palestinians, irrespective of whether their families inhabited a piece of land for generations, are not guaranteed the right to return to their lands in Israel if the Israeli state has declared that they have abandoned the land. This is once again in contravention to United Nations resolutions and Geneva Conventions.

Palestinians, regardless of their country of residence, are subject to humiliating harassment when they attempt to enter or leave Israel. Palestinian citizens of Israel find themselves subject to full body searches at airports and other exit points, not to mention extensive interrogations.

As noted earlier, there are certain roads on which Palestinians are prohibited. This was a matter that our delegation directly experienced. The van we were using was authorized to travel on settler-only roads, but our Palestinian guide could only travel with special permission. Yet these “settler-only” roads often run under or through Palestinian land. The inability of Palestinians to use these roads means that travel between various points within the West Bank is nothing short of onerous. A trip that would normally take 30 minutes can end up taking 90 minutes or more.

An additional feature to “race” in Israel and the Occupied Territories is something that can perhaps be described as ecological racism. It concerns trees—specifically, pine trees. In the vicinity of many of the Israeli settlements one finds pine trees. They are very beautiful but there is a problem. These pine trees are not native to Israel/Palestine. They have been brought to the region by Europeans. The planting of these pine trees is as ecologically catastrophic as it is offensive to the Palestinians. There are pine trees that are native to the region, but the settlers have decided to ignore that reality and bring in alien vegetation that is harmful to the land and the water table.4 The settlers have made a practice of planting these European pine trees on the locations of Palestinian villages in the Occupied Territories that were destroyed in order to make way for the Israeli settlements.

In order to understand race, one must appreciate the notion of arbitrariness. Anyone who has directly experienced racism realizes that it is the insecurity and the notion that at any moment matters can be taken out of your hands that makes the racist oppression ever-present and very real. In the case of an African American in the USA, the idea that one can be stopped by the police when driving through a white neighborhood, or in a different scenario, shot and killed by a white homeowner if you happen to knock on his door, that emphasizes the perpetual vulnerability that one experiences.

This is very much the same with Palestinians. A former Israeli soldier, offering insight into the workings of the Occupation, noted that Israeli soldiers are trained and encouraged to engage in random, violent acts against the Palestinians, for example, through invading the homes of Palestinians for no apparent reason. The idea behind such psychological warfare is to keep the Palestinian people perpetually unstable and uneasy.

Violence perpetrated against Palestinians, particularly by settlers, is rarely punished by the Israeli state. Yet any violence by Palestinians against settlers earns the wrath of the settlers and the Israeli military. Again, despite the pretense of a system governed by laws, the Israeli domination of the Palestinians—whether in Israel or in the Occupied Territories—is outside the law. To borrow from the Dred Scott decision in the US, the Palestinians have few, if any rights, that Israelis are bound to respect. Though this is frequently covered in religious and semi-religious rhetoric, the basic fact remains that the Palestinians exist as a subordinate species as far as most Israelis are concerned.

This sense of violence surrounded our experience as a delegation. We never feared a terrorist attack or armed assault by Palestinians. Yet every day, it is fair to say, we approached our activities with caution vis-a-vis the Israelis. One never knew, from one moment to the next, whether we would be held and interrogated, or whether our Palestinian guide would at some point be whisked away from us for allegedly breaking any of the myriad restrictions imposed on the Palestinians by the Israeli establishment.

But the sense of violence was concrete in a different manner. At one point, in a tour of the South Hebron Hills, our van stopped and a guide, who happened to be a former Israeli soldier, had us outside while he was explaining the Israeli system of outposts and settlements. Several settlers drove by, slowly, watching us. In one case a settler, who as it turned out had been implicated in physical assaults on Palestinians, drove by twice, the second time stopping his vehicle immediately behind us where he just sat for several minutes, glowering. Although our Israeli guide was not particularly worried, our delegation, keenly aware of African-American history and black experience at the hands of white vigilantes, was less than sanguine about sitting out in the middle of nowhere. At the end of the day, we all knew that there existed scant (no) justice (system) in the Occupied Territories for people like us.

Race has taken on a newer form in Israel with the introduction of African migrants. There are actually two sets of African migrants. First, the Ethiopian Jews (Falasha), many of whom were brought to Israel in a mass retrieval. The Israeli establishment, irrespective of their rhetoric, has never been entirely comfortable with this population, and Israeli right-wing and semi-fascists are even less so. A recent incident whereby a Falasha, who is an elected member of the Knesset, was not allowed to donate blood highlights the point. Nevertheless, this segment of the population is considered, officially at least, to be legitimate. They are found in the Israel Defense Forces and elsewhere.

Separate and apart from the Falasha are the African migrants who have traveled to Israel as political refugees. Described by none other than Prime Minister Netanyahu as “infiltrators”—a term which I only recently learned had originally been coined to describe expelled Palestinians who crossed back into Israel—this population has grown over the last decade. A significant percentage of these migrants are from Eritrea and Sudan. Their likelihood of gaining citizenship or a legal status is slim to none. Yet, as with migrants in so many other parts of the world—including but not limited to the US—the Israeli economy finds such migrants quite useful as a productive and vulnerable workforce, even if the Israeli political Right wishes them expelled.

Walking through the streets of South Tel Aviv on a Saturday afternoon is a surreal experience. Our delegation saw a huge wedding party of East Africans. A park became the home for hundreds of African men, socializing or simply hanging out. This migrant population has become an unstable element in Israel. The political establishment has shown no interest in offering asylum—temporary or permanent—to these migrants, so many of whom have sought freedom from hunger, repression and war. Instead they have been locked up or are living lives in the shadows. In the recent past they have begun to organize and mobilize, insisting upon their human rights. In fact, our delegation spoke with Israeli supporters of the migrants who informed us that the loose organization of migrants wishes to take their case to the United Nations if the Israeli government continues to refuse to recognize their rights as legitimate refugees.

In the case of both the Palestinians and the African undocumented migrants there is a demographic concern that eats away at the Israeli political establishment. They are actually quite open about this concern. Contrary to the international notion of an ethnically pluralist democracy, the Israeli establishment believes that they, and they alone, have the right to an ethnically/religiously pure nation-state. However, they face four problems: the existence of Palestinian citizens of Israel who represent approximately 20% of the state of Israel and are growing; the Palestinians in the West Bank; a Palestinian Diaspora that insists upon its internationally recognized right to return to the land that they believed that they temporarily vacated in 1948, and later in 1967; and the undocumented Africans.

For the Israeli establishment the sum total of these problems is a demographic threat to Israel. Specifically, the Israeli establishment is deeply worried that they will quickly become another apartheid South Africa or white minority Rhodesia, wherein the Jewish population ends up constituting a minority and is swamped by non-Jews.5 Although publicly cast in religious terms, the problem really comes down to cold demographics, in that sense so very similar to the US Southwest in the period after the US war against Mexico and the white expansion into lands populated by Mexicans and those populated by Native Americans.

Since We Are Talking About Race...

There is another side to race in Israel and Palestine that gained the attention of our delegation: race within the Palestinian community.

Among Arabs, race is a very complicated matter that cannot be distilled down to skin tone or hair texture. The Arabic word that is frequently used for “blacks” is the same word that is used for “slaves” (Abeed or Abid). Yet, some who use that term—as in the case of Northern Sudanese—would be described as black in a US context.6 It is also worth noting that there has been struggle around the very usage of the term, much as there has been in the USA around terms such as “Oriental.”

One can get different signals from within both Arab and Muslim history regarding race. One of the most important people in Islamic history was an Ethiopian slave liberated by the Prophet Muhammad, named Bilal ibn Rabah. And certainly a "black" presence can be seen throughout the Arab world and Arab history, e.g., in the recent past, Egypt’s Nasser and Sadat. At the same time there was the Arab-run slave trade and in various parts of the Arab World biases against those seen or described as black.

Arabs who migrated to the USA (pre-1980) by and large developed a relationship with African Americans that was less than solidaristic. Arab/African American tensions in the US in part reflected the economic niche that many Arabs came to occupy, that is, store owners in African-American neighborhoods, and otherwise having little constructive contact. This was compounded by attempts by Arab immigrants to assimilate into white America, attempts which grew in complexity in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.

The problematic side to the relationship between Arabs and African Americans in the US contrasts with the emergence of a significant Muslim trend within black America and also with the attention that the Arab world received within progressive political circles in black America in the context of the anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century. For example, the Egyptian Revolution and the Algerian Revolution were discussed in African-American political movements and frequently served as points of inspiration. The favorable feeling toward the Arab world in much of black America was aided by the outstanding assistance that Arab nations, such as Egypt and Algeria, offered to anti-colonial struggles in other parts of Africa.

The Palestinian movement, as it moved to the Left and became more radical in its analysis and approach, also saw itself as aligned with other anti-colonial and national liberation movements. This included attention to the African-American people’s movement in the US. The Left within the Palestinian movement had an appreciation of the African-American struggle, but the global solidarity work of the Palestine Liberation Organization never matched that of South Africa’s African National Congress or Pan African Congress of Azania in terms of building a breadth of organized support.

Nevertheless, certainly by the time of the Oslo Accords (1993), the PLO/Palestinian Authority adopted a different and more insular view. Much like Ireland’s Sinn Fein, which in the aftermath of the cease fire in the north of Ireland slowly but surely abandoned many of the broader international relationships it had cultivated, the Palestinian Authority turned in on itself, ignoring many of its global supporters, and sadly, ignoring many from the global Palestinian Diaspora as well. As such, connections that seemed to have existed between the Palestinian movement and black America dried up.

Attention to the matter of racism among Arabs reemerged in the context of the civil war that took place in the Sudan (between the North and the South), and subsequently, the war in Darfur and the genocide that unfolded. As a result of the fact that so many countries of the Arab world united behind Sudanese President Al Bashir in both internal conflicts (claiming that the West was attempting to dismantle the Sudan), and ignored the plight of those who suffered at the hands of his and prior regimes, sensitivity to this issue has grown within segments of black America.

Our delegation was not immune to that sensitivity. Thus, it was fascinating to have begun the trip with a discussion with Afro-Palestinians. There is a lengthy African presence within and among the Palestinian people. While there are those who can trace their ancestry back 1,000 years, over the last 100 years migrants from various parts of Africa settled in Palestine (what is now Israel as well as the Occupied Territories) and were absorbed into the larger Palestinian community. This community sees itself as Palestinian and there has been much intermarriage with other segments of the Palestinian community. Yet, shades of color and the legacy of the Arab slave trade remain a component of the Arab reality, compounded by the impact of European colonialism and its modification of the ignominious color line.

The biases we occasionally encountered were not surprising, any more than unpleasant encounters between an Arab delegation and some African Americans, if the former were visiting the US. The critical matter that confronted us, as a delegation, was the attitude of leading elements of the Palestinian movement toward race both within and among the Palestinian people, but also vis-à-vis the Arab relationship within and toward the larger African world.7 It was here that we began a constructive dialogue that can be mutually beneficial. Among other things it reminded the African Americans that race does not play itself out identically around the world. Our experience with white supremacy in the US, for instance, is quite different from the rationale and operation of race among Arabs, a formerly colonized people. Our experience with white supremacy, however, shares a great deal in common with the Palestinian experience with Israeli apartheid in both the state of Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Time Running Out

When I first visited Occupied Palestine, in 2011, there was something about the experience that seemed very familiar. It was not only the sense of the racist oppression the Palestinians were experiencing; it was something else. When I returned home I realized what it was.

In 2005 I drove with my family from Los Angeles to Boulder, CO. We drove through a Navaho area. There was a sense of depression, if not despair, from the Navaho we encountered and the realization that this proud people had been relegated by a conqueror to less than perfect lands where they were to remain. Some Native Americans were not so “lucky.” They are only remembered by the names of some rivers and towns, having been annihilated in the process of the European expansion westward.

There was a moment in the early 19th century when the demographic balance of North America was not so unbalanced that it might have been possible for Native Americans to have constructed a different outcome. This was the principal focus of the Shawnee leader Tecumseh, but there were others who also recognized the nature of the challenge. Unfortunately, by the time of the US war against Mexico, the balance was clearly against Native Americans. Immigrants from Europe were flooding into North America, and combined with technology (including military technology), the Native Americans were defeated and ultimately marginalized.

While Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. may have been correct in affirming that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice, this does not mean that every morally just struggle wins, at least in the short-term. There is something about timing, which is linked to organization and the extent of support any cause has within both a nation-state context and globally.

As our delegation rode through Israel and the Occupied Territories I could not help but wonder how much time remained for the Palestinians. I do not mean to suggest that they face physical annihilation, in the sense of extermination through mass executions.8 They do face the possibility of a different sort of annihilation. If their land continues to be seized; if they cannot build; if they remain cornered like rats in a maze; they will cease to exist. They will find themselves without their homeland, and much like Native Americans in North America, relocated to some other territory or simply dispersed onto the winds.

Much of the Israeli political establishment believes that Palestinians should be evicted and moved to Jordan. In that sense the Israeli strategy for a slow-moving annexation of the West Bank, as criminal as it is, is nevertheless quite understandable. They want to turn the conditions in the Occupied Territories, along with the conditions for Palestinian citizens of Israel, into something so inhospitable, that there is no choice but to move.

Our delegation certainly was moved to speak out against this abomination. Yet so much more is necessary. Insofar as the leadership of the Palestinian Authority is prepared to make serial and humiliating concessions to the demands of Israel and its US sponsors, the future of the Palestinians will resemble the reality of today’s Native American nations in North America. In the alternative, the extent to which the global community is moved to counter the current denial of Palestinian rights, appropriation of Palestinian lands, and displacement of Palestinian people—as occurred with regard to colonialism and white minority rule in Africa—is the extent to which Dr. King’s arc will bend toward justice.

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1 Some in the Palestinian movement have taken the position that the entire area of historic Palestine is occupied. They base this claim on the manner in which the United Nations divided up the then-British-controlled “Palestine Mandate” into Jewish zones and Arab zones (and Jerusalem as an international city) without the input or approval of any Arabs, not the least being the exclusion of the Palestinians themselves. In the text of this essay, however, the use of the term “occupied” makes reference to territories seized by Israel through the June 1967 war.

2 Morocco, in part due to its alliance with France and the US, has done much the same.

3 For more on the situation in Hebron, see: Allison Deger, “Palestinians in Hebron demand Israel ‘Open Shuhada Street’ and protest 20th anniversary of Ibrahimi Mosque massacre,” Feb. 24, 2014, mondoweiss.net/2014/02/palestinians-twentieth-anniversary.html. Additionally, see: Alternative Information Center, “Settler Aggression Against Palestinian Children in Hebron,” Institute for Middle East Understanding, April 14, 2011, at imeu.net/news/printer0020752.shtml.

4 It is interesting to note that European settlers did much the same thing in South Africa. The post-apartheid government began taking steps to remove the alien vegetation due to its impact on the environment.

5 A close examination of the current numbers, if one were to look at the Gaza, West Bank, and Palestinian citizens of Israel, points to the basis for the demographic unease within the Israeli establishment. This helps to explain the xenophobic tendencies within the right-wing of the Israeli establishment that would actually like to envision a wholesale population “swap.”

6 Look at a picture of Sudan President Al Bashir, for instance.

7 The wording of this challenge is complicated by many factors. “Arab” represents a culture and Arabic is a language. Arabs are themselves quite diverse. In fact, there is an overlap between Arabs and other ethnic groups in North Africa especially, e.g., the Berbers. Arabs are part of Africa (and Asia) and the broader African world, while at the same constituting their own Arab world. Neither is monolithic. The Maghreb, or the Arab world to the west of Egypt, includes various tribes and ethnicities as far west as the Western Sahara and Mauritania.

8 The Deir Yassin massacre is among the most well-known of the ethnic cleansings carried out against Palestinians between 1946-'49 at the hands of Zionist military units.

Happy Birthday, Ornette Coleman, free jazz pioneer

How Latino activists are standing up to the Israel lobby

Adriana Maestas and
Rania Khalek
The Electronic Intifada
6 March 2014

Wall along the border between the US city of Nogales, Arizona, and the Mexican city of Nogales, Sonora. Graffiti says “The border is big because we are on our knees” and “No wall!” (Steev Hise/Flickr)

This special report for The Electronic Intifada is the second of two. The first looked at the Israel lobby’s outreach campaign to the Latino American community.

As the pro-Israel lobby’s aggressive recruitment of Latino Americans intensifies, a number of Latino and Chicano groups are pushing back by aligning themselves with the Palestinian struggle.

At its March 2012 annual conference, chapter leaders of the Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA), a Chicano (Mexican-American) student group with a four-decade history of activism and a presence throughout the US, endorsed the call to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel for its occupation and settlement in Palestine.

Drawing on the parallels of the Chicano struggle for justice in the US, the endorsement of the boycott was announced on National Cesar Chavez Day, which also happened to fall on Palestinian Land Day.

Chavez famously led strikes and boycotts in the struggle for justice for farmworkers and is widely considered one of the most important Latino leaders in American history.

In a joint press release, Students for Justice in Palestine at Arizona State University and National MEChA highlighted the growing trend of building “cross-movement relationships” between Latino groups and Palestine solidarity organizations at universities across the country.
A Tale of two checkpoints

Gabriel Camacho, a Boston-based immigrant rights advocate and coordinator for immigration programs with the American Friends Service Committee, has been involved in countering the efforts of Zionists who invite Latino leaders on all-expenses-paid trips to Israel.

The AFSC has a history of supporting Palestinian refugees since 1948, when 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from what would become Israel.

Beyond his professional work in immigration, Camacho became more involved in the Palestine solidarity movement after he noticed that Latino leaders in the Boston metropolitan area were being invited on all-expenses-paid trips to Israel sponsored by groups including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee.

To offer an alternative perspective, Camacho organized a delegation to Palestine in 2010 for people of color.

“There were Chicanos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans,” said Camacho. “We were mostly in the West Bank – we weren’t able to go to the Gaza strip.”

Many of the participants recognized parallels between the oppression of Palestinians and their own oppression as colonized and marginalized people.

“A young Chicano from San Diego who was part of the delegation said, ‘Wow, this was just like home,’ and then he went on to describe how the border patrol asks for your ID and can stop you when you take a trolley to San Ysidro,” explained Camacho.

San Diego’s trolley system provides service to the San Ysidro point of entry, which is one of the busiest land border crossings in the world adjacent to Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico. Back in 2002, Latino rights organizations criticized the Border Patrol for targeting Latinos who were riding the San Diego trolley in its pursuit of undocumented immigrants.
“Two Walls, One Struggle”

When he returned from Palestine, Camacho immediately got working on a PowerPoint presentation titled, “Two Walls, One Struggle: a structural comparison of colonialization, territorial loss, and racist aggression in Mexico and Palestine” to present to Latinos who are invited on trips to Israel by some of the Israel advocacy organizations.

The presentation noted striking similarities between the US colonization of Mexico and Zionist colonization of Palestine.

At the end of the US-Mexican war in 1848, Mexico lost nearly half of its territory to the US, which annexed the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming.

In his book, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, scholar Rudolfo Acuña argues that people of Mexican descent in the US southwest live under the domination of Anglo-American invaders.

Building on this connection, the presentation noted that Elbit Systems, the Israeli company that helps operate the illegal separation wall in the West Bank, also has a contract with the US Department of Homeland Security to build high tech portions of the border wall between the US and Mexico.

Camacho has managed to connect some Latinos with organizations in Palestine during their Israel hasbara — propaganda — trips so that they can stay a few more days and get an unfiltered view of places in the West Bank, like Hebron.

Still, Camacho said, it is rare for a Latino leader who is disturbed by what they have witnessed in Palestine to speak out due to backlash from the pro-Israel groups.
From Puerto Rico to Palestine

Puerto Rico has been a colony since 1493, but the island was not formally ceded to the United States until 1898 at the end of the Spanish-American War.

Sometimes referred to as “the oldest colony in the world,” some Puerto Ricans have compared their political situation to that of the Palestinians.

René Pérez, of the hip-hop group Calle 13, shot a music video in Bethlehem, in the occupied West Bank in December 2013.

Pérez told the Associated Press during that trip that Puerto Ricans are connected to Palestinians “because we are a colony of the United States. Here you have the situation with Israel.”

He added, “It would be good to start building bridges between Palestine and Puerto Rico.”

Building bridges is something that Natasha Lycia Ora Bannan is doing as well.

The Puerto Rican attorney who serves as the executive vice president of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) told The Electronic Intifada about her efforts to expose Puerto Ricans to the situation in Palestine with an upcoming trip she is leading with the NLG.

“The National Lawyers Guild is a progressive legal organization of lawyers, law students and legal workers who work to ensure that human rights shall be regarded as more sacred than property interests,” Bannan explained in a written statement.

“NLG has long supported Palestine’s right to self-determination and has sent previous delegations to the occupied territories in Gaza and the West Bank before to observe, investigate and document the numerous human rights abuses being committed against Palestinians by the Israeli government.”

Bannan continued: “Our delegations are open to all NLG members and we will likely have the participation of some of our colleagues from Puerto Rico join us this year.”

Bannan noted that there would be a “focus on the conditions of detention for Palestinian political prisoners, an issue that has long affected Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico and Palestine have a shared history of fighting for their independence and sovereignty, leading to the imprisonment of many political prisoners.”

Ironically, thousands of Palestinians who have fled their land have moved to Puerto Rico.
Israel’s trail of blood in Latin America

“You cannot talk about the Israel lobby and Latinos without mentioning the long history of Israeli intervention in Latin America,” says Ron Gochez, a member of the California community-based group Union del Barrio.

Union del Barrio has taken a clear stand in supporting Palestinian self-determination.

“We are a political organization, not a non-profit. We are clear on the issue — we are not anti-Semitic. We are anti-imperialist. A lot of people are afraid to speak on this topic,” explained Gochez, underscoring Israel’s sordid history in Latin America.

“In almost every country in the region that has had a repressive government, Israel has had a hand in it in recent history.”

Indeed, Israel has been a source of weapons and military and security training for some of the most despotic regimes in Latin America.

Efraín Ríos Montt, the former de facto president of Guatemala who was convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity last May for his role in the Guatemalan civil war, received support from Israel (Ríos Montt’s conviction was overturned after a spat between judges over technicalities).

In addition, Israel has armed and trained right-wing groups and regimes in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela according to investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood (“Israel’s Latin American trail of terror,” Al Jazeera English, 5 June 2003).

Mexico also has a history of purchasing weapons from Israel and utilizing Israeli military personnel against the Zapatista uprising twenty years ago.

In recent years, Mexico has purchased drones to spy on drug cartels in its bloody and ongoing drug war.

Israel’s cozy relationship with Latin America’s military juntas extended to the Israel lobby as well.

As writer and activist Roberto Lovato told The Electronic Intifada, “When I was in LA in the early ’90s, and we were opposed to the death-squad government of Armando Calderon Sol of El Salvador, I remember seeing the ADL award Calderon Sol with a human rights award. We staged some protests – we were asking ‘what is this?’ He was presented with a Humanitas award in Century City in Los Angeles.”
Chilling silence

In 2010, Janet Murguia, the president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, the largest national Latino civil rights organization in the US, went on a trip to Israel with Project Interchange with several other Latina leaders.

When contacted for comment regarding this piece in early February, the communications director for the council responded via e-mail, “I’m sorry, we cannot speak about this. We don’t have an expert that can comment.”

Pro-Israel organizations also heavily donate to Latino elected officials.

According to Open Secrets in the current election cycle, Florida congressional representatives Joe Garcia (Democrat) and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Republican) have received over $20,000 from the pro-Israel lobby.

Additionally, representatives Linda Sanchez (D-California), Albio Sires (D-New Jersey), Loretta Sanchez (D-Califorinia), Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Florida), and Raúl Grijalva (D-Arizona) have all received at least $1,000 from pro-Israel groups in the current election cycle.

We contacted these Latino congressional representatives, all of whom support a path to immigration for the undocumented, asking if they supported the apartheid conditions in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and the treatment of African migrants by the Israeli government, but not a single one responded.

All of them have been supportive of an immigration overhaul in the US, with Representative Garcia being a chief sponsor of H.R. 15, a comprehensive immigration reform bill introduced in the House of Representatives last fall.

Carlos Montes, a long-time Chicano activist based in Los Angeles, with a history of anti-war advocacy, believes Latino elected officials and leaders are reluctant to speak out against Israel’s human rights abuses due to the lobby.

“They see that the Israel lobby is strong, and they are politicians,” said Montes. “If they take a position that is against Israel, they will get snapped. They are looking to get support locally for any of their campaigns.”

“They [Latino leaders] go, they get a trip, but they ought to be smart enough to know that the lobby will want them to be neutral or to say nothing.”

Gabriel Camacho added that fear of upsetting pro-Israel groups has Latino activists scared silent as well.

“These organizations, like the ADL and the JCRC [Jewish Community Relations Council] silence dissent and the Palestinian narrative. They also have a huge influence on the Congress and the Senate. And that influence is trickling down to community activists,” Camacho said.

“It’s difficult if your primary responsibility is to keep a small organization afloat. You don’t want to be blacklisted by very influential organizations.”
Pro-Israel efforts: destined to fail?

Some Latinos feel that despite the efforts of pro-Israel organizations to gain support of the broader Latino community, these vigorous outreach and propaganda endeavors will ultimately fail.

Curtis Marez, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, San Diego and president of the American Studies Association, which has called for an academic boycott of Israeli universities, expressed doubts about the Israeli strategy to gain Latino political support.

“Focused on relatively elite Latinos such as politicians and Hollywood celebrities, I don’t anticipate that Israel’s marketing campaign will take hold among the vast majority of US Latinos,” Marez told The Electronic Intifada.

“The national Chicano student group MEChA has issued a ‘Statement of Solidarity Toward the Palestinian People,’ while its members have been central to divestment movements on college campuses.”

“Largely Latino civil rights groups like the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union have made similar statements. Scholars of Chicano studies have further studied the similarities and differences between the US/Mexico border and the Israeli-occupied territories, while activist entertainers such as the Chicano band Quetzal have boycotted Latino-focused events sponsored by the Israeli Consulate,” added Marez.

Similarly, Roberto Lovato shared that he has seen more Latinos joining the BDS movement and condemning the actions of Hollywood actor Scarlett Johansson who has endorsed a soda product that is manufactured in a West Bank settlement.

“How can the pro-Israel groups cover the eyes, ears and noses of Latinos in an increasingly interconnected world?” asked Lovato.

“Multimillion-dollar efforts by organizations like AIPAC [American-Israel Public Affairs Committee] and the ADL are destined to fail,” he argued.

“Sure, some Latinos will be influenced by the lobbying efforts, but as we say in Spanish, ‘no puedes tapar el sol con un dedo’ — you cannot cover up the sun with one finger, even if that finger is a multimillion-dollar operation recruiting leaders who are questionable at best. I suspect that a lot of Latino leaders who go on these trips will remain silent when asked about it.”
Solidarity is unstoppable

As long as Latinos in the US are subjected to racial profiling, the deportation of undocumented loved ones, and the effects of colonialism in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and in the southwest states, comparisons will be made between Latinos and Palestinians.

When those comparisons are openly discussed and shared in the Latino community, it may be more difficult for pro-Israel groups to gain the support of the nation’s largest minority group.

Adriana Maestas is a Southern California based writer who covers Latino political affairs. You can follow her on Twitter @LatinoPolitics.

Rania Khalek is an independent journalist reporting on the underclass and marginalized. You can follow her on Twitter @RaniaKhalek.

How the Israel lobby is courting US Latinos

Rania Khalek and
Adriana Maestas
The Electronic Intifada
27 February 2014

This special report for The Electronic Intifada is the first of two on the Israel lobby’s aggressive outreach campaign in the growing Latino American community.

The top issues for Latino voters in the United States are immigration, the economy, health care and education. Rarely do issues pertaining to the Middle East register a blip in the polling of Latino voters, except for when it comes to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So why are pro-Israel groups spending more and more resources courting Latino elected officials, community leaders and students?

In the US, a Latino, often equated with Hispanic, refers to a person who can trace his or her origin to Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Central or South America. Mexican-Americans are the largest Latino group in the US and sometimes refer to themselves as Chicanos.

As the Latino population and electorate continue to grow, along with this population’s impact on national elections, an aggressive lobby is working to ensure that Latinos view and adopt a clearly pro-Israel stance on the question of Palestine despite strong grassroots sympathy with the plight of Palestinians.
Neutralizing the brown electorate

Speaking to Washington Jewish Week last year, Stuart Eizenstat, the former US ambassador to the European Union, warned that people of color in the United States might see the oppression of Palestinians as similar to their own.

“The problem is, and this is for Hispanic and Asian Americans and African Americans, they see themselves as minorities,” said Eizenstat (“Courting majority minority,” 24 July 2013).

To combat this natural alliance, Eizenstat implored pro-Israel groups to “make it clear” that the struggle for justice in Palestine “is not a civil rights issue. It’s rather a very different conflict in which violence is being used and Israel’s right to be a state is questioned.”

Eizenstat’s sentiments came on the heels of more than a decade of questionable research accusing Latinos of exhibiting an alarming hostility toward Jews, prompted by the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) 2002 annual survey.

The survey measured “anti-Semitism” based on how strongly respondents agreed with statements like “Jews stick together more than other Americans” and “Jews are more loyal to Israel than America,” which are hardly precise measures, and are open to broad interpretation.

“Negative attitudes toward Israel and concerns that American Jews have too much influence over US Middle East policy are emerging as factors responsible for fostering anti-Semitic beliefs,” warned the ADL, which blamed “lower levels of education among African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans in comparison to white Americans in particular,” for the alleged high rates of anti-Semitism in those communities.
Not supportive enough of Israel

And the accusations have not subsided.

A 2011 survey conducted by the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding found that almost half of American Latinos feel US foreign policy is too supportive of Israel (“Latinos believe US too supportive of Israel,” 28 March 2011 [PDF]).

Equating lackluster support for Israel with anti-Semitism, the foundation’s president Rabbi Marc Schneier told Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “We need to understand how real anti-Semitism is within the Latino community and how we can counter it … to bolster Latino empathy for the Jewish state” (“Poll: Nearly 50% of Hispanic Americans believe US too supportive of Israel,” 28 March 2011).

Fringe elements in the pro-Israel community have responded by lashing out at immigrants. Stephen Steinlight, senior political analyst at the anti-immigrant and white nationalist linked Center for Immigration Studies distilled this sentiment, warning that Muslim and Latino immigration “will erode Jewish political clout.” (“Activist blasts Jewish groups on immigration,” New Jersey Jewish News, 28 March 2011).

Meanwhile, mainstream Zionist organizations have adopted Schneier’s recommendations by creating avenues for Israel advocacy specifically designed for the Latino community under the guise of Jewish-Latino coalition building.
Project Interchange

In 2005, the American Jewish Committee launched the Latino and Latin American Institute.

Working in collaboration with the AJC’s Project Interchange, which organizes “educational” trips to Israel for influential leaders from around the world, the institute has helped coordinate over 20 delegations made up of American Latino leaders, including journalists, corporate and media executives, elected officials and prominent Latinas.

“The purpose of these trips, like all Project Interchange seminars, is to provide an opportunity to learn about Israel through first-hand experience,” the organization’s spokesperson Myra Clark-Siegel told The Electronic Intifada in an email.

Asked whether participants meet with Palestinians, Clark-Siegel replied, “Project Interchange participants meet with leaders across the social and political spectrum, and yes, they of course meet with Israeli Arabs as well as Palestinian leaders,” ranging from “the Palestinian Prime Minister to senior officials of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization].”

One “Israeli Arab” who speaks regularly at Project Interchange seminars is Khaled Abu Toameh, a journalist with the right-wing Jerusalem Post and senior fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute.

The Gatestone Institute is an offshoot of the Washington-based neoconservative Hudson Institute — founded by Sears Roebuck heiress Nina Rosenwald, a hardcore Zionist who has funneled millions to Islamophobes on the far right to increase support for Israel.

As the Arab darling of US neoconservatives, Toameh rejects the characterization of Israel as an apartheid state, arguing that Israel treats Arabs and Palestinians better than any other country in the Middle East.

Toameh’s views are fringe, rather than representative, among Palestinians who directly experience life under Israeli rule, and his positions are flatly contradicted by mountains of evidence from Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights and equality-monitoring organizations.
Touring settlements

Clark-Siegel, the Project Interchange spokesperson (who is married to the Israeli consul-general in Los Angeles) added that delegations usually visit an Israeli settlement as well. “[W]e see great value in learning, seeing, and understanding these complex issues through first-hand experience and conversations with the leaders themselves, rather than from a distance,” she explained.

In her reply to a follow-up email asking if participants are informed of the illegality of settlements under international law, Clark-Siegel refused to elaborate, saying, “I answered your questions through my response yesterday.”

But a blog post written by Duke University student Sabrina Rubakovic in The Chronicle, an independent student newspaper, about her 2010 Project Interchange experience visiting Efrat, an illegal Israeli colony in the West Bank, demonstrates that touring settlements serves to legitimize Israel’s settlement enterprise (“Project Interchange Israel- Day 5,” 11 January 2010).

“I was sitting in the home of Bob Lang, the head of the religious council of Efrat, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank,” wrote Rubakovic.

“Out the window and across the street I had a clear view of a nearby Arab town. And there it was, laid out before me: an age-old territorial dispute between Israel and Palestine over Jewish settlements in the West Bank.”

While it is unclear whether Rubakovic was given an opportunity to speak with Palestinians about the devastating impact of Israeli home demolitions, land confiscations, settler-only roads and other abuses against Palestinian daily life, she left believing that Project Interchange had exposed her to both sides of the conflict.
“Congratulations, you’ve been invited to go to Israel”
20140227-adl-deleg.png

A 2013 ADL delegation of New England Latino leaders.
(Anti-Defamation League)

The Anti-Defamation League has led several free trips to Israel for Latino leaders as well, again ranging from Latino media executives and journalists, to elected officials.

We contacted several people who participated in the ADL’s December 2013 junket, comprised of Latino leaders from the Boston area, but only one responded.

Dario Collado, a 34-year-old Dominican-American who works as a corporate development officer at Boston Children’s Hospital Trust, traveled to Israel with the ADL knowing very little about the region or the conflict.

Collado, who was still running Harvard’s Latino Leadership Initiative at the time, was approached by Jerry Villacres, co-chair of the ADL’s Latino-Jewish Roundtable, asking if he could provide names of Latino leaders to nominate for the ADL’s upcoming trip.

“Two or three weeks later, I get a big envelope in the mail saying, ‘Congratulations, you’ve been invited to go to Israel,’” explained Collado. Thrilled at the opportunity to visit another country for free, he did not hesitate.

“I faxed back that form in seconds before they changed their minds,” he said.

Collado was impressed with the ADL’s apparent neutrality on the conflict.

“I think the ADL did a great job showing both sides of the story,” he remarked. “It was really an opportunity to form your own independent viewpoint on the entire region.”

But judging by Collado’s understanding of the realities since returning, it’s clear that the the ADL was anything but unbiased.

For a start, Alan Dershowitz, who recently ended his half-century long career as a Harvard law professor to propagandize for Israel full time, was presented as a man of peace.
“It’s complicated”

When asked if participants were informed of the rounding up and imprisonment without charge of non-Jewish African asylum seekers in Israel, Collado responded, “We had a frank conversation with Alan Dershowitz,” who he described as “the leading figure trying to bring peace accords for a two-state solution. It’s complicated.”

Collado came away believing that the conflict is rooted in “religion and centuries of mistrust between both sides.”

This is a typical line in pro-Israel propaganda that erases almost seven decades of Israel’s forced dispossession and displacement of Palestinians.

As for a solution, Collado blamed Palestinian aggression for stalled progress.

“Unfortunately, what happens is that when progress is made there’s a suicide bomb,” said Collado. “Time is of the essence because after [Palestinian Authority leader] Mahmoud Abbas passes away or retires, Hamas could come in and take over Palestine.”

Collado’s favorite part of the trip was visiting the Bialik-Rogozin School in Tel Aviv, where the children of undocumented immigrants — or as Israeli leaders call them, “infiltrators” — learn alongside Israeli children. Collado was especially delighted to meet a Dominican-Israeli seventh grader.

Bialik-Rogozin certainly is an unusual school considering that it is located in a country where segregation is often state policy and where the children of non-Jewish migrants cannot become citizens or receive asylum status simply because they are the wrong ethnicity.

Of course, the participants don’t seem to have been informed of this or of the fact that Israel’s very own education ministry has denounced Bialik-Rogozin for its integration, arguing that it “harms” Israeli children (“Integration of migrants’ children into schools harms Israeli students, state says, Haaretz, 23 August 2012).
Israel “en Español”

After Latino voters propelled President Barack Obama to re-election victory in 2012, Michael Freund, the former deputy communications director for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, took to the pages of The Jerusalem Post to demand that Israel “launch a comprehensive and coordinated hasbara, or public diplomacy, campaign that makes Israel’s case to Hispanics directly and ‘en Espanol’” (“Fundamentally Freund: Time for Hispanic ‘hasbara,’” 14 November 2012).

Citing America’s rapidly growing Latino electorate, Freund explained rather candidly, “the face of America is rapidly changing, and so too should Israel’s hasbara.” Israel, he said, must follow the example of Project Interchange.

Unbeknownst to Freund, Israel was already on it.
“The best public relations”

As Israeli bombs pulverized Gaza’s defenseless population in November 2012, a group of Latino journalists were touring Israel at the invitation of the Ministry of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs, which is tasked with deploying hasbara, or propaganda, abroad to counter the country’s increasingly negative image as a violent colonizer that subjects Palestinians to shocking levels of brutality.

While Gaza’s besieged and immiserated population was dodging ruthless Israeli weaponry, a writer in Israel Hayom, one of Israel’s most popular newspapers, openly celebrated rocket blowback as an opportunity to propagandize the journalists.

“An air-raid siren that sounded in Jerusalem this week startled … a group of Hispanic journalists from the United States,” the article stated with delight (“The blog is mightier than the sword,” 23 November 2012).

“Fear, terror and helplessness washed over the group. But some good came of the incident, at least from the Israeli perspective. The foreign journalists got a taste of the war situation in Israel and felt the rocket threat firsthand.

“Back at the hotel that evening, they translated their experience into articles, radio broadcasts and blog posts that were seen and heard all over the world.”

Yuli Edelstein, the minister of public diplomacy at the time, remarked that such incidents are “the best public relations for the State of Israel.”
Hispanic Evangelicals

Reverend Luis Cortés — president of Esperanza, a Philadelphia-based Hispanic evangelical network — is launching Esperanza Para Israel, an initiative supported by the Israeli government and the Jewish National Fund dedicated to promoting Israel to America’s 15 million Hispanic evangelicals.

Its advocacy efforts will include producing pro-Israel television programs to air on the Spanish-language Christian TV network, Enlace, and coordinating trips to Israel.

“The Israeli government has been courting him for some time,” Burt Siegel, former director of Philadelphia’s Jewish Community Relations Council and a close friend to Cortés, told Jewish Exponent. (“Philadelphia Pastor Brings Hope to Hispanic-Israeli Ties,” 24 December 2013).

Cortés , who in 2005 was hailed by TIME as one of the 25 most influential evangelical leaders in America, is a staunch advocate for a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants in the US, making his pro-Israel stance all the more jarring given that country’s horrific abuse of African asylum seekers as well as Palestinians.

Cortés insists his love for Israel is based purely in theology, but he’s long been involved in the national political scene as an organizer of the yearly National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, DC, an event attended by the nation’s top power players including President Obama.
Pushing back

Almost every pro-Israel organization today, from the most powerful Israel lobby group AIPAC to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs — JINSA — is involved in efforts to court Latinos, including at the collegiate level.

Despite this aggressive campaign, some activists and leaders are pushing back.

In our next article, we explore the reactions of activists to the overtures of the pro-Israel groups along with some of the work that is being done by Latinos to increase awareness of the Palestinian struggle.

Rania Khalek is an independent journalist reporting on the underclass and marginalized. You can follow her on Twitter @RaniaKhalek.

Adriana Maestas is a Southern California based writer who covers Latino political affairs. You can follow her on Twitter @LatinoPolitics.
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