Opinion: Hate against Haitian immigrants ignores how US politics pushed them here

Régine Théodat
Wed, October 2, 2024

As Haitians find themselves at the center of yet another political firestorm, a pawn in another U.S. election cycle, it’s easy for some in the United States to forget about the real people caught in the middle. The political back-and-forth might lead those unfamiliar with Haiti's struggle to wrongly assume that Haitians are incapable of being at the center of their self-determination, as if today’s Haitians are somehow different from those who rose up in 1791, fought their enslavers and liberated themselves in 1804 to create the first free Black republic.

A new documentary, "The Fight for Haiti," shows how untrue that is.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric ignores key factors that brought us here. Ironically, the most recent anti-corruption movement was dismantled by Jovenel Moïse, a president backed by both the Trump and Biden administrations.

Moïse’s actions before his assassination in 2021 further fueled gang violence, displacing hundreds of thousands.

In testimonies to the U.S. Congress, activists have warned that Washington's continued support for corrupt leaders would result in mass migration ‒ something today’s xenophobic rhetoric ignores.
Why Haitian group filed criminal charges against Trump, Vance

President Donald Trump welcomes Haitian President Jovenel Moïse and other Caribbean leaders in 2019 to his Mar-a-Lago estate in West Palm Beach Fla.

Last week, the Haitian Bridge Alliance filed citizen criminal charges against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, citing their "baseless and malicious comments" about Haitian immigrants in Springfield eating pets.

The repeated claims without evidence resulted in bomb threats and evacuations, terrorizing Springfield. Under Ohio law, private citizens seeking an arrest of prosecution can file an affidavit for review.

In a now-deleted tweet, Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., disparaged the advocacy group by dismissing its legal action as a "sophistication" Haitians couldn’t possibly possess ‒ seemingly unaware of the "sophistication" of the Haitian Revolution that played a crucial role in the Louisiana Purchase, where he now holds office.

Opinion: Trump's Republican Party excuses racists

Haitians have, and always have, embodied the wherewithal to seek self-determination. "The Fight for Haiti" shows us that the Haitians of today are indeed their ancestors' wildest dreams.

This gripping documentary takes us into historical and current events sparked by a seemingly simple question: What happened to billions of dollars in missing development funds received through Venezuela’s PetroCaribe oil alliance?

The film centers on the PetroCaribe challenge that struck a nerve in a nation long burdened by corruption, broken promises and worsening living conditions. Despite facing physical loss, death and threats, the aptly named “Petrochallengers” held firm in their question: "Kot kòb PetroCaribe a?" (Where is the PetroCaribe money?)

Opinion alerts: Get columns from your favorite columnists + expert analysis on top issues, delivered straight to your device through the USA TODAY app. Don't have the app? Download it for free from your app store.

It was a question Haitians globally were asking. In 2018, Haitian filmmaker and writer Gilbert Mirambeau Jr. posted a photo of himself holding a cardboard sign with that very question. This unsuspecting tweet quickly became the catalyst for a monumental shift in Haiti’s sociopolitical landscape, landing at the perfect moment. Social media challenges were thriving, and a digitally savvy, frustrated and mobilized youth in Haiti turned it into a movement.

The question cut through Haiti's internal social hierarchies, which often separate people by wealth, location or education. Everyone wanted the answer.

Haitians demanded justice from US-backed regime

Director Etant Dupain interviews anti-corruption activist Stephanie Boucher in 2021 in Port-au-Prince for his 2024 documentary, "The Fight for Haiti."

As the director of "The Fight for Haiti" documentary, Etant Dupain, explains: "The movement unites all walks of life, this is one of the reasons I interviewed all different ages, classes and groupings of people, I want to show that all Haitians are concerned."

The country had grown accustomed to corruption and broken promises, but the film shows why this specific question about the PetroCaribe funds was different. The deal with Venezuela offered Haiti discounted oil, with the savings intended for development projects such as infrastructure, health care and education. Unlike typical foreign aid, which often leaves countries trapped in debt and under foreign control, this was a chance for Haiti to invest in itself.

Unfortunately, much of the money disappeared, stolen by the people trusted to safeguard it. Many projects were either never completed or poorly executed.

Opinion: I'm a pastor in Springfield. Haitian immigrants in our city need compassion, not hate.

Like their ancestors, who turned from everyday people into soldiers, today's Haitians became activists and investigators. When the movement began in 2018, anyone with a smartphone could be a Petrochallenger. People used social media to demand a collective audit of the funds.

Eventually, the Moïse government was forced to conduct a full audit. Despite threats against the auditors, the Petrochallengers persisted, and three thorough reports were published.

This audit serves as the foundation for holding those responsible accountable, recovering the stolen funds and investing them in the country's development. The United States and Canada have initiated economic and political sanctions against many involved in the funds misappropriation. No arrests have been made, but Petrochallengers hope and continue to fight for justice.

The story of the question "Kot kòb PetroCaribe a?" and the Petrochallengers is more than a movement; it’s a symbol of the Haitian people’s resolve. "The Fight for Haiti" powerfully captures that determination, making it not just a historical document but an urgent call to action for a brighter future.

"The movement is not dead because the activists believe the trial is nonnegotiable," Dupain says. "The film itself is proof that the movement is very much alive, and it is also a tool to build momentum."

Will you also be a Petrochallenger?

Régine Théodat is a Haitian American entrepreneur, strategist and cultural advocate.

Régine Théodat is a Haitian American entrepreneur, strategist and cultural advocate. She’s principal at Anana Consultants and owns a children's cultural learning brand, Isse & Lo.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Trump, Vance lie about Haitians. 'Fight for Haiti' doesn't

Trump on Springfield Haitian migrants: ‘They have to be removed’

Damita Menezes
Wed, October 2, 2024 

NEWSNATION


Former President Donald Trump spoke with Ali Bradley, who leads NewsNation’s daily coverage of the border. Follow Ali on X and click here to download the NewsNation app to see exclusive reporting from the border every day.

HOUSTON (NewsNation) — Former President Donald Trump exclusively told NewsNation in an interview Wednesday he would revoke the temporary protected status for Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio, and ensure their return to Haiti.

The Republican nominee was at a private fundraiser in Texas when he addressed the situation in Springfield, telling NewsNation border reporter Ali Bradley that 32,000 Haitian migrants had been relocated to a community of 52,000 residents.

Trump told NewsNation he believes Haiti would accept the migrants back under his leadership.

“It has nothing to do with Haiti or anything else. You have to remove the people, and you have to bring them back to their own country,” he said.

“Springfield is such a beautiful place. Have you seen what’s happened to it? It’s been overrun. You can’t do that to people. I’d revoke (the protected status), and I’d bring (the migrants) back to their country.”

Voter Guide 2024: Breaking down the candidates, policies and issues

The comments come after Trump’s running mate, Republican Ohio Sen. JD Vance, revisited false claims he made about immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating pets, saying now he is “concerned for the American citizens” in the city.

“In Springfield, and communities across this country, you have schools that are overwhelmed, housing that is totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes,” Vance said while debating Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, his Democratic opponent, in the election’s only vice presidential debate.

Trump calls Jack Smith filing ‘pure election interference’
Enabling and protecting border law enforcement

The former president told NewsNation he would enable local law enforcement to execute what he calls the largest deportation in American history and potentially deploy military forces to combat drug cartels.

Trump said border agents “know everything about [migrants] … they know the good ones, the bad ones, and they’re going to get them out.”

Addressing cartel violence along the southern border, Trump proposed a “military operation” to counter increasingly sophisticated tactics by Mexican drug organizations, which reportedly now employ drone jammers and have been found with rocket-propelled grenades and improvised explosive devices near the border.

“They’re very rich, and they’re very evil,” Trump said of the cartels. “We’re going to have to get in some military action. … They’re killing 300,000 people a year.”

Two Mexican drug cartels have helped flood the United States with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 80 times stronger than morphine that’s killing over 200 Americans daily, authorities say.

Exclusive: Mexican cartels using devices to disrupt U.S. drones

The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels have established a sophisticated supply chain, sourcing precursor chemicals from China and manufacturing fentanyl in clandestine Mexican labs before smuggling it across the U.S. border, according to Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) reports.

Mexican drug cartels operating along the U.S.-Mexico border are using electronic devices to disrupt drones being used by U.S. border officials to track immigrants who crossed into the United States illegally, NewsNation learned.

In September 2023, Border Patrol agents in Texas discovered a backpack with what appeared to be cannonball-sized IEDs. It wasn’t the first time the U.S. government had found potential explosive devices at the border.

In May 2023, NewsNation reported border officials recovered a rudimentary device created using an M&M container that was bound with electrical tape.

The former president also praised GOP Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s border initiatives but maintained that border security ultimately requires federal action, stating, “All you have to do if you’re the president is say to the Border Patrol and to the states, ‘Nobody come in, it’s closed.'”

Trump predicted he would win New Mexico because of the southern border. Trump lost the state in 2020 by about 11 points and in 2016 by about 8 points.

Houston teens carjack driver to smuggle migrants
How many people are crossing the border?

U.S. Border Patrol arrests along the Southwest border rose slightly from July to August but remained among the Biden administration’s lowest monthly numbers.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data, agents had 58,038 encounters between ports of entry in August, up from 56,399 in July.

The actual number of encounters at America’s borders is expected to reach about 10 million by the end of the fiscal year, including repeat crossings and deportations.

These encounters include repeat crossings and deportations, which means the actual number of unique individuals entering the country is much lower.

Walz, Vance spar on immigration
‘The largest deportation effort in American history’

One of Trump’s key promises if reelected is to mount the largest domestic deportation in U.S. history. He made similar promises when he first ran for office, but during his administration, deportations never topped 350,000.

For comparison, then-President Barack Obama carried out 432,000 deportations in 2013, the highest annual total since records were kept.

This time, Trump has given some more specifics on his promises. He said he’ll use the National Guard to round up migrants. And he said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to deport any noncitizen from a country that the U.S. is at war with.

He’s also vowed to kick out hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have entered the country under two key Biden administration programs if he’s reelected.

Any mass deportation plans would certainly be challenged in court and be enormously expensive to carry out. And it would depend on countries’ willingness to take back their citizens.

Trump also said he would bring back policies he had put in place during his first term, like the Remain in Mexico program and Title 42. Remain in Mexico made migrants wait in Mexico while their asylum cases were heard, while Title 42 curbed immigration on public health grounds.

He has said he’ll revive and expand a travel ban from his term that originally targeted citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries and pledged new “ideological screening” for immigrants to bar “dangerous lunatics, haters, bigots and maniacs.”

Trump also seeks to end birthright citizenship for people born in the U.S. whose parents are both in the country illegally.

DHS increases time for new asylum regulations

Why is the border a top voter issue?

Making the border safer and other immigration-related issues remain among the biggest concerns for voters heading into the 2024 election. Trump has used the border as a backdrop for a series of campaign stops in recent months.

Trump has repeatedly criticized President Joe Biden and Harris, claiming that the president and his “border czar” are to blame for the steady amounts of migrants and for the trouble that Trump has alleged has come specifically from the illegal border crossings.

The president has countered with the effectiveness of his executive order, which led to a drop in the number of border encounters after a record 250,000 encounters were reported in December 2023 alone.

There has been a significant drop in encounters between federal agents assigned to the U.S.-Mexico border and immigrants who have entered the country illegally.
Political gridlock on border policy

In June 2024, Biden released a series of executive actions capping migrant crossing until border encounters remain consistently low — under 2,500 per day for an entire week — to give Border Patrol more time to handle each migrant’s situation.

The president also clarified his use of executive powers, saying he was doing what Congress would not about a bipartisan immigration deal that failed in the Senate after Trump urged GOP lawmakers to vote against it.

NewsNation’s Jeff Arnold and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media, Inc. 

Trump says he would revoke Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants in Springfield if elected

Rashard Rose and Kate Sullivan, CNN
Wed, October 2, 2024 



Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday said that he would revoke Temporary Protected Status for the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and deport them if he is reelected in November.

“You have to remove the people, and you have to bring them back to their own country. They are, in my opinion, it’s not legal,” Trump said in an interview with NewsNation.

Trump, asked if he would revoke the migrants’ Temporary Protected Status, said,
“Absolutely. I’d revoke it, and I’d bring them back to their country.”

The former president and his allies have continued to spread misinformation about Haitian migrants in the city of Springfield.

Many Haitians came into the country under a Biden-Harris administration parole program that gives permission to enter to vetted participants with US sponsors. And many have “Temporary Protected Status,” as CNN has previously reported, which shields them from deportation and allows them to live and work in the country for a limited period of time.

Some received that protection after the Biden-Harris administration expanded the number of Haitians eligible in June. Others have been living in the US with Temporary Protected Status since before the Biden-Harris administration.

Trump, pressed in the Wednesday interview on what would happen if Haiti refused to receive them, said: “They will,” without providing additional details.

“Well, they’re going to receive them, they’ll receive them. If I bring them back, they’re going to receive them,” Trump said.

During the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security was aggressive in ending a number of temporary protected status designations that had been on the books, in some cases, for decades.

Trump in recent weeks has spread debunked conspiracy theories about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, including at last month’s presidential debate, as part of his efforts to stoke fears about immigrants and push his hardline immigration policy proposals, including mass deportations.

From the September 10 debate through September 20, Springfield received more than 35 threats of violence, including bomb threats, according to Springfield Mayor Rob Rue. The threats prompted evacuations of elementary schools and supermarkets, lockdowns of hospitals and a transition to remote learning at several local colleges.

Rue, Ohio Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and other local officials have decried the rumors as false and destructive to the community. A staffer for Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate who helped to propel the misinformation, was told early last month by Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck that “there was no verifiable evidence or reports to show” that the rumors are true, CNN reported.

The city of Springfield notes on its website that approximately 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants live in Clark County — which has a population of roughly 136,000 — and that Haitian immigrants are there legally.

Haitian workers play a significant role in Springfield’s economy, filling much-needed jobs, the city has said. DeWine has acknowledged the city was having some issues adjusting to the influx of mostly Haitian immigrants, but he said in an interview last month they were working to deal with the issues and called the Haitian immigrants “positive influences” on the community.

CNN’s Jack Forrest, Daniel Dale, Danya Gainor, Catherine E. Shoichet, Elizabeth Wolfe, Melissa Alonso, Jeff Winter and Chelsea Bailey contributed to this report.


Dominican Republic will deport up to 10,000 Haitians a week, citing an 'excess' of immigrants

Associated Press
Wed, October 2, 2024


Undocumented Haitians detained by immigration officials stand inside a police vehicle, in Dajabon, Dominican Republic, May 17, 2024. (AP Photo/Matias Delacroix, File)

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic (AP) — The Dominican Republic announced Wednesday that it would start massive deportations of Haitians living illegally in the country, expelling up to 10,000 of them a week.

Government spokesman Homero Figueroa told reporters that the government took the decision after noticing an “excess” of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

Figueroa said officials have seen an increase in Haitian migrants as a U.N.-backed mission in Haiti to fight gang violence flounders. He said authorities also agreed to strengthen border surveillance and control, but he did not provide details.

Last year, the Dominican Republic deported more than 174,000 people it says are Haitians, and in the first half of the year, it has expelled at least 67,000 more.

Activists have long criticized the administration of President Luis Abinader for what they say are ongoing human rights violations of Haitians and those of Haitian descent born in the Dominican Republic. Abinader has denied any mistreatment.

Wednesday's announcement comes a week after Abinader announced at the U.N. General Assembly that he would take “drastic measures” if the mission in Haiti fails. It is led by nearly 400 police officers from Kenya, backed by nearly two dozen police and soldiers from Jamaica and two senior military officers from Belize. The U.S. has warned that the mission lacks personnel and funding as it pushes for a U.N. peacekeeping mission instead.

Gangs in Haiti control 80% of the Port-au-Prince capital, and the violence has left nearly 700,000 Haitians homeless in recent years, while thousands of others have fled the country.

____

Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

The Corporate Power Brokers Behind AIPAC’s War on the Squad

An In These Times investigation reveals the individuals behind AIPAC’s election war chest: nearly 60% are CEOs and other top executives at the country’s largest corporations.



Branko Marcetic
June 3, 2024
Published in
June 2024
IN THESE TIMES

LONG READ 

On the eve of a high-profile Democratic primary in April, incumbent Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) wasn’t giving a speech or knocking on doors.

She was at a Passover Seder.

The representative and members of her campaign team joined supporters and their families at a home in Pittsburgh’s historically Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood, the site of a deadly 2018 attack where 11 Jewish worshipers at the Tree of Life Congregation were murdered by a white supremacist.

At the Seder, as the U.S.-backed Israeli assault on Gaza raged in the background, Lee and her fellow peace activists reflected on the trying months since October 7, 2023. Organizers who criticized Israel’s brutal response to Hamas’ attack had been smeared as anti-Semitic and apologists for atrocities. Exhausted but optimistic, they spoke about creating a larger movement that would span race, class and age.

“It felt so palpable,” recalls Lauren Maunus, who was at the Seder. Maunus is the political director of IfNotNow, an American Jewish group opposed to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. ​“What we’re trying to build,” Maunus says, ​“we are building in real time.”

Lee tells In These Times that the Seder felt like ​“a reclaiming of our movement.”

“There had been such an attempt to drive us, our communities, away from each other,” Lee says, ​“using our pain, our traumas, our oppression.”

The following night, Lee stepped up to a lectern to address cheering supporters as the first-term congresswoman beat her primary opponent by more than 20 points, with the race called less than 90 minutes after polls closed.

“It’s a good night,” Lee told the crowd, adding: ​“Last time, two years ago, if you were here and you remember, it was a longer night.”

Lee’s victory two years prior was a nailbiter. She saw a 25-point lead evaporate as the United Democracy Project — a Super PAC created during the 2021-2022 election cycle by the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — poured $2.4 million into a deluge of attack ads in the final month. Lee squeaked out a win by just shy of 1,000 votes.

But the story of the two-year turnaround in Lee’s electoral fortunes is about more than one congresswoman’s career or one political contest. It is a tale about the intersection of the pro-Israel lobby and corporate, right-wing politics.

An In These Times analysis of the hundreds of people and organizations financing AIPAC’s push to elect conservative, pro-Israel Democrats shows the lobby’s electoral efforts are largely in line with the interests of Wall Street and other corporate actors — the same interests that have, for years, fought to maintain a status quo of free market fundamentalism.

Peace activists rally outside the New York offices of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee on February 22 to decry the lobby’s influence on U.S. politics.Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images

It’s also a story about the progressive resistance to this onslaught of money poisoning American democracy, a pushback that may finally be weakening AIPAC’s influence.

By training its sights on left-wing members of Congress, AIPAC is setting up a battle not just over U.S. policy surrounding Israel and Palestine, but for the soul of the Democratic Party — and a progressive future.


A PARTY PROBLEM


Hardline supporters of the Israeli government were confident that the political fallout from October 7 would finally spell doom for the Squad, the group of diverse, Bernie Sanders-inspired left-wing members of Congress that includes Lee and fellow progressive Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Greg Casar (D-Texas) and Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.). Members of the Squad had come under fire after calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, suggesting U.S. military funding to Israel should be conditional, and voting against a House resolution that backed Israel and blamed the rising Palestinian death toll solely on Hamas.

“This is a scarlet letter that far-left candidates will have to wear,” Democratic strategist Jake Dilemani told Jewish Insider at the time.

Mark Mellman, another Democratic strategist and one of the founders of Democratic Majority for Israel — a Super PAC that, like AIPAC’s United Democracy Project, was created to boost pro-Israel primary challengers against left-wing congressmembers — believed ​“the savagery of Hamas has moved the center of gravity in a pro-Israel direction.”

After October 7, United Democracy Project (UDP) began running digital ads against Lee and Bowman, maligning them for their refusal to back the singularly pro-Israel House resolution.

Eliding the fact that Lee and other Squad members had vocally condemned the Hamas attack, one such ad read: ​“Fourteen hundred Israelis slaughtered by Hamas. Women raped. Babies beheaded. Over 200 hostages. But Summer Lee was one of just 10 votes in Congress against condemning Hamas’ terrorism.”

Before long, Slate reported that AIPAC was expected to spend the gargantuan sum of $100 million during the 2023-24 cycle to unseat high-profile Israel critics in Congress, including Lee and other members of the Squad.

AIPAC wading into elections was nothing new. The lobby has been a powerful and influential force in U.S. politics for many years — and, according to James Zogby, co-founder and president of the Arab American Institute, ​“AIPAC coordinated the PACs that existed prior to dark money.” In such cases, Zogby explains, ​“These 15 PACs will give to this guy, and these 20 to that guy, and by the way, each one of these PACs has someone on their board who’s on AIPAC’s board of advisors.”

But the sheer scale of AIPAC’s spending — enabled by Supreme Court decisions that have unleashed the distorting influence of big money in elections — and the tactics being used are more recent developments. These pro-Israel groups now directly intervene in Democratic primary races, flooding the airwaves with negative ads maligning progressives in the eyes of loyal Democratic voters.

Former Ohio state senator and Sanders campaign surrogate Nina Turner was among the first targets of this strategy during her 2021 run for Congress. Much like Lee, Turner was the overwhelming favorite for an open blue congressional seat in northeast Ohio but saw a massive early lead vanish under a nearly $2 million avalanche of negative advertising by Democratic Majority for Israel that painted her as a disloyal extremist.

The ads funded by the pro-Israel lobby ​“kind of say the same thing: Here’s these radicals … who are scary, who are not aligned with President Biden,” explains Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, a left-wing electoral organization.

Sign up for our weekend newsletter
A weekly digest of our best coverageEmail Address
“They told me they didn’t recognize me anymore, that Palestinians have no rights [and] that if I didn’t ‘disavow’ the Squad, they were going to come at me with everything they had. And that is, in fact, what they did.”


Turner recalls a conversation with a former ally who does business in Cleveland: ​“They told me they didn’t recognize me anymore, that Palestinians have no rights [and] that if I didn’t ​‘disavow’ the Squad, they were going to come at me with everything they had. And that is, in fact, what they did.”

Since Turner lost that election, a spate of progressives have been ousted from their seats, including establishment-friendly politicians like former Democratic Reps. Donna Edwards in Maryland and Andy Levin in Michigan, whose sole offense appeared to be criticizing illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and supporting a two-state solution (both of which are stated positions of President Joe Biden and many mainstream Democrats).

Levin, who comes from one of the country’s most prominent political and Jewish families, lost his seat in 2022 after redistricting pitted him against another incumbent for the new, open seat. AIPAC put more than $4 million toward defeating him.

“We were buried by [that] avalanche,” Levin recalls.

Those backing Israel’s assault on Gaza now hope to deliver another bloody nose to the Left, in particular by defeating Bowman and Bush, the politically vulnerable duo that made up the Squad’s 2021 class and are also outspoken critics of the Israeli government. Bowman has referred to Israel as an ​“apartheid” state, while Bush has condemned what she calls ​“Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign” and ​“atrocities against Palestinians.”

The most recent public polls (conducted by groups hostile to Squad members in March and February, respectively) show Bowman trailing his primary challenger George Latimer by 17 points, while Bush was trailing opponent Wesley Bell by 22 points. AIPAC’s PAC (a separate entity from UDP, its Super PAC) has already funneled $1.3 million to Latimer, in its largest total donation to any candidate this election cycle. The PAC also gave $555,000 to Bell.

In mid-May, UDP made its first expenditure on the Bowman-Latimer race in New York, spending $1.9 million to place ads charging that Bowman ​“has his own agenda” and ​“refuses to compromise, even with President Biden.” By the end of the month, that spending figure rose to nearly $8 million, the most the Super PAC has ever spent in a single race. At the same time, UDP poured roughly $240,000 into the Bush-Bell race in Missouri, a number that’s expected to grow significantly in the coming weeks.

Democratic operatives familiar with both races told The Intercept in May that AIPAC is forecast to spend more than $20 million against Bowman and Bush in each primary, including through negative ads funded by UDP. Neither AIPAC nor UDP responded to In These Times’ requests for comment.


Since fall 2022, some of those in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party have twice tried to ban Super PAC funding from primaries through a resolution to the Democratic National Committee. But the resolution was never even raised for debate, despite having 31 co-sponsors, including four state party chairs and two vice chairs. ​“When it comes down to it, they want the option to interfere in the primary elections if they feel that’s in the interest of the [party],” says former Nevada State Democratic Party Chair Judith Whitmer, who co-authored the resolution.

The impact of the party’s refusal to rein in outside spending has become apparent. As she competed for reelection this year, Lee apparently became a target of billionaire Jeff Yass, who put $800,000 into a group called Moderate PAC, which helped finance ads accusing Lee of ​“opposing President Biden” at a time when abortion rights and democracy are under threat from former President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress.

The irony runs deep: Yass was not only reportedly invested in one of Trump’s companies, but he’s also a prolific funder of right-wing causes and the largest single campaign donor overall this cycle, with 99% of the more than $70 million he’s spent going to Republicans.


Protesters march near AIPAC headquarters in Washington D.C. in support of a free Palestine on March 13.Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
“This may have been pioneered by AIPAC, but Big Pharma isn’t stupid, the tobacco industry isn’t stupid, the fossil fuel industry isn’t stupid. Why won’t they just say: ‘Great idea, AIPAC. Thank you very much. We will pick the nominee of both parties and that’ll be great for us to advance our interests.’”


“As a progressive and a Democrat, I don’t want to have Republicans coming in and picking nominees,” Levin says. ​“This may have been pioneered by AIPAC, but Big Pharma isn’t stupid, the tobacco industry isn’t stupid, the fossil fuel industry isn’t stupid. Why won’t they just say: ​‘Great idea, AIPAC. Thank you very much. We will pick the nominee of both parties and that’ll be great for us to advance our interests.’”

Or, as Bush recently explained to Politico, ​“AIPAC and their Republican mega donors are targeting Black and brown Democratic incumbents with the same right-wing playbook across the country.”

The data analyzed by In These Times shows these worries are not misplaced.


FIRE VS. THE SQUAD


An In These Times analysis found that the 528 individuals and corporations who gave to UDP between January 2023 and February 2024 are largely top-level executives from the finance and real estate industries, along with a smattering of billionaires and other members of the 1%. Nearly 60% of UDP donors are high-level executives, including CEOs and other corporate officers.

This dynamic is essentially flipped when it comes to those funding Squad members like Lee, Bowman and Bush, whose 2023-24 donor pool is made up of just 4% CEOs and other top executives, while 60% are non-executives.

The list of donors to UDP includes dozens of current or former AIPAC officials, indicating their passion to maintain unconditional U.S. support for Israel. But a deeper look into the backgrounds of those funding the Super PAC suggests that foreign policy isn’t their sole motivation.

“It’s not just their personal pro-Israel interests that they’re advancing,” says Charlie Blaettler, senior campaign strategist at the progressive Working Families Party, which has supported several electoral campaigns of Squad members. ​“A lot of folks are also advancing their own professional and business interests with these donations.”

Many of the donors to UDP are true blue Democrats — donors like the Hillary Clinton-superfan Haim Saban (whose company once produced the Power Rangers franchise) and former Blackstone Senior Managing Director Steve Zelin (who backed the 2020 presidential campaigns of Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden).

But UDP’s single biggest donor is Jan Koum, the multibillionaire former CEO of WhatsApp and prolific Republican donor. He has also been a major funder of groups like Friends of Ir David and the Central Fund of Israel, which fund and support illegal Israeli settlements. Koum’s propensity for sharing pro-Trump and anti-immigration stories from outlets like Breitbart and Fox News made news in 2018.


Design by Rachel K Dooley
Nearly 60% of UDP donors are high-level executives, including CEOs and other corporate officers.


UDP’s heavy reliance on right-wing (even hard-right) oligarchs comes into stark relief when looking at its most elite donors. As of February, 43 individuals and corporations had given $200,000 or more each to UDP this cycle, accounting for $25.5 million, or 55% of total contributions. Of those, 26% are either primarily Republican donors or Trump donors (or both). Trump donors include the Kraft Group, helmed by billionaire Robert Kraft (the New England Patriots owner whose friendship with Trump goes back decades), as well as billionaire Bernie Marcus (the co-founder and former CEO of The Home Depot, who has promised to keep financing Trump’s presidential bid even if the Republican nominee ends up behind bars).

AIPAC itself has become increasingly aligned with far-right politicians. The lobby has notoriously endorsed hundreds of anti-abortion candidates and election deniers since 2021, including recent Republican gubernatorial nominee Mark Robinson in North Carolina, who has a long history of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitic comments.

“Big money interests are always on the hunt for elected officials that will do their bidding,” Turner explains. ​“Behind the curtain though, these groups could care less about the Democratic Party itself or the people who live in my district who need clean water, housing and jobs.”

Nearly half of UDP’s donors work in what’s collectively known as the FIRE sector — finance, insurance and real estate. WinnCompanies, for example, founded by Arthur Winn, is a member of the National Multifamily Housing Council, a powerful landlord and rental housing trade association. It was part of an industry coalition that lobbied Biden in June 2021 to end the pandemic-era eviction moratorium, a moratorium vocally backed by members of the Squad and successfully extended (albeit temporarily) thanks in large part to the efforts of Bush, who spent four days sleeping on the steps of Capitol Hill to pressure the White House to prolong the policy.

Squad members have also been highly critical of the private equity industry — a subset of the finance sector heavily represented among UDP donors — for, among other things, driving up housing costs.

Private equity was, along with a broad crosssection of Wall Street and corporate America, also a fierce opponent of Build Back Better, the $2.2 trillion social spending bill proposed by Biden and championed by Squad members and other progressives. At least a dozen UDP donors, including billionaire Paul Singer, are top executives at firms that are members or directors of the trade group American Investment Council, which fought Build Back Better to its death over the legislation’s tax increases on corporations and executives.

The failure of Build Back Better also came in large part because of the opposition of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (then D-Ariz.), who ​“would do nothing at all on carried interest, so we’re just stuck on that,” according to one Democratic staffer complaining to Mother Jones. Sinema, long a magnet for finance sector cash, was also on the receiving end of the generosity of numerous UDP donors as she gummed up the works for what was supposed to be Biden’s signature piece of domestic legislation. One such donation, of $5,800, was sent to Sinema in September 2021 — the exact time she was actively working to block Build Back Better — from billionaire Trump donor Marc Rowan, whose firm Apollo Global Management is represented on the board of the American Investment Council.


Design by Rachel K Dooley


WIZARD OF OZ POWER


AIPAC’s recent big money onslaught isn’t just about defeating a handful of left-wing lawmakers; it appears to be in service of cultivating an aura of invincibility and enhancing AIPAC’s fearsome reputation as the one lobby you don’t dare cross on Capitol Hill.

“I’ve worked on campaigns where the candidate will say, ​‘I’d like to stay with you guys, but they’re threatening to spend this much money against me and I can’t do it, so I’m going to retract the statement that I made,’” Zogby says.

Geoff Simpson, campaigns director for Justice Democrats, says potential attacks and spending from AIPAC are ​“always one of the first things on candidates’ minds.”

“There’s been at least a dozen conversations with candidates or prospective candidates where AIPAC is one of the first things brought up,” Simpson adds.

Andrabi notes that, recently, the message from some members of Congress is that ​“what’s going on in Palestine is awful … I would call for a cease-fire, but I just can’t risk an AIPAC primary.”

It’s a reputation AIPAC works hard to broadcast, posting a nearly 100% success rate. On X (formerly Twitter) this April, AIPAC announced that all of its endorsements in Pennsylvania came out on top.

But AIPAC also makes strategic choices to maintain that reputation — which suggests the lobby isn’t quite so unbeatable.

As Andrabi explains: ​“They’re desperate to spend money in races, even if it doesn’t really matter or it’s not that effectual, and then claim victory immediately.”

Jewish Insider noted early in the campaign cycle that a ​“sizeable majority” of AIPAC’s list of House endorsees were running for seats that the Cook Political Report rated as far from competitive. In Pennsylvania, all but one of the 13 candidates AIPAC endorsed this cycle ran unopposed in their primaries, and Cook rated seven as uncompetitive in the general election, with only two rated as toss-ups.

Most tellingly, AIPAC only ensured its flawless record in Pennsylvania by eventually deciding not to contest the Lee race, despite having attempted to find a challenger to bankroll.

Lee’s opponent received neither the lobby’s endorsement nor the benefit of UDP’s outside spending. It was a curious move for an entity marshaling astronomical amounts to spend Israel critics out of existence, especially since Lee has accused Israel of carrying out ​“war crimes” and has backed cutting off military aid to the country.

“We know of four or five people AIPAC asked to run against Summer [Lee] in Pittsburgh who told them no, because they didn’t think that Summer was beatable,” Simpson says. The sum AIPAC was discussing putting toward the race, Simpson adds, was between $10 and $20 million.

“To be clear, AIPAC lost because they couldn’t win,” Lee says.

design by rachel k dooley


“To be clear, AIPAC lost because they couldn’t win,” Lee says.

A further examination of the electoral landscape reveals this race was just one of several high-profile failures for AIPAC this cycle so far.

In March, AIPAC fell flat on its face in an early test of its power to shape Democratic primaries after the establishment-friendly Dave Min prevailed in the Democratic primary for Rep. Katie Porter’s seat in Orange County, Calif. UDP ran $4.6 million worth of attack ads against Min, whose pro-Israel stance is tempered with only mild criticism. He won by six points anyway.

In Michigan, two people came forward in November 2023 alleging they had been offered $20 million to run against Squad member Rashida Tlaib. Both refused, even though Tlaib’s controversies since October 7 — including censure by the House for refusing to denounce the phrase ​“From the river to the sea” — should have made her an easy target, at least by AIPAC’s logic.

“I didn’t intend for a private phone call to turn public. But now that it has, here’s the truth. One of AIPAC’s biggest donors offered $20m if I dropped out of the U.S. Senate race to run against @RashidaTlaib. I said no. I won’t be bossed, bullied, or bought,” Hill Harper tweeted on November 22, 2023.

A spokesperson for AIPAC told Politico that they were not involved in the exchange with Harper. Five days later, Nasser Beydoun tweeted that he also ​“was offered $20 million to withdraw from the senatorial race and to run against my friend @rashidatlaib.”

The lobby appears to, at least so far, be staying away from the race.

Still, AIPAC has had a major impact when it chooses to spend. To the extent progressives have neutralized its influence, it’s been the result of deliberate, strategic efforts. Lee’s win, for instance, wasn’t just a matter of the politics around Israel changing at home; she was propelled into office as part of a progressive electoral wave that has reshaped Pittsburgh politics.

“It’s a situation where … if you’re going to run against Summer [Lee], you’re crossing Summer, but you’re also crossing Mayor Ed Gainey, the County Executive Sara Innamorato, and SEIU Healthcare, which has proven one of the biggest power players locally in Pittsburgh and across the state,” Simpson says.

And, he adds, Lee and her team have focused on continuing to provide effective constituent services while delivering money to her district. They boast, for example, of helping deliver $1 billion of federal money to western Pennsylvania for projects ranging from infrastructure repairs and affordable housing to clean energy manufacturing and lead removal.

“We help the constituents with their passports and their Social Security and Medicare,” says Wasi Mohamed, Lee’s chief of staff. ​“There’s a lot of this work that people don’t see.”

As a result, Lee blunted the emergence of a viable challenger while winning the endorsement of not just progressives but AIPAC-backed centrists — including Pennsylvania Sens. Bob Casey and John Fetterman, who has emerged as an unapologetic supporter of Israel’s devastating assault on Palestinians.

“They polled extensively in this district,” Lee says of AIPAC, ​“and last I heard, polls are not free, nor are they cheap.”

“It’s sort of like The Wizard of Oz,” Zogby says. “Pull back the curtain and what you see is a pretty sordid mess: a little guy at a computer grinding out hostile ads. They know that Israel is not a winning issue."


By contrast, Bowman and Bush entered the political scene by emulating insurgents like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and unseating longstanding congressional incumbents, leapfrogging the process of moving up through local and state levels. That left them without the level of local party support Lee earned. And, unlike Lee, the two most vulnerable Squad members have also been tagged with scandals that pre-dated October 7. Bowman has been harangued in the press over his congressional censure after setting off a fire alarm in the middle of a House session in September 2023 (allegedly to delay proceedings, an accusation he has denied), while Bush has been fending off attacks over the alleged misuse of campaign funds for security services (accusations she calls ​“simply false”).

According to Zogby, the threat of an AIPAC-funded challenge is intended to coax members of Congress away from the type of brazen progressive positions advocated by Bowman and Bush.

“It’s sort of like The Wizard of Oz,” Zogby says. ​“Pull back the curtain and what you see is a pretty sordid mess: a little guy at a computer grinding out hostile ads. They know that Israel is not a winning issue. … They want to hide their own fear and project the omnipotence and power — ​‘We can’t be bucked, we can’t be beat, so you ought to come on board.’ Unfortunately, all too many members do that.”

In early April, Bowman echoed this sentiment in a #ProtectTheSquad livestream event organized in part by Justice Democrats, saying that AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel cast a ​“paper-tiger Wizard of Oz power.” Determined, Bowman added: ​“We are gonna take down AIPAC this election cycle.”


Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), who has called for a cease-fire in Gaza, speaks at a news conference with Rabbis for Ceasefire and other members of the Squad. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is making efforts to unseat the incumbent.MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images


REJECT AIPAC


Far from wilting in the face of these attacks, progressives are trying something new. In March, a group of more than 20 progressive organizations — including IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace Action, the Working Families Party and Justice Democrats — announced the formation of Reject AIPAC. The organization pledged to put forward a ​“seven-figure electoral defense campaign” to defend AIPAC’s targets in Congress and launch its own lobbying campaign to counterbalance AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill, pressuring Democrats to reject an AIPAC endorsement.

The coalition started coming together after AIPAC’s involvement in the 2022 election cycle. Over the following year, a core group of organizers researched, polled and discussed what the effort could look like, while bringing in more coalition members. The effort found new urgency in the aftermath of October 7 and AIPAC’s renewed focus on progressives.

“It’s taken months and months to get together,” says Andrabi. ​“What accelerated it most definitely was the Israeli military’s horrifying assault on the Palestinian people.”

Meanwhile, the Israel lobby’s post-October 7 escalation against the Left, coupled with the Biden administration’s stubborn support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, has had a galvanizing effect on grassroots support for progressives, particularly from Muslim and Arab Americans intent on proving that being pro-Palestinian isn’t a political liability. Muslim donors angry about the Democratic response to Gaza ​“have stepped up in a major, major way for our candidates,” Simpson says.

“There’s always been a Palestinian solidarity movement, but not one that is also looking on the electoral track,” says activist and author Linda Sarsour, who helped organize the Reject AIPAC coalition. ​“The Biden administration’s unequivocal support of Israel has forced Muslim Americans to think to themselves, ​‘We have money, we have voters in swing states — why do we not have any influence?’”

Sure enough, many in the Squad saw their quarterly fund-raising totals more than double in the period after the violence broke out in Gaza. Ilhan Omar, a favorite target of the Israel-at-all-costs camp, saw a nearly fourfold rise in her fundraising haul in the final quarter of 2023, while going into the primary, Lee also raised many times more than the amount she had before October. Tlaib’s nearly $3.7 million total that was raised between October 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023, made up 80% of what she raised for the entire cycle, despite the manufactured controversy swirling around her.

“Our No. 1 volunteers were people who said, ‘I’m knocking on a thousand doors because you stood up for justice when it was hard,’” Mohamed says. “That, to me, was the story of this whole election.”


And it wasn’t just fundraising; ground game support also surged. ​“Our No. 1 volunteers were people who said, ​‘I’m knocking on a thousand doors because you stood up for justice when it was hard,’” Mohamed says. ​“That, to me, was the story of this whole election.”

All Squad members, as well as Squad-affiliated progressive Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), have vocally supported a ceasefire in Gaza since October. Another progressive freshman associated with the group, Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.), joined the call a month later. All were more recently part of the historic 37 Democrats to vote against sending $17 billion in weapons to Israel, and they also voted against the key rule-change cooked up by GOP leadership to get the bill passed through the House. The participation of Frost and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) is especially notable: Both drew criticism two years ago for centrist positions on Israel that they apparently took to head off an AIPAC-funded challenge, and had declined to join Squad members in voting against the House’s pro-Israel resolution last October. (Reached for comment, Casar said, ​“So much has changed since 2022, but I’ve always tried to work toward the safety and freedom of Palestinians and Israelis alike with a focus on human rights.”)

“It’s the movements that they’re a part of,” says Sarsour. ​“These people are responding to the moment that we live in. They’re watching organizing happening all across the country, they’re watching mass mobilization.”

Indeed, critique of Israel and opposition to unconditional U.S. military support is quickly becoming more common within the Democratic Party, as much of the U.S. public has shifted its views to align more closely with the Squad.

Polls show majorities of Americans now support putting various conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel — only five years after Ocasio-Cortez was denounced for simply suggesting that cutting such aid ​“can be discussed.”



THE LONG GAME


Just as the targeting of progressives by UDP donors is about more than Israel, the progressive fightback is, too. ​“I was working for the Sunrise Movement during Andy Levin’s election and I saw these dynamics very clearly threatening the prospects of climate policy,” says Maunus. All the candidates Sunrise supported were under threat by AIPAC, he recalls, ​“because they’re also the candidates that understand the realities in Palestine [and] are criticizing Israel.” Maunus would become central to forming the Reject AIPAC coalition.

Lee notes that ​“AIPAC and its donors are blatant in their actual agenda, [which] is less Israel and Palestine, and more how to keep the Democratic Party from being a party that reflects the interests of marginalized people, of working-class people, of labor, of our environment and of those who are desperate for Medicare for All.”

This resistance to AIPAC’s onslaught and this fight, progressives warn, will last more than a single election cycle, and it will likely see defeats along the way. But its impact is already clear in AIPAC’s inability to unseat Lee and recruit a viable candidate to challenge Tlaib, among other ways.

Simpson says that sometime between six months and a year ago ​“people were writing that the whole Squad was in danger and were going to get wiped out, and now it’s really narrowed to Jamaal [Bowman] and Cori [Bush].” Reflecting on their power and strategy, Turner says the movement has ​“got to play the long game.” She emphasizes: ​“AIPAC has been doing this for decades.”



One part of that long game may look like an aspect of Lee’s campaign, when volunteers were knocking on doors this spring, days before Lee broke matzah at the Seder in Squirrel Hill. Door after door, Lee’s volunteers didn’t just speak to voters about her reelection but engaged in the kind of difficult conversations around the assault on Gaza that have been the source of such bitter division in U.S. society since October 7.

Those conversations did not include just Jewish voters, but Muslim and Arab American communities, along with progressives who feel abandoned by the Democratic Party but remain determined to transform it — in part by planting the seeds of a new coalition capable of beating back the big money interests that further corrode democracy each and every election cycle.

“We have to go and talk to some people who maybe are not inclined to naturally come to us, or have fallen off because of the use of certain issues as wedges against progressives and people of color,” Lee says. ​“Campaigns are not just a vehicle to win elections. They’re also vehicles to drive and create and sustain community.”


Research and fact-checking provided by Riley Roliff, Imani Sumbi, Andrew Ancheta, Eloise Goldsmith, Joshua Mei, Thomas Birmingham and Skyler Aikerson.

Gaza’s Children Face an Unseen Crisis

The psychological toll taken by nine months of war is in a category not seen before, experts warn.

By Hoda Serif

August 8, 2024

Source: New Lines Magazine



Until this year, the Alashi siblings — Said, 16, Jihan, 15, and Hanan, 12 — were at school and knew only the routine of life in Gaza. The two sisters aspired to be artists.

Now they dream of mastering English, driving a car like their mother and becoming physicians so they can save the lives of people in Gaza.

The children’s parents were divorced. They lived with their father in Gaza while their mother, Dina Massoud, lived in Staten Island, in a cramped, sublet one-bedroom apartment that she shares with her new husband and their newborn baby. Crucially, she is a U.S. citizen. In November her ex-husband, who requested anonymity, called Dina, urgently requesting that she obtain the necessary paperwork from the U.S. Embassy in Egypt to evacuate him and their children from Gaza. She worried about organizing their departure, knowing that the journey to Rafah crossing was extremely dangerous. With the help of Najla Khass, 43, a Palestinian refugee coordinator in New York City, Dina decided to risk getting her family out; it was a decision, she understood, that would put her young children in direct contact with the Israeli army and what she described as their “draconian commands.”

Said, Jihan, Hanan, their father and his family evacuated their home in northern Gaza in December, along with another 1 million Palestinians, following the Israeli army’s orders to move south. For several weeks they sheltered at the Abdullah Bin Rawahah primary school near Deir el-Balah, waiting for Dina to arrive in Egypt. Each family at the school-turned-shelter was allocated one classroom containing six small twin-size beds.

Bodies were packed tightly, and men sleeping in opposite directions stretched their legs out toward the faces of the others, Hanan recalled. Some slept on desks or on the floor, covered only with light blankets. Hanan rose early each morning to join the long line for the limited bathrooms, a daily struggle that usually took two to three hours. Running water was limited, and the children lived in constant fear of being bombed. With United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) aid and food trucks turned away from Rafah crossing in the south and at the Beit Hanoun border in the north, Hanan stored a single packet of vanilla Oreos she had found on the floor under her pillow, taking small bites each night. A few weeks later the Alashi family set out on the journey to Rafah, where the few Palestinians who have managed to obtain a permit can cross into Egypt.

“And just two days after we left the empty school, Israel bombed it,” Jihan said. “We made it out.” Later, she said, “I don’t know if that makes us lucky.”

The sisters described with expressions of horror the sight of large Israeli tanks on Salah al-Din Road, the north-south artery that leads to the Rafah crossing. It was the first time they had encountered Israeli soldiers and Jihan remembers the racing beat of her heart. “Here, feel,” she said as she took my hand. The girls recounted seeing many dead bodies strewn across the main road, as they inched closer to the crossing. Jihan said her heart rate surged each time her gaze met her sister’s. “The thought of anything happening to Hanan or Said or Baba [Dad] — I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

Jihan frequently reenacts the maternal, protective role over her younger sister, a natural instinct she attributes to a childhood spent without their mother. That day in the car, her thumping heart rate was accompanied by sweaty palms and frantic recitations of verses from the Quran as they sat huddled in the car.

“We held our hands up in the air, waved the white cloth, and didn’t look [Israeli soldiers] in the eyes. We had to stare straight ahead,” Jihan said, adding, “If we wanted to survive, this is what we had to do.” Almost in unison, the girls said, “Some survive, others don’t.”

At Rafah crossing, an Egyptian officer informed them that their father would not be permitted to enter Egypt. Because he was divorced from Dina, he was not considered a member of her immediate family and so was not eligible for a crossing permit. He embraced his children and they said goodbye, not knowing when they would see one another again.

In Egypt, the Alashi children and Dina spent a month hotel-hopping in El-Warraq, a municipal district of Giza near Cairo. Once all the necessary paperwork for entry into the U.S. was prepared, the family was set to fly to New York on Jan. 8. During the long flight, all the girls thought about was Gaza: when they would next touch the granular sand of their cherished beach, where they had flown their white kites with friends and watched as the sunset painted hues of deep reds and pinks, or when they could next visit the bakery that served their favorite mango ice cream. Said wondered most about when they would next see their father and who would take care of him now that they were gone.

As Israel continues its relentless bombing campaign in Gaza, trauma experts from around the world have expressed deep concern about the devastating impact this war is having on “successive generations of Palestinian families,” Dr. Vivian Abouallol, the head of the steering committee at the USA-Palestine Mental Health Network said. The group of mental health professionals at the network identify the Israeli occupation as the sole cause of turmoil to the mental well-being of both “the Palestinian and the Israeli public.” As of this writing, the number of Palestinians who have been able to leave Gaza remains unclear, while the process is becoming increasingly onerous and costly. As of this writing, UNRWA estimates that up to 1.9 million people in Gaza have been internally displaced, or about 90% of the population.

Juliette Touma, director of communications at UNRWA, said that the current war in Gaza has, in addition to taking a death toll far exceeding that of previous wars, caused trauma on a scale worse than the intergenerational trauma that is the legacy of the Nakba in 1948, when the newly established Israeli army forced an estimated 850,000 Palestinians into what became permanent exile. When Touma visited Gaza with other UNRWA members in late October, she saw pain on a scale “unfathomable to the human mind.” She said the shock of it all keeps mourning Palestinians from crying. “It’s a reopening of an unhealed wound because many of them have either experienced the Nakba in 1948 or their grandparents have told them stories about it. For them to be forced to watch as their communities are bombed to rubble, forced to flee their homes and villages, or worse to evacuate their kids from Gaza entirely, is all part of revisiting that agonizing journey of exodus, of pain and no longer belonging.” What has transpired in Gaza over the past eight months, she adds, has created “the most destructive mental injury to the human brain, experienced by 2.4 million people, and these are just the numbers inside of Gaza.”

Najla El-Temawi Khass was born in 1980 in Shujaiyya, Gaza City’s largest neighborhood. This is where she lived when the First Intifada began in December 1987. By September 1988, riots and deadly military incursions had made the neighborhood unlivable; Najla’s parents left and settled in New Jersey, where they raised Najla and her five siblings.

Najla recalled that during the First Intifada, the Israeli army would raid the house of anyone suspected of violating the strict curfew. As an act of resistance, Palestinians would leave footprints in the sandy, unpaved streets; the Israeli soldiers would follow the footprints, raid the homes they led to and force their residents to show them their shoes. If children were caught, they were detained and tried in Israel’s military court system, which has a conviction rate above 99%, according to the Israeli army’s own records. Or they were kept in indefinite administrative detention.

“It was always little boys they wanted,” Najla said. “The goal has always been to dehumanize them. I understand now all their tactics to intimate and stoke fear.”

“One day, my eyes will speak. They will say they saw true horror. Worse than anything you can imagine,” she continued. “My ears heard it. My chest felt it. What’s happening in Gaza now is all very real to me.” She spoke softly as we sat down to drink our coffee. Her eyes wandered to a distant corner of her home in a penetrating stare, which occurred frequently when our conversations triggered memories of the Israeli military. Najla’s family is currently sheltering in displaced persons camps across Gaza. Her childhood home, which her parents had built, was demolished by an Israeli airstrike back in November.

Since settling in New York as a child, Najla has dedicated her days to serving as a full-time refugee coordinator with the Islamic Circle of North America’s ICNA Relief, a Muslim aid organization that provides services to victims of war and survivors of disaster, mostly from Palestine, Libya, Sudan and Iraq. Khalto (Auntie) Najla, as the kids call her, slowly became everyone’s aunt in her close-knit, predominantly Arab neighborhood in the New York City borough of Staten Island. The children she helped became something of a second family to her. “It’s the Palestinian way,” she said – a phrase she repeated often during our interview. “Keeping myself distracted is the only way I know how to survive,” Najla added.

The mental health crisis for Palestinians living in Gaza was already acute before Oct. 7, according to reports from UNICEF. Since 2006, Israel had imposed a military closure on Gaza, controlling everything from who and what entered or left the territory to the population registry and the daily allotment of electricity. The closure shaped entire generations that have grown up amid repeated cycles of violence, with military incursions, airstrikes and severely restricted freedom of movement. The Israeli military incursions as well as the constant surveillance and monitoring took an enormous toll; even before the current war, UNICEF estimated that at least 500,000 children in Gaza were in need of psychosocial support.

Caesar Hakim is a clinical psychologist who specializes in child and adult trauma. In addition to his private practice in Haifa he also lectures at the University of Glasgow. He was previously clinical director at the Guidance and Training Center for the Child and Family in Bethlehem. He treats patients with continuous traumatic stress disorder (CTSD) — a condition, he said, that is “radically unique” among classifications of trauma and is inherently rooted in every Palestinian’s experience.

Hakim treats patients in Haifa, Galilee, Jerusalem and the West Bank. Because Israel’s restrictions on movement make it impossible for him to see patients in Gaza, he offers remote assistance to psychologists there.

“Palestinians have long faced repeated danger,” Hakim said. “With no external protection systems to process any of their experiences, it throws them into a cycle of revictimization. It is far from what we can clinically describe as PTSD, where one’s fears are stuck in a traumatic loop, suggesting little to no likelihood of recurrence. In Palestine, that loop is reality. The threat is still there. It has always been there. This chronic, generational pain is the only breath most children have ever taken in Gaza.”

The term CTSD was first coined by South African writer Frank Chikane in the 1980s to describe the effects of apartheid on generations of children in South Africa. Children, he discovered, were particularly susceptible to developing CTSD from prolonged exposure to various forms of political repression, violence or systemic racism against their people.

The younger generation of children, Hakim says, is experiencing a resurgence of past traumas that they never had a chance to process. “What they need is stability — caretakers. Just imagine a child living in a world like this, when he was born, that there is no responsible adult to help them. Everyone is just focused on sheer survival.”

Hakim said that a significant number of his patients are increasingly reflecting on their past, with many expressing a strong desire to go back in time. “Patients come in with all the questions. They ask me: How can we live in a place like this? How can we take care of our families? Why am I here? How can I survive here?” He added: “Each one of them has his own story in his own personal life of how they lived this trauma over and over. And now it is all coming out. And they can’t avoid it, nor can they face it. There is nowhere to turn.”

The cornerstone of therapy, he says, is being able to provide a safe haven for those in need of security. For many of Hakim’s patients, his office serves as their sole sanctuary. The high rates of attempted suicide, according to Hakim, remain a daunting reminder that the Palestinian sense of alienation is everywhere amid the violent social, cultural and historical atmosphere of Israel today.

Ifirst met Said, Jihan and Hanan at Najla’s Staten Island home a week after they arrived in New York. The school day had ended and Najla, who had made a habit of picking them up each day, had just brought them home. Their mother, Dina, and I were sitting on the black leather couch in the living room as the children ascended the stairs, 16-year-old Said trudging up slowly behind his sisters and greeting me with uncertainty. He was a reserved, quiet young man with a towering posture and wavy dark-brown hair that framed his face. He did not raise his eyes to acknowledge my presence or engage in conversation. Instead, he walked silently, his feet tapping the light-orange wooden-paneled floor with the slow, uncertain steps of a man twice his age. His gaunt shoulders sagged underneath his gray hoodie as he moved, slowly but carefully, always pausing for balance before taking the next step.

Slumped in a beige armchair, legs extended, the 16-year-old became engrossed in his iPad, which Najla had gifted upon their arrival. “His head is always in that thing,” Dina said.

Before the children fled Gaza, their father had buried 12 of Said’s friends, all in the same month — a tragedy I discovered not until weeks later. I did not learn much about Said; he was withdrawn, averting his gaze when spoken to. I watched as Najla offered him a glass of water and he remarked: “Who’s getting Baba water now?”

Said remembers the last time he retrieved water for the family; he carried it alone from the well back to his home using carts laden with plastic containers. He was in Haraat al-Daraj, northwest of Gaza City, where he’d managed to acquire just two six-liter containers of briny water for four shekels ($1.10). This ration had to last his extended family of 50 for an entire week.

“Right now, you are in America, not Gaza. You can eat and get full, and you can even eat again after that,” Najla reassured Said, pushing a bowl of spicy macaroni and cheese toward him. The sisters refused meals that did not involve their ritual of sharing with one another, a reminder of their ceaseless struggle to procure food in Gaza’s ruins, where the act of eating alone was a luxury they could never afford.

They had become unaccustomed to tasty, wholesome food after subsisting for weeks on end on paltry meals — cans of tuna that had passed their expiration date, fava beans or ramen. “That’s all that we could find. The bread, if any, was moldy.” The girls were sometimes afraid to open the tuna cans because they had heard that some were booby-trapped with explosives.

Said was resolute in minimizing electricity usage as much as possible. That day, he walked around Najla’s home, vehemently switching off lights and unplugging unused appliances — from hair straighteners to iPhone chargers — a habit that was a legacy of Israel’s control over the electricity supply in Gaza, which was limited to four hours per day even before the war and then cut off completely on Oct. 8.

Jihan appeared slightly happier about the move than her two siblings did. Her hope, I learned, was in the power of academia. If they had stayed in Gaza and if there had been no war, she would have completed high school in al-Daraj, at the same school her mother, aunts and uncles had attended. “But I barely had the chance to start,” Jihan said. Her school was bombed just one month into the start of the academic year. She was most looking forward to her advanced art class, where she would learn how to create abstract canvases with oil paint. With her brother, Jihan is now enrolled at Wagner High School on Staten Island, where she has yet to forge any friendships that feel authentic. Stabraq, her best friend from Gaza, will never be replaced, Jihan tells me. “I hope she is still alive and that I can meet her again soon. We did everything together.”

“It is as if the war is not happening or people don’t seem to care as much here,” Hanan told me, referring to the school’s bleak social climate. Jihan added: “I still have nightmares. Of course I do. I can hear the sound of the bombs. But I keep it to myself. I am so lucky to be safe. To have escaped. Of course I don’t feel lucky, but I can’t complain. All I can do is work hard to achieve the grades I need to help my people.”

Dr. Samah Jabr, 47, grew up in East Jerusalem, which is occupied by Israel. For eight years she has been chair of the mental health unit at the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Ramallah, overseeing all mental health provision in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. She said that all the traumatized patients she sees in her office show a strong lack of trust, belonging and hope in human relationships: “My patients tell me they are supposed to contain their pain inside their heart, no matter how distressed, to avoid the shame of sharing it,” she said. “Such reactions are not just limited to individuals. Attitudes like these have become generalized over generations in Palestine, forming a body of maxims and proverbs that communicate a loss of faith, pervasive fear of danger and an avoidance of disclosure for both men and women. These reactions are all barriers to their healing,” she said.

Jabr has conducted training sessions for hundreds of medical professionals in Palestine, Afghanistan, Libya and Jordan. Each day, she sees up to 30 people experiencing personality changes and emotional torment, often manifesting as physical ailments. Political trauma in Palestine is both “transgenerational and collective,” she said, adding that her unit has nearly reached its capacity.

“Even if we had the funding and professional resources to address this, how do we begin to solve a trauma that is man-made, deliberate and ongoing? It is a mistake to believe it is any easier, mentally, for the child when living abroad. We, as marginalized Palestinians, do not fit the current framework by which the West defines trauma.” There is no safe place to help them anywhere in the world, Jabr adds, so long as the root of the problem endures: the Israeli occupation. “Giving people who lost their humanity, who have been reduced to nothing, their dignity back is all part of the solution. Psychologists can’t do that alone. We need responses at state and international level. We need the rest of the world to stand with us.”

Samar Harfi is a licensed clinical psychologist in Illinois. She works with the Khalil Center, a Zakat Foundation project where her clinical approach focuses on traditional Islamically integrated psychotherapy. Harfi received the President’s Volunteer Service Award for her work with refugees and treating war-related trauma in 2012. She spoke to me about the Alashi children, who are “rare cases” she says, of civilians who have been able to flee since the onset of the war. She says that what they have been exposed to in Gaza will live inside them for a long time; they have lost the sense of belonging that children desperately need for healthy development and recovery.

“This is the epitome of CTSD: shame, survivor’s guilt. Why them, not me?” Harfi added: “It is the mind that is still colonized, even if the body is physically removed from the violence.”

Back in the car, Najla was driving us to the American Veterans Memorial Pier in Brooklyn, where she had organized a kite-flying session for the children and other community members. Said opted out, as he did most days, preferring to spend the day playing basketball with Najla’s sons.

“That’s how he deals,” Najla told me. “He won’t even stay in the room if we turn on the TV, afraid he will hear the bombs off Al Jazeera.”

I watched Hanan, who was particularly thrilled by the roads, record videos of the scenery with her new iPad. On her face was an expression of wonderment at a world preserved beyond the flames of perpetual war and bombardment. Hanan looked forward to sending the videos to her father and other family members still in Gaza. “So they can see that the whole world doesn’t also look so dull. I swear, we forgot what the sun and a clear sky looks like. Listen to the birds!” she cried out. The girls ate chips while Najla tended to at least 30 unread chats about refugee relief on WhatsApp. “Welcome to a day in my crazy circus life.”

As we pulled up to the 25-foot-high memorial on the Brooklyn waterfront overlooking lower Manhattan, a group of people — some 30 children and their parents — awaited Najla, the organizer, who hurriedly removed the box of white kites and posters from her trunk. The kids sprinted to her, all waiting to choose their favorite ones. Without hesitation, Hanan pointed to the white kite coiled with green, black and red strings, then clapped her hands and launched it into the air almost immediately. Jihan stayed behind to keep a close eye on her sister.

She was only four years older than Hanan, but Jihan worried incessantly about her younger sister’s safety, afraid she might lose track of her amid the overwhelming crowd of kite flyers. “Please make sure we can always see her,” Jihan said. Najla reassured Jihan, so that she would release the protector’s burden and see that within it, joy too could be found. After all, Najla would later argue, that was her job now — and one she fully embraced.

For over two hours, Hanan immersed herself in the joyful pursuit, every movement radiating pure happiness. She darted through the crowded space, lost in the bustle of New Yorkers, the kite trailing behind her like a ribbon in the wind.

The weariness set in as soon as Hanan paused to catch her breath. She reminisced about lying in Gaza’s moist sand; those were special moments when she would gaze up at the sky where white kites flown by children seemed to dance like ghosts in the wind with the sun shining down on them and their feet anchored in the glistening sand. “It was so beautiful,” she said. On days when safety concerns kept them from the beach, the girls improvised by flying kites out of their window, a gesture to let those on the beach know they were with them in spirit.

I marveled at the sheer happiness that the simple act of flying a kite could generate for a child ravaged by war.

“This was our freedom,” she told me.

Hanan wishes she had some way of letting the kids in Gaza know that she is thinking of them. She is sure that one day they will return to play with kites on their beloved shores of Gaza.

“I have to believe,” she said. Najla silently nodded, her pencil-thin eyebrows descending toward her black, beetle-leg eyelashes: “Our beach was our only escape. Sometimes, our only hope.”

The sun had started to set, and Najla’s vision blurred with the onset of floaters, a recurrence she attributes to her many long days. Together, the sisters and Najla strolled back to the car, arms linked, ready to return to Najla’s house. The sky was sprinkled with black, red and green kites. Najla smiled.

“I was once them,” she said. “They don’t understand where they’re allowed to take up space in this world, to just exist. I do this work to remind them, and myself in the process, that hope comes with the fight and to find meaningful ways to live through this grief,” she said, speaking softly. “These are our wounds.”

US Academia and the Censoring of an Anti-Zionist Professor

BY FAWZIA AFZAL-KHAN     JULY 19, 2024

LONG READ

Facebook

TwitterRedditEmail

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

In this essay, I will describe my activism on behalf of Palestinians’ human rights and their right to self-determination, from my graduate student days on a US campus, to the present in my position as a tenured full professor, and the ways in which I’ve experienced attempts at silencing and censorship. These attempts today are more blatant and worrisome than ever before on anyone speaking up for Palestine in the USA, in the wake of the deadly genocidal massacre and famine unleashed by Israel on Palestinians in Gaza after the Oct 7^th 2023 attack by Hamas; an attack, which whilst condemnable for loss of 1200 innocent Israeli civilians, must be seen in light of the 75+years of ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and people with far more dead, injured and imprisoned than Israelis to date.

When I arrived at Tufts from Pakistan at the end of the 1970s, as a graduate student in English, I was hardly aware of the outsize influence Israeli Zionist ideology exercised on college campuses, an extension of its hold on the halls of Congress and US politics in general. Like many who grew up in what was then called the Third World, especially a new country like Pakistan which for the decades I was growing up was very much in the US camp and through the influence of mass media (TV and cinema in those days)—my generation really bought into the vision the US presented of itself as the bastion of free speech, equality, and a haven for immigrants of all races, colors and creeds. The history of its genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African peoples to fuel its capitalist paradise for the few were of course, facts that were entirely obscured in the popular narrative of America as the Land of the Free and the Brave.

Very quickly after my immersion in my graduate studies in 1979, my political education began to be shaped by cataclysmic global events such as the Iranian Islamic revolution that succeeded in ousting the West’s puppet, Reza Shah Pehlavi, the Afghanistan debacle unfolding on the borders of my home country- yet another example of Big Power rivalry ruining the lives of millions of brown-skinned peoples- and the rejection, by the Arab Summit Conference’s General Assembly, of the Camp David Accords for failing to uphold the UN’s charter, that included the right of return, national independence and sovereignty in Palestine and participation of the PLO in all decisions pertaining to the future of Palestine.

Recognizing, with some of my other fellow international students from Lebanon and Iran, that most students were either quite ignorant of events and histories beyond the borders of the USA, or unaware of the biases of their news media toward the “third world”—we decided to focus on one particularly egregious example of this lack of information: the case of Palestine. Becoming a founding member of the first-ever Student-led Committee on Information about Palestine on my campus, I learnt first-hand how dangerous it was to speak out on behalf of Palestine and advocate for their rights when our event posters were torn down and threatening messages left on our answering machines (in the era before cellphones). Consequences we are seeing today for students and faculty protesting against Israeli genocide in Gaza are much worse, when people like myself and my comrades from Tufts would have been doxxed, our student group and its activities suspended or banned. Back then, the reactions to our efforts at presenting an alternative viewpoint on the question of Palestine were limited to messages meant to intimidate, but did not actually result in a loss of future employment as they have for many unfortunate student supporters of Palestine today.

My own professional trajectory proceeded fairly smoothly from finishing my graduate studies to landing a tenure-track position in the Department of English at Montclair State university a year after I graduated with my Phd. from Tufts. Aside from a few Visiting Professor gigs at places like Harvard, NYUAD and several higher ed institutions in my home country of Pakistan over the decades, my tenure home has remained Montclair State, which has gone from being designated as a College when I joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1987, to becoming a University. My 37-year career is, I contend, a study in surviving, at times even thriving in academia, despite the many obstacles small and large that are thrown into the paths of faculty like myself who dare to challenge the normative political narrative around Zionism, the singular issue that defies and denies all other progressive viewpoints.

First Rebellion

During my second year at MSU (then MSC)—I attended what was then an annual feature of our campus life: the annual Presidential Lecture. That year, our speaker was the famed New York intellectual, Susan Sontag, who was introduced a deferential group of administrators including the Acting President, and a leading member of our English Department faculty. The esteemed Ms Sontag spoke on the unit of the decade—what it is, what it signifies, how it came to be a temporal marker and so on—the usual arcane stuff intellectuals like to ponder. She honed in on a specific decade to provide some concrete examples to buttress her larger philosophical argument: the decade that the world witnessed the holocaust of the Jewish peoples in Nazi Germany, which was horrific in every sense. What got my goat, however, was the fact that this was the same decade—the 1940s—that also witnessed the creation of the state of Israel on Palestinian lands and concomitant Nakba—catastrophe—visited on the Palestinian natives of those lands, thousands of them forced to flee the onslaught of Israeli forces, many who became victims of massacres and destruction of their homes, their olive and lemon groves, their villages, their past. When I raised this point as a question for Ms Sontag to comment on, as to why she had not alluded to this other group of people affected so badly during the decade under scrutiny—she started to tremble visibly on the stage, and ultimately responded with anger at the audacity of my question.

I remember how several junior faculty approached me as we streamed out of the auditorium asking what I was thinking, and wasn’t I afraid of jeopardizing my tenure and promotion at the institution? The following day I received a summons to the Chair’s office, who proceeded to school me in the true meaning of Jews being the Chosen People of God, and why I had in a way, disobeyed God’s laws by questioning his favorite humans! It was an extraordinary meeting, and I was tempted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, except that I knew it was a serious matter, that I had to proceed with caution if I was going to get through the next few years and past the tenure decision with success. Luckily for me, I had a wonderful defender in the person of a senior member of the department, a very well-respected colleague who had brought some major grant monies into the department and college. She wrote a very strong op-ed for the campus student newspaper, The Montclarion, defending my right to free speech and expressing disdain for a globally renowned author who could not respond to a fair question except by berating me for simply asking the question. In the weeks that followed, I was amazed to discover daily messages left in my voicemail by colleagues—both staff and faculty—whom I did not know, acknowledging my courage in speaking out on a topic that most are trained to fear touching.

Since these were the days before social media, I was protected by the fact that such comments like mine could not go “viral” and hence avoid what today would surely be some sort of “cancellation.” Several years later I did get my tenure—but no promotion. For that, I had to fight hard, to the point of threatening a lawsuit, but again, luck prevailed and I got promoted to Associate Professor level the following year.

Post-tenure Obstacles and Resistances

The politics of fear that I observed amongst non-tenured faculty especially and also amongst those aspiring to leadership positions in the department and institution, operated on the unspoken assumption that criticism of Israel was unthinkable, a sure way to end a career, and hence resulted in a self-imposed censorship on the part of the majority of faculty at the university. Only one other senior tenured faculty member of my department and I, were vocal in our support for the right of Palestinians to self-determination and we were the only two who would speak out against the increasingly obvious Israeli apartheid state policies and its massive and brutal military response to stone-throwing Palestinian kids during the 1^st and 2^nd intifadas.

After Hamas’ electoral win in Gaza in 2005—and it bears noting that Israel helped create it as an alternative to the secular PLO in 1987 after the First Intifada—Israel, despite agreeing to a truce that held for a number of years, staged a raid by the IDF on members of Hamas, killing six of them on Nov 4^th, 2008. This led to retaliatory firing of rockets by Hamas, and on Dec 27, 2008, Israel attacked the Gaza strip by land and air in what it dubbed Operation Cast Lead, killing, over a 3 week period, a total of 1419 Palestinians of whom 1167 were civilians, according to the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whilst Israeli Human Rights group B’Tselem reported 1385 Palestinians killed. The use of white phosphorus bombs on civilian targets including two hospitals (Al Quds and Al Wafa), as well as on the UN compound in Gaza City, was declared a war crime by several human rights organizations such as Amnesty International as well as the Goldstone Report, as were family massacres conducted by IDF forces, and killing of Palestinian civilians fleeing homes holding aloft white flags. During Operation Cast Lead, total number of Israelis killed was 4: 3 civilians and 1 soldier, and 518 wounded.

When I tried to organize a day long teach-in with scholars and artists at my university to educate our student body as well as the larger community on the scale of atrocities being committed by Israel during Operation Cast Lead, allowing for debate and discussion on Zionism as a political ideology, the creation and role of Hamas in Palestinian resistance struggles as part of a rise in Islamist or political Islam which many countries in the grip of US imperialist policies, rightly or wrongly saw as a strategy of resistance–I was taken aside by certain department members who later held leadership roles, in an attempt to discourage me from inviting some of the speakers I had lined up—specifically, the anti-Zionist academic activist, Norman Finkelstein. When I asked why, I was told that “he is not a scholar.” This, despite the fact that even before being declined tenure at DePaul university, Prof Finkelstein had already published 3 books with major academic presses which most “scholars” would be honored to have their books published by: University of California Press, University of Minnesota Press, and Verso, plus a fourth book by Henry Holt and Company, an imprint of Macmillan Books—also very prestigious, being one of the oldest publishing companies in the US.

Obviously, the issue had little to do with whether he was or wasn’t a scholar; rather, as a son of holocaust survivors, the fact that he was writing exposes of Israel as a fascist, apartheid state, with a book entitled the Holocaust Industrystriking a blow to the sacrosanct status of the Holocaust as sui generic and untouchable by any sort of critique, followed by another on the “mis-use of antisemitism and abuse of history”—well, the Zionist industry had to silence him and unfortunately that was the effect my colleagues’ persuasive tactics resulted in; in the end, I invited Joseph Massad, a scholar of Palestinian history at Columbia, who at that point in time, hadn’t yet become the target of Zionist student attacks demanding his ouster for teaching, in their opinion a “one-sided” perspective on Israel-Palestine, effectively smearing him as an anti-semite in the process.

I want to be clear here that the colleagues in question are themselves respectable scholars in their respective fields, and have been kind and gracious in their dealings with me through the decades.  I’m sure they wouldn’t recognize or even agree that what they were doing was a form of censorship by invoking the dreaded spectre of antisemitism. Their approach to censoring opinions like mine are far more sophisticated than the more outrightly course and obvious intimidation of some other colleagues, like, for instance, a self-proclaimed Christian Zionist who was Chairperson of our College’s department of Religion and Philosophy for many years, and had affixed to his office wall, a large Confederate flag. For displaying an obviously racist emblem extolling the virtues of a slaveholding past in the South, this colleague was never sanctioned or told he couldn’t fly the flag in full view of students (and faculty) walking past his office, many of whom were surely intimidated or felt harassed or unsafe by in the presence of such a symbol. Yet in recent days after the Oct 7^th 2023 Hamas attack on southern Israel that immediately resulted in Israel’s massive deadly assault on Gazan civilians and which was clearly genocidal in intent—the little Palestinian flag I affixed to my office door (courtesy the Students for Justice in Palestine on our campus)—drew notice and condemnation from several faculty members, including my current dept chair(one of the two colleagues who in 2008 had argued against issuing an invitation to Norman Finkelstein) who told me during a private exchange that he was hurt to see this display of support for Palestinians so soon after Hamas attacked Israel; never mind that as I pointed out in our friendly exchange of views, and without endorsing Hamas actions, that there really was no comparison in terms of number of lives lost—27,000 vs 1200 to date—nor had the attack resulted in damage to civilian infrastructure on the Israeli side anywhere close to what Israeli counterattacks on Gaza’s schools, hospitals, homes delivered in retaliation. The sign on his door, announcing his office as a safe space for all students experiencing “anti semitism, anti Zionism, Islamophobia,” has, by equating anti-semitism with anti-zionism, opened up a dangerous space that encourages attacks from students on those of us who proffer critiques of Zionism as a racist nationalist ideology that is unacceptable to many people of the Jewish faith too. Sure enough, a student in one of my classes this past semester brought a charge of anti-Semitism against me, which I managed to effectively debunk because of meticulous record-keeping I have learnt to do precisely to ward off such attacks. Whilst within a week of my putting up the little Palestinian flag in a display of solidarity, it was gone, vandalized, my Chair’s sign remains on his door. Despite our cordial relationship,  I cannot get him to see how the fallacious conflation it endorses, poses a grave threat to freedom of speech in our classes. The passage of HR 3016 into law recently will have a similar chilling effect.

To return to my Christian Zionist colleague, who is now long-since retired—back then he was a very powerful faculty member, who headed up for over a decade, our college’s committee that decided annually who would be awarded the prestigious University Distinguished Scholar award. It would be an important recognition legitimizing the kind of schol-activist work I had been doing, combining literary with cultural critique to avowedly advance a social justice agenda. And I believe that was precisely why it was important for the neoconservative cohort to deny me such recognition, which could open the door to many other scholars (and students)—to follow this path.

I had to apply 10 years in a row before I got it—and that was only once I brought a complaint against my self-proclaimed Christian Zionist colleague, insisting he be relieved of his chair’s position on this committee as no one is supposed to serve continuously for that length of time. To demonstrate how egregiously biased this individual was and yet managed to control the actions of a diverse body of faculty in his attempts to prevent an award/recognition I had clearly earned through my numerous publications when I started applying for this award, I will share the following point of information. One year, the committee under his leadership, decided to vote for another faculty member who had applied for this award so as to prevent me from being in the running, which proved to be such a ridiculously partisan decision that even the university President (no supporter of mine)—that year was forced to deny their decision, with the humiliating result that NO ONE was awarded this honor that year. How do you vote for someone to be given a Distinguished Scholar recognition when they haven’t published anything of note—except a few newsletter entries and an article in a non-peer-reviewed journal? Thanks to someone with a sense of justice on that committee, I managed to have a look at this other faculty’s application dossier (all of 2 pages long!)—and used the information I gleaned to later write to the President as well as the Dean of my College to let them know I wasn’t going to abide the current Chair of the Award Committee being allowed to serve another term. In that letter, I detailed the decisions taken over the past 10 years which according to what I knew about research and publication records of applicants including myself, had wronged me by refusing to acknowledge both the breadth and depth of my scholarship.

The next year, sure enough, with the threat of legal action by me as well as perhaps, a few awakened consciences—I got what by rights I should have received a decade earlier. Perhaps because my scholarly publications have nothing to do with the Israel-Palestine issue, I was helped with a strong case made on my behalf by my department representative to the Awards committee, the same colleague who is in disagreement with my anti-Zionist views.

This is where things get trickier and murkier.

People obviously have/should have, a right to their views, but when holding a particular set of views puts someone’s career in danger, and brings them into the line of censure and censorship, then dangerous precedents curbing free speech are being set.

In the cases I experienced involving the two colleagues described above, one has been very subtle in this area of curbing my right to free expression through a soft “guidance”, at times even by helping me advance certain career goals, whereas the other made blatant attempts to deny me a platform of visibility and scholarly prominence due to my views on a particular issue with which he was in disagreement. The real problem is that these two very different types of censoring actions, one within the bounds of friendly collegiality the other not—are united under the banner of a shared Zionist ideology that has huge clout in academia and politics and works to isolate people like me in an effort to curb our ability to grow in numbers and strength. As an illustration of the latter claim I’m making, despite pleading for the past two decades to my department colleagues to back a request to the upper administration for a tenure-track line in Arab and Arab American literature and culture, or hire even another postcolonialist like myself who could teach within my areas of interest such as the course I created called Images of Muslim Women and which currently gets offered only when I am available to teach it—my requests have been effectively sidelined. Hiring another brown South Asianist like me or an Arabist has proved impossible over the past 37 years, and we remain a white-dominated dept.

In the case of the more blatant approach, it led my Christian Zionist colleague in the aftermath of 9/11, to posting outrageously racist and xenophobic comments about me on a 3-4,ooo strong faculty and staff listserv, such as “Go back to the caves you crawled out from”—when I insisted on historicizing the 9/11 tragedy, bringing to the fore arguments being made by activist writers like Arundhati Roy about the many 9/11s that preceded what happened on US soil, in so many countries of the global south thanks to unrelenting military and economic interference by the US’s military-industrial imperialist complex. Part of my own historicizing argument was to link unqualified US backing of the Zionist colonial-settler Israeli apartheid nation to the state of general distrust and dislike of the US by the majority of the world’s brown and black peoples. I also published an anthology of writings by Muslim women called Shattering the Stereotypes in which I made these links between US’s destructive imperialist policies around the globe, including its egregious support for land theft and killing of native Palestinians by Israel, to the rise of Islamist extremism as a form of opposition to what its sympathizers and followers perceive as the unchecked hegemony of the western bloc of nations led by the US of A.

Making such links obviously did not go down well with people like the former Chair of Religion and Philosophy at Montclair. Accordingly, he made vocal and visible attempts to silence me, but in effect, this just exposed his bias ever so clearly, to the chagrin of more sophisticated minds, some of whom may have shared similar reservations about my politics and point of view.

Without going down the path of assuming I know what lay in the hearts and minds of colleagues as well as administrative leaders, I can attest to the fact that a strange confluence of pressure built up around me in the decades after 9/11, wherein I became the “Muslim Woman” made to emblematize both the exception to the rule of Muslim fundamentalism in western academic locations, as well as to be looked at with suspicion for harboring sentiments which, because they were at odds with the US-Zionist machine of Empire, rendered me unpatriotic (hence a traitor) in the eyes of many. Several students especially in classes where I taught Palestinian writers like Ghassan Kanafani or Arab feminists like Nawal el Saadawi who also exposed the links between Zionism, US imperialism, patriarchy and racial capitalism, as well as so-called Islamic fundamentalism —called me anti-USA, complaining about me in student evaluations. At times some Jewish students expressed anger at my views, although in more recent years, the number of Jewish anti-Zionist students has grown exponentially on campus, as a result, perhaps, of exposure to oppositional views of Zionist discourse taught by people like me. In any case, the net result of the confluence of both admiration as well as distrust for what I stood for, for the views I espoused unambiguously in my teaching and my writings, exposing the links between all manner of pieties, combined to result in a number of eventualities.

The first of these was the discovery that my name was on the AMCHA list of professors “inimical to Israel” and hence to be avoided and denounced. Here is what the Amcha Initiative’s website announcement of their stated objectives:

IMPORTANT: Share this list with your family, friends, and associates via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, or word-of-mouth.

As the fall semester begins, many students will consider taking courses offered by Middle East scholars on their respective campuses, in order to better understand the current turmoil raging in the Middle East, especially the Israel-Gaza conflict. AMCHA Initiative has posted a list of 218 professors identifying themselves as Middle East scholars, who recently called for the academic boycott of Israel in a petition signed. Students who wish to become better educated on the Middle East without subjecting themselves to anti-Israel bias, or possibly even antisemitic rhetoric, may want to check which faculty members from their university are signatories before registering. (my emphasis)

From MSU, apparently, I’m the only such signatory listed:

Montclair State University
Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Professor and Director, Women and Gender Studies

During the 2016-2017 academic year, after a semester teaching abroad at NYU in Abu Dhabi, I returned to MSU and because of a sudden departure of the woman who had succeeded me as Director of Women and Gender Studies after I’d completed two terms in the position, I was requested by colleagues teaching in the program, and at the behest of the then Provost, to take up the post once more so as to keep the program running smoothly. I agreed to do so for one year, stating that we needed to find someone else to take on these leadership responsibilities as I had done my duty and had agreed to resume my position only for a year to ensure that a program I had built up over the past 6 years and in whose success I was invested, would not fall apart. Over the summer months preceding the Fall term, I then worked pro-bono to restore some order in the program prior to moving into the AY, which included finalizing the hiring of 2 new adjunct instructors to teach several of our required courses which were already at capacity with registered students. One of these new instructors, who had already met with, and whose credentials had been vetted by, the outgoing Director, who had offered both him and the other instructor jobs for the coming year, apparently had tweeted a comment sometime over the past year, expressing his disgust at President Trump and stating, “Trump is a f—ing joke. This is all a sham. I wish someone would just shoot him outright.” I did not know of these political opinions of said instructor or about this social media posting expressing a strong wish to see the current President of the US dead, but even if I had, I would have treated it as his right to free speech particularly in off-campus fora. A few weeks prior to the start of the Fall term, I was asked to meet with the Dean of my college, who informed me that I had been relieved of my position as Director of the program.

The reason I was given for this ignominious “firing” from a leadership position that I had been invited to—nay begged—to fill, was that a letter had been sent to the President of the University, from an outside source asking how someone calling for the assassination of our country’s President, had “slipped through the cracks” in the hiring process without being properly vetted.  Since I was the Director in charge, the barb was clearly pointed at me, and as such, had its desired effect: not only the instructor in question, but I too was relieved of our positions. Here is how I saw what happened, as I outlined in an article published soon thereafter in CounterPunch.

I believe strongly that my “firing” was in response to the Islamophobic rant sent to the President, Provost and Dean of my university by right wing columnist James Merse (who writes for a rag called the Daily Caller in NJ)—and on which he also copied me. In this email he threatened the university, claiming he and his “cohort” of right-wing supporters would have marched in protest onto the campus had the admin not fired Allred! He kept asking in that email “how did Allred’s hire slip through the cracks” (he had previously stated such things publicly)-and since I was the new Director in charge of the Program at this time, the question was obviously pointed at me. Now all the administrators knew I had had nothing to do with hiring this Allred guy—so why remove me then? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that these right-wing nuts like Merse knew of my public writings exposing their outfits and the individuals that head them and that right now in the US, these scary folks are exercising their financial and political clout to pressurize university administrators to fire or otherwise silence voices like mine who are anathema to them.

A particular article I had published a few years prior, also in Counterpunch, traces precisely this money-trail of funders of Islamophobia which I argued in the article, is quite clearly linked to Zionist and pro-Israeli sources and conservative think-tanks. My research into these links was prompted in the fall of 2012, by seeing huge billboards appear at my Hudson Valley town’s train station, touting nakedly Islamophobic ads. I wrote:

I was stunned to see an ad on a billboard staring me in the face from across the train tracks stating the following:

19,250 deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11/01. And counting. It’s not Islamophobia, it’s Islamorealism.

The ad was paid for by two organizations called “Jihad watch.org” and “Atlasshrugged”. Jihad Watch is a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, and its Director is a man named Robert Spencer who is the author of twelve books, including two New York Times bestsellers, The Truth About Muhammad and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). According to the Jihadwatch website:

Spencer has led seminars on Islam and jihad for the United States Central Command, United States Army Command and General Staff College, the U.S. Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the U.S. intelligence community.  Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs (Regnery), is a supposed “expose” of how jihadist groups are advancing their agenda in the U.S.

Spencer was joined in weaving his web of anti-Muslim (and more specifically, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian) conspiracy theories—which are still being taught to and ingested by the US military forces—by his colleague Pamela Geller, an acolyte of the early 20^th c. writer Ayn Rand, a libertarian conservative and uber-capitalist—hence the name of the blogsite she sponsors, Atlasshrugs.com. which today has become https://gellerreport.com/ and is spewing forth venomous stories repeating unsubstantiated Israeli hasbara claims about Hamas ‘ rapes of Israeli women (which have been proved to be utterly factitious, relying on uncorroborated accounts of two unreliable witnesses belonging to a very suspect and morally compromised militia group called ZAKA, which in Israel itself prior to Oct 7^th, had been subject to incessant criticism, investigations, and demands to dismantle it).[1]

As I was researching the links between Islamophobic content of Spencer and Geller’s work and their support for Israel, it became clear that theirs was a racist agenda that also appealed to neoconservative white supremacists in Europe. So I pointed out how

The attacks on Muslims and those thought to be Muslim which … are linked to racism in general, are hardly confined to the US. The terrible massacre of innocent children at summer camp in Norway by Anders Brevik a few years ago can be linked to the hate-speech of bloggers Geller and Spencer who are cited as important influences by Breivik in his Manifesto.

As I argued in the conclusion of that essay, there was (still is!)–a confluence of several dangerous discourses that coalesced in August 2012 in the anti-Muslim ads such as those posted on MTA train stations in NY. Jihadwatch and AtlasShrugged were also behind another series of ads posted on municipal buses in San Francisco and on municipal buses, and here is what these proclaimed:

In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man.

Support Israel, Defeat Jihad.

The equation of “civilized man” with the State of Israel, the “savage” with that of the absent Arab, is lifted verbatim from a 1974 lecture by American author Ayn Rand, which have been echoed by Golda Meir and other past and present leaders of Israel:

The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it’s the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don’t want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don’t wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I’ve contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.

(lecture delivered in 1974)

Connecting the Dots

What I’ve tried to do throughout my academic career, is to connect the dots between phenomena the academy wishes to keep separate and de-linked via its erection of disciplinary walls, zealously guarded, even when lipservice is given to the virtues of interdisciplinarity. Most of all, drawing connections between Zionism, US militarism, racialized capitalism and exposing, as I have, how these disparate formations are threaded together in ways that permeate and inform the hallowed halls of academia, is clearly the kind of display of disobedience to the norms of our profession that must needs be punished.

It was, therefore, no surprise that the University President took the occasion of a threat toward the campus made by the reporter for the Daily Caller (a Fox News affiliate, founded by Tucker Carslon and Neil Patel), who stated in an email to the top brass that he had been prepared to “organize and lead significant peaceful-but loud—protests and campaigns” to hold the university accountable had it not terminated the adjunct instructor’s position– to not just fire that adjunct, but also “punish” me by publicly dismissing me from my position as Director of WGS.  Doing so can be read as a decision made possible by a serendipitous confluence of factors, to appease a university President wary of someone espousing my politics “leading” and setting policy and curricula goals for a small but thriving program with a reputation for disobedience, as well as to do the kind of damage control needed to prevent conservative donors allied to the individuals, media outlets and think-tanks the Daily Caller reporter had links with, to withdraw their financial support.

What I had argued several years prior to my wrongful dismissal–that a confluence of interests in the US political and cultural sphere threatened to overcome the polity with hatred, zenophobia, Islamophobia, racism—these same factors came together a few years later to ensure the following outcome in my professional life: as a brown Muslim woman who had painstakingly exposed links between Zionism and these other ills, I would not be given a public-facing position that might result in persuading others to what is clearly anathema in US discourse. Here is what I had written in 2012, following the Islamophobic and anti-Palestine poster campaign orchestrated by Geller and Spence:

What this uncritical support and valorization of the State of Israel and its Jewish citizens leads to, as the world has seen in the past 60 years or so since Israel was founded and Palestine reduced to a series of occupied settlements, is ongoing war between unequal opponents in Israel/Palestine.  Such a state of affairs based on injustice toward the Palestinians who have been refugees in their own lands since 1947, with more than 4 million of them displaced in the Palestinian diaspora, has contributed to many of the troubles we face today as the world becomes a full-scale conflict zone from East to West, North to South. The mentality of the Gellers and Spencers of this world has infected the good sense of people on all sides of this and other related debates on human rights worldwide, and exerted undue influence on the foreign policy of the USA; it has shaped presidencies and policies, and now, if unchecked,  such a mentality could bring together discourses of racism, zenophobia, class and gender politics together with Islamophobia, that may push the electorate into voting for people who would lead the country back into the Dark Ages of a second McCarthy era.

Well, as it has turned out, whether you are Trump or Biden—the Palestinians remain as fodder to be served up to the Israel lobby.

Where I Am/ We Are Today

We are obviously all under surveillance and today we are seeing the terrible consequences of speaking truth to power affecting students and faculty across our campuses who dare to condemn Israeli genocide and show empathy with Palestinian civilians being butchered in the thousands.

Once again, with a handful of other faculty on my campus, I am active on our campus discussion list in posting analysis and information beyond state-sponsored media narratives. Once again, we are the victims of name-calling and one of us on my campus has been publicly silenced due to complaints against him of “creating a hostile work environment.” I have in recent months, published an essay outlining this outrageous turn of events.

While dangerous moves to equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism are afoot as witnessed in a US Congressional Resolution passed last December, the temper of the masses has changed. This has been unambiguously on view as millions of people many of them of the Jewish faith, across the world continue to take to the streets in protest of the Israeli genocide–a word that following the ICJ’s ruling, will now forever be attached to the Israeli state.

On US campuses, as well, while firings and suspensions of untenured faculty who are vocal in their support of Palestine are on the rise, as is the doxxing of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students from many of whom job offers have been rescinded, this is all being countered by many more of us than ever before, refusing to be silenced or intimidated. Helped by several colleagues, I am proud to announce that we have joined FJP National with the creation of our university’s chapter of the same, and are slowly seeing numbers of members rise, though many have requested anonymity.

While I have at times elected to, and at others been deliberately sidelined in the decision-making apparatus of university life, I believe that justice will always prevail in the end. I am proud of having remained a disobedient voice, of questioning the norms that compel us to be compliant to the norms of authority in, or outside of, academe. Indeed, I am currently the plaintiff in a case to investigate and discipline my Dean who at a public event in February of this year, refused to greet me or my husband civilly when I walked up to him to say hello, and instead launched into a hostile diatribe against what he claimed were antisemitic remarks I had made on the campus listserv.

I’d like to end by citing a passage from Steven Salaita’s latest essay, in which he pulls no punches regarding the compromises we as scholars working for remuneration and rewards make; at the same time, he exhorts us to do the right thing, to embrace disobedience and class disloyalty, in order to refuse compliance to a genocidal world order:

Maybe it’s time for scholars to disobey our own compunctions—that we’re important or even indispensable, that our education gives us special insight, that innovation would die if we suddenly went away.  Our main compunction, as with all the professions, is to obey class loyalties.  Disobedience should be introspective, then.  We have to disrupt the norms and procedures that advantage the compliant.  How can this be done?  It’s hard to say.  But that it needs doing is by now beyond doubt.

(“Customs of Obedience in Academe,” Feb 12, 2024))

Steven paid the ultimate price for disobedience—he was fired from his faculty position even before setting foot on the campus that had hired him, for a series of tweets condemning Israeli slaughter in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. I am lucky I managed to get tenure, and within the constraints and privileges afforded by it, have tried and will continue to try to speak truth to power—including going after those, like my Dean, who think they can get away with abuse of power in their attempts to silence us.

Notes.

[1] See Nadine Sayegh, “Israel’s ‘purple-washing’ and the dehumanisation of Palestinian men and women.” The New Arab. Feb 8, 2024. https://www.newarab.com/features/purple-washing-and-abuses-against-palestinians

Fawzia Afzal-Khan is University Distinguished Scholar at Montclair State University in NJ. Her latest book is Siren Song:Understanding Pakistan Though it’s Women Singers. She can be reached at:  fak0912@yahoo.com