Here is another article I wrote for the Spectator, this one from March:

Apartheid Comes to New Jersey
Saifedean Ammous
3/5/07

It was a cold Sunday morning in Teaneck, N.J. Some two-hundred-odd Jewish-Americans were entering the Orthodox synagogue Congregation B’nai Yeshurun where they were to hear a sales pitch by the Amana Settlement Movement aimed at convincing them to buy homes in illegal Israeli settlements.

America, the land that gave the world the separation of church and state, is hosting an auction where only members of one religious group can buy property.

And here I am, a Palestinian who grew up hundreds of meters away from some of these very settlements. I cannot buy any of these houses and am not admitted into the auction room. Literally and figuratively left out in the cold, I light a cigarette and get over it immediately; being denied entry is not an entirely novel experience for a Palestinian.

A group of around 50 pro-peace activists gather outside to protest the auction. Rabbi Steven Pruzansky comes out to speak to journalists; he doesn’t seem to understand the controversy. “Everyone can buy land anywhere. I was in the Bahamas and they were selling land; in Florida they sell land to anyone, why can’t we buy land in Israel?” When a journalist mentions to him that these are colonies for Jews only, he says that he prays hard for peace, and looks forward to the day when Jews and Arabs can live together, but for now this is hard because of the “security situation.” It doesn’t occur to him that this “security situation” may itself be the result of these exclusive colonies being built on stolen Palestinian land.

I ask a middle-aged man leaving the presentation what he thought of it. He tells me he will definitely move to Israel one day. I ask him if he knows anything about the legal status of these settlements; he tells me it is “unclaimed land.” I mention to him a recent report by Israeli group Peace Now which finds that 40 percent of settlements are built on confiscated private Palestinian land (as opposed to the other 60 percent that are built on illegally occupied land.) “Peace Now and B’Tselem are the two most anti-Semitic organizations in the world,” he replies, “Can they prove it?”

I tell him that this is based on documents from Israel’s “Civil Administration” and that the Israeli government never denied these reports, but he’s having none of it. I ask him if he thought about asking Amana about the legality of the land, but he answers with a stern “No, I don’t want to ask them. I don’t need to know.”

One of my most vivid memories of growing up under Israeli apartheid came in the summer of 1993, when our house in Ramallah would receive water only three days a week. I remember driving one day near the colony of Shilo (back in the good old days when we could still drive between Palestinian cities) and witnessing the water sprinklers bursting at full blast outside the settlement to water the surrounding hills, ensuring the view for the colonialists was a little greener. Someone today will buy a house in Shilo, and in a few years, on a hot summer day, she will wake up to this beautiful green view, while I would wake up praying there would be enough water to shower.

Settlements receive around 10 times the amount of water per capita that Palestinian cities and villages receive. While we had to resort to buying plastic dishes to cut down on dish-washing, they would spend their days in swimming pools enjoying the lush green views afforded to them by their sprinklers.

And today, this colonialism is taken to absurd lengths. Having helped turn the West Bank into the world’s biggest constellation of ghettoes surrounded by walls and racially-exclusive colonies and roads, Amana was still not satisfied. Nor were they satisfied with the economic and political support that the American government provides to the Israeli government’s abuses of human rights and international law. They had to squeeze money from the people of New Jersey to build more exclusive illegal colonies, dispossess more Palestinians, and take more water from my family. All part of “Keeping the Zionist Dream Alive,” as the Amana brochure put it.

Watching the quintessentially American family of a dad, mom, and three kids emerge enthusiastically from their blue Ford SUV toward the auction made me think of all the families I knew whose lands were taken by Israel; often forcefully displaced and separated, these families can not even buy these lands back if they wanted to. In “The Only Democracy in the Middle East,” real estate is run by imaginary ghosts from 3,000 year-old books that displace families from their only homes to auction them as second and third homes to Americans.

I wonder what drives this beautiful family to wake up on a Sunday morning and go find out about joining a colonial project instead of going to the mall; contributing to its success with their money by not knowing and not wanting to know about the reality of what they are getting into. It sounds too banal to be true, but a consumerism that willfully and consciously chooses to be blind to the consequences of its purchases is helping prop up the world’s only remaining colonial apartheid system.

The night before coming here, this family doubtlessly weighed the option of joining this project against skiing, shopping, or visiting relatives. Unfortunately for my future bathing prospects, they have decided to join in Amana’s quest to “Keep the Zionist Dream Alive.”

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© Copyright 2007 Columbia Daily Spectator

The Antiwar Movement & Palestine

Here’s a little article I wrote for the Columbia Spectator a couple of months ago:

Recognizing Palestine’s Struggle
Saifedean Ammous
1/26/07

As anti-war activists prepare to march on Washington, D.C. on Saturday demanding an end to the war in Iraq, one issue will be conspicuous by its absence from the agenda of the majority of groups participating: Israel’s despicable oppression of Palestinians.

That this issue is left out of the march is more significant than it may initially seem. After all, there are many worthy causes around the world that are not mentioned in this anti-war march. Yet, not mentioning Palestine in the antiwar movement reflects an absurd short-sightedness in dealing with the Middle East. It will doom this movement to failure if the benchmarks for its success are set to a reasonable standard beyond the myopic (and by now largely inevitable) “Bring the Troops Home.”

First, the moral case: if the antiwar movement opposes the war on Iraq because of moral concerns, it is baffling it would remain silent on Palestine. Israel has set up walls and checkpoints that separate farmers from their lands, students from their schools and universities, patients from their hospitals, and fiances from each other. In effect, Israel has in place a colonial system of apartheid in the West Bank where close to half a million Jews get superior access to all resources, live in their Jewish-only communities, drive on roads for Jews only, and are completely separated from any contact with Palestine’s non-Jews. No wonder that Archbishop Desmond Tutu has denounced Israel’s policies in Palestine as worse than those of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

When confronted with these facts, some members of the antiwar movement will concede that the Palestinian situation is bad, but will wash their hands of it by saying that it is not America that is engaged in such policies and that the antiwar movement is a domestic movement aimed at exerting domestic pressure on the American government. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Whereas Americans are not carrying out the actual oppression in Palestine, America is as morally culpable as Israel in these actions. American aid (both military and civilian) subsidizes the racist occupation and settlements with billions of taxpayer dollars, leading to a situation where each Israeli citizen receives more money from the U.S. federal government than citizens of most American states do. In fact, America gives more to Israel than it gives to all of Sub-Saharan Africa combined.

Further, the political cover that has allowed Israel to continue in its delinquent disregard for international and human rights laws only comes thanks to the continued, unconditional, and morally complicit diplomatic and political cover it gets from the world’s only remaining superpower. America allows Israel to continue to oppress Palestinians. Moral opposition to the Iraq war has to be accompanied by moral opposition to Israeli apartheid.

Now we turn to the practical case. Many argue that in order for the antiwar movement to be effective, it needs to concentrate only on Iraq. Asking for too much is a recipe for achieving too little, we are told, and in order to save Iraq we may need to forget about Palestine. After all, politics is not all about morality, and politicians need to prioritize.

I disagree. It is flawed for the movement to think that the only problem with America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy is the occupation of Iraq. Continued support for Israel’s crimes is the root of the problem and has radicalized anti-American fervor since long before the Iraq debacle. Iraq has worsened this, but even if the situation there were to be magically resolved, this would still not end the anti-Americanism and the rightful resentment that the majority of Arabs and Muslims feel. It is surely not a solution, just a reversal of one of the many grave mistakes America has committed. But don’t take my word for it.

The Iraq Study Group’s report clearly states that America must engage in finding a real solution to the Israel-Palestine problem in order to succeed in Iraq and the wider region. From Jimmy Carter to Philip Zelikow to Zbigniew Brzezinski to Brent Scowcroft, a growing number of foreign policy experts and scholars agree with this proposition. As Martin Luther King said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

The antiwar movement continues to fudge the issue, carefully circumventing any serious discussion of America’s Middle East policy. It is truly a remarkable nadir for an antiwar movement to have a moral position inferior to that of hard-nosed, Cold War no-nonsense realists.

Neither immorality nor nationalistic chauvinism nor even bigotry could amply explain the antiwar movement’s silence on Israel-Palestine. The most flattering explanation one can find is ignorance, though more likely, it is a unique mix of cowardice, folly, and pathetic political hackery.

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© Copyright 2007 Columbia Daily Spectator