Permission To Narrate

If Mr. Netanyahu really wants to know what ethnic cleansing means, he should ask the Palestinian citizens of Israel. 85% of the Palestinians living in what is now Israel were forced out in the 1948 Nakba – just because they weren’t Jews.

Barack Obama entered the White House more deeply informed about and sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than any incoming president before him. He had attended and spoken at numerous events organized by the Arab-American and Palestinian-American communities, in which he had numerous contacts, and he had repeatedly criticized American policy, calling for a more even-handed approach toward Israel. Yet if there has been a distinguishing feature of Obama’s record on Israel-Palestine, it is that, unlike his recent predecessors, he has not a single achievement to his name. In the view of some top advisers, Obama’s final months in power are a unique opportunity to correct the record, and, more important, score an achievement that his successors could scarcely undo.

Despite the outrage of many pro-Israel groups, there is a long history of human rights scholarship and legal analysis that supports the assertion Israel is committing genocide, according to a statement from the Center for Constitutional Rights. ‘Genocide can be applied to the destruction of a people or a national group as a viable group, and that can be both with their being driven from a land or the rendering of their language no longer legal, or just the destruction of their national identity,’ Katherine Franke, board chair at CCR, told The Electronic Intifada.

A powerful pro-Israel policy group with ties to the Obama administration and the Israeli military intelligence establishment is promoting plans for a ‘two state solution’ that would subordinate Palestinians to Israeli military rule, supervised by a permanent U.S. military presence. 

The New York Times has already been exposed as a key propagator of narratives on Israel/Palestine that whitewash or disappear the violence of the Israeli occupation. So, it was no surprise to find the Times coverage of campus activism on Palestine riddled with revealing silences and implicit endorsement of a right-wing ‘dialogue’ effort that was cast as the laudable middle road.