The situation was a clear-cut case of ethnic profiling. On this everybody should agree. Some of those who support the pilot’s action want to disclaim their support of profiling, but such a desire is dishonest. People need to accept the realities of the positions they express, even if those positions attach to descriptors that have negative connotations. If you support the pilot, you are supporting an instance of ethnic profiling. Either accept that fact or develop a different opinion.

I have been reading commentaries about the case with much interest. One argument in particular keeps arising: the notion that Rahman and Zaghloul deserve what happened to them because they dressed like terrorists. The reasoning goes like this: Muslims commit terrorism; Muslims look a certain way; a certain look thus portends the possibility of terrorism. In short, those who appear to be Muslim are worthy of extra scrutiny because they are more likely to be terrorists than other people.

I want to leave aside the fact that the belief that Muslims are more likely than others to commit terrorism is a myth with no basis in factual evidence. I also do not have the space to illustrate that there are thousands of variations of traditional Muslim dress. Even Rahman and Zaghloul wore different types of clothing on the day they were profiled.

I’d like instead to focus on this notion of “dressing like a terrorist,” a phrase that has the peculiar intimation of a fashion statement. There is no quantifiable evidence to show that dress is a predictor of any sort of behavior, especially the behavior of terrorism. What we’re dealing with in the Rahman and Zaghloul case is an overexerted imagination that associates political violence what I call the terrorist costume.

The terrorist costume is a simulated reality, circulated in Hollywood and countless news broadcasts, that evokes a causal relation between appearance and action. The terrorist costume is familiar to nearly all Americans: a thick beard, an ashen robe, brown skin, sandals holding dirty feet, and some sort of headgear, usually a Sikh-style turban. The terrorist wearing this costume often sports a Qu’ran, so the audience can be certain that he is a Muslim.

Yet the acts of terrorism that have been committed by Muslims involved perpetrators, like Mohamed Atta, who didn’t at all resemble the image of the Hollywood terrorist. Rahman and Zaghloul unfortunately resembled a racist simulation that could define them to an American audience. But that simulation has never actually been implicated in a real crime.

To impugn Rahman and Zaghloul for their dress, then, is to engage in highly troublesome judgment, one that not only contravenes their Constitutional rights, but also the rules of basic logic. The United States has long been a place where appearance is believed to foreground attitude or behavior (vis-à-vis skin color, clothes, physiognomy, ethnic typology, gender, sexuality, possessions, and so forth). Yet judgment by appearance is a terribly ineffective indicator of either attitude or behavior, not to mention being highly unethical and often illegal.

Those who believe that Rahman and Zaghloul brought their unjust treatment on themselves ought to think about what their lives would be like if their own logic were applied to them. In the end, if we are to let fanciful stereotypes dictate access to basic rights of citizenship, then none of us will ever live up to the grandiose promise of our own worthiness.

In the past month, the people of Egypt—inspired by the recent democratic revolution in Tunisia and preceding emergent revolutions in Libya, Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen, and Morocco—have undertaken a revolt of truly stunning proportions, one that includes men and women from all class strata, religious and ethnic origins, and ideological commitments. They managed to rid themselves of a longstanding and brutal dictator worth over $40 billion and supported by the collective power of the United States, European Union, Israel, and the Arab Gulf States.

Now that two Arab dictators have been vanquished by the collective will of unaffiliated protesters, many American commentators have been forced to rethink their assumptions about the supposedly tribal and authoritarian Arab mind. Such commentators, sometimes conservative but often liberal, fancy themselves guardians of a civic and political enlightenment that in reality is misinformed in addition to being conceited and imperialistic.

Nevertheless, given the ardor and self-confidence of the notion that American values exemplify democratic modernity, let us imagine a few potential outcomes had the pioneering people of Egypt followed the example of today’s liberal American Democrats.

Mubarak offered the Egyptian people what he deemed sweeping reforms. The people rejected his overtures as inadequate and disingenuous, which only increased their desire to oust Mubarak. A protester named Dalia observed, “Nothing will make this regime go unless we keep on coming and keep on coming.” Had Dalia been a Democrat, she might have instead responded, “The Egyptian government has a real opportunity in the face of this very clear demonstration of opposition to begin a process that will truly respond to the aspirations of the people of Egypt.”

Despite police brutality, the people of Egypt remained steadfast and continued their chants of “down with Mubarak” and “Tunisia is the solution,” both slogans underscoring the importance of a genuinely transformative revolution. Had they been Democrats, they surely would not have been so quixotic and would have instead opted for a pragmatic approach, as most Democrats do in every American election. As Michael Moore warns, democratic transformation has no real place in American politics: “And so, I just—I think that—I mean, what I’ve proposed for the last few years is that if we really want to try and get this power in our hands, in the people’s hands, in the hands of the working people of this country, then we should, on a very grassroots level, from the bottom up, be doing things to—whether it’s running for local office, taking over the local Democratic Party.”

Working within a corrupt system, rather than trying to abolish it, is the way American liberals like Moore prefer to pursue justice: “well, we have these two political parties which are really very much like one party, why don’t we make sure that one of those parties actually is a second party and start locally and do that? And that’s what I encourage people to do. That’s my approach.”

The Egyptian protesters demanded rule by the people rather than subservience to a small caste of politicians and crony capitalists. They continue to agitate for a new constitution, universal health care, a multiple-party democracy, unionization for workers, and an end to the violent suppression of dissent. If they were Democrats, they probably wouldn’t be so ambitious. In the United States, dissent is often suppressed, sometimes violently, unions are busted, two parties representing 300 million people assert plutocratic hegemony, and politicians of the two parties serve the interests not of their citizen constituents but of crony capitalists. The Democrats do not tolerate dissentient action in the form of mass protest; they prefer the tactic of voting for Democrats during election season.

Liberal commentators dismiss as silliness any desire to oust dictatorial leaders outside the pragmatic framework of Democratic values. Todd Gitlin preaches discipline in the face of abusive state power: “Will the rebellious left discipline itself, cool its boiling blood, and decide that the pleasures of sectarianism are worth less than the steady resolve of infrastructural work?” Speaking against—what else?—leftist politician Ralph Nader. Eric Alterman is less diplomatic: “The man needs to go away. I think he needs to live in a different country. He’s done enough damage to this one. Let him damage somebody else’s now.” Alterman despises Nader because of Nader’s lack of faith in politicians: “Politicians blow with political winds. To force them to blow our way, progressives need leaders who can combine hardheaded realism with the ability to inspire Americans’ nascent idealism.”

According to liberal Democrats, alternate politics are impossible and thus undesirable. The Egyptian people do not share the same viewpoint. There was nothing pragmatic about what they did: it is never a reasonable idea to march into bullets, tear gas canisters, and police boots in order to upend a rotten political system brandishing the imprimatur of the world’s most powerful armies and politicians. But if the Egyptian people wanted a just political system, rather than the practical realities of theft and corruption, they needed to replace and not merely reform their government. To challenge bad politicians by electing more bad politicians is not serious political thinking; it is an inducement to apathy and intellectual frivolity.

The Egyptian people erected a remarkably functional democratic space in Tahreer Square, complete with an infirmary, a kindergarten, and a pharmacy. When Democratic Party bosses get together, protesters are entrapped in chain link cages.

In short, if the Egyptian protesters were Democrats, they would have undertaken no revolution. The Democratic Party represents the pervasiveness of elite corporate power; its liberal supporters represent the appropriation of oppositional politics into the neoliberal economies of electoral hegemony; the Egyptian protesters represent a determined, collective will to social justice and legitimate freedom. If those protesters were American liberals, they would have sided with the state while professing support for the people.

If the Egyptian protesters were Democrats, they would have accepted Mubarak’s proposed reforms—not because those reforms were good, but because Democrats are accustomed to settling for empty rhetoric. They would have accepted Mubarak’s handpicked successor, the infamous torturer Omar Suleiman—not because they like him, but because he would presumably be less evil than his predecessor. They would have accepted the inevitability of defeat—not because they wanted to lose, but because losing would be both pragmatic and realistic. The actual Egyptian protesters, however, would only accept freedom.

For those who might respond to this hypothetical exercise by pointing out that the United States is not Egypt, I would agree. Egypt under Mubarak was more equitable than the United States under Barack Obama. Egypt has far less income inequality than the United States, and all of Mubarak’s brutality was at least indirectly underwritten by the American government.

The people of the Middle East and North Africa have never listened to American liberals, who through the years have loved to bestow unsolicited advice on Arabs. Had the Arabs accepted this unsolicited advice, they would have become Democrats instead of revolutionaries.

The only acceptable liberal American response to the revolutions in the Arab World is the silence that enlivens a sincere attempt to listen. Clearly it is time for American liberals to stop lecturing Arabs and start following their example, instead.

A few days ago I traveled internationally and had some opportunities to experience these notorious new security measures.  Because AIT, according to Congressional testimony by Columbia University biophysicist, David Brenner, delivers radiation at a rate of “20 times the average dose that is typically quoted by TSA and throughout the industry,” I leaned toward being groped rather than zapped.  The TSA has been lying about other things, after all, proclaiming that the AIT machines don’t record or store images when, in fact, they can and sometimes do.

Exhausted after entering customs in Detroit after a fourteen hour flight, however, I was in no mood to have my privates jostled, so I opted for a zapping.  It seemed innocuous enough.  I cleared my pockets, stood in the transparent cylinder, and raised my arms as the panels rotated and emitted a flash of light.  Not even Aldous Huxley was imaginative enough to have predicted the scene.  While I was in the cylinder awaiting the zap, I rolled my eyes at a skeptical woman who seconds earlier had flatly proclaimed to the agent, “I’m not getting in that thing.”  She grinned at me, a favor I was able to return a minute later after I had gathered my belongings and passed her as she stood in an area designated for miscreants, a TSA agent’s hands down the back of her pants.

It was one of the few times I’ve shared a moment of solidarity with a stranger in the face of state power.  Usually in airport security lines, I keep my face taut and my mouth shut, assuming that the majority of my fellow passengers, inundated with narratives about the terrorism committed by my kind, will take the side of the government and be all too happy to out me as a security threat.  But on that day I felt comfortable expressing my displeasure for nearly all my fellow passengers were also visibly displeased.  This spontaneous solidarity is the only positive outcome of a paranoid government that seems determined to fly too close to the sun.  One need only visit an airport to see just how weary most Americans are of this endless war on terror and the millions of tiny ways it arrests our freedom to be human.

There has been such an outcry among the American public against the TSA’s new procedures that it constitutes as much of a popular revolt as we are likely to see in the United States.  Unfortunately, much of the opposition to AIT is misguided.  Rather than questioning the foreign policy and curtailment of civil liberties with which AIT is in dialectic, numerous commentators have urged more efficient ways of monitoring travelers, such as racial profiling and better intelligence.  Why should regular (read:  white) Americans be so inconvenienced when everybody knows that it’s Arabs and Muslims who should be dealing with the extra security hassles?  This reasoning is troublesome, but not just because of its implicit racism.  There are no good ways for the state to arbitrarily police its citizens; when given the opportunity, governments always abuse their power.  We should instead challenge the very ideas of terrorism, intervention, and security that facilitate corporate hegemony, from whose psychotic logic the need for AIT arises.

A particularly troublesome aspect of opposition to AIT is the widespread invocation of Israel as a counter-narrative to American airport protocol.  Israel, which apparently has superhuman security acumen, is lionized as a responsible exemplar by those on the political left and right.  According to the New York Times, Congressman John L. Mica (R-FL), decrying the new TSA regulations, “says the Transportation Security Administration should look at Israel, which uses early detection techniques at airports.”  These “early detection techniques” are based on comprehensive racial and religious profiling and are not actually systematic, but arbitrary, often performed at the discretion of individual security personnel with no discernible consequences for the abuse of passengers.

In November, 2010, liberal television host, Keith Olbermann, interviewed former El Al director of security Isaac Yeffet.  Leading into the interview segment, Olbermann asks, “Tonight, our number one story, why are we doing this?  Why are we doing this and all of these other remarkably stupid and ineffective invasions of privacy when nations that have nearly perfect records against would be aviation terrorists do not?  Nations like Israel?”  One of Yeffet’s solutions to invasive security seems unlikely to improve the travel environment in airports:  “First of all, we have to understand that people are waiting in line to go to the ticket counter.  While they are waiting in line, this is an opportunity for us as security people to go in to interview every passenger.”

By turning to Israel as an example of more responsible and effective policing of airline travelers, commentators on both the political left and right do little to ameliorate state invasiveness.  In fact, they are asking for a type of government interference that goes far beyond the same TSA security procedures they abhor.  This is possible because most of the commentators that lionize Israeli security are actually perpetuating a venerable mythology, that of the world-weary and businesslike Israeli who has honed his craft into a science amid decades of terrorism.

The list of Israeli abuses of Palestinians, Americans, Arabs, Muslims, and even Jews at Ben Gurion International Airport and at border crossings is lengthy and mortifying.  Those abuses include physical beatings, hours- and sometimes days-long waits, unjustified deportations, torture, intrusive and multiple interrogations, child abuse, and rectal and vaginal probes.  In practice, Israel provides no protection of civil liberties to travelers; its security procedures are more accurately described as martial law.  Israel’s spokespersons mythologize those procedures as democratic and pragmatic, but in actuality Israeli security is patently racist and belligerent, conceived of an obsession with terrorism that has permeated American discourses about safety, modernity, and national belonging.

The element of Israeli security of greatest concern to American commentators and to our understanding of the issue is racial profiling.  While many Israelis such as Yeffet claim that Israeli officials do not profile travelers, according to the Washington Post “Israeli Arabs, who make up about one-fifth of Israel’s population, are regularly subjected to a more intensive questioning that goes beyond the routine queries, such as ‘Where did you just arrive from?’ and ‘Who packed your bags?’  They also are subjected to body and bag searches more frequently than Jewish passengers.”  Israeli security officials and “terrorism experts” will admit only to looking for particular signs and behaviors in choosing who to single out for interrogation (or worse), but those signs and behaviors are distinctly racialized.

Passengers, for example, are often asked if they know, met with, or plan to meet with Arabs while in Israel; an affirmative response is considered suspicious.  Passengers who are suspected or known to be Arab themselves are almost always subject to intense scrutiny, sometimes leading to the violent practices I highlighted above.  In invoking Israel as an effective example for the TSA to follow, the majority of commentators are arguing that innocent Americans should not be inconvenienced when it is obvious that only those who fit a specific profile should be subject to extra scrutiny.

This profile is an invented cultural icon, but a powerful force in influencing public opinion.  The profile is usually male and dark-skinned, often bearded and the bearer of a visibly “Muslim” name.  Any supposed “Muslim” symbology — a Qu’ran, Arabic script, political garb or reading material — is worthy of extra scrutiny.  Although anxiety over Arab-Muslim terrorism reifies the bearded male icon vis-à-vis the helpless, oppressed woman, Muslim women can trigger security concerns through the contested garment of the hijab.  The hijab signifies Muslim devotion and thus ineluctably identifies the suspicious traveler, not only from a cultural standpoint but from the more critical standpoint of her devotion to Islamic pathology.

I use the term “racial profiling” because, even though we cannot ascribe any single racial characteristic to Muslims, Muslims have been racialized around specific images, the majority of them arising from the simulations of an invented Arab antagonist.  It might appear that Israel and the United States perform religious profiling, but the identification of religion in the act of profiling would be meaningless without that religion being outfitted with a set of atavistic characteristics illuminative of a racial group.  The more obvious of these characteristics include an innate disposition toward violence, a pathological culture, a tribal social structure, and an inability to coexist with democracy.  The Muslim, then, assumes the fixed and observable traits of a distinct biological group predisposed to certain types of behavior.

We should also consider the profound violence of the same modernity glorified by both proponents and opponents of AIT as contradistinctive of the barbarity from which Western societies must be protected.  The act of mandating strict and invasive security does not exist in a vacuum; it is a reactive process evolving from a self-perpetuating state violence.  The anxieties inspiring the security craze are intimately connected to the anxieties over the destructiveness the state itself perpetrates.  AIT is meant to ameliorate those anxieties, but airline security and foreign policy do not exist in separate spheres.  The violence that accompanies Israeli and American foreign policy and the colonial histories of both nations are in dialectic with the pragmatic need to protect travelers from harm.

It is therefore stupid and dangerous to glorify Israel if our goal is to keep the government out of our pants.  It’s a poor idea to turn to Israel for any sort of inspiration other than military brutality and settler colonization.  Indeed, while we’re going through the trouble of contesting AIT, we ought to try to get rid of Zionism and American imperialism as well.

While Abergil’s pictures may not seem as abhorrent as the Gaza and Mavi Marmara brutality—Abergil, for her part, described her behavior as nonviolent and free of contempt—all three actions are intimately connected.  First of all, we must dispel the notion that Abergil’s photos are nonviolent.  As with the Abu Ghraib debacle, a sexualized and coercive humiliation is being visited on the bodies of powerless, colonized, and incarcerated subjects, which by any reasonable principle is a basal form of violence; there is also the obvious physical violence of Palestinians being bound and blindfolded, presumably in or on their way to prisons nobody will confuse with the Mandarin Oriental. 

More important, these recent episodes merely extend an age-old list of Israeli crimes and indignities that illuminate a depravity in the Zionist enterprise itself.  What is noteworthy about Israel’s three recent escapades is that more and more people are starting to pay attention to its crimes and indignities.  In so doing, more and more people are questioning the origin and meaning of Zionism—that is, the very idea of a legally ethnocentric Israel. 

I would like to address this piece to those who have undertaken such questioning or to those who are prepared to initiate it.  I would urge you not to limit your critique of Israel only to its errors of judgment or its perceived excesses; it is more productive to challenge the ideology and practice of Zionism itself.  There is no noble origin or beautiful ideal to which the wayward Jewish state must return; such yearnings are often duplicitous mythmaking or romanticized nostalgia.  Zionists always intended to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, a strategy they carried out and continue to pursue with horrifying efficiency. 

Likewise, Zionism was always a colonialist movement, one that relied on the notions of divine entitlement and civilizational superiority that justified previous settlement projects in South Africa, Algeria, and North America.  Zionism, by virtue of its exclusionary outlook and ethnocentric model of citizenship, is on its own a purveyor of fundamental violence.  The bad PR to which Israel sometimes is subject today is a reflection of changed media dynamics, not a worsening of Israel’s behavior. 

The 2008-09 Gaza invasion, the attack on the Mavi Marmara, and Abergil’s facebook photos aren’t anomalous or extraordinary.  They are the invariable result of a Zionist ideology that cannot help but view Palestinian Muslims and Christians as subhuman, no matter how ardently its liberal champions assert that Zionism is a liberation movement.  Zionism has the unfortunate effect of proclaiming that one group of people should have access to certain rights from which another group of people is excluded.  There is nothing defensible in this proposition. 

Here, then, are four reasons why Americans (and all other humans regardless of race or religion) should oppose Zionism: 

1.  Zionism is unethical and immoral:  Because Zionists claim access to land and legal rights that directly obviate the same access to an indigenous community, it operates from within an idea of belonging that is cruel and archaic.  Israel bases its primary criterion for citizenship on religious identity.  Imagine having your religion on your driver’s license.  And imagine having limited access to freeways, farmland, family, education, employment, and foreign travel because the religion by which the state has chosen to identify you is legally marginalized.  Such is the daily reality of the Palestinian people. 

2.  Zionism is racist:  This claim isn’t the same as saying that all Zionists are racist.  I would make a distinction between the categories of “Zionist” and “Zionism.”  However, inherent in the practice of Zionism is a reliance on racialist judgments about who can fully participate in the benefits and practices of a national community.  Many Zionists view themselves merely as supporting freedom and safety for Jewish people.  I would suggest that people who identify themselves as Zionist look more closely at the ideology they support.  Such freedom and safety, both of which are, in fact, mythologies, come at the direct expense of people confined to Bantustans and refugee camps. 

3.  Zionism contravenes the geopolitical interests of the United States:  Many Americans have heard former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert boast that he once pulled George W. Bush off the dais while Bush was giving a speech, or more recently current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that “America is something that can be easily moved.”  Israel costs the United States billions of dollars in direct aid and in bribe money to Jordan and Egypt for their docility.  Israel also is the main reason for disgruntlement about American foreign policy in the Arab and Muslim Worlds.  I raise this point with some hesitation because I believe all citizens of the United States should challenge and not celebrate American geopolitical interests.  I would also point out that Zionism’s narrative of salvation and redemption resonates deeply among Americans because of the United States’ origin and continued presence as a nation of settler colonists.  In the end, America itself needs to be decolonized and the vast sums of money that support the imperial projects Israel so brazenly exemplifies need to be directed toward the well-being of those who pay the government its taxes. 

4.  Zionism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy:  Israel, as a result, is undemocratic and will be as long as it uses religious identity as the operating criterion of citizenship.  We hear much in the United States about Islam being incompatible with democracy, a belief that is historically untrue and that elides the massive military and monetary support the United States provides to the assortment of dictators and plutocrats that rule much of the Arab World.  Neoconservative and mainstream commentators both evoke Israel in opposition to Islam as a symbol of democratic achievement, but in reality Israel performs one of the most barbaric forms of oppression today in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (and discriminates against the Palestinian citizens of Israel). 

The alternative media engendered by new technology have allowed more people to witness the unremitting violence that has been Israel’s stock in trade for decades.  Many consumers of this information and these images believe that Israel is guilty of excess when a simpler explanation exists:  Israel is acting out the requisites of an exclusionary and inherently violent ideology. 

These days all it takes is a little braggadocio from an ex-soldier such as Eden Abergil to so perfectly symbolize the callousness of Zionist colonization.  Ten years ago, the Israeli government’s lies about the IDF killings aboard the Mavi Marmara would have been unchallenged by gruesome cell phone footage.  Nobody these days could have stopped the images of white phosphorous exploding and spreading over the Gaza Strip from being aired; Israelis, themselves, were foolish enough to capture Jewish children writing messages on soon-to-be-launched missiles. 

Americans now have all the evidence they need for a reasonable and morally-sound conclusion, that Zionism produces a cruelty and truculence that they bankroll with their taxes and legitimize with either silence or consent.  As a result, I am not arguing that Americans should reassess their level of support for Israel.  I am arguing that Americans should oppose Zionism altogether.  Perhaps in this way we might begin the long and difficult process of redeeming our own nation of its imperial sins.

I’m starting on the assumption that we’re all aware of Israel’s brutality in the Gaza Strip and that we all find it unconscionable, as does the vast majority of the world. I assume as well that we’re aware of the brutality preceding and following Israel’s military assault nearly a year ago. I’d like to examine how corporate media in the United States presented coverage of Israel’s invasion, and how discourses of justification for Israel are built into the foundation of that coverage.

First of all, let’s get a sense of just how devastating Israel’s aggression has been. In the weeks following Israel’s invasion, it became clear from a variety of sources that at a minimum 1,400 Palestinians have been killed. Nearly 500 were children. Because American media did such a poor job of putting these numbers into context, I will do it for you: The overall population of Gaza is around 1.4 million. Let’s do a basic comparative analysis, then. At least 1,400 Palestinians were killed, which is .001, or one one thousandth, of Gaza’s population. If you take that number and apply it to Israel’s population of 7.3 million, it would be the same as 7,300 Israeli deaths. The United States’ population is 305 million; the equivalent casualties per capita would be 305,000. 305,000 people. Think about that for a moment. And then think about the fact that we’re being asked to accept this level of Palestinian death as part of some abstruse battle against terrorism.

It’s important to look at these Palestinian deaths in the broader context of Israeli colonization. The vast discrepancy in power between the Israeli military and Palestinian resistance is reflected in some mortality and economic figures. In 2008, for instance, on the eve of Israel’s Gaza invasion, 820 Palestinians had been killed by Israelis whereas 35 Israelis had been killed by Palestinians. You probably didn’t hear much about these Palestinian deaths because the first rule of corporate media in the United States is that periods of “relative calm” predominate when only Palestinians are dying.

Since the September 2000, start of the second Intifada, the figures are equally disproportionate. Although Americans are told over and again that Palestinians started the violence in 2000, the facts reveal this narrative to be fallacious. In the fall of 2000, 140 Palestinians were killed before there was a single Israeli casualty. Likewise, Israel murdered 82 Palestinian children before a single Israeli child was killed. Since 2000, 123 Israeli children have been killed by Palestinians; 1200 Palestinian children have been killed by Israelis. 1,067 Israelis have been killed; at least 5,500 Palestinians have been killed. Around 8,500 Israelis have been injured; over 35,000 Palestinians have been injured. Israel has been targeted for condemnation by over 65 UN resolutions. One Israeli is being held prisoner by the Palestinians; 10,756 Palestinians are being held prisoner by the Israelis. Zero Israeli homes have been demolished by Palestinians; over 19,000 Palestinian homes have been demolished by Israelis. The Palestinians do not have any illegal settlements inside Israel; Israel has over 400 illegal Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land. The unemployment rate inside Israel is 7.5 percent; the unemployment rate inside the Gaza Strip is 80 percent. And yet Israel receives around 7 million dollars per day from the United States. This money goes to a government that continually denies any responsibility for the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

The 2008-09 attacks on Gaza entailed massive human rights violations. Let me give you just one example that you’re not hearing about on CNN and NPR, or from cutting-edge liberals like Rachel Maddow or Michael Moore: Israel has used a variety of illegal chemical weapons, including white phosphorous. If you’re not familiar with white phosphorous it is a substance that ignites and spreads upon contact with oxygen. Anybody who comes into contact with it goes into uncontrollable fits; enough exposure to it will cause one’s flesh to melt down to bone. It is the chemical that Saddam Hussein used against the Kurds in the infamous Halabja massacre, the one invoked repeatedly by the United States as a pretext to invade Iraq.

One would think that this sort of brutality would be widely condemned in Israel, where, unlike in the United States, it’s actually reported; but that hasn’t really been the case. There’s been some grassroots action, some low-level protest, and some of the typical philosophical flatulence from famous doves like David Grossman and Amos Oz about the deterioration of the Israeli soul. On the whole, the Israeli cultural, economic, and intellectual elite applauded Israel’s invasion, supporting it whole cloth with little reservation; indeed, much of the criticism focused on claims that Israel is being too restrained.

For all we hear about Palestinians cheering on terrorism, which is a myth, Israeli and Arab news stations have shown footage of Israelis literally dancing in the streets. I’m sure you saw the pictures of the Israelis who set up lawn chairs on a hilltop to have a picnic and watch the destruction of Gaza as if it were a movie. These are the traits of a very sick society, one that can never escape its violent colonial origin. These traits are the result of a fundamental belief among Zionists that Palestinians aren’t human.

This fundamental belief has pervaded American media coverage. There are two features of media coverage around Israeli colonization that stand out: 1) the Palestinians, no matter who is dying, whether it’s a bearded gunman or a baby, are always called militants, terrorists, or some other term that suggests they are never civilians; and 2) any Israeli military invasion is almost uniformly deemed retaliatory. At the height of Gaza’s destruction, the International Herald Tribune noted, “Civilians have been caught in between suicide fighters and a powerful military.” This phrase suggests, of course, that Israel’s aggression is justified. But it’s even more insidious when you look at it closely. It also suggests that the Palestinians are unworthy of the very freedom that Jews naturally deserve. Palestinian deaths therefore become unremarkable. These narratives are not only inaccurate and irresponsible, they are racist because they refuse to imagine the Palestinian in a human capacity, seeing him instead only in the context of Israel’s whims and desires. And when Israel desires to kill Palestinians, the justification is easy, because it is built into a perception of Palestinian inhumanity: Israel wishes to conduct the business of its apartheid, colonization, and human rights violations without the inconvenience of those pesky Palestinians fighting for basic dignity and freedom.

Everything Palestinian is a Hamas stronghold according to American media, which simply reiterate whatever propaganda comes out of the Israeli military’s spokesperson’s mouth. In the past year, Israel has attacked hospitals, schools, heavily-populated residential areas, police stations, mosques, orphanages, and a civilian boat carrying humanitarian aid. The rationale is the same every single time: whatever Israel bombs is a repository of terrorists. Nothing Palestinian, then, is fundamentally free of the influence of terrorism – not Palestinian schools, not Palestinian kitchens, not Palestinian automobiles, not Palestinian mosques and churches, and not Palestinian children. At one point during Israel’s slaughter, a Palestinian infant was killed by Israeli bombs while she was feeding. Apparently, his mother’s breast was a Hamas stronghold.

I would suggest that we don’t simply counter these pernicious Israeli and American narratives by pointing only at the current Israeli human rights violations. We have to remember, and remind others, that Israel is a colonial nation, created on the ashes of an indigenous population that is now confined to 22 percent of its homeland and constantly under threat to lose that, too. So, when people deem Israel’s actions retaliatory, we can say that such a claim is factually untrue and in contravention of the historical record. And we can point out that as a rule, colonization is never defensive. It never was and it never will be. Its very nature renders it offensive, and that’s exactly what Israel is doing now: launching a genocidal offensive on a dispossessed and colonized people.

To hear American media tell it, though, the death of Palestinian civilians is an unfortunate byproduct of their own innate barbarity. By continually emphasizing Israel’s so-called retaliation, American media simultaneously justify and absolve Israel of its cruelty. We need to point out that most of the Gazans are refugees who are indigenous to the villages and cities Israel claims to now be protecting. Gaza’s population does not consist of irrational Muslim extremists who inexplicably dislike Jews and take a perverse joy in undermining Israel’s timeless and innocent democracy, as American news outlets relentlessly suggest; it consists of people who have been systematically dispossessed, starved, tortured, and economically exploited. Nor does this population exist outside of history; it is engaged in a colonial war against a powerful state that has long undertaken a program of ethnic cleansing.

If it seems like this is too tall an order for the hopelessly pro-Israel corporate media, then keep in mind that the world is comprised of fundamentally decent human beings, which is why over 99 percent of people in the world will agree with you. Corporate media reflect the interests of the elite and the powerful, but they aren’t strong enough to control the flow of all information in an age of mass communications. Therefore, even though American media relentlessly vilify the Palestinians, most Americans aren’t buying the bias anymore. For example, a Rasmussen poll last year showed that 44 percent of Americans supported Israel’s invasion of Gaza, while 41 percent opposed it.

Unsurprisingly, among Republicans there was 62 percent support, with 27 percent opposed. Among Democrats, however, there was only 31 percent support, with 55 percent of respondents opposed to Israel’s aggression.

While this poll is far from comprehensive of American attitudes, it is hopeful. We learn, for example, that the new ruling party in the United States takes a position on Israel that contravenes well over half of its supporters. Israel won’t be able to keep up its impunity and belligerence forever. Its free pass, which it acquired through constant fear- and guilt-mongering, is about to be invalidated. This is Zionism’s last gasp as a civil, cultured movement. It’s difficult to support a state that constantly claims to be victimized but somehow has the capacity to starve millions of people and swiftly slaughter over 400 children.

I do not want to explore whether or not nonviolence is the best strategic or moral form of anti-colonial resistance. The difference between violence and nonviolence is not as trenchant as most commentators imagine. Violence and nonviolence, both amorphous terms, are in constant dialectic, and no historical example can be found of either of these approaches being effective without the other present. Undertaking nonviolent resistance is an ethical and strategic decision with which I have no quarrel. In fact, I have tremendous admiration for those who practice this method at the risk of their personal safety and in the service of national liberation.

I dislike the frequent lecturing from Western liberals to Palestinians about the merits of nonviolence, an act as misguided as it is patronizing. Michael Tomasky of The Guardian, for example, posed the following hypothetical amid Israel’s January, 2009, massacre of civilians in the Gaza Strip: “A hypothetical question for you. Suppose the Palestinian liberation movement, going way back to the founding of the PLO in 1964, had been dedicated to nonviolent struggle as opposed to armed struggle, and the Palestinians had had a Gandhi, and not an Arafat.” The Palestinians, Tomasky surmises, would have had a state over twenty years ago. His colleague Gershom Gorenberg argues that “[t]hrough violence—from airplane hijackings to suicide bombings and rocket fire—Palestinians have failed to reach political independence…. So why not adopt the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience, the methods of Gandhi?” Gorenberg wonders, “Is that kind of radicalism imaginable in Islam?”

On CommonDreams.org, Marty Jezer explains, “Palestinian nonviolence seems a romantic fantasy, an idealistic dream. But perhaps idealism is the most realistic approach at this time; and nonviolence the solution most grounded in reality. I challenge anybody to come up with an equivalent strategy, one that assures Israelis their security and Palestinians their state.” Michael Lerner asks what he imagines to be a self-evident question: “Who are Palestine’s friends? Those who encourage a path of non-violence and abandoning [sic] the fantasy that armed struggle combined with political isolation of Israel will lead to a good outcome for Palestinians.”

It would be too time consuming to respond to all the problems in these passages, but in them we can identify some useful points of analysis. The most important point is that the Palestinians do practice nonviolence. They have done so ever since Zionists began settling their land, a process that is by its very nature violent. Today, as throughout the twentieth century, one can find ample examples of intrepid and imaginative civil resistance. I have met very few Westerners who have traveled to Palestine and didn’t return home inspired.

An interesting feature of Palestinian nonviolence is that it usually evokes a ferocious response by Israel. During the 1980s, peaceful demonstrators had their bones broken at the behest of Yitzhak Rabin. Earlier generations were deported and had their homes demolished. Today’s nonviolent activists are often shot, imprisoned, or beaten. The village of Bi’lin in the West Bank has done a weekly protest for over four years. During the course of these peaceful gatherings, the Israeli military has been utterly brutal. In April, 2009, soldiers shot and killed an unarmed demonstrator, Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahmah. Abu Rahmah was hit in the chest with a tear-gas grenade, the same weapon that earlier in the year cracked open the skull of American demonstrator Tristan Anderson. In June, 2009, one of the leaders of the Bi’lin demonstrations, Adeeb Abu Rahme, was arrested and kept in military detention without due process. The breathless appeals by concerned Western liberals for the Palestinians to practice nonviolence are both ludicrous and immoral in light of the historical record and the invidious violence of the Israeli state.

The Palestinians have always mixed violence and nonviolence, like all anti-colonial movements. It is through a host of racist presuppositions and an inherent commitment to Zionism that American liberals imagine that somehow Palestinians are a special case, that their reliance on violence is culturally innate (Gershon Gorenberg) or that they are motivated by factors other than liberation, such as anti-Semitism and civilizational envy (Alan Dershowitz). The inability or unwillingness of so many liberal intellectuals to recognize the long tradition of Palestinian nonviolent resistance bespeaks tacit racism in addition to a hypocritical devotion to Israel’s normative and continuous state violence.

These calls for Palestinian nonviolence pretend to be ethically disinterested, but they are entangled with troublesome politics that are fundamentally destructive and undemocratic. For instance, they are often accompanied by appeals to avoid criticism of Zionism (Norman Finkelstein), to eschew effective nonviolent tactics such as boycott and divestment (Michael Lerner), and to reject counterproductive things like binationalism and right of return (Finkelstein and Lerner). In other words, the Palestinians should reject violence, and while they’re at it go ahead and give up all of their legal entitlements and decolonial aspirations.

My good friend, the philosopher Mohammed Abed, pointed out to me recently that the grueling endurance of life under military occupation—waiting hours at checkpoints, being denied medical care, having universities shut down—is itself a testament to an unusual commitment to nonviolence. I suspect that when many Western liberals urge the Palestinians (and other colonized people) to undertake nonviolence, they are using a truncated definition of the term informed by a poor or distorted understanding of the concept. In this usage, they conflate nonviolence with passivity. It is a great convenience to the liberal advocates of colonization to have a colonized population comprised of passive resistors. But colonized people are never as stupid and gullible as their liberal saviors imagine them to be.

The Palestinians, anyway, are far too evolved to listen to those who would use their courage and diligence to dispossess them of their right to active resistance. Violent or nonviolent, their choice of resistance isn’t the business of liberal armchair ethicists. Those ethicists are fond of claiming that if the Palestinians resisted nonviolently they would have already achieved their liberation. This claim is factually untrue. It is just as likely that if liberal commentators would assess their own profound support of violence they would have a lot less to say to others and more time to devote to their own failed selves.

It turned out that I had only one dissenter (from an admittedly small audience), an old professor of mine whose intellect and pedagogical style I had admired as a student (and still admire as a professional). I took three classes with this professor, finding all three valuable and interesting. I knew at the time that he was Jewish, just as he knew that I was Arab, but we transcended assumed political differences through a mutual passion for literature. I am still indebted to him for having written me a generous letter of recommendation for graduate school.

When my old professor turned up for the presentation, I had a feeling that he wouldn’t like what I was about to say despite the fact that I carefully avoided polemics and prepared a factual account of Israel’s early war crimes, referencing standard historiography. I struggled not to cringe when he raised his hand immediately after I finished speaking. A minute later we were arguing vocally with one another. I was mildly enjoying the opportunity to have at it with a former mentor and authority figure, but disturbed by the vitriol of his reaction to what I conceptualized as a tepid presentation. I’ve certainly said worse things about Israel on other occasions.

We soon reassumed our composure and attempted to think through our discrepant viewpoints. As audience members and the event organizer, another former professor of mine, interjected their commentaries I could see my antagonist growing progressively agitated.

“You don’t believe in the right of Israel to exist,” he suddenly declared. I was taken aback not by the intimation of the declaration, but by the fact that nowhere in my prepared comments or in our argument did such a topic arise.

“I don’t think anybody here has heard me say anything about destroying Israel, professor,” I responded coolly. He wouldn’t drop the subject, though, bringing it up over and again, each time impelling me to affirm Israel’s right to exist. Each time, I ignored him or flatly refused. He left the event shaking, inconsolable despite the doting of the event organizer.

There are lots of reasons why I declined my former professor’s demand that I recognize Israel. The first reason is practical: I never advocated for its destruction, and so it seemed peculiar to be asked to affirm its existence. Nobody has ever asked me to affirm another nation-state’s existence, a demand that I would in any case likewise decline. Like anybody who values humanity above capital and hierarchy, I believe it is people and not national institutions that require our empathy and attention. Besides, I was unhappy with the congenital violence implicitly ascribed to me while Israel’s entrenched violence, which I had spend 45 minutes illuminating, once again benefitted from an uncritical perception as normative.

The other reasons for my reluctance to acquiesce to my former professor’s peculiar demand are philosophical and political. It is remarkably brazen for a nation founded on the destruction of Palestine and now embroiled in vicious forms of ethnic cleansing to ask the victims of its malevolence for recognition. It is also a rhetorical trick that scarcely conceals some propitious imperatives: the legitimization of Israel as a Jewish-majority state; the whitewashing of Israel’s ugly past; tacitly absolving Israel of its immoral behavior; the privileging of Israel’s needs at the expense of basic recognition of Palestinian needs.

I have no desire to encourage these imperatives. Even if I did have the desire, I don’t have the authority: it is not up to me or to any other individual to relinquish Palestine under the pressure of a spuriously humanistic insistence by Zionists that their perfidy be excused because it will somehow make me a more respectful and responsible person.

Many people, anyway, have written in more detail about the insidiousness underlying affirmations of Israel’s “right to exist,” a phrase so ambiguous it should invoke any thinking person’s suspicion. Rather than limiting my discussion to philosophical, political, and practical factors, I’d like to mention a worthy psychological reason to refuse the demand that anybody who wants to enter into a conversation about the Israel-Palestine conflict must first proclaim devotion to Israel’s existence: principle.

Indeed, I would suggest refusing to acquiesce on principle. Zionists hold nearly all the power in the Israel-Palestine conflict and much of the power in the culture wars the conflict inspires. They have more funds, better access to corporate media, and the backing of the American military. The Palestinians, however, hold one form of power that doesn’t require money, media sympathy, or weaponry: the legitimacy that Zionists so desperately want us to confer to Israel. It is a small power, one without a material apparatus, but it is power, nevertheless, one I am unwilling to relinquish, one I have no moral obligation to relinquish. Zionists already took Palestine. Now they’re trying to appropriate our right to resist, too.

I am happy, eager even, to affirm the right of Jewish people to live in peace and security, wherever that may be, a right that all humans deserve in no particular order of worthiness. But I won’t celebrate Israel’s bloody founding and its goal of retaining a juridical ethnocentrism. Ultimately, when Zionists demand that you affirm Israel’s right to exist, what they are really asking for is your validation. Don’t give it to them. Until Israel treats the Palestinians equally and humanely, it won’t have earned the right to a celebrated existence.

It has been especially difficult for Israel’s doves to reside in a state being accused by leftist fanatics and furtive anti-Semites of such a horrible thing. That’s why I always take a moment to keep the true victims of Israel’s aggression in my thoughts. It’s not only the right thing to do; it’s the civilized perspective, the type of moral reckoning that matters. Such a terrible fate as the liberal Israelis’ should be illegal. Yet so-called human rights groups, with their tendentious prejudices, continue to bombard them with facts implicating their supposedly ugly behavior.

The testimonials of my liberal protectors break my unevolved Palestinian heart. In The Nation, always impressive for its proper sensitivity, Naomi Chazan declares, “These are bleak days for progressive Israelis.” And no wonder: the horrors in Gaza are clear in Israel “where bravado and intolerance threaten to eat away at the country’s democratic core and consume its internal moral compass.” Chazan is a woman who knows not to let silly things like ethnic cleansing detract from the need to save Israel from its occasional failure to light up other nations with inspiration instead of bombs and white phosphorous.

David Grossman is even more eloquent. He points out, “We cannot pardon the Palestinians or treat them forgivingly, as if it were obvious that whenever they feel put upon, violence will always be their sole response, the one they embrace almost automatically.” It’s clear why Grossman is a leading novelist and heir to Amos Oz’s dovish brilliance: he reminds us that we cannot forget that the Palestinians merely feel put upon (it’s not only the Crescent that’s fertile). His readers will understand that surely the Palestinians are mistaken, given as we are to uncouth hyperbole and fits of irrational violence. I must admit that Grossman is correct: I frequently complain, feel angry even, when I see Israel doing something loathsome. I remind myself that I shouldn’t merely focus on images of dead Palestinian babies—their skin peeled back from petrified faces, their organs spattered onto bloody asphalt—but I should also spare sympathy for my troubled Israeli friends.

I know it must be terribly difficult supporting an ethnonationalist state that wantonly slaughters little brown civilians. I know that it is excruciating to have democratic ideals disrupted by ungrateful natives. And I know how tough it must be to witness the death of other people’s children.

In respect for troubled Israeli liberals, then, I would like to forget about the Palestinians and focus on them instead. I may be able to help them solve their dreadful quandary. I would suggest—humbly and respectfully, of course—that they emulate American liberals, who have perfected the art of dispossessing indigenous peoples while pretending to love them. There’s no need to antagonize the savages so crudely when you can displace them quietly and simultaneously appropriate all they hold sacred. Hummus was a good start. And tabbouli was a bold move, one that has been improbably successful. I know this is difficult for you to hear, but now you must quit emphasizing your own feelings and say that everything Israel does actually helps the Palestinians. It’s a great way to enhance your humanitarian credentials, without—get this—having to give up any of your entrenched authority.

In the meantime, I will continue to urge my Palestinian compatriots to do the right thing. We are not merely Israel’s enemies; we are in the way of progress, stubborn impediments to the dream of modernity. So let’s go ahead and drop this irrational emphasis of ours on freedom, dignity, self-determination, and survival, and instead start praying that Israel’s true peacemakers finally learn how to overcome the travails of their colonial privilege.

We condemn Israel’s recent (December 2008/ January 2009) breaches of international law in the Gaza Strip, which include the bombing of densely-populated neighborhoods, illegal deployment of the chemical white phosphorous, and attacks on schools, ambulances, relief agencies, hospitals, universities, and places of worship. We condemn Israel’s restriction of access to media and aid workers.

We reject as false Israel’s characterization of its military attacks on Gaza as retaliation. Israel’s latest assault on Gaza is part of its longtime racist jurisprudence against its indigenous Palestinian population, during which the Israeli state has systematically dispossessed, starved, tortured, and economically exploited the Palestinian people.

We reject as untrue the Israeli government’s claims that the Palestinians use civilians as human shields, and that Hamas is an irredeemable terrorist organization. Without endorsing its platforms or philosophy, we recognize Hamas as a democratically elected ruling party. We do not endorse the regime of any existing Arab state, and call for the upholding of internationally mandated human rights and democratic elections in all Arab states.

We call upon our fellow writers and academics in the United States to question discourses that justify and rationalize injustice, and to address Israeli assaults on civilians in Gaza as one of the most important moral issues of our time.

We call upon institutions of higher education in the U.S. to cut ties with Israeli academic institutions, dissolve study abroad programs in Israel, and divest institutional funds from Israeli companies, using the 1980s boycott against apartheid South Africa as a model.

We call on all people of conscience to join us in boycotting Israeli products and institutions until a just, democratic state for all residents of Palestine/Israel comes into existence.

Mohammed Abed
Elmaz Abinader
Diana Abu-Jaber
Ali Abunimah
Opal Palmer Adisa
Deborah Al-Najjar
Evelyn Azeeza Alsultany
Amina Baraka
Amiri Baraka
George Bisharat
Sherwin Bitsui
Breyten Breytenbach
Van Brock
Hayan Charara
Allison Hedge Coke
Lara Deeb
Vicente Diaz
Marilyn Hacker
Mechthild Hart
Sam Hamill
Randa Jarrar
Fady Joudah
Mohja Kahf
Rima Najjar Kapitan
Persis Karim
J. Kehaulani Kauanui
Haunani Kay-Trask
David Lloyd
Sunaina Maira
Nur Masalha
Khaled Mattawa
Daniel AbdalHayy Moore
Aileen Moreton-Robinson
Nadine Naber
Marcy Newman
Viet Nguyen
Simon J. Ortiz
Vijay Prashad
Steven Salaita
Therese Saliba
Sarita See
Deema Shehabi
Matthew Shenoda
Naomi Shihab Nye
Magid Shihade
Vandana Shiva
Noenoe Silva
Andrea Smith
Ahdaf Soueif
Ghada Talhami
Frank X. Walker
Robert Warrior

Modernity, which the United States says it is trying to preserve through constant military interventions, is not an epoch or an institution as much as it is an invention of the Western liberal imagination, a self-perception arising from a Western belief in cultural superiority. Modernity is a state of mind that denotes being civilized and enlightened, which have some prerequisites: free-market capitalism, diligent secularism (often in conflict with social values), technological industriousness, nominally democratic governance, adoration of wealth, the burden of exporting civility. These features of modernity supplement the maintenance of elite power, a fact that is too convenient to be a coincidence. Preemptive war, then, is indivisible from modernity.

I make these points to foreground analysis of some peculiar justifications for Israel’s brutality, the ones claiming that Palestinians must learn the hard way, though force, to quit supporting terrorism (i.e., to stop electing parties that do not express adequate fealty to Israel).

Neoconservative partisans like Daniel Pipes have long encouraged Israel to more aggressively pound the Palestinians into submission, not only to generate a better negotiating position but also to teach them a lesson in humanity. Upon Israel’s 2006 Lebanon invasion, such a viewpoint became mainstreamed, as when Richard Cohen of The Washington Post warned, “The only way to ensure that babies don’t die in their cribs and old people in the streets [in Israel] is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they, no matter how reluctantly, host those rockets, they will pay a very, very steep price.”

Now Thomas Friedman has taken up this discourse, albeit with his infamously terrible prose, which nevertheless conveys the meanness of his spirit. In a recent column, he writes, “I have only one question about Israel’s military operation in Gaza: What is the goal? Is it the education of Hamas or the eradication of Hamas? I hope that it’s the education of Hamas.” Of all the things he could have questioned about Israel’s behavior — its massacre of babies, its targeting of schools and ambulances, its use of white phosphorous, its deployment of experimental weapons, its massive violations of international law — Friedman chooses to question whether Israel is being adequately fierce and steadfast.

Endorsing the notion that Arabs are “implacably hostile,” Friedman goes on to observe, “Israel basically said that when dealing with a nonstate actor, Hezbollah, nested among civilians, the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians — the families and employers of the militants — to restrain Hezbollah in the future.” Friedman applies the same logic to Israel’s current bloodletting, although Hamas isn’t actually a non-state actor; it is a democratically-elected ruling party. The underlying idea here is common, though it hasn’t been articulated cleverly since Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: the unpolluted Western soul is corruptible when it is unwittingly coerced into an engagement with dark legions of the pre-modern.

Friedman’s viewpoint is stated more eloquently (and honestly) by an unnamed protestor in Max Blumenthal’s frightening video of a pro-Israel demonstration in New York. “They’re forcing us to kill their children,” the protestor complains.

These narratives are racist because they render Palestinians incapable of the sort of love proffered by more civilized people, but they are also proactive. Situated in an Enlightenment logic that celebrates the violence of modernity as a force of good in the world, the narratives rationalize war because it’s not enough that Palestinians hate indiscriminately — they must be taught through widespread death the value of human life. The justification for Israel’s belligerence never has to move beyond the presence of Palestinians, whose very existence threatens Israel’s colonial ambitions.

The glorification of Israeli modernity in opposition to Palestinian pre-modernity has pervaded corporate media coverage. Two features of this media coverage stand out: 1) the Palestinians, no matter who is dying, whether it’s a bearded gunman or a baby, are always called militants, terrorists, or some other term that suggests they are never civilians; and 2) the Israeli invasion is almost uniformly deemed retaliatory, even among progressives like Robert Sheer and Akiva Eldar, who takes a moment to assert “her national right, as a Jew, to live in [Israel].” This national right, it should be mentioned, has no basis in any legal system anywhere in the world beyond Israel’s insidious Law of Return.

Both corporate media coverage and Eldar’s obduracy suggest that the Palestinians are unworthy of the freedom that Jews naturally deserve. Palestinian deaths therefore become unremarkable. Most commentators can only view Palestinians in the context of Israel’s whims and desires. And these days Israel wishes to conduct the business of its colonization and ethnic cleansing without the inconvenience of those ungrateful Palestinians rejecting the whip of modernity in favor of basic dignity and freedom.

Most Americans are familiar with the verbal infelicities involving Arabs that became common as Election Day approached. The most notorious of these infelicities entailed a flabbergasted John McCain taking the microphone from a concerned spectator accusing Barack Obama of being “an Arab.” McCain promptly issued a defense of Obama that reinforced the spectator’s notion that being Arab is inherently bad: “No, ma’am, he’s a decent family man.”

In fact, Americans heard the same tacit message repeatedly during the general election campaign, particularly from Obama and his supporters: being called Arab or Muslim constitutes a smear because apparently being Arab or Muslim is objectionable in itself. Obama inspired a nation. In the meantime, Arab and Muslim Americans solidified our standing as the quintessential domestic stranger. Obama wouldn’t have accepted anything less. He didn’t need to, in any case, because Arab and Muslim Americans supported him despite his constant insults, both tacit and explicit. Those of us untaken by Obama were deemed idealists or even heartless. As Obama’s hawkish and neoliberal Cabinet selections thus far indicate, it wasn’t Obama’s skeptics who were being idealistic. And the Palestinians who always suffer the brutal aftermath of liberal pragmatism can explain better than I exactly who is being heartless.

The problem is not that fear-baiting tactics around Arab ethnicity went uncontested. They were condemned widely. The problem is that they were rarely contested beyond their effect on Obama’s candidacy. Everybody was so focused on how the so-called smear of being Arab or Muslim unfairly represented Obama they forgot to mention that over a billion people were also being smeared, including millions of Americans.

As a child of Arab immigrants, I found this election remarkably difficult to follow. Obama was somebody easy to be excited about for a person of my background. We are both ethnic minorities. We both have funny names. He is young and eloquent, and looks much more like the Americans of my generation than do typical politicians. Obama has that effect on others. I was happily surprised to see so many young people mobilizing and participating actively in American political discourse.

On the other hand, I was disappointed that Obama never stood up for Arab and Muslim Americans. I often found myself feeling betrayed that he didn’t use his influential position to improve the situation of Arab and Muslim Americans dealing with the slander of being deemed terrorists, enemies, and fifth columns. Instead, it was another supposedly transcendent figure, Colin Powell, who came to our defense: “Is there something wrong with being Muslim in this country? The answer’s no.”

The imaginary Arabs and Muslims from whom Obama constantly distanced himself don’t at all resemble actual Arabs and Muslims. The Arabs I know, including those who raised me, are peaceable, honest people who participate in American cultural, economic, and political life in various ways. It would have been appropriate, and it certainly was necessary, for one of the candidates to have mentioned this fact. Such an omission was expected from the dreadful McCain. From Obama—the racial healer, the steadfast hoper, the heavenly dreamer—that omission was unconscionable.

In a historic election that is widely believed to have mitigated or even ended racism, it is ironic that racism against Arabs and Muslims constituted its most important rhetorical feature. This racism has been overlooked in the euphoria of Obama’s victory, but for many Arab and Muslim Americans the merriment of 2008 is premature. We are aware that the candidate supposedly representing the demise of racism achieved victory in an election that reinforced Islamophobia and relegated Arabs to the status of an absurd ethnic spectacle. The sort of racism engendered by the election is now omnipresent but somehow forgotten.

Nothing makes this class of politico so hysterical as somebody choosing to exercise the right to vote for a candidate who best represents his or her own positions. That hysteria exposes the carefully-unexamined assumption that the purpose of voting is to fortify institutional Democratic agendas. The use of pragmatism to justify this pandering is meant to suggest a political reasonableness, but it actually functions to reinforce complicity in the same centers of power these liberals claim to challenge.

These matters illustrate another reason why voting in the United States is mostly disport, a way for the unwitting enablers of imperial neoliberalism to feel like they are participating in a civic and economic system in which they are political surplus, useful only insofar as they spend and consume. Whether or not they vote, the system will continue to operate unabated, its managers welcoming voting because it convinces would-be agitators that they are actually effecting change.

Now that these qualifications are out of the way, let’s focus on what this essay will be about: why I won’t vote for Barack Obama. I hope others will likewise eschew Obama, but I welcome them to vote their conscience. Or, I welcome them to not vote at all. There are better ways to procure a right to complain.

I won’t vote for Obama because he once was promising but has morphed into an unusually charismatic but typically mediocre politician. A man once known for engaging the issue of Palestinian liberation in Chicago’s Arab American community now can be found sharing his message of Israel-love to anybody who will listen. This change of opinion intimates a lack of integrity. Obama’s supporters will argue that he is simply doing what allows him to become a viable contender for president, to which I would respond: if one wishes to keep his or her integrity intact, then that person shouldn’t seek national office as a Democrat. Obama is willingly forfeiting his integrity for his ambition. That is his choice and it isn’t my place to make the decision on his behalf. However, it is my place to decide not to vote for him based on that choice.

The primary but not exclusive impetus for my displeasure with Obama is his suddenly avid support of Israel. It is an issue that I and many of my peers in the Arab American community cannot dismiss, as do other progressive supporters of Obama. We may be accused of shortsightedness by rejecting Obama based largely on this issue, but nearly everybody privileges one or few concerns when entering into the American political arena: religion, abortion, a particular foreign policy, immigration, the economy. I cannot listen to the man smilingly discuss the continued dispossession of millions of people who have already suffered unspeakably and then endorse such treachery with a vote.

In any case, there is no need to apologize for or shy away from emphasizing Israel’s brutality. Far from being a marginal item in the life of the United States, American support for Israeli colonization has serious moral and geopolitical consequences. It, more than any other action, generates justifiable anger toward the United States in much of Europe and almost uniformly throughout the Southern Hemisphere. It extends the bloody tradition of settler colonization in the American polity and in its imagination, a state of mind that helps facilitate so many of today’s imperialist adventures. And it renders every politician who has ever lectured an Arab nation about human rights glaringly hypocritical.

Obama’s wasted potential as a candidate is exemplified by his already-legendary “Race in America” speech. Obama critiqued the topic of race in a way that would be considered tame in an Ethnic Studies department, but that was audacious by the standards of mainstream politicians. Unexamined in the chorus of praise, however, was the following statement, offered as a rebuke of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s beliefs, which Obama patronizingly dismissed as misguided despite his refusal to condemn their messenger:

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

The statement does lots of things at once. From a public image standpoint, it allowed Obama to further distance himself from accusations that he is secretly Muslim while simultaneously cozying up to his still-slightly-suspicious Zionist patrons. As rhetoric, it enabled Obama to fulfill the requisite demand that whites be made adequately comfortable, a demand that entails the condemnation of anything that might actually threaten their privilege. This injunction is de rigueur for people of color.

But I don’t want to highlight these stupid political games. I’m more interested in what the statement doesn’t do, which is to convey anything even incidentally truthful. Obama’s claim is a profound insult not only to the Palestinians who have courageously fought for their physical and cultural survival, but to anybody who values the use of evidence to express an informed opinion. In no framework other than Zionist extremism can the Israel-Palestine conflict be attributed to “radical Islam.” Even those who disagree vehemently about the history of Palestine concur that the conflict is fundamentally territorial.

The very construct of a “radical Islam,” in fact, means nothing of substance; it is a rhetorical ploy for the intellectually vacuous. Much of Palestine’s resistance, in the past and present, has been conducted by members of the Christian minority. Palestinians, far from being religious extremists, are noted for their progressive secular institutions. The first Palestinian suicide bombing, an act said to exemplify “radical Islam,” didn’t even occur until 1994. To Obama, this is apparently the point at which the Israel-Palestine conflict started.

It is utterly indecent for a person to deem himself a moral authority on tolerance while concurrently recycling an anti-Arab racism whose existence has been devastating for the Palestinians.

For these reasons, I won’t vote for Barack Obama. His liberal supporters claim that as a complete package Obama is superior to any other candidate, despite whatever flaws may exist in his platform (if flaws are even acknowledged). To me, though, his revivalist Zionism is a flaw that I cannot overlook and that liberal pragmatists should not ignore. Obama made a choice to court the AIPAC bloc, and we fail in our duty as citizens of a democracy if we do not hold him accountable for his immorality. We fail to strengthen the well-being of our own society, and we fail in our moral obligation to those who suffer the brute end of the imperialism our taxes bankroll. Obama should therefore be punished for his choice by those who stand against Israel’s oppression of Palestinians.

When the liberal cognoscenti lecture Nader supporters for our obstinacy or naiveté, they are yet again performing the conceit of the privileged: they are telling us that they know our needs better than we do. (It happens right around the time they accuse Nader of egomania.) They are telling us that a commitment to Palestinians, whose dispossession the United States underwrites, is silly or unimportant. And they are telling us, without having to confront any of the consequences, to accept the permanence of Israel’s violence. We should know well enough that what they imagine to be virtuous or commonsensical is ultimately a projection of their own needs and interests.

So, consider voting for somebody other than Obama. Or consider not voting at all. It’s your choice, after all. Whatever you choose, though, just quit telling the Palestinians that their lives don’t matter.