[Discussion] The Middle East in Crisis

Demoralized by the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war, Palestinian American Samia Assed found in Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension — and her running mate pick — “a little ray of hope.”

That hope, she said, shattered during last month’s Democratic National Convention, where a request for a Palestinian American speaker was denied and listening to Harris left her feeling like the Democratic presidential nominee will continue the U.S. policies that have outraged many in the anti-war camp.

“I couldn’t breathe because I felt unseen and erased,” said Assed, a community organizer in New Mexico.

Under different circumstances, Assed would have reveled in the groundbreaking rise of a woman of color as her party’s nominee. Instead, she agonizes over her ballot box options.

For months, many Palestinian Americans have been contending with the double whammy of the rising Palestinian death toll and suffering in Gaza and their own government’s support for Israel in the war. Alongside pro-Palestinian allies, they’ve grieved, organized, lobbied and protested as the killings and destruction unfolded on their screens or touched their own families. Now, they also wrestle with tough, deeply personal voting decisions, including in battleground states.

“It’s a very hard time for Palestinian youth and Palestinian Americans,” Assed said. “There’s a lot of pain.”

Without a meaningful change, voting for Harris would feel for her “like a jab in the heart,” she said. At the same time, Assed, a lifelong Democrat and feminist, would like to help block another Donald Trump presidency and remain engaged with the Democrats “to hold them liable,” she said.

“It’s really a difficult place to be in.”

She’s not alone.

In Georgia, the Gaza bloodshed has been haunting Ghada Elnajjar. She said the war claimed the lives of more than 100 members of her extended family in Gaza, where her parents were born.

She saw missed opportunities at the DNC to connect with voters like her. Besides the rejection of the request for a Palestinian speaker, Elnajjar found a disconnect between U.S. policies and Harris’ assertion that she and President Joe Biden were working to accomplish a cease-fire and hostage deal.

“Without stopping U.S. financial support and military support to Israel, this will not stop,” said Elnajjar who in 2020 campaigned for Biden. “I’m a U.S. citizen. I’m a taxpayer ... and I feel betrayed and neglected.”

She’ll keep looking for policy changes, but, if necessary, remain “uncommitted,” potentially leaving the top of the ticket blank. Harris must earn her vote, she said.

Harris, in her DNC speech, said she and Biden were working to end the war such that “Israel is secure, the hostages are released, the suffering in Gaza ends and the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination.”

She said she “will always ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself,” while describing the suffering in Gaza as “heartbreaking.”

While her recent rhetoric on Palestinian suffering has been viewed as empathetic by some who had soured on Biden over the war, the lack of a concrete policy shift appears to have increasingly frustrated many of those who want the war to end. Activists demanding a permanent cease-fire have urged an embargo on U.S. weapons to Israel, whose military campaign in Gaza has killed over 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials.

The war was sparked by an Oct. 7 attack on Israel in which Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people and took about 250 hostages.

Layla Elabed, a Palestinian American and co-director of the Uncommitted National Movement, said the demand for a policy shift remains. Nationally, “uncommitted” has garnered hundreds of thousands of votes in Democratic primaries.

Elabed said Harris and her team have been invited to meet before Sept. 15 with “uncommitted” movement leaders from key swing states and with Palestinian families with relatives killed in Gaza. After that date, she said, “we will need to make the decision if we can actually mobilize our base” to vote for Harris.

Without a policy change, “we can’t do an endorsement,” and will, instead, continue talking about the “dangers” of a Trump presidency, leaving voters to vote their conscience, she added.

Some other anti-war activists are taking it further, advocating for withholding votes from Harris in the absence of a change.

“There’s pressure to punish the Democratic Party,” Elabed said. “Our position is continue taking up space within the Democratic Party,” and push for change from the inside.

Some of the tensions surfaced at an August rally in Michigan when anti-war protesters interrupted Harris. Initially, Harris said everybody’s voice matters. As the shouting continued, with demonstrators chanting that they “won’t vote for genocide,” she took a sharper tone.

“If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” she said.

Nada Al-Hanooti, national deputy organizing director with the Muslim American advocacy group Emgage Action, rejects as unfair the argument by some that traditionally Democratic voters who withhold votes from Harris are in effect helping Trump. She said the burden should be on Harris and her party.

“Right now, it’s a struggle being a Palestinian American,” she said. “I don’t want a Trump presidency, but, at the same time, the Democratic Party needs to win our vote.”

Though dismayed that no Palestinian speaker was allowed on the DNC stage, Al-Hanooti said she felt inspired by how “uncommitted” activists made Palestinians part of the conversation at the convention. Activists were given space there to hold a forum discussing the plight of Palestinians in Gaza.

“We in the community still need to continue to push Harris on conditioning aid, on a cease-fire,” she said. “The fight is not over.”

She said she’s never known grief like that she has experienced over the past year. In the girls of Gaza, she sees her late grandmother who, at 10, was displaced from her home during the 1948 war surrounding Israel’s creation and lived in a Syrian refugee camp, dreaming of returning home.

“It just completely tears me apart,” Al-Hanooti said.

She tries to channel her pain into putting pressure on elected officials and encouraging community members to vote, despite encountering what she said was increased apathy, with many feeling that their vote won’t matter. “Our job at Emgage is simply right now to get our Muslim community to vote because our power is in the collective.”

In 2020, Emgage — whose political action committee then endorsed Biden — and other groups worked to maximize Muslim American turnout, especially in battleground states. Muslims make up a small percentage of Americans overall, but activists hope that in states with notable Muslim populations, such as Michigan, energizing more of them makes a difference in close races — and demonstrates the community’s political power.

Some voters want to send a message.

“Our community has given our votes away cheaply,” argued Omar Abuattieh, a pharmacy major at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Once we can start to understand our votes as a bargaining tool, we’ll have more power.”

For Abuattieh, whose mother was born in Gaza, that means planning to vote third party “to demonstrate the power in numbers of a newly activated community that deserves future consultation.”

A Pew Research Center survey in February found that U.S. Muslims are more sympathetic to the Palestinian people than many other Americans are and that only 6% of Muslim American adults believe the U.S. is striking the right balance between the Israelis and Palestinians. Nearly two-thirds of Muslim registered voters identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party, according to the survey.

But U.S. Muslims, who are racially and ethnically diverse, are not monolithic in their political behavior; some have publicly supported Harris in this election cycle. In 2020, among Muslim voters, 64% supported Biden and 35% supported Trump, according to AP VoteCast.

The Harris campaign said it has appointed two people for Muslim and Arab outreach.

Harris “will continue to meet with leaders from Palestinian, Muslim, Israeli and Jewish communities, as she has throughout her vice presidency,” the campaign said in response to questions, without specifically commenting on the uncommitted movement’s request for a meeting before Sept. 15.

Harris is being scrutinized by those who say the Biden-Harris administration hasn’t done enough to pressure Israel to end the war and by Republicans looking to brand her as insufficient in her support for Israel.

Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said Trump “will once again deliver peace through strength to rebuild and expand the peace coalition he built in his first term to create long-term safety and security for both the Israeli and Palestinian people.”

Many Arab and Muslim Americans were angered by Trump’s ban, while in office, that affected travelers from several Muslim-majority countries, which Biden rescinded.

In Michigan, Ali Ramlawi, who owns a restaurant in Ann Arbor, said Harris’ nomination initially gave him relief on various domestic issues, but the DNC left him disappointed on the Palestinian question.

Before the convention, he expected to vote Democratic, but now says he’s considering backing the Green Party for the top of the ticket or leaving that blank.

“Our vote shouldn’t be taken for granted,” he said. “I won’t vote for the lesser of two evils.”

Israel’s military has said it was highly likely its troops fired the shot that killed Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, the American-Turkish woman killed at a protest in the occupied West Bank.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said her death was unintentional and expressed deep regret.

The statement came as Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, called the killing of the 26-year-old last week “unprovoked and unjustified”.

Speaking on a diplomatic visit to London, Blinken told journalists that Eygi’s death showed the Israeli security forces needed to make fundamental changes to their rules of engagement.

“No one should be shot and killed for attending a protest,” he said, in one of his harshest comments to date against the IDF.

Turkish and Palestinian officials said Israeli troops shot Eygi, a volunteer with the activist group International Solidarity Movement (ISM), during a demonstration on Friday against settlement expansion in Beita, a village near Nablus.

On Tuesday, the IDF said commanders had conducted an investigation into the incident.

“The inquiry found that it is highly likely that she was hit indirectly and unintentionally by IDF fire which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the riot,” the military said. “The incident took place during a violent riot in which dozens of Palestinian suspects burned tyres and hurled rocks towards security forces at the Beita junction.

“The IDF expresses its deepest regret over the death of Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi,” it added.

Beita residents gave a different account, saying a group of demonstrators had gathered, as they had every Friday for midday prayers, to protest against Eyvatar, an Israeli settlement on the next hill built on land belonging to Palestinian farmers.

On this occasion, there were about 20 Palestinians from Beita, 10 foreign volunteers from the ISM, including Eygi, and about a dozen children from the district.

“The kids were throwing stones here at the junction, and the soldiers fired teargas at them,” Mahmud Abdullah, a 43-year-old resident said. “Everyone scattered and ran into the olive grove and then there were two shots.”

Neighbours pointed out the spot where Eygi was shot and a house on a ridge where they said the bullet came from.

The owner, Ali Mohali, said soldiers had gone on to his roof, 200 metres from where Eygi was shot. He said he heard one shot, but was not sure if there had been a second shot from that position.

Jonathan Pollak, an Israeli participating in Friday’s protest, said the shooting occurred shortly after clashes broke out, with Palestinians throwing stones and troops firing teargas and live ammunition.

The protesters and activists retreated and clashes subdued, he said. He then watched as two soldiers on the roof of a nearby home trained a gun in the group’s direction and fired. He said he saw Eygi “lying on the ground, next to an olive tree, bleeding to death”.

At the University of Washington, where Eygi recently graduated with a degree in psychology, Aria Fani, a professor of Middle Eastern languages and cultures, said she had been active earlier in the year at a pro-Palestinian encampment.

Fani said he had tried to talk Eygi out of going to the West Bank but that she told him “she needed to bear witness for the sake of her own humanity”.

Human rights groups say Israeli soldiers who kill Palestinians, or their foreign supporters, are rarely held to account. The Israeli military says it investigates and acts if criminal wrongdoing is found.

Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank are considered illegal under international law but Israel contests this.

Associated Press, Agence France Press and Reuters contributed reporting

Water wet, fire hot...

Israel says ‘highly likely’ its troops killed Turkish-American activist

The craziest part is that so many folks are still using pagers.

Maybe they use pagers to avoid wire taps, a la The Wire.

I don’t have problems with an exploding pager per se but ensuring that you have positive confirmation on the legitimacy of your target is way problematic. And it doesn’t look like they were particularly careful about that considering one of the killed was a kid.

This is one step removed from dumping sarin in the water supply.

I used to regularly have to contact Doctors at my job and almost all of them had pager numbers listed in the hospital directory and many still preferred being paged over being called or texted for some reason.

Well, I agree with the sentiment, but remember, Jane's assessed Hezbollah's fighting forces at 20K active and 20K reservists... In 2017. There are more now, I'm sure. So the assumption is that anyone who had one, got it from a Hezbollah member, and since it was for their organizational communications, that should have limited it to a very few outsiders. Looks like less than 10% of Hezbollah were deemed critical enough to use these devices. My guess is that a large percentage of their mid-rank leadership are injured right now. I expected some kind of follow-up and I'm puzzled at the lack. (Which does not speak well of Netanyahu's motives in this.)

Of course the Iranian ambassador carrying one on his person is extremely telling.