I recently came across The Sydney Statement on Anti-Palestinianism. It is excellent. I have reproduced parts of it below.

November 9, 2023

Dear Workplace Leaders,

The undersigned legal organizations write to share with you the enclosed letter from over 600 legal organizations and lawyers throughout the US, urging institutional leaders to take immediate measures to protect against anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim discrimination, and to protect advocates for Palestinian rights from retaliation for their political views. This is urgent in this moment when advocacy for Palestinian rights is being punished on a mass scale, and is causing a discriminatory and hostile environment for individuals who are connected to and are morally compelled to speak out about the current crisis in Gaza and throughout Palestine.

We also share this urgently today as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) urges companies to undertake its “Workplace Pledge to Fight Antisemitism.” It is absolutely critical that workplaces create inclusive environments and prevent discriminatory and hostile environments for their employees based on their protected characteristics. Antisemitism, along with other bigotry based on people’s racial, religious, ethnic, and other backgrounds, should not be tolerated in any workplace.

It is incumbent upon us, however, as organizations that have a history of defending human and civil rights, and with a deep commitment to social justice, to expose the troubling history of the ADL, which reveals one of its objectives in asking employers to sign this pledge. For many years, the ADL has played a significant part in concertedly attacking speech critical of Israeli policy or favorable to Palestinian rights. While branding itself as a civil rights organization, the ADL has pursued an agenda that has undermined social justice movements and has used its positioning to attack Palestinian, Muslim, Black, LGBT+, immigrant and other communities and movements.

The primary tool that it has used in attacking Palestinians and their allies is to label critics of Israel and advocates for Palestinian rights as “antisemitic.” For example, the ADL’s website unequivocally states that “Anti-Zionism is antisemitic, in intent or effect, as it invokes anti-Jewish tropes, is used to disenfranchise, demonize, disparage, or punish all Jews and/or those who feel a connection to Israel, equates Zionism with Nazism and other genocidal regimes, and renders Jews less worthy of sovereignty and nationhood than other peoples and states.” To render opposition to Zionism as antisemitic is itself anti-Palestinian. Zionism is a political ideology that calls for a Jewish state in historic Palestine. As it has been implemented in practice, the creation of Israel as a self-described “Jewish state” has meant the dispossession, exile, military occupation, and unending violations of the international human and national rights of the Palestinian people. To declare that opposition to Zionism is the equivalent of antisemitism is to declare all Palestinians and their supporters as anti-Jewish because they aspire to end the decades-long occupation of their land and to live freely and in full equality in their homeland. Needless to say, political ideologies are not protected characteristics under anti-discrimination law, and any attempt to make them so should be rejected.

Signing this pledge will, unfortunately, put corporate offices in the position of being arbiters of political speech on Palestinian rights issues, lead to Palestinian, Arab, Muslim and other groups 2

feeling targeted for expressions of their identity, and thereby create a hostile environment for these groups and other advocates for Palestinian rights. A primary tool that the ADL has widely promoted to enforce its own political views on Israel is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism that it and other Israel-aligned groups have pushed in legislatures, institutions and now workplaces around the country. The IHRA definition has been widely discredited as a tool of censorship that, rather than making Jewish people safer, uses the stain of antisemitism to target critics of Israel.

In this moment, when the atrocities unfolding in the Gaza strip (“Gaza”) and throughout Palestine are undeniable, Palestinian and allied voices calling for an end to Israel’s genocide and for Palestinian freedom from Israel’s 75-year long occupation are more important than ever. As of the date of this letter, the Israeli military has so far killed over 10,000 Palestinian civilians in Gaza, including over 4,000 children. The Israeli government—through its serial bombardment—has coerced the mass exodus of Palestinian civilians from northern Gaza to the south of the besieged strip, while attacking putatively safe and humanitarian exit-corridors. It has also struck other civilian targets and is depriving the entire civilian population in Gaza essential access to water, food, medical care, internet service and electricity—even while remaining hospitals are overrun with critically injured patients. Israeli soldiers and settlers have also killed over 150 Palestinians in recent weeks in the occupied West Bank, as settler rampages drive Palestinians out of their lands and homes. All of these measures against Palestinian civilians contravene international law, rise to the level of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and flout the condemnation of the World Health Organization and United Nations.

To condemn these state actions against Palestinians and demand their safety, hundreds of thousands of people have protested in solidarity with them worldwide. High-ranking officials within the U.S. and abroad have, too, undertaking defiant and public resignations. Unfortunately, as the enclosed letter details, the ADL and other Israel-aligned groups have undertaken a campaign of mass censorship, even calling for the criminalization of student activists.

To cast as antisemitic the criticisms that human-rights advocates globally have of Israeli state policy, which is infused with racist and genocidal rhetoric, lacks rigor and cheapens the serious dangers of bona fide antisemitism (meaning, animus against Jewish people because of their ethnic and/or religious identity)—an undeniably real and present danger that all of the undersigned take seriously and uniformly decry.

We therefore ask you, as the enclosed letter urges, to reject attempts to push a distorted definition of antisemitism that aims to censor criticism of Israel and advocacy for Palestinian rights by falsely labeling it anti-Jewish. The ADL’s pledge does just that – not explicitly, but in its reference to the National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism and the Shine A Light Campaign, both of which make explicit reference to the IHRA working definition as a tool to combat antisemitism, and which the ADL has had a significant hand in shaping.

Following the lead of a group that has proven itself as dedicated to undermining Palestinian, Arab and Muslim communities, as well as social justice causes across the country, will put you in the position of replicating the ADL’s anti-Palestinian agenda. It will counter the work of DEI offices by encouraging exclusion of and discrimination against Palestinian, Arab and Muslim 3

employees and creating a hostile environment for these groups and all people who support Palestinian rights, including many Jews. Instead, we urge you to address antisemitism along with other bigotry in the workplace in a holistic manner that allows you to create safety and inclusion for all people – not comfort for some at the expense of others. We recommend instead resources on antisemitism such as PARCEO’s “Curriculum on Antisemitism from a Framework of Collective Liberation,” and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice’s Understanding Antisemitism,” and Jewish Voice for Peace resources. In addition, it’s critical that workplaces understand how anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry manifests, and we urge you to reach out to this letter’s signatories for resources on those issues.

Thank you for your urgent attention to this matter, and for your careful consideration of any affiliation with the ADL.

Respectfully,

American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

The Center for Constitutional Rights

Council on American Islamic Relations

Law For Black Lives

National Lawyers Guild

Palestine Legal

Project South Encl.

Shibley Telhami posted this article in the form of a tweet on October 25, 2023. Here is the link to that tweet. I’ve copied and pasted his article below.

THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE ON ISRAEL/PALESTINE TITLED “BIDEN AIMS TO CONTAIN VIOLENCE IN ISRAEL/PALESTINE. HIS POLICY MAY BE STOKING IT INSTEAD,” WAS SUBMITTED BY EMAIL TO A LEADING NEWSPAPER ON APRIL 11, 2023. IT WAS NOT PUBLISHED (AS IS THE CASE WITH MOST SUBMISSIONS). WHAT FOLLOWS IS THE UNEDITED TEXT AS IT WAS SUBMITTED, PROVIDING CONTEXT FOR THE CURRENT ISRAEL/GAZA WAR.

(APRIL 11, 2023) Biden Aims to Contain Violence in Israel/Palestine. His Policy May Be Stoking It Instead. By Shibley Telhami

As bouts of violence in Israel/Palestine have become more frequent, the Biden administration has been aiming to ‘calm down tensions’ and prevent further escalation.  Instead, its policies have played into the hands of the militant Israeli far right while undermining the most important non-violent levers available to Palestinians for legitimate resistance of life-long repression. In the process, the stage has been set for even more violence ahead. The administration’s voice is usually loudest when there are visible violent eruptions, such as rocket fire from Gaza and Lebanon, or high casualty attacks in Israel or the West Bank — especially when the victims are Israelis. These are of course troubling events that could lead to escalation and do require response. But inherent in this posture is the assumption that the status quo preceding them is not itself violent and thus should be maintained.  Nothing could be further from the truth. The toxicity and violence of the daily status quo drives the bouts of lethal eruptions we are witnessing. The expansion of the illegal settlement enterprise and settler violence against Palestinians — as well as their crops, schools, homes, and villages — has pushed the daily Palestinian reality to the breaking point. And the Biden administration’s reticence and reluctance to address this toxic reality in its statements and policies is, rightly or wrongly, interpreted as tacit acceptance of the situation. The status quo is anything but peaceful and normal under a military occupation that has lasted most of a century with no end in sight. Even when the guns of occupation are silent, their coercive presence cannot be missed.  Every aspect of Palestinian lives is controlled and regulated by Israel — driving, studying, farming, working, traveling abroad, access to healthcare, and even the ability to marry and live with the person you love — just to name a few. Israeli extremists have made no effort to hide the fact they want to make life as difficult as possible for Palestinians, and restrict them into a few overcrowded municipal enclaves, deport them, or worse. The guns are often far from silent. Last year, more than 170 Palestinians, including at least 30 children, were killed across the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. In January 2023 alone, at least 29 Palestinians, including five children, have been killed. Both innocent Israelis and innocent Palestinians have died tragically over the years, but the overwhelming majority of the casualties — 87% from 2000-2014 — have been Palestinian. Since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, nearly a million Palestinians have been imprisoned, many without charges. Currently, over 1,000 Palestinian detainees are being held by Israel without charge or trial, the highest number since 2003. In fact, when one takes a close look at what it’s like to be a Palestinian at this moment, what stands out is how the overwhelming majority have endured this apartheid-like system and daily humiliations with perseverance and self-control — not violent resistance. Palestinians and Israelis who want to see an end to the occupation, dehumanization and violence are waiting for President Biden to see them, hear them, and act consistent with shared values. To start, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza face an overwhelming disadvantage in resources and power, much of which has to do with decades of extraordinary American support for Israel that has given Israel military and political primacy in the Middle East and enabled it to maintain its occupation for most of a century. This asymmetry of power means that Palestinians cannot possibly have a chance of success in peaceful resistance without the help of the rest of world. Biden is making that nearly impossible. There is a lot on Biden’s plate at home and abroad; no one expects major peace efforts, especially given the dire state of politics among Israelis and Palestinians. But Biden must stop making a bad situation worse. The president has actually spent much effort on Israel/Palestine already – principally assisting the Israeli government in avoiding the peaceful consequences of its transgressions by shielding Israel at the United Nations from even diplomatic condemnation of its actions. In the face of Israeli settlement construction in violation of international laws Biden’s diplomats worked hard last month to shield Israel at the UN from a Security Council resolution that would hold Israel accountable. This month, Biden prevented a mere UN statement condemning Israel’s provocation at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that led to violence and bloodshed. Since his election, Biden has adopted and pursued the expansion of Trump’s Abraham Accords, which decoupled ending Israeli domination of Palestinians from peace with Arab states — one of the few levers Arabs had to influence Israeli behavior. In the process the US played into the hands of Israel’s far right which has always argued it can have its cake and eat it too. The president even went on a highly controversial trip to Saudi Arabia last summer that he said was aimed at advancing Israeli interests. The US has also made it a priority to fight peaceful international levers to influence abusive Israeli behavior. And, unlike several of our European allies, Biden has failed to forcefully push back against Israeli government efforts to target Israeli and Palestinian civil society and human rights organizations. These efforts show that those explaining the administration policy based on its “crowded agenda” aren’t seeing that this issue has actually been high on the administration’s agenda. The problem is that, rather than advancing peace and coexistence the efforts may have done the opposite. The inevitable outcome is that, on the Palestinian side, those advocating non-violence will lose ground as despair increases and those advocating military resistance will gain ground. On the Israeli side, the empowerment of the militant far right and its ascendance into positions of power promises more violence, which they appear to seek, in pursuit of the “last war.” Some ask: Why should Washington ‘single out’ Israel when the world is full of other human rights abusers? Because Israel is not just any country. In many respects it’s the country in the world that we are most intertwined with due to unparalleled American diplomatic, intelligence, military, and economic support, which has made us complicit in entrenching what has become a one-state reality akin to apartheid – a category that stands out even in the midst of pervasive international illiberalism. The president appears to be a throwback to another era of Democratic politics, when a knee-jerk embrace of Israeli policies was the safe political bet, though his support for Israel may go beyond politics into the personal, as he has stated. But this unprecedentedly dangerous moment demands something very different. This Israel is different, and this coming collapse into violence and settler vigilantism led from the offices of elected Israeli cabinet members will be like nothing we have seen before. It is clear that Biden’s constituents have not been with him on this issue, as polling shows that more Democrats now sympathize with the Palestinians than with Israel. Even Democratic members of Congress have grown critical of his posture on this issue.  Silence and lack of action serves to enable the dangerous Israeli far right and sets the stage for more hopelessness and violence. It puts gas on the fire. The clock is ticking. The president must lead, as he has done elsewhere, and we must stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution.

As a group of researchers, policy analysts, and experts with deep commitments to and expertise on the Middle East and North Africa, we have always worked side-by-side to advance policies based on shared universal values. Today, we find much of the government-led responses to the Gaza war to be in grave violation of these values and principles. After the horrific slaughter of civilians by Hamas in Israel on October 7, the world correctly and justifiably reacted with condemnation and solidarity; a response we are in complete alignment with. An accumulated legacy of dehumanisation of Palestinians has resulted in far too many western governments uncritically condoning the campaign of collective punishment against millions of innocent Palestinians that Israel launched in retaliation. When Russia bombed critical civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, or Assad held Aleppo under siege, western governments loudly and rightly condemned these attacks and called for immediate humanitarian ceasefires. Many wonder why they won’t do the same here. We have reached a point where there is virtual consensus among rights groups that war crimes were committed by Hamas on October 7 where over a thousand Israeli civilians were killed, and that war crimes have been committed by Israel since its aerial bombardment campaign against Gaza began which has killed more than five thousand civilians so far. To make matters worse, incitements to ethnic cleansing removing the distinction between civilians and combatants has been broadcast from the most senior levels of the Israeli establishment. The facts make for an ominous forecast and averting it should be our collective priority and is our collective responsibility. Western capitals pride themselves on solidarity with allies, and are demonstrating this again with Israel. But to achieve long-term security for Israel and the broader region, there is a moral and strategic obligation to ensure that Israel’s self-defence is characterised by international humanitarian law and leads to an end to the occupation; Western governments have not sufficiently emphasised that obligation, despite the situation demanding it. UN experts have also raised the need to restrain Israel from international law violations. But rhetoric is not enough. Using diplomatic leverage to pressure both Israel and Hamas, who are holding hundreds of hostages, towards adhering to international law is one of our key tools for de-escalation. One that is currently being discarded. Western governments should be advancing attempts to de-escalate, rather than give the impression that ‘might is right’. Given the power asymmetry between Israel and

Palestinians, this has enabled collective punishment in Gaza, and fast-tracked illegal
settlement expansion in the West Bank, where reports indicate that Palestinians are
being dispossessed, killed, or placed in ‘administrative detention’ in their hundreds.
This path, rather than ensuring security for Israelis, deepens the cycle of violence
and only makes the conflict’s regionalisation more likely.
The lack of strategic focus and failure to pressure collective adherence to
international law, denigrates the West’s global moral standing. It isolates it from
swathes of the world, deepening divisions at a time of great power competition and
shared challenges to our climate, collective security, and the world economy. It also
creates a precedent that imperils small states and fatally undermines any semblance
of a global rules-based order.
We are mandated to respond to this challenge by foregrounding our common
universal values, and we should be forewarned that our response is nothing less
than a civilisational litmus test, which will catalyse either the spread or retreat of
these values in the world.
We, the undersigned, call on western governments and our colleagues across the
policy-making world to centre those core values, upholding the equal humanity of
Palestinians and Israelis, rejecting anti-Semitism, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry,
at home and abroad.
Above all, in this crisis, we advocate for an immediate ceasefire, the provision of
humanitarian aid to all in need, and the return to political processes that can facilitate
just and fair resolutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
If we fail to do this, and instead enable the worst, then we condemn this region to the
tumult of war, deepen global divisions, and put an indelible stain on our collective
conscience.

To add your signature to this letter please email: OpenLetterIP@gmail.com

All signatories are signing in their personal capacity so as not to imply any
institutional positions. However, the following signatories are associated with a broad
variety of noted institutions in the policy arena, including but not exclusively, the
International Crisis Group, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Chatham
House, the European Council on Foreign Relations, Cambridge University, the Middle
East Institute, King’s College London, the Atlantic Council, the Tahrir Institute for
Middle East Policy, and others.

1. Comfort Ero, Institute Director
2. Marwan Muasher, former Foreign Minister
3. Yair Wallach, Reader
4. Yezid Sayigh, Senior Fellow
5. Lara Friedman, Foundation President
6. Maha Yahya, Center Director
7. Michelle Dunne, Institute Director
8. Nathalie Tocci, Institute Director
9. Hugh Lovatt, Senior Policy Fellow
10. Mohanad Hage Ali, Deputy Director for Research
11. Jonathan Portes, Professor
12. H.A. Hellyer, Senior Fellow & Professor
13. Joost Hiltermann, Programme Director
14. Adel Abdel-Ghafar, Programme Director
15. Alessia Melcangi, Associate Professor
16. Mai el Sadany, Institute Director
17. Kelly Petillo, Programme Manager
18. Johan Schaar, Researcher
19. Emad Badi, Senior Research Fellow
20. Eduard Soler I Lecha, Assistant Professor
21. Hafsa Halawa, Independent Consultant
22. Zuri Linetsky, Research Fellow
23. Zaha Hassan, Human Rights Attorney
24. Gerd Nonneman, Professor
25. Timothy Kaldas, Institute Deputy-Director
26. Virginie Collombier, Programme Deputy Director
27. Dalia Ghanem, Programme Director
28. Beverley Milton-Edwards, Professor
29. Tarik Yusuf, Institute Director
30. Haizam Amirah-Fernandez, Senior Analyst
31. Riccardo Fabiani, Project Director
32. Intissar Fakir, Programme Director
33. Wolfram Lacher, Senior Associate
34. Elham Fakhro, Research Fellow
35. Cinzia Bianco, Senior Policy Fellow
36. Noha el Mikawy, Dean
37. David Butter, Analyst
38. Sami Nader, Institute Director
39. Marc Owen Jones, Professor
40. Noha Aboueldahab, Assistant Professor
41. Sarah Yerkes, Senior Fellow
42. Assad al-Achi, Institute Director
43. Shahram Akbarzadeh, Professor
44. Abdullah Baabood, Professor
45. Karim Emile Bitar, Professor
46. Galip Dalay, Senior Research Fellow
47. Ishac Diwan, Director of Research
48. Aziz al-Ghashian, Researcher
49. Karim Haggag, Professor
50. Adel Hamaizia, Institute Director
51. Asma Khalifa, Institute Director
52. Tarek Megrisi, Senior Policy Fellow
53. Kholood Khair, Institute Director
54. Khaled Mansour, Writer
55. Renad Mansour, Senior Research Fellow
56. Karim Mezran, Senior Fellow
57. Ahmed Morsy, Senior Researcher
58. Farea al-Muslimi, Senior Research Fellow
59. Tariq al-Olaimy, Institute Director
60. Rouzbeh Parsi, Programme Director
61. Randa Slim, Programme Director
62. Andreas Kreig, Professor

At time of publication, this letter has been endorsed by over 125 faculty members
and over 1,030 students and community members

LINK: Sign to Support This Petition

As members of the UBC academic community and educators committed to principles of social
justice and equality, we are troubled by the statement that UBC Interim President Deborah
Buszard issued on October 11th titled “Supporting the UBC Community.”

The statement explicitly refers to “the atrocities from the terrorist attacks on Israel” but remains
silent regarding the ongoing state terror committed by Israel against Palestinians.

At the time of this writing, and as reported by UN bodies, Human Rights Organizations, and
news agencies, Israel has:

● Killed more than 3,500 Palestinians including over 1,000 children
● Displaced over 260,000 civilians and ordered the forcible population transfer of over 1
million
● Cut off supplies of food, water, medicine, fuel and electricity, along with humanitarian aid
● Bombed schools, media offices, universities, ambulances, hospitals, houses of worship,
and civilian residences
● Used white phosphorous in its bombing of Gaza and southern Lebanon
● Called for hospitals in Gaza to rapidly evacuate, which as the WHO states is a death
sentence to the sick and injured.

These actions are a clear violation of international humanitarian law and amount to crimes
against humanity.

They are taking place while Israeli officials continuously dehumanize
Palestinians. Israel’s defense minister called Palestinians “human animals.”

Members of Israel’s house of representatives, the Knesset, and apologists abroad openly advocate for slaughter, ethnic cleansing, collective punishment, amounting to another Nakba, or catastrophe, when
over 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in 1948.

President Buszard’s statement also makes no reference to Palestine or Palestinians,

choosing to refer instead to “Israel, Gaza and elsewhere”.

The erasure of Palestine as a geography, Palestinians as a people, and their plight as a nation dehumanizes Palestinians and denies them the fundamental right to safety, security, freedom and liberation.

It runs contrary to the claim that UBC is committed to “providing a safe, inclusive environment, with a shared value of peaceful relations.”

UBC’s declared support for decolonization and practices of equity, diversity and inclusion ring hollow in light of this partisan approach.

Such dehumanization comes in the wake of similarly lop-sided statements by UBC’s Faculty Association and other university administrations across Canada, the US, and the UK.

Statements that erase or dehumanize Palestinians may have a dire impact in Palestine and in
the diaspora, as made evident by the hate-driven murder of Wadea Al Fayoume, a 6-year old
Palestinian-American child in Chicago.

In light of all of the above,

We send a message of support to all Palestinian colleagues and academic communities across
North America and Europe that are facing a hostile climate of intimidation from their
governments, media, and university administrations.

We affirm the right of the Palestinian people to freedom and sovereignty from Israeli occupation,
settler colonialism, and apartheid.

We renew our commitment to and valuation of the safety and well-being of UBC’s Palestinian
students, faculty, staff and their allied colleagues.

We demand that the UBC’s President’s office:

1. Rectify the statement and condemn Israeli state violence and violations of international
   humanitarian law.
2. Publicly denounce and actively prevent attempts to silence, demonize, or harass any student,
   staff, or faculty member for expressing their solidarity or support for justice in Palestine.
3. Reiterate UBC’s full commitment to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech,
   including the right to teach on Palestine and criticize any state or group’s crimes and violations
   of international humanitarian law
4. Provide meaningful support to all faculty, staff, and students who are subject to bullying or
   harassment in class or on campus as a result of their support for justice in Palestine
   
   LINK: Sign to Support This Petition

For anyone with the least awareness of the recent history of the Middle East, the most recent violence that began when Hamas launched a devastating assault on Israeli military bases and kibbutzim along the cease-fire lines between Israel and the Gaza Strip, was the culmination of a more than 75 year history of conflict between first, Zionist settlers, and then, the Israeli state, and Palestinian Arabs who were obstacles to the realization of the Zionist state. We are now fast approaching the denouement: either peace based on recognition of the equality of Jew and Palestinian Arab in historical Palestine, or something approaching genocide. If Israel chooses the latter strategy — and it seems likely that it will — it will not stop with Gaza. It will quickly turn its attention to the Palestinians in the West Bank and seek to liquidate as many of them as possible too. The only way to put an end to this slaughter, and restore a dynamic for peace, is intervention by outside powers, namely, the United States, but everything seems to suggest that the United States, under the leadership of “Genocide Joe” Biden, has come to accept genocide as a solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict.

How did we get here? In my opinion, the basic dynamic of the conflict between Israel and Palestine can only be understood through what behavioral economists call the ultimatum game. One of the lessons of the ultimatum game is that human beings have a general tendency to reject unjust outcomes, even when submitting to an unjust outcome would advance their economic welfare from the perspective of classical economics.

The tendency of human beings to prefer self-destruction over submission to unjust outcomes is well-illustrated in the famous Melian Dialogue of Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian Wars, the classical account of a several decades’ long war between Athens and Sparta over domination of the ancient Greek world.

In 2005, before I became a law professor, but was already despondent over the future of the Middle East and despairing over a just settlement of the Palestine/Israel conflict with the collapse of the Oslo Peace Process, I wrote a short essay, “Palestine and the Melian Dialogue.” The Melian Dialogue is a poignant presentation of the conflict between perceived right and the realities of might, precisely what I believe drives the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The Zionist movement, and later Israel, has always relied on overwhelming military might to create facts favorable to its political ambitions, and then seeks to compel the Palestinians to recognize those facts, regardless of the dubiousness of Israel’s normative claims. Given the structure of the interactions between Israel and Palestine, the only rational moves for Palestine are either to surrender or, by engaging in effective, but ultimately self-destructive, violence, convince Israel that it would be better off making a more generous offer. But for a strategy of resistance to superior power to prevail, the weaker party must also rely on the possibility of third-party intervention, others moved to act based on the injustice they see being done. Hence, the necessity of international law for the Palestinians, but its irrelevance to Israel.

We are witnessing this dynamic in real time today, as Israel applies genocidal violence against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and supporters of the Palestinians’ rights are mobilizing worldwide to restrain Israel in the name of international legality. My 2005 essay, although written almost 18 years ago, is frighteningly relevant to current events. I reproduce it below:

Watching the progress of the bloodletting among Palestinians and Israelis, one feels that he is a witness to a reenactment of Thucydides’ Melian dialogue.  Thucydides, the celebrated ancient Greek historian, tells us that when mighty Athens “invited” the tiny island of Melos to join its empire, the Melians responded by noting pessimistically that “all we can reasonably expect from this negotiation is war, if we prove to have right on our side and refuse to submit, and in the contrary case, slavery [if we submit and accept your terms].”  The Athenians dismissed the relevance of the Melians’ response, telling them that “you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”  The Athenians warned the Melians of the grave consequences that would befall their land if they stubbornly insisted on independence, warning them against entertaining hope in either the gods or their kindred against Athens’ awful might.  The Melians, however, disdained the path of prudence, and instead, did choose to place their trust in “the gods . . . and in the help of men.”  Unfortunately for the citizens of Melos, the gods and men proved themselves unworthy of their trust. The Athenians laid siege to their city, and after some initial setbacks, they took the island, killed all the adult males, enslaved the women and children, and replaced the Melians with Athenian settlers.

Today’s Palestinians are in a situation not substantially different from that facing the Melians – either to stand on right, and face almost certain annihilation, or to accept the path of prudence, and submit to permanent Israeli domination.  In a rare moment of lucidity, Newsweek, at the time of the Camp David II negotiations, noted that peace would require Palestinians to “accept the bittersweet reality of permanent domination by Israel.”  In that one sentence, the naked power that lay behind the peace process was made plain to all by disclosing, honestly and forthrightly, that the purpose of the peace process was not to establish reasonable terms of coexistence between Arabs and Israelis; rather, its purpose was to enshrine Israeli domination over the Palestinians by “convincing” them that it was more prudent to submit to superior power than it was to stand fast on principle.  As we now know, the Palestinians, like the Melians before them, “foolishly” chose to have hope in the future rather than to submit to a certainty of domination, a domination made more “bittersweet” if obtained under the imprimatur of a legitimate peace treaty.

That the expected outcome of the peace process was not to be peace so much as submission should not have surprised any but the most casual observer of Israeli-Palestinian relations.  When Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, dispatched two rabbis on a fact-finding mission to Palestine in the late 19^th-century, they reported to him that “[t]he bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man,” a reference to the incontestable fact that Palestine was not an empty land awaiting Jewish settlement, but a land that already teemed with inhabitants, inhabitants who lived in its cities and towns, inhabitants who developed that country with their labor, as demonstrated in their arts, crafts, agriculture, business, and other manifestations of human civilization.   Instead of this fact deterring the Zionist project, however, the Zionist movement adopted the strategy of the “Iron Wall”: Zionism would prevail over the Palestinians not on the basis of a superior moral claim that could be presented to Palestinians with the reasonable expectation that they would give it their assent, but on the basis of overwhelmingly superior power, presented in the nature of a fait accompli or ultimatums, that would compel the Palestinians to submit to the Zionist program.  

Zionism’s stubborn refusal to recognize the existence of inalienable Palestinian rights in historical Palestine has resulted in the two sides being caught in a deadly ultimatum game.  The internal logic of an ultimatum game requires that each move be accompanied by a marginal increase in violence until one of two possible long-term outcomes is reached: either both parties realize the irrationality of the game, and abandon it in favor of a compromise based in equality, or the stronger player obliterates the weaker one. 

The collapse of the peace process, the ensuing bloodletting, and the strategies subsequently deployed by both the Israelis and the Palestinians during Intifada II are perfectly predictable consequences of a framework that afforded no concern to legality.  Some might dismiss a stubborn insistence upon legal rights as either pie-in-the-sky idealism, or extremely dangerous insofar as it promotes false hope in the Palestinians, or both.  Yet, lawyers know that in the absence of a baseline of entitlements that only law provides, it is virtually impossible for any negotiation to be concluded successfully.  In a context of lawlessness, each party gets only what it is strong enough to take.  By its very nature, therefore, the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, has encouraged unilateral actions that only produces in the other side the desire to strike quicker, faster, and harder. 

Moreover, because the Israelis enjoy overwhelming military, the Palestinians know that the end game is their annihilation, and accordingly, the only way they can “win” this game with Israel is to convince it that the cost of victory is too high by demonstrating their toughness.  Indeed, if we are to believe Thucydides, the Melians, upon rejecting the Athenians’ offer, did not sit around waiting for the inevitable Athenian invasion: They immediately initiated hostilities with Athens. But, because of the overwhelming disparity in the power of the two sides, the only likely outcome, if the parties are left to themselves, is the destruction of the Palestinians. Certainly Israel has no incentive to abandon the game, and the Palestinians, cannot abandon the game without surrendering.  The United States is the only power that can impress upon both parties the desirability of abandoning their game.  Were the Bush administration to insist that the peace process proceed on the basis of the universal values enshrined in international humanitarian law, it would rescue the Israelis and the Palestinians from the ever-increasing spiral of violence that marks the grim progress of an ultimatum game.  So far at least, the Bush administration has eschewed a law-based approach to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and has tacitly chosen to remain passive in the face of Israel’s decision to proceed in its next round of escalation.  In these circumstances no one, especially President Bush, should be surprised that, in the words of Yeats’ Second Coming, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” and we are all left to wonder “what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”  And, Israel too, ought to heed both the prudential words of the Melians – that exercise of might unrestrained by justice inevitably reduces security, as all will feel threatened and will eventually confront what they collectively perceive to be a dangerous threat – as well as the eventual, disastrous defeat the Athenians suffered at the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War.   Israel may very well its immediate battle with the Palestinians, but in so doing, it may also end up losing the war.

I gave this lecture almost three years ago at the Program on Islamic Law at Harvard Law  School on the history of the Mālikī law of spousal abuse (ḍarar al-zawjayn). As I explore the topic in greater detail in what I hope will be a monograph on legal process in medieval Islamic law, it has become much clearer to me the pathways of legal change over the roughly  one thousand years that separated Mālik b. Anas, the titular eponym of the Mālikī school law, from the content of the law as it existed in the 18th century. The Mālikī doctrine of judicial divorce based on a broad conception of spousal harm was not known to Mālik but it evolved gradually over time as a result of the interaction of remedies in the law of consensual divorce settlements (khulʾ) and the practices of document writers that inserted provisions in marriage contracts giving wives the right to divorce themselves in the event their husbands treated them poorly. How this doctrine developed is an interesting case of how remedies can themselves become substantive rights. The mature doctrine — that a wife could establish harm by hearsay and obtain a judicial divorce as a result — effectively did an end run around ordinary rules of evidence that only admitted the testimony of men (at least according to the Mālikīs) to prove marriages and prove divorces. Hearsay was originally recognized as admissible solely for the purpose of allowing a woman to claim she had been unlawfully coerced  into paying her husband for a divorce on the theory that it was merely a claim for money. Because that claim was viewed solely as a property dispute and not a status dispute, evidence other than that of two men were admitted. It was only later that this became a free-standing cause of action for a judicial divorce and not simply a basis for restitution for money unjustly paid.

The last lecture I gave during my recent trip to Morocco was delivered at the Muhammad VIth Institute for the Training of Imams and Murshidat in Rabat. This is a post-graduate institution (i.e., students are admitted after graduating from another degree program) intended to produce graduates with the skills required to meet the daily religious needs of Muslim communities, such as prayer leaders in public mosques (imams) and spiritual care. Standards, as far as I can tell, are relatively high: no one is admitted who has not, for example, already memorized the Quran.

One of the innovations of this institute was that it opened itself to female students (murshidāt). While Islamic law does not permit women to lead mixed-gender congregational prayers, and Maliki fiqh does not even allow women to lead congregational prayers consisting solely of women (although other Sunni schools of law do), clearly Muslim women need religious instruction just as Muslim men do. The creation of a program for women to serve as murshidat was intended to make sure that women, too, had access to high-quality teachers of religion.

This institute reflects the domestic and international aspects of Morocco’s religious policies. Domestically, Moroccan policy seeks to create a Moroccan national religious identity based on three elements — Ash’ari theology; Maliki jurisprudence; and moderate, “Junaydi” Sufism. Internationally, Morocco seeks to project itself as a bastion of moderate and authentic Sunni Islam. The institute, therefore, is international, accepting students from other North African countries, Subsaharan Africa, and France.

I have no idea whether these policies “work” as a matter of statecraft, but as this video shows, the Moroccan state seems to take them quite seriously as this video of the king marking the completion of the third stage of the institute along with his attendance at the distribution of awards to the top students seems to indicate. The video, based on what I saw when I gave my lecture, gives a fair representation of the diverse nature of the student body. When I gave my lecture, there were large numbers of female students as well as large numbers of students from Subsaharan Africa. Any yes, the lecture hall is quite large. I don’t think I ever gave a lecture in a larger lecture hall than that of the Muhammad VIth Institute.

It was also quite a humbling experience: I think of myself as a legal academic, no more, and otherwise, just an ordinary Muslim doing my best to live a reasonably Islamic life. When I entered the lecture hall, the students welcomed me by standing up and reciting the opening lines of Busiri’s Mantle Poem in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. They did the same when I left. Despite my general cynicism, the warm welcome the students gave me was deeply moving.

In choosing my lecture topic, I wanted to both be respectful of my guests and their policies toward religion while at the same time say something substantive. In preparing for my lecture, I came across this document on the website of the Moroccan Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs, “The Guide for the Prayer Leader, the Friday Preacher and the Religious Adviser (Dalīl al-Imām wa’l-Khaṭīb wa’l-Wāʿiẓ).” This document attempts to assist those religious functionaries who interact with the public on how to go about delivering the most important Muslim public ritual – the sermon at the Friday congregational prayer.

The Friday sermon has always been political in Islam, it being the prerogative of the ruler to deliver the sermon. Traditionally, the Friday congregational prayer could not be held without the permission of the ruler. For this reason, the Shi’a have generally refused to recognize the validity of Friday prayers in the absence of the Imam, but that discussion must be deferred for another day. In any case, the aforementioned Guide for the Prayer Leader, in addition to being a practical reference guide, amounts to a clear articulation of the political theology of the Moroccan state, and is worth of an academic study from that perspective alone.

But there was one topic it touched upon that overlapped with my narrow interests as a legal academic: the obligation of religious functionaries to follow the well-established (mashhūr) position of the Maliki school when they publicly perform rituals. The continued salience of taqlīd is a point of major contention in Muslim societies in the modern period. In my lecture, I defended the legitimacy of the duty of taqlid, particularly in the domain of ritual, from a theological perspective and a political one: theologically, taqlid is legitimate because Muslims are not obligated to follow “true” opinions, only reasonable opinions, and the fact that a doctrine is “well-established” means by definition that it is a reasonable understanding of what God requires; and politically, taqlid in matters of worship is defensible because the point of ritual is discipling the self through practice, something that is fulfilled by acting in accordance with the well-established rules of the Maliki school, while opening the doors of reinterpretation (ijtihad) in matters of ritual will only have the effect of creating dissension and confusion without furthering the principle aim of ritual — disciplined practice — the least.

I also argue in this lecture that just as the common good vindicates taqlid in matters of ritual, it also places limits on taqlid in non-ritual matters: we cannot use taqlid as an excuse to continue following rules that are neither theologically absolute or consistent with our common good, and that this was the kind of taqlid that earned the criticism of modern reformers like Muhammad Abduh, Rashid Rida and the 20th century Moroccan jurist, Muhammad b. al-Hasan al-Hajwi . It is in this latter category of actions that ijtihad is required, not out of fear that practicing taqlid results in not following God’s will, as certain kinds of Salafists would have it, but out of fear of not pursuing the common good.

In 2019, the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School published a new translation of the seminal Islamic legal text, the Muwaṭṭaʾ of Imam Mālik b. Anas (d. 179/795), according to the recension of the Andalusian legal scholar, Yaḥyā b. Yaḥyā (d. 234/848). This translation was the culmination of several years of work involving a team of translators from Morocco and North America. I was responsible for ensuring the accuracy of the translation from the perspective of Islamic law.

Our translation of the Muwatta is available for free download from ShariaSource, a project of the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School.

In recognition of the importance of the translation, the Moroccan Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs invited me to give a lecture to the High Council of Religious Scholars on June 29, 2022, to discuss the work behind the translation and the methods we used. The High Council of Religious Scholars supervised the editing and publication of the Royal Moroccan Edition of the Muwatta of Yahya b. Yahya (the “RME”).

The RME was the first critical edition of the text based on the oldest North African and Andalusian manuscripts of the text. The Arabic text of the RME also includes many of the copious notes and glosses found in the marginalia of these ancient manuscripts that were left by the North African and Andalusian scholars who studied the Muwatta in the centuries after the introduction of the text to Muslim Iberia and North Africa.

For those interested in the subject of translating Arabic texts, they might find my lecture on how we approached the translation to be of interest. I also prepared slides illustrating the different stages of the translation process, and the differences between our translation and prior translations.

The Arabic text of the second edition of the RME is available on line at this link. A downloadable and (mostly) searchable pdf version of the Arabic text of the RME is available here.

Last June, at the invitation of the Moroccan Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs, I gave a series of lecture at different Moroccan educational institutions. This is the text of the first lecture I gave, at the esteemed Qarawiyyin University in Fez. It was a great honor for me to give a lecture at this venue, which is arguably the oldest university in the world and without doubt one of the oldest centers for the study of Maliki law.

My lecture, which was delivered to the University President, senior administration, and graduate students in Islamic law, raised the question of the legitimacy of the modern state from the perspective of Islamic law, the sharia. I argued, contrary to certain Islamist groups and post-modern intellectuals, that there is no reason to believe that the modern state is per se illegitimate from the perspective of Islamic law.

Drawing on the Maliki tradition of Islamic law, I show that the legitimacy of decisions of rulers is not based on substantive conformity with the shari’a (or justice) as much as it is based on the consent of the ruled and the substance of the decision not being manifestly unjust. Based on this principle, I argue that states that enjoy popular legitimacy are, by virtue of that fact alone, substantially legitimate from the perspective of Islamic law. Accordingly, working toward achieving representative institutions that enjoy effective public consent is a crucial condition for the legitimacy of the modern Muslim state.

With regard to what it means for a decision not to be manifestly unjust, I also rely on Maliki authors to point out that jurists did not demand that particular decisions be in conformity with what jurists believed was the correct rule of the Shari’a, only that decisions not violate certain clear rules and principles of the Shari’a. Finally, I pointed out that what many radical Islamists take to be “ruling based on something other than what God has revealed” — and therefore is illegitimate or worse — is in fact nothing more than the state exercising its lawful discretion to organize the public interest through the issuance of positive laws. Far from undermining the shari’a, these help make the law more effective by replacing informal and discretionary methods of dispute resolution with clear rules.