Expert Analyst: International Politics, Middle East & Nonviolent Action
Israel and Palestine
Sa’ed Atshan is generally considered one of the most highly-respected young Quaker scholars in the United States. A graduate of Ramallah Friends School and Swarthmore College with a doctoral degree from Harvard, he is currently an assistant professor in Swarthmore’s…
Santa Cruz Sentinel September 29, 2017 It seems that UC Santa Cruz now reserves the right to bring in ultra-conservative speakers as a condition of accepting in-kind donations from those with left-of-center views.
The Progressive & Huffington Post August 1, 2017 A disturbing number of Congressional Democrats have joined their Republican counterparts in co-sponsoring a bill (S. 720/H.R. 1697) effectively criminalizing support for boycotts against Israel or companies doing business in the…
Tikkun May 17, 2017
The Progressive, Huffington Post & Common Dreams The Trump Administration’s efforts to legitimize the Israeli occupation and illegal settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories has received surprising bipartisan support. A series of bills passed or under consideration in Washington and in…
National Catholic Reporter March 7, 2017
But congressional Democrats won’t act without a push. In These Times & The Huffington Post February 17, 2017
National Catholic Reporter February 9, 2017
Monterrey Herald January 13, 2017
Foreign Policy In Focus January 11, 2017: In the first major foreign policy vote of the new Congress, most Democrats sided with Trump — and against international law — on Israeli settlements.
National Catholic Reporter January 10, 2017 The election of Donald Trump may mark the end of any realistic hope of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And don’t expect the Democratic Party to try to save it, it…
The Progressive December 29 2016 Here’s one way to look at it: The United States was the only country in the fifteen-member U.N. Security Council that did not support a resolution passed last week criticizing Israel for continuing to…
The Progressive December 22, 2016 Among the many disturbing appointments by President-elect Donald Trump are the people charged with conducting U.S. policy in the Middle East. Trump’s ignorance of the region will make him even more dependent on his…
National Catholic Reporter & Huffington Post July 18, 2016
A fight is brewing as Democrats prepare to debate U.S. policy on Israel at their national convention in July. Bernie Sanders’ appointees to the platform committee Cornel West and James Zogby plan to challenge the party establishment’s uncritical support for an increasingly aggressive, right wing Israeli government.
The foreign policy divide between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders could not have been more obvious than in last week’s debate in Brooklyn when the moderator brought forward the issue of Israel and Palestine. The answers they gave not only revealed differing emphases among two politicians who both strongly identify as being “pro-Israel,” it revealed a striking contrast regarding the role the United States should play as a mediator in international conflicts and attitudes towards international humanitarian law.
Following earlier Congressional initiatives to effectively recognize Morocco’s illegal annexation of the occupied nation of Western Sahara, a bipartisan effort has been launched in Congress in support of Israel’s colonization of occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank and greater East Jerusalem, effectively recognizing Israeli annexation of territories seized in the 1967 war.
Supporters of the international legal framework – which has, with mixed success, governed international affairs since the end of World War II – have long expressed concerns over the prospect of former senator and secretary of state Hillary Clinton becoming president. Her support for the US invasion of Iraq (a flagrant violation of the UN Charter), as well as her hostility toward the International Criminal Court, her support for international recognition of Morocco’s illegal annexation of occupied Western Sahara, and her attacks against the United Nations and a number of its key agencies raise concerns that her election would bring a return to the Bush administration’s neoconservative rejection of longstanding international legal principles.
UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal, in an all-campus mailing sent out Nov. 19, expressed his opposition to a recently passed resolution by the Student Union Assembly in a manner which has raised serious concerns among supporters of corporate responsibility and academic freedom. It is virtually unprecedented for a chancellor or other high-level administration to criticize student representatives for participating in a democratic process of debate and decision making, even on contentious issues…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s October 20 speech claiming that Hitler had not planned to exterminate Jews until a prominent Palestinian cleric pressured him to do so, while outrageous, is consistent with the longstanding narrative of the right-wing government and its U.S. supporters.