Why We’re Suing the U.S. Treasury Department
by
Susan Abulhawa
Janet McMahon: As we
heard this morning, one manifestation of Israel’s influence on this
country is the failure of government agencies not only to guard the
interest of American citizens, but to even enforce the law.
Our next speaker, Susan Abulhawa, is one of the plaintiffs in a
lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department for allowing
tax-deductible contributions to go to illegal Israeli settlements.
The attorney who filed that and another lawsuit against Sheldon
Adelson, Friends of the IDF, and others who actually make those
contributions is here with us today. And I’d like to ask Martin
McMahon—who is no relation to me, as far as I know—to stand up so
people will know who he is if they want to talk to him more about
the details of these cases. So he’ll be available for the rest of
the afternoon for those of you who want to speak to him. Thank you.
Martin McMahon: Thank you so much. [Speaks off-mic] Nothing is
possible without great plaintiffs like Susan coming up.
Janet McMahon: And I’d like to add to that that Susan Abulhawa is a
wonderful novelist, poet, and essayist. Her debut novel, Mornings in
Jenin, became an instant international bestseller and was translated
into 27 languages. Her most recent novel, the Blue Between Sky and
Water, has likewise been translated into 26 languages thus far.
She’ll be signing copies of her book in the exhibition hall
following this panel. Susan’s first poetry collection, My Voice
Sought the Wind, was published in 2013, and she has contributed to
several anthologies. Her essays and political commentary have
appeared in print, radio, and digital media internationally.
In 2001, before she left a career in neuroscience research to become
a full-time writer, Susan founded Playgrounds for Palestine, a
children’s organization dedicated to upholding the right to play for
Palestinian children. Last July at the Allenby Bridge in Jordan,
Israel denied her entry to Palestine, where she had planned to build
two new playgrounds and visit possible new sites. Somehow I suspect
she will not be deterred.
It’s a great pleasure to introduce Susan Abulhawa.
Susan Abulhawa: Thank you to the Washington Report and to
all of you for being here, and especially to Martin McMahon. It’s an
honor to share the stage with my comrades, Maria and Tareq and
Huwaida, and listening to Tareq and Maria just now makes me feel
like we are winning.
As you heard, I’m here because I’m a plaintiff in Martin’s lawsuit.
But I’m not a lawyer. I’m a writer, and I’m all about narrative. So
I’m going to talk about why I joined this lawsuit, because I think
bringing it back to Palestine, no matter how much we know about it,
is always so important.
First to the question at hand: whether Israel’s influence is good or
not for the United States, I think the answer to that largely
depends on which United States we’re talking about. There is the
U.S. of the civil rights movement and Dr. King. Then there’s the
U.S. of the Klan and the Grand Wizards. There’s the U.S. of
revolutionaries and warriors like Malcolm, Harriet Tubman, Crazy
Horse, Black Hawk, Geronimo, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Kwame Touré.
And then there are the architects of the financial crisis who made
off with billions of dollars and people’s lost homes and lost
savings. There’s the U.S. of intellectual giants like W.E.B. Du
Bois, Howard Zinn, Alice Walker, Edward Said, and Chomsky. And then
there are the likes of Friedman and Fox News.
The United States I’m briefly going to touch on belongs to the
latter grouping. It is some of the wealthiest, most privileged
Americans like the Falic family—I assume it is not pronounced
“phallic”; the Schottenstein family, owners of American Eagle
Outfitters; the Book family, owners of Jet Support systems, who
funneled billions of tax-exempt money to finance the persistent
incremental theft of Palestine. The theft of another people’s
ancestral lands, of our homes, our history and heritage; the theft
of our culture, our food, our memories, our cemeteries, our
churches, our mosques, our orchards, our olive groves—all so they
who have so much can also have an extra country, so that every
Jewish person in the world may be accorded an entitlement to dual
citizenship, one in their own ancestral homeland and one in mine.
This colonial enterprise or population change can be visualized
through maps showing the expropriation and the dramatic transfer of
land ownership, such that the native sons and daughters of Palestine
are now relegated to what amounts to less than 11 percent of our
historic homeland, arranged as an apartheid waterless archipelago of
ghettos.
But as Grant showed us this morning, such images of the settler
colonial reality have not permeated U.S. popular imagination,
principally because U.S. media gives a disproportionate platform to
Zionist voices who repeat tired mantras about terrorism to
manufacture fear and its resultant alignment of loyalties, tired
mantras about negotiations and peace overtures, living side by side,
lofty and emotional verbiage that’s carefully orchestrated precisely
for American ears in order to create the false narrative of
parity—one that paints a highly militarized colonial enterprise as a
victim of the principally unarmed, defenseless and besieged native
population that they occupy. It is an extraordinary and breathtaking
inversion of the historic and forensic record.
So while a mythical narrative of biblical proportions dominates U.S.
airways, newspapers, radio, film and literature, I’d like to give
you a glimpse of what they’re actually doing. These actions are
predicated on an ideology explicitly articulated by Zionists in the
highest offices, particularly to each other, and often when they
think no one is listening. It is a language of supremacy, of the
wholesale negation of another people’s humanity. It is replete with
various permutations of the word colonize and with words like
transfer.
From the very beginning, Theodor Herzl said spirit the penniless
population across the border, that the removal of the poor must be
carried out discretely. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a founding member of
Zionism, did not mince words. He said Zionism is a colonizing
adventure. Rafael Eitan, who we heard about earlier today, said when
we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it
will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle. And
the current Israeli prime minister, in a moment when he thought no
one was listening, said Israel should have exploited the repression
of demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that
country, in order to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of
the territories.
Yitzhak Rabin, the Nobel Laureate and father of break Palestinian
bones doctrine, said Israel will create in the course of the next 10
to 20 years conditions which would attract the voluntary migrations
of Palestinians. Rabin uttered those words in the 1980s—and, indeed,
Israel has created those conditions. Here is a glimpse of what he
was talking about. As with all colonial projects, a foundational aim
is to create a docile, subjugated native population without rights
or without recourse, a broken humanity that’s good for cheap labor.
They start terrorizing us at a young age. At any given time, Israel
typically holds hundreds of Palestinian children in administrative
detention, where they are interrogated and tortured without charge,
without trial, without their parents, without a lawyer, without an
advocate. They’re often kidnapped on their way to and from school,
playing in the streets and throwing rocks at tanks, as they have a
right to do, or pulled from their beds and dragged away in the
middle of the night. They’re shot and murdered or maimed wherever
they stand.
Israel systematically targets Palestinian education. They bomb
schools directly and close them down regularly, raid them, fire on
students, often inside their classrooms. They impede the ability of
students and teachers to physically reach their classrooms. In
addition to checkpoints, road barriers and closures, violent
settlers often prevent young and old alike from reaching their
destinations, whether it’s school, work, shopping, a family visit, a
funeral, a field, a mosque or a church, a wedding or any place to be
in any moment to complete a day of living.
They demolish our homes one by one, evict whole families, whole
neighborhoods. Israel is perhaps the only nation in the world that
creates homelessness as a matter of national policy. At the same
time that native families are pushed out, Jewish foreigners are
imported from all over the world to take their place. Since 1967,
25,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed, internally displacing
over 200,000 Palestinians. Fifteen thousand of those homes were
demolished since the signing of the Oslo accords in ’93. Since that
year, 53,000 new Jewish settler homes have been built on land
confiscated from Palestinians.
They destroy our precious ancient olive trees that we have loved and
nurtured for centuries and which have sustained and defined so much
of our lives in return. Nearly one million olive trees have been
uprooted, cut, burned—a lone statistic, a holocaust in itself. A
life-giving earth transformed into a graveyard for broken and burned
trees.
They steal Palestinian water. They pump it out from aquifers beneath
Palestinian land and then they allocate it on the basis of religious
affiliation. What Palestinians are accorded of their own water is
sold to them at prices several folds more compared with what Jews in
the same area are charged. In 2013, an Al Haq report demonstrated
how 550,000 illegal Jewish settlers used five times more water than
the 2.6 million Palestinians in the same area. Palestinian access to
water is further limited by Israel’s denial of Palestinian water
development. It is nearly impossible for us to get permission to dig
new wells. And further, what wells and cisterns already exist are
frequently damaged or destroyed by Israel. The assault on Gaza’s
drinking water is so severe that 90 percent of the ground water in
Gaza now is unfit for human consumption.
Israel rules with color-coded ID cards, with massive surveillance of
voice data, of movements, of habits, of hopes and secrets. They have
color-coded license plates, and segregated roads, and segregated
buses. Implementation of Israeli apartheid goes to the smallest
details of life, including even cell phone coverage. While Israeli
settlers in the ’67 occupied territories enjoy 3G and 4G coverage,
Palestinians are limited to 2G—a limitation with massive economic
implications, designed to perpetuate economic dependency on Israel.
And yet, in the United States, financial support of such policies
are catalogued as charitable.
So much of this system of ethno-religious supremacy has been made
possible by external funding—both governmental and by an estimated
30,000 nongovernmental, so-called charitable organizations. In the
U.S., tax-exempt groups have poured billions of dollars into
subsidizing population change. A 2002 study by Dr. Thomas Stauffer
estimated that $50 billion to $60 billion had been transferred from
the U.S. charities to Israel over a 20-year period, from 1980 to
2002. Similarly shocking numbers were revealed in a 2013 study by
the Forward that looked at 3,600 U.S. tax-exempt groups funneling
money to Israel.
A Haaretz investigation reported in a four-year period—between 2009
and 2013—that 50 U.S. tax-exempt organizations alone funneled more
than $220 million to exclusively Jewish settlements in Palestine.
The Hebron Fund that you see is one example. This is a
Brooklyn-based group that provides approximately half of the Hebron
settler community’s funding. Between 2009 and 2014 it transferred
$5.7 million to the settler community of just a few hundred
individuals who live in the midst of 220,000 Palestinians.
This small but heavily armed and guarded settler outpost among
nearly a quarter of a million Palestinians has acted as a
paramilitary force, terrorizing local inhabitants into leaving. This
community further has well-documented connections to terrorism and
human rights abuses. They have been accused of crimes including
theft, harassment, murder, assault, destruction of property. They’ve
been involved in gunfire, attempts to run people over, poisoning of
a water well, breaking into homes, spilling of hot liquid on the
face of a Palestinian, and the killing of a young Palestinian girl.
Another organization is this one, Honenu—I’m not sure if I’m
pronouncing that correctly, I don’t really care. Donations to this
organization go primarily to legal aid and family support for
accused, confessed, or convicted Jewish terrorists. Among their
beneficiaries was Ami Popper, who murdered seven Palestinian
laborers in 1990. He pulled them out, lined them up, and shot them
along the wall. They’ve provided support for members of a terrorist
underground that attempted to detonate a bomb at a girls’ school in
East Jerusalem in 2002.
Other high-profile accused or convicted terrorists who have received
funding from Honenu include the settlers who kidnapped to beat,
tortured, and then burned alive 16-year-old Muhammad Abu Khdeir from
Shuafat in 2014. Also the settlers who firebombed the home of the
Dawabsheh family, killing 18-month old Ali along with both of his
parents, and severely burning his older brother.
Another organization is the Central Fund of Israel (CFI). This is an
umbrella charity that operates out of a textile company that’s owned
by the Marcus Brothers in the Manhattan garment district. It has
received money from the likes of Ace Greenberg, Kirk Douglas,
Michael Milken—the “Junk Bond King.” In 2014 alone, they sent $25
million to Israel.
Philip Weiss, who’s with us today, reported in Mondoweiss that CFI
provides funding to a yeshiva that’s headed by Rabbis Shapira and
Elitzur. These guys co-authored a book called The King's Torah, in
which they make it clear that the commandment, thou shalt not kill,
applies only to Jews who kill Jews. The bulk of the text in this
book is a rabbinical instruction manual explaining the ways of
kosher murder for non-Jews. Non-Jews, the book explains, are
uncompassionate by nature and, therefore, attacking them may “curb
their evil inclinations.” The book permits the killing of infants
and children of non-Jews since, “it is clear that they will grow up
to harm us.” These are things that are funded by U.S. tax-exempt
dollars. In the interest of time, I think I’m going to skip through
some of these.
These are only a few examples in a large body of evidence showing
how financial transactions from tax-exempt organizations are used to
fund ethno-religious supremacy and entitlement, with its consequent
displacement and destruction of native Palestinian life. It does not
include a whole other ecosystem of synagogue- and church-giving to
Israel.
So, I think the more appropriate question to ask today is whether
specific actions, protocols, laws and political adventures bend our
collective human experience toward justice, toward universal dignity
and moral evolution. The forcible removal of an entire nation, a
deeply rooted people, in order to replace them with others from
around the world, people whom the new state deems a better form of
human, is itself a form of moral regression.
European Zionists conquered Palestine, a place that already had an
ancient history that had produced an extensive society whose
character formed organically over thousands of years of documented
habitation, conquest, pilgrimages, births of religions, religious
conversions, marriages, rapes, enslavement, settlements, wars,
crusade, commerce, travel and natural migrations of known tribes
like the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Mamluks, the Syrians,
Hebrews, the Romans. They all passed through our lands and became of
us, as we became of them, and we never left. We were always there,
until the turn of the century, when European Zionists arrived with
guns and hatred and made of us a homeless refugee people, an exiled
and an occupied terrorized people.
We were and we remain the children of that patch of earth, of that
history. We belong to that place where are buried our parents and
grandparents and great-grandparents and on down the line. We did not
arrive there a few years ago from Poland and Belarus, or Russia, or
Florida, France, England, Germany—or any other place from which the
vast majorities of Israelis hail. We do not have hundreds of years
of European history, of documented life and achievement in Europe,
the Americas and elsewhere, and the whole world knows it. But our
humanity is nothing to them. It is as if we are vermin in the eyes
of American Zionists financing the destruction of Palestine.
The dismantling of our society is happening today in 2016. That’s I
why I joined Martin McMahon’s initiative to sue the U.S. Treasury,
so that they might investigate these organizations, so that my
American compatriots might be moved to shut them down. I joined this
lawsuit because I see it as a way to confront power when we are
mostly powerless, when we are so outgunned, outmoneyed,
outmaneuvered, outconnected. I joined because I believe that
confronting power with truth is the least one can do with the
privilege we have. When so many who are a fraction of my age are
risking their young lives to confront heavily armed soldiers with
rocks, when grown men and women with nothing but their bellies to
protest waste away as hunger forces the body to eat itself. I joined
this lawsuit because I believe in the United States of the Civil War
heroes, of its warriors and intellectuals, because the cause of
Palestine is squarely in the categories of this America.
I will close with one last quote by Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who, despite
his abhorrent supremacist ideas, clearly understood something
fundamental about Palestinians. He said this about us: “They look
upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that
any Aztec looked upon his Mexico, or any Sioux looked upon his
prairie. Palestine will remain for the Palestinians not a
borderland, but their birthplace—the center and basis of their own
national existence.”
But unlike the destruction of the Aztecs and the Sioux, we are not
yet outnumbered. Our anguish is audible to global civil society and
the moment portending our existential peril is now.
So, the question, then, for this audience is: which United States do
we want to prevail? Thank you. [Standing ovation]
