When we look around us at the world, everything seems bleak - whether in Palestine, where the 36th year of occupation began two days ago and where things seem worse than ever, or here at home, where routine media abuse of Arab-Americans, violations of their rights, and racist stereotyping and caricatures have only grown more prevalent since September 11th of last year.
There is no question that our community faces the greatest challenges in its history. But we should see that there are great opportunities as well, and that in many ways we are on the brink of a breakthrough in this country, if we can manage to do some of the things that are in our power, and if instead of retreating into ethnic and religious ghettos, we emerge into the light of a broader society, and fight the battles facing us that in fact can be won.
Let me speak first of the challenges: they are on multiple fronts, and we must be absolutely clear what they are. I will focus on two: that regarding Palestine, and that on the U.S. internal front. On the question of Palestine, we face a momentous challenge: this is to bring home to the American public the true nature of what is going on there at a time when Americans are more alienated than ever from Palestinians by attacks on Israeli civilians, especially in the wake of 9/11.
The first thing we have to do about Palestine is to stop whining about how the Israeli lobby controls everything. As long as we continue to offer this pathetic excuse, we will never do a thing, and nothing will change.
A little history is in order here. Surprising though this may seem to some of you, the Israeli lobby did not exist 45 years ago, and there was no Jewish lobby 65 years ago. When the Nazis were persecuting Jews in the 1930’s, before the genocidal mass extermination of the Final Solution had been decided on, there was no Jewish lobby, and no political force in America capable of opening the doors of immigration to this country, and thereby potentially saving millions of lives. Similarly, in January 1957, when President Eisenhower peremptorily ordered Israel to evacuate the Gaza Strip and Sinai -- he gave them 24 hours to do so -- there was no Israeli lobby to stop him, and Israel did exactly as it was told.
What has gotten the Israeli lobby where it is today are two things: the first is the maturation of the Jewish community and its integration into the mainstream by the 1960’s, a few decades after major Jewish immigration to the U.S. ended with the 1924 Immigration Act; and the second is lots and lots of hard work, organization, research and fundraising since the 1960’s.
There is nothing occult about any of this. This is nothing special or mysterious about it. It is as American as apple pie. And we can do it, too. We now have a critical mass of Arab-Americans who are not new immigrants, who speak English as their first language, who are educated in this country, and who are as capable of doing what needs to be done for Arabs-Americans to have influence on the local and national level as the Jewish community was in the 1960’s. And we all feel intensely a sense of urgency about what is happening to our communities in the Middle East and to our community here, on a par with what Jews in America felt in the 1940’s, ’50’s, and ’60’s. Finally in many Arab-American and local organizations, we finally have the framework to make our voices heard. What I am saying here is that our community has matured and has a younger generation that can fight this fight.
But it is essential that we do two things: The first is to be sure we have the right message. As far as Palestine is concerned, that message has to be an end to occupation and settlements, and the establishment of a Palestinian state now. In my view, this has to be linked to a clear condemnation of violence against civilians, ALL civilians. Firstly, because Israel has killed three times as many innocent civilians as have Palestinians, for all the media hysteria about suicide bombers. So proper and full condemnation of killing civilians means condemning Israel in the first instance. Secondly, because killing civilians is a war crime, whoever does it, although resistance to occupation is legitimate in international law, and international law is a major ally in any just liberation struggle. We must have absolute clarity in making these distinctions, and incidentally must throw our weight on the side of those in Palestine who oppose attacks on innocent civilians, while at the same time thereby making it possible for our main message to be heard here: occupation and settlements are the basic sources of violence in this conflict, and only if they are ended can the violence be halted. It cannot be simpler than that.
The second thing we must do is to work tirelessly at the local level and at the national level, to match what is done by those who in effect are justifying occupation, settlement, and oppression. Again there is no secret to any of this: there are more Arab-Americans in most Midwestern states, for example than there are Jewish-Americans. We have the capability to influence every congressperson, every senator, every newspaper, every local NPR station, and every community organization in that important region, if we will only get our act together on the local level. This is the only way that changes at the national level ever take place. We have to pay attention to the Chicago Tribune, WBEZ in Chicago, the Free Press in Detroit, the papers in Ohio, and so forth, and when they do something good or bad, tell them so. (How many of you who stayed in this hotel read the copy of USA Today that was right outside your doors this morning, and saw those two awful letters advocating ethnic cleansing of Palestinians? How many of you wrote letters to USA Today?) We have to be registered voters, we have to hold our local representatives to some basic standards, and we have to learn the ins and outs of local politics, local party primaries, municipal politics: these are the building blocks of political power in this country: you don’t influence Congress without first influencing City Hall and the State House.
All of these things I have been talking about relate to how Arab-Americans can come to change public perceptions regarding Palestine, but they apply as well to all the issues in the Arab world that concern us, from Iraq to the defamation of Arab and Muslim culture. This means we have to enlighten ourselves, learn the facts, and understand how to present them. If that means media workshops, or training in public speaking, or help with research, these are things we must do, with the help of Arab-American and local groups. It is not enough to depend on the all-too-few spokespersons we have in this country to put our case for us: we ALL have to be able to do it, as are all the advocates of every single successful cause in this country.
What about the other major challenge, the domestic one, to us as a community in this country? Here, some of the same general mechanisms I talked about earlier are also relevant. But here, too, it is essential that we have the right message: that Arab-Americans are fully American, and that what we are fighting for are the civil rights and the civil liberties of all Americans, and against the ugly racial stereotyping that disfigures the image of this country, and is a function of ignorance and prejudice. Hating Arabs and Muslims was always marginally acceptable in this country. Since 9/11, it has grown almost fashionable in some circles, and has even established a strong foothold in media and in the political class.
It is up to us to show the positive face of our community. That means doing what the successful communities in this country have always done, by reaching out to others, by showing all the things in our culture that have served and can serve as contributions to world civilization and to American culture. That means knowing about Arab history, about the history of Arab-Americans and about the contributions they make and have made to this country.
Sixty-five years ago, the Jewish community in the United States could not move this country to save potential victims of the Holocaust when they could still be saved. Today, there is a U.S. National Holocaust Memorial in our nation’s capital less than two miles from where we stand today. Nobody would have dreamed, in the old anti-Semitic USA of the 1930’s and ’40’s, when disparaging Jews on the radio was acceptable, when Jews could not buy homes in Chevy Chase, just north of here into the ’50’s, that there would one day be a Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. But there is, and what is unimaginable today is possible tomorrow, if we will just stop complaining about the obstacles in our way, and do what has to be done. From being unable to prevent the first Nakba of 1948, and the nakabat still going on in Palestine, I am suggesting to you that using the potential that this community already has, one day we can erect a memorial to the Palestinian Nakba here in Washington D.C., if that is what we want to do.
One can say many things about the U.S., but we are all here of our own free will, or that of our parents and grandparents, and that means we have made a choice to be Americans. We have made this choice, or our parents or grandparents did, because of the civil liberties, the freedom, the tolerance, the rule of law, and the opportunities that America provides. These are the things that make America great, not the greed, or the racism, or the other things that we could criticize in American life. It is up to us to emphasize that we are here because of these good things , and to stress these values because they protect us, as they protect others in this society. If our fight is for these things, we will win, because the American people in the end believe in tolerance and not intolerance; in the end they believe in civil liberties, and the Constitution, and the rule of law, not in the police state mechanisms some want to institute, taking advantage of the post-9/11 hysteria.
Our fight should be for these values, because that is what brought us here, that is what brought most Americans here, that is what finally freed the slaves, and in the 1950’s and 1960’s finally gave their descendents equal rights, and those are values around which we can build a coalition that will both help our Arab-American course, and make America a better place.
I came back to the United States from France two days ago to speak at a memorial ceremony for Hala Salaam Maksoud. At that ceremony, I talked of Hala’s entire life as being dedicated to building a bridge between the two worlds she was fully a part of, the American and the Arab worlds. That is a course we should all dedicate ourselves to, both in terms of bringing understanding of the Arab world to the people of this country, and in order to bring the American values we all appreciate: democracy, free speech, the rule of law, tolerance and opportunity, to the Arab world. That too is our responsibility, and though we are here in the United States, and it is here that our main effort must be focused, we can have a powerful impact on the societies that we and our parents and grandparents left, where there exist the same aspirations for democracy, freedom, and opportunity as here, but where they are so often thwarted by the forces of reaction and autocracy.
What this means is that we should all take to heart the example of Hala Salaam Maksoud’s tragically shortened but achievement-filled life, and work, as she did, building a bridge across which the best values of our Arab heritage and our American present can be shared by both peoples we are a part of.
Source: http://www.acj.org/articles/Rashid%20Speech%202002.htm