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2008 Palestine Center Annual Conference
"The U.S. and the Arab World: An Assessment of American Policy in the Middle East"

The Palestine Center
Washington, DC
10 October 2008


Mr. Chris Hedges:

Thank you very much. I want to focus on, I think, the most pressing issue that faces all of us today and that’s how this current election will influence events in the Middle East and in particular, of course, the Palestine-Israel conflict. 

I want to be completely up front with everyone in this room before I begin. I am not voting for [U.S. Senator] John McCain, and I am not voting for [U.S. Senator] Barack Obama. I am voting for [Independent Candidate for U.S. President] Ralph Nader.  And I hope that by the end of this half hour, you'll understand why. I, like many of you, lived for seven years in the Middle East. Like many people in this room, I have close friends in Beirut, Jerusalem, Gaza City, Cairo, Tehran.  The messianic war that has been unleashed in the Middle East with a fusion of right wing, messianic Jews who control the Israeli government and right wing, messianic Christians who control the American government is one that I find terrifying. If we go back to the inception of this conflict with Iraq, most Arabists - and let’s say the roughly 10,000 Arabists in this country some of whom, of course, are sitting in his room and by that I mean people who speak Arabic - have lived for a prolonged period of time in the Middle East and dedicated their lives to the study of Arabic society and Arabic culture.  If you take that roughly 10,000 number in the United States, at the inception of the cause for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, I don’t think you could have found more than ten who thought invading and occupying Iraq was a good idea.  And I include all the Arabists in the State Department, the intelligence community and the Pentagon.

What we unleashed through the invasion of Iraq was the inception or the beginning of what I could call a “utopian project.”  I don’t think many in this room have probably thought of [U.S. Vice President] Dick Cheney as a “utopian,” but he is in the way that [English author] Thomas More coined the word in 1518. “Utopia” literally means “no place;” it does not exist.  And utopian projects when wedded to violence, when utopians believe they have been given a mandate to remove human impediments towards their vision of a better world always descend into moral depravity and criminality, which is precisely what the war in Iraq has become.  This marriage of American utopians with Israeli utopians is one that has dire and frightening consequences not only for us as a nation but for many of those in the Middle East. 

I have, as some of you may know, been an outspoken critic of American policy in the Middle East for many years.  I lost my job at The New York Times over the Iraq war.  I had published a book in the fall of 2002 called War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.  It was an essay or a meditation on the some 20 years that I had spent primarily as a war correspondent starting with the war in El Salvador where I spent five years; moving on to the civil war in Algeria after the 1991 imposition of martial law overturning the election results, of course; the civil war in the Sudan; Yemen; the conflict between Israel and Palestine; the first Gulf War; the Punjab; the Congo; and finally the last three years that I spent in Bosnia in Sarajevo covering the war and then in Kosovo.  This gave me a kind of prominence on the national state.  I was then still a news reporter for The New York Times, and I would inevitably be asked about the arguments to invade and occupy Iraq.  Now, I certainly understood after fifteen years at The New York Times that for me to begin to speak about foreign policy decisions by my own government was professional suicide. On the other hand, I felt and still feel that this invasion of Iraq and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are probably the worst foreign policy blunders in American history. 

I was giving a commencement address in May of 2003, two weeks after [U.S.] President [George W.] Bush landed on the aircraft carrier with the banner “Mission Accomplished” (you can watch it on YouTube) where I was booed off of the stage, had my microphone cut twice and finally towards the end of my address—I was saying things like, “This is a war of liberation, but it is a war of liberation by Iraqis against American occupation”—large segments of the crowd stood as I was speaking and began singing “God Bless America.” Some of them were weeping. Both the British publication Granta and The Progressive magazine printed transcripts of the talk, but in italics they printed what people shouted—my favorite being some woman who screamed, “Atheist stranger!” There’s sort of something visceral about that that, I think, captured the distance between myself and that crowd. 

Well, that speech was picked up by Fox News and most of the cable networks. [American television host Bill] O’Reilly dedicated two hours to me and the Wall Street Journal wrote an editorial about me.  I was called into The New York Times—and I’m not going to pretend that was an easy moment, it wasn’t—and I was given a formal written reprimand for impugning the impartiality of The New York Times.  This was during the age of [former New York Times journalist] Judy Miller and told that I was no longer allowed to speak out about the war. And that’s when I left the paper.  I had a choice and that was to pay fealty to my own career and muzzle myself, but that was a compromising of my own integrity that I was not willing to make. 

For any of you who follow my writings, I just did a book with Laila Al-Arian, Sami’s daughter. We spent seven months interviewing 50 combat veterans from Iraq. It’s called Collateral Damage.  It ran as a 15,000 word piece in The Nation magazine, and it was the study of the kind of atrocities committed against Iraqi civilians that were either witnessed by Iraqi combat veterans or, in some cases, these were atrocities they took part in themselves.  I’ve covered many different types of conflicts, and I think there’s no question that there are different types of wars.  For instance, the war in El Salvador was primarily a civil war fought by Salvadoran against Salvadoran as was the conflict in Guatemala as was the conflict in Nicaragua—albeit the Contras, of course, had strong support from the [late U.S. President Ronald] Reagan administration—but nevertheless it was Nicaraguan against Nicaraguan. 

I covered the first Gulf war.  I spent three months with first battalion, first marines and went to Kuwait with them.  I’m certainly well aware of the heavy loss of Iraqi civilian life through the saturation bombing of southern Iraq.  When in our marine encampments, we watched night after night huge flashes and fireballs, formation after formation of American war planes blasting much of southern Iraq and certainly its infrastructure into rubble.  I was later, by the way, in the Shi’ite uprising in Basra until I was captured and taken prisoner by the Iraqi Republican Guard.  I like to say I was embedded with the Iraqi Republican Guard and saw firsthand what that devastation had done to the civilians because not only all the power stations but also the water purification plants had been destroyed.  I was with a light-armor battalion that was trying to punch its way north to Baghdad.  We never made it.  We were drinking water out of mud puddles.  It was cold and rainy, and I remember stopping as we filled up our canteens in water that had already turned my own guts inside out. And there was a young mother with an infant and a small child, and they were drinking the same water and certainly the consequences of that for a small child, without exaggeration, is serious illness and most probably death.  Standing in the rain at that moment, although I was the only English speaker present, I recited as a blessing on that woman, [American poet] W.H Auden’s “Epitaph on a Tyrant:”

 Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
 And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
 He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
 And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
 When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
 And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

So, the consequences of the aerial campaign, of course, were serious and horrible. Nevertheless, the actual clash took place primarily in open space between large mechanized units, probably one of the last major conventional battles many of us will see as we move forward into what the military calls “asymmetrical warfare.”        

Then we have the third kind of conflict, which is the conflict between Israel and Palestine, the conflict between American forces and the Iraqis and, of course, American forces and the Afghanis. And that is classical foreign occupation.  The imposition of a foreign force that is culturally, historically and linguistically illiterate that arrives to impose its will on an occupied people by force.  That kind of conflict, as anyone who has read [American psychiatrist and author] Robert Jay Lifton knows, is always the dirtiest and the most venal because the only language you speak is the language of force.  You are incapable of speaking any other language.  Remember most of these kids driving down streets in Fallujah, Basra or Baghdad can’t even read the street signs.  Not to mention what’s happening in Afghanistan, which we can talk about in a minute.  In every conflict that I covered, murder is always part of war, and by murder I mean the taking of a life of somebody who does not have the capacity to do you harm.  In the conflicts like the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, in the conflicts we are now participating in in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is primarily about murder and not about killing, the taking of life of somebody who can harm you.  You are fighting an elusive enemy who you never see.  This is very much part of the Israeli experience on Palestinian land and it is part of our experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Lifton, who did studies on this from the Vietnam War, again a very similar experience, calls these kinds of conflicts “atrocity producing situations” because, he argues, there is a very short psychological leap. When you are in a unit and comrades within your unit are gravely wounded and killed and you don’t know who to lash out against, there’s a short psychological leap from identifying a hostile population, an occupied population and the enemy, fusing them with the enemy.  So, Lifton writes that it becomes psychologically acceptable to raid out into a rice patty in Vietnam and gun down women and children who are picking rice in retaliation for casualties that you yourself have suffered within your own unit.  And that is very much part of the experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza. I’ve spent a lot of time in Gaza, months and months of my life in Gaza with deep frustration over the way the Israel-Palestine conflict is covered.  If you sat down in a room of foreign correspondents who covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, none of us would disagree on the indiscriminant use of violence on the part of Israeli forces and the forms of collective punishment and the incredibly mendacity of the Israeli government when they describe events that Robert Jay Lifton would correctly call “murder.”  But in a public forum in the United States, most of these journalists and reporters will not speak out because it’s a carrier killer. 

The great tragedy for me, and one of the reasons I am going to vote for Nader, is that the Israeli lobby in the United States is promoting not the interests of Israel—in fact I think they’re probably in many ways the greatest enemy Israel has in terms of its long-term viability—it promotes a very utopian, right-wing ideology.  I covered [late Israeli Prime Minister] Yitzhak Rabin’s election to be prime minster, the battle between Likud and Labor at the time. And by that time, AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] and most of the major Israeli organizations in the United States had clearly come to identify themselves with Likud, not only providing money and support and sending, by the way, American people to pick at Rabin’s house in Tel Aviv and chant really degrading and horrible slogans against Rabin but staff and pollsters as well.  And the fury that Rabin felt toward these organizations is perhaps—for those of us who were in Israel understood it—I think not widely known in the United States.  So that when he was inaugurated as prime minster, he did not invite AIPAC to the inauguration.  There’s a great story of him arriving in one of the big hotels in Washington not long after he became prime minister, and I heard this from someone in his office who was with him.  He was told that there were leaders of AIPAC and other Israeli or American Jewish groups who wanted to meet with him. And Rabin, who never minced words, said, “I don’t have time to talk to scumbags,” or whatever the Hebrew equivalent is to “scumbag.”

So the kinds of things those of us who are critical of Kadima’s policy will say in the United States—we used to say what would elicit yawns among most of my Israeli friends—but unfortunately the cost now for getting up and speaking up about the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza, which is really unconscionable, is so severe that we have been completely shut off. You know one of the fascinating things about writing about peace with Laila is that when it came out, the right wing tried to go after it but, of course, I’ve had long experience dealing with these people going all the way back to Reagan and Central America. I insisted to The Nation that we build an investigation, and they were sort of pulling their hair out because it took me so long to do where it will be unassailable.  So, every single interview that we carried out we tape recorded.  Every single interview was on the record.  If somebody didn’t want to speak on the record, we didn’t do the interview. And we spent, literally, probably a few hundred hours typing out every single transcript before we published the piece.  Hundreds of pages of transcripts.   Then, we contacted the Pentagon to make sure that every single soldier or marine we interviewed was where they said they were in Iraq at the time to verify their service records.  The only thing that they could do, of course, was come after us and say that we had taken stuff out of context.  This was [Executive Director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America] Paul Reikoff’s group and others. And as soon as that happened, we just posted the entire transcripts up on The Nation website.  It was around the same time the scandal around The New Republic blog; I don’t know if people followed that, but there was an anonymous soldier who had written also of abuses of Iraqi civilians. I think The New York Times ran three of four stories about it.  And for us—certainly the largest collection by far of combat veterans who were speaking openly about the war in Iraq—there was a deafening silence. 

[New York Times journalist] Bob Herbert wrote a great column about it, but it challenged that narrative of us as heroes.  Even for people who oppose the war, it was a step they couldn’t take.  What was fascinating was watching how this study, which you can read online and Nation Books did a longer version of it called Collateral Damage which you can pick up, was what happened in Europe.  [It] was very similar to what happened in 1981 when Vietnam veterans came back from the Vietnam War and held the Winter Soldier Hearings, which was made into a great documentary—if you haven’t seen you should see—and including a brief cameo by [U.S. Senator] John Kerry.  That form exploded in Europe and was virtually ignored here for another two decades.  In the case of this study, The Guardian newspaper printed all 15,000 words, almost unprecedented for a newspaper to devote that much space to a foreign story.  The Independent probably printed at least half of that. The BBC ran numerous shows on it; Irish radio; and here, nothing.  And just as we ran into that inability to propose a counter-narrative that ran against the accepted clichés and slogans of who we are and what we do in Iraq, you also find it extremely difficult to propose a counter-narrative to the Israel-Palestine conflict.  This is one that’s going to have disastrous consequences.

I’m sure all of you followed Barack Obama’s visit to Israel.  Twenty-four hours with the Israeli government and 45 minutes with the Palestinians.  No visit to Gaza, no denunciation of the collective punishment that’s meted out against 1.5, 1.6 million Palestinians in Gaza.  Someone probably has more recent figures, but I think we’re talking about 30 percent malnutrition.  There’s been an Africanization of the Palestinian people in both the West Bank and Gaza, and that is Israeli policy.  That is what the building of the Wall or the so-called “security barrier” is about.  It’s not about a dividing line; you need to pull out the map.  It is about creating ringed ghettos where at the flick of a switch Palestinians will be completely entrapped because that so-called “barrier,” Wall links up with settler ring roads, military out-posts and settlements themselves.  When you carefully draw the map—and the U.N. has done this—what you do on the West Bank is essentially create about eight ringed areas, which are not economically viable in any way. And there has been a concerted effort to drive out the middle class, especially Christians on the West Bank.  I remember being up a couple years ago around Bethlehem and Nazareth, and they just have made it impossible because of the restriction of movement for businessmen, whether it’s grocers or people dealing in car parts, to actually move material around to do business.  We’re now talking in Gaza of people living, literally, on a dollar or two dollars a day, not any different from what people are suffering in sub-Saharan Africa.  If you look in your folder, you have a talk on Israel, and it’s a talk I gave at Princeton reprinted on TruthDig.  We don’t have a lot of time, but that lays out in more detail my own criticism of how American foreign policy has become hostage to right-wing, messianic groups in Israel and, of course, now in the United States, courtesy of the Christian right. 

I do want to speak for a moment about the Christian right because despite what you’ve heard they’re not dead and they’re not dying.  I grew up in the church; by the way, my father was a Presbyterian minister and my mother was a seminary graduate although she was a university professor.  I graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity; I have a Masters of Divinity; I have all the academic work to be a minister although I was not ordained.  I’m not in any way hostile to religion.  As a matter of fact, I went out and debated [American author] Sam Harris at UCLA, who wrote The End of Faith, and then two days later flew to San Francisco and went to Berkley to debate [British author] Christopher Hitchens, which is not an experience I would wish on anyone in this room.  I hadn’t paid close attention to this new atheist movement.  Three quarters of the way through The End of Faith, Sam Harris asks us to consider carrying out a nuclear first strike on the Arab world—long defenses of torture.  And what these “new atheists” have done is essentially replicate the ideology of the radical Christian right in secular terms.  What they are are secular fundamentalists, and while they are not a political threat in a way the Christian right is, what I fear is that we now have seen such a poisoning of civil and political discourse. The kinds of things that are said by mainstream figures like McCain about Muslims and the Muslim world are really tacit approvals for acts of genocide—McCain talking about 700 million terrorists.  And what I fear is that in a moment of crisis—and we’re certainly on the cusp of an economic meltdown—in a moment of crisis and instability [is] when we suffer another terrorist strike on American soil. I spent a year of my life covering al-Qaeda out of Paris. I covered al-Qaeda in Europe and North Africa, and there was not an intelligence chief who I interviewed who ever used the word “if;” it was always “when.”  And when that attack occurs—if especially it is deemed rightly or wrongly to have emanated out of the Muslim world—what I fear is a convergence of supposedly secularists and the danger of this garbage that is peddled by [British author Richard] Dawkins and [American philosopher Daniel] Dennett and Hitchens and Harris that has seeped into the universities.  What I fear is a convergence of that secular intolerance with the religious bigotry of the Christian right. When I speak at universities, I’m often asked by students, “Well, what should we do? What can we do?”  I said, “Well the first thing you have to do is form solidarity or an alliance with whatever Muslim student organization there is on your campus so that when this begins, it’s not just olive-skinned kids standing out there protesting but you’re with them.” 

I think that this is a real threat.  I’ve covered enough war to know that all conflicts and all violence begin with the corruption of language. That when you get people to speak in the language of violence, which is, of course, an attempt to dehumanize other people, it is a very short step to getting them to carry out acts of violence.  And we’re already far down that road in the terms of the use of racist language within the mainstream.  How many times have everyone of us in this room sat down in front of the television and heard blowhards, who don’t speak Arabic and have never been to the Middle East, expound upon Muslim culture?  It’s terrifying, and one that we should not let go un-passed.  I’ve become very frustrated with the American left, which I think is largely bankrupt.   It doesn’t have the courage of its convictions.  It has no moral standard that cannot be crossed.  I’m a victim of FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act].  Probably, there are other people in this room who are victims of FISA.  The FISA Reform Act is a giant step towards fascism.  If you look at it, it’s absolutely terrifying, and Barack Obama went and voted for it.  Why?  Because the telecommunications companies are the second largest contributors to congressional campaigns.  The danger is this corporate state, this corporatism—which if we look back carefully on what has happened certainly over the last seven years of the Bush administration and one could even go extending into the [former U.S. President Bill] Clinton administration, with the repeal of NAFTA [North American Free Trade Agreement], the Financial Modernization Act of 1999, the slashing of welfare is a coup d’état in slow motion.  What I fear is that by the time we wake up and realize what’s happened to us, it will be too late. 

Just these last few minutes, I want to talk a little bit about the Christian right, which I think is a movement that is deeply misunderstood by people on the outside.  I had a professor at Harvard Divinity School named James Luther Adams.  He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936, and he worked there with Martin Niemoller and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the so-called Confessing Church, the anti-Nazi group, a small group of individuals who defied the fascists.  He was picked up in ‘36 by the Gestapo and interrogated for a night and told that maybe now would be a good time for him to leave Germany, which he did.  He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolf Hitler over the contents of his suitcase.  The ruse worked; when the border guards opened the suitcase and saw the portraits of the Führer, they let him leave Germany.  In that suitcase were rolls of home movie film of the Confessing Church but more importantly of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi.  I watched hours of those films in his apartment in Cambridge as he narrated.  Adams told us that when we were his age—he was then 80-years-old—we would all be fighting the Christian fascists. He saw that that fusion of Christian iconography and Christian language with the iconography and language of American nationalism was toxic and dangerous.  And he understood because he had lived in Germany and knew Weimar that the economic collapse of Germany had created conditions of personal and economic despair that had driven people into the arms of a totalitarian movement. 

If you read the great writers on totalitarianism—Hannah Arendt, Karl Popper, Fritz Stern, The Politics of Social Despair, Robert Paxton the engine of totalitarian movements, and this was certainly born out by my own coverage of the wars in Yugoslavia. The war in Yugoslavia was not caused by ancient, ethnic hatreds.  The war in Yugoslavia was caused by the economic collapse of Yugoslavia.  He understood that the Weimarization of the American working class, which began as I was a seminarian in the early 1980s, the ability to drive jobs overseas, the working class in this country has been virtually decimated.  We’re now witnessing, of course, an assault on the middle class.  He understood that that Weimarization coupled with the rise of a movement that essentially sanctified the right to temporal power was fascist.  You know, as brilliant a man as he was, and he was a very intimidating professor to have.  He never used lecture notes.  He would just arrive to class with piles of books—he was a great musician by the way—and could sweep from discourses on Schoenberg to Renaissance art to [German painter Wilhelm Heinrich] Otto Dix to [German philosopher Arthur] Schopenhauer to [Swiss Reformed theologian] Karl Barth. But even then, I think all of us felt that his predictions might be a bit apocalyptic until I arrived back in this nation 20 years later and saw how the Christian right has moved from the margins and fringes of American society to the very epicenters of power.  

The engine of this movement is despair.  It is a deep and abiding despair which this economic crisis we are enduring is about to make much worse because when you sink to those levels of despair, you retreat into a world of magic, into a world of miracles, into a world of historical destiny.  You sever you relation with the real world and you embrace a utopian or a non-reality based belief system, which makes you absolutely impervious to rational argument or to facts.  Facts don’t matter.  You can believe whatever you want to believe.  That’s what the whole debate between evolution and creationism is about.  It’s not about offering an alternative.  It is about the destruction of the dispassionate, honest, scientific and intellectual inquiry.  And once you set a creationist with an evolutionary biologist on the same platform and give equal credibility to both, you’ve already lost. 

I just spoke at Eastern Kentucky University, and I was told by the professors there that in Kentucky they no longer use the world “evolution;” they call it “change over time” and present it as a theory as credible as creationism or intelligent design.  There is already within their own faculty in the biology department a full professor of biology who is a creationist.  That attack against rational discourse, intellectual inquiry cannot be countered by exposing the factual inconsistencies of the movement.  It won’t make any difference.  And if you push these people, the rage that they exhibit—and it is rage—is the rage of those who are terrified of being pushed back into a reality-based world that almost crushed them.  I did interview after interview after interview with these people and the stories of economic dislocation and personal despair, struggle with substance abuse, domestic violence, the absolute breakdown of communities, especially in places like Ohio, former manufacturing centers is heartbreaking.  And they have retreated into this world manipulated, of course, by the charlatans and demagogues who run this movement and who have made vast personal fortunes off of this movement because it is the last refuge that they have.  I think in many ways we as a society bare the blame for this because we betrayed them. 

We and much of my own family comes from the lower working class in Maine and have fallen into this very despair—towns that my relatives are from, the old mill towns are old boarded up wrecks.  There aren’t any jobs, and there isn’t any hope.  Not only is there no hope, there isn’t hope for their children and they know it.  I think that the decision by the liberal intelligentsia, the bourgeois liberal class of the United States to tie their fortunes to the Democratic Party has been disastrous because it is the Democratic Party courtesy of the Clinton administration that put a knife into the backs of these people.  And they know it.  The $700 billion bailout is a massive transference of wealth upwards; it’s the end of New Deal economics.  And it’s not even working because the problem is not liquidity, it’s credit. 

So, I think, we enter tumultuous and dangerous times.  If you look closely at the policies of the Democratic and Republican candidates towards Israel and towards the Middle East, you’ll find very little difference ultimately.  In fact, both of them want to expand the war in Afghanistan.  If the war in Iraq is a disaster, the war in Afghanistan is utterly hopeless.  In that presidential debate in New Hampshire, [late American television journalist] Tim Russet asked all the Democratic candidates, “Can any of you guarantee that we’ll be out of Iraq by 2012?” None of them, including John Edwards, would do that.  The only person who would be willing or was willing to make that commitment, [U.S. Congressman] Dennis Kucinich, was locked out of the debates, standing literally outside next to a snow bank protesting his exclusion.  You know the presidential commissions, the people who run these debates, is a private corporation, as Nader will never tire of reminding you.  They not only decide who gets to speak but what you speak about, and that’s why we don’t have open and fair discussion on the Middle East.  It’s why we don’t discuss universal, not-for-profit, single-payer health care.  It’s why we don’t discuss repealing NAFTA.  Those issues are taboo. Those issues are not brought up. 

I’ll just end by saying that as someone who has lived as long as I have in the Middle East and has many friends who had suffered and are suffering and in the future will suffer, I’ve tired calling on people of conscious to do much and have decided that finally it’s only a matter of my announcing what I will do and hoping that that makes some effect, which is why a few months ago I wrote an article in The Nation magazine that said that if we go to war with Iran, I will no longer pay my income taxes.  I don’t expect many people to join me.  I don’t expect it to stop the war.  I re-read [American author Henry David] Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience three times, and I think that in many ways for me when I return to the Middle East, I have to be able to look into the eyes of my brothers and sisters in Gaza or in Iran or in Beirut and tell them that I did everything I could. Everything within my power.  And I hope that at that moment through my own actions, I will at least have earned the right to ask for their forgiveness.

Thank you.

                  
Mr. Chris Hedges is currently a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City, a former Lecturer in the Council of the Humanities and former Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University. He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Hedges currently writes for numerous publications including Foreign Affairs, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, Granta and Mother Jones. 

This “For the Record” transcript may be used without permission but with proper attribution to The Palestine Center. The speakers' views do not necessarily reflect the views of The Jerusalem Fund. 
 

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