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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. Anthony Shadid:

Thank you.  It's a great pleasure to be here.  I thank the Palestine Center for organizing the conference today and for inviting me.  It's a great honor to share the table with Mr. Paul Findley.  I first saw him speak when I was 16 or 17, and I’ve always thought he stands for the best of what American politics can represent.  What I understood from the organizers is that I get to speak about what’s gone wrong over the past eight years and Mr. Findley gets to speak about how to fix that.  I think I can definitely say that I have the easier job. 

It's stunning when you look back at what’s happened over the past eight years from my own personal, somewhat selfish perspective. It started with getting shot in Ramallah in 2002; I got divorced; I was in Baghdad when the Americans invaded; I was in Beirut when the Israelis invaded; and then I got to go into exile for the past year or so to rebuild my grandparents house in southern Lebanon.  Now, I’m not sure I can credit the [U.S. President George W.] Bush administration for that last bit of fortune, but I definitely enjoyed it the most.  For a year, I got to work on a book I’m trying to finish right now; I picked olives; I tried to choose old tile, the Levantine sort you see in these beautiful old houses in Nablus, Marja’oun and other places [like] Damascus; and I tried to make sense of a region that a lot of us feel doesn’t make a lot of sense right now.  In essence, I got all rested up so that I can go back to Baghdad in December for another year or two. 

Every person that spoke today is probably better qualified than I am to speak about policy.  I’ve never felt all that adept at it either in writing or speaking, certainly not in journalism where I think there are way too many people speaking with way too much authority about subjects they don’t know all that much about.  I have to say, coming back to the United States and watching these new shows and seeing these journalists reminds me of taxi drivers in Cairo.  They can answer any question.  They’ll be sitting there in the taxi, four fingers on the steering wheel.  You’ll ask them, “What’s up with nuclear fission?”  They’ll take a drag on the cigarette, lean back and say, “Habibi, let me explain this to you.”  That in mind, I’m going to try not to be a Cairene taxi driver. 

What I’d like to do is take you through some experiences I’ve had over those years I’ve mentioned,  starting with experiences in Baghdad, going through Beirut and then to Marja’oun where I’ve spent much of the past year or so.  I’m trying to offer a different perspective than we’ve heard today.  We’ve heard a lot about policy.  We’ve had fantastic analysis—very interesting and compelling.  But I’ll try to maybe take a little more human direction if I can because I think there is something that we’ve lost over the past eight years, and I want to try and capture it if I can. 

I want to focus on this somewhat sad idea defined as broadly as possible, and this idea is loss.  It’s the overwhelming narrative of our experience in the Middle East and, for that matter, my experience there since 2001.  Time and again, it’s what I’ve encountered as a reporter and, importantly, as a resident of the region.  I’ve seen it in Iraq defined in so many different painful ways.  I’ve seen it in Lebanon, a country that seems locked in this strange interregnum between war and peace. I’ve seen it quietly in Marja’oun, a small dying town near the Israeli border where I’ve been living.  And what is this loss?  I struggled with this in writing the book right now, how to define that loss. And to me, it’s the disappearance of an ideal; of an older notion of the Levant; of a certain cosmopolitanism of a diversity and a tolerance that is dwindling in the wake of the wreckage of U.S. policy in Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine and elsewhere.  I think this loss of this ideal and this wreckage of U.S. policy go hand in hand. 

Personally, I learned about this idea in striking up a friendship with a man I came to know in Baghdad.  His name is Mohammad Hayawi, and I think he was a remarkable guy.  He was a bookseller on Mutanabi Street, and there’s one conversation that still lingers with me all these years later.  It happened back in 2003 on a summer day, and it still makes me smile when I think about it.  This was a time when Iraq was still filled with these half truths of occupation and liberation.  It’s before its nihilistic descent into carnage, that kind of mind numbing violence that we still see today.  Hayawi was a ball bearer of a man who used to stand in his bookstore.  It was called the Renaissance Bookshop, and he would kind of hold court in a way.  I always loved his bookstore.  It was remarkable for its mix of what it had.  There were books by communist poets and martyred clerics, translations of Shakespeare, predictions by Lebanese astrologers.  There’s actually a 44 volume tome by a revered Ayatollah.   It was remarkable—44 volumes.  And these dusty stacks would spill out onto the floor.  I always remembered Hayawi, it was always hot; he was trying to cool himself with a fan with sweat pouring down his face. 

Now, this bookseller and I had met before the American invasion; we shared tea.  And nearly a year later, he almost immediately recognized me as I walked through the door.  “Abu Laila,” he said.  It was the name of my daughter. And when he addressed me that way, I always felt more friend than reporter and more neighbor than foreigner.  Then, he delivered a line to me that I would hear him say often, in fact each time we met over the next few years, “I challenge anyone, Abu Laila, to say what’s happening now and what will happen in the future.”  He’d have this routine after he’d make a statement like that; he’d smoke on a cigarette.  He had these huge bags under his eyes.  He’d run his hand over his sweaty cheeks, and he said this line also more than once, “Does this look like the face of 39 years?”  And on this day he offered that line along with another.  He knitted his brow and he turned grimmer.  “We don’t want to hear explosions.  We don’t want to hear about more attacks.  We want to be at peace,” he told me that day.  “An Iraqi wants to put his head on his pillow and feel relaxed.”  And what he meant was he didn’t want to lose anymore. What he meant was that he, as his fabled city and his persecuted country, had already lost too much. 

I think there are so many ways to read loss over the past eight years in the Middle East.  In a way, I think Iraq is lost, and it’s not on the physical sense of the word—a country that amazingly to me manages to still show signs of resilience.  But its name still conjures up this collage of chaotic images, disturbing in their brutality and grotesque in their repetition.  I thought it was put well in an article the other day, and the point was made this morning as well, that an absence in violence or, more accurately, a decrease in violence isn’t a synonym for success.  It’s not simply the sense of American loss either, this arrogance that was conflated with ignorance that helped bring about this disaster.  It’s painfully cultural like I said too, and I think a lot of people here feel probably feel that; even the notion of Baghdad, of the name of the city and what that city used to represent, what that city still represents, I think, in the collective memory of the region.  In fact, there’s a verb that’s not used all that often anymore but it’s tibaghdad.  It remains one of my favorite words in the language; I like the sound of it and how expressive it is.  To be honest, the only time I heard it used was by a sculptor, a guy named Mohammed Ghani.  Some of you may be familiar with him here.  I think he liked this word because it represented a certain nostalgia, and he liked to mention it often. 

I went to see him about the same time as I saw the bookseller, Mohammad Hayawi.  The sculptor and I drove together in this car through Baghdad.  He had been gone during the invasion, and he had just come back.  I remember him staring out the window at a city that was now occupied.  He kept looking in front, behind and to the side, and I remember him uttering over and over, “Allahu Akbar.”  From him on this day, it suggested resignation, I thought, as we drove through the city.  Across the window, we’re passing his city’s stories basically.  The temperature outside was 120, 125 degrees, and you could feel it.  Municipal services had collapsed much as they still have today.  U.S. soldiers in the street were pointing M16 assault rifles toward cars.  I remember a slogan inscribed on one of the tanks in the streets that day—“love machine” I remember it reading.  You could see that Mohammed was affected by all this.  That he was upset and disturbed, and I remember his words were unhurried.  In a way, their slowness almost felt like a narcotic to me on the chaos outside.  “I swear to God,” he told me, “Baghdad is a beautiful girl but her clothes are dirty.” 

I had met Mohammed, the sculptor, back in 1998 way before.  I was still working with the Associated Press back then, and I was trying to make sense of Saddam’s Iraq.  Mohammed was on older man back then.  He was 74-years-old.  He had these bushy black eyebrows.  I remember a time that was shadowed by fear.  He was someone that would speak to me, and I give him a lot of credit for this.  It wasn’t an easy time. There was a lot of fear.  It was a rough place.  Mohammed would always turn up the volume on his radio as we spoke but he still talked to me.  I always appreciated that.  He wasn’t somebody I just met on the street either.  This was a sculptor who was pretty well known in the country.  His monuments dot the landscape.  They’re still there in fact.  He tried to capture what Iraqis like to boast as the 11,000 years of history—that succession of Sumerian and Babylonian, Assyrian and Islamic civilizations.  We drove past them that day—Ishtar, Kahramana.  We even saw what was one of my favorites, Shehrezad.  It was standing vigil over once libertine Abu Nawas Street along the Tigris River.  I always remember that statue on the street itself was a mix of what I thought made Baghdad great.  Its medieval glory was represented by the statue that fabled Baghdad of the Abbasid Empire, of an unabashed self-confidence.  Then there was Abu Nawas, which in its modern heyday, a generation ago, was a free willing stretch of riverside parks and restaurants and bars.  I remember as we sat there talking that day, as Mohammed and I were driving down that street, he knew that both of those worlds were forever gone.  He looked out at the trash along with uprooted trees, discarded bricks and rolls of concertina wire. You’d catch the glint of the sun, and it was sneering garbage.  The scene was like Baghdad, I think, out of flux and permanently in disorder, which is as it is today.  It was the first time that he had seen the statue of Shehrezad since he had come back.  And I’ll never forget him breathing this sigh of relief.  There was still something left in his city.  Baghdad we were looking at was a lonely landscape.  It was getting ready for horrors that I don’t think we could even imagine.  The street—its secular, liberal, even cosmopolitan view was recent history.  But not everything was lost.  That statue was still there.  “Look how beautiful she is,” he said to me.  “No one comes anymore but Shehrezad remains.”  And as he left, he looked towards a young boy selling soft drinks out of a Styrofoam cooler. “Take care of the statue,” he told the boy.  “If thieves come here, go tell someone.  Don’t let them take her away.” 

You know, I think, so much has happened since then.  Like I said, I’m going to try to sketch a little bit of a different notion of what’s happened over the past eight years and because so much has happened since those conversations I had back in Baghdad with the bookseller and the sculptor both in Iraq and across the region that’s wrestling with its own traumas, traumas that are propelled and often initiated by American policy that from abroad, at least, feel seemingly imperial.  And I’ve often wondered what it might’ve felt like to be in Berlin as World War II drew to a close or in Baghdad as the Mongols approached in 1258.  I wonder if the dread I so often feel in the Middle East is anything akin to that.   I wrote a book about Iraq.  I called it Night Draws Near.  And it wasn’t just a title to me.  It was a feeling, in a way, of what’s ahead, of my sense of the region. 

A year after I had met this sculptor, I moved to Lebanon where I tried to cover the Middle East.  I think for much of my life, growing up, living and working in Lebanon had been my goal.  Here’s this elusive promise I hoped of what the Middle East would represent—cosmopolitanism that embraces diversity and intellectual space that celebrated criticism and critique.  And I have to say the Lebanon I arrived in a couple years after Baghdad was still brutalized by its civil war.  It was blinded by that conflict’s lack of resolution.  I think as in Iraq and Egypt and much of the Arab world, the cosmopolitanism, the bookseller and the sculptor were gone and instead it was nostalgia.  Nostalgia is often simply, I think, an appreciation of loss, no more. And I think a lot of people who’ve spent time in the region understand the power of that nostalgia.  I’ve often wondered as a journalist is how you capture that notion.  It’s a tough one.  I think it’s tough for Americans to understand.  Americans don’t really have a nostalgic place.  In some ways, I think it’s very subtle, and I think it’s subtle in the region as well. 

I’ve tried to write about characters. The sculptor is one example.  The bookseller was another.  I’ve also tried to write about place. And I think place holds a certain significance in journalism or in journalism that could be good about the region in places like I’ve mentioned, Mutanabi Street  for instance in Baghdad, Abu Nawas Street.  There’s places that I’m very fond of in Cairo still and Cairo’s downtown, the Groppi Café for instance or Rivoli.  Places that represent a bygone era in Egypt.  Then, what I’ve discovered soon, living in Lebanon, was there was another place that you can probably put in that category and that’s Hamra.  I think only Hamra Street could’ve represented the more sophisticated, open and pluralistic space in the Arab world.  Again, people here may be familiar with it.  From the sixties until the civil war started in ‘75, Hamra’s theaters and restaurants dominated nightlife in Beirut.  AUB, the American University of Beirut, propelled its ferment and its cafes, hosting Arab dissidents, Palestinian exiles, Lebanese of all sects and tendencies.  It shaped an intellectual sanctuary in a way that I think delivered a cadence to the Arab politics.  A friend of mine, a guy named Mohammad Soueid, he’s a film critic.  We were once talking about it, and he said it was like the Arab Champs Elyse.  He said if you wanted to make a career as an intellectual or get involved in film, the Hamra Café is the best place to meet people and discuss. It was a meeting ground between the West and the Arab world.  The civil war, of course, in Lebanon ended its moment in time. I think Hamra’s intersection was consumed in Beirut’s collision much like Baghdad today.  It’s shown a little bit of revival these days.  In Beirut, there’s some new restaurants there.  There are some new cafes.  But I still feel it’s a shadow of what it was.  Hamra as an idea is gone and so has what it represented.  I think it’s very dangerous to try to conflict globalization with cosmopolitanism.  I have to say, I walked down the street often.  I’d like to think I’m a victim, a little bit, of the same nostalgia.   And each time I walked down it, I realized something that makes me very sad.  I don’t think there’s any room left in Lebanon for what Hamra represented. I don’t think there’s any room left in Lebanon for it.  Sadly, I’m not sure there’s any room left in the Middle East for it today.

There’s an irony that for so many decades of criticism in the Arab world of Israel’s exclusive view of its identity as a Jewish State, the Arab world today is organizing itself similarly from Iraq to Lebanon and beyond.  There really are no secular movements of import these days, the kind that once propelled it forward.  Ideology has, in many ways, I think died in the Middle East. Be it Arab nationalism, currents to the left and so on.  In whatever their success or failures—and there were plenty of them—it was hard to deny that in them.  In those secular ideologies, there was a universality that transcended the parochial identities of the past.  That’s simply no longer the case.  Politics are more and more reflected through this often unyielding religious discourse or more primordial affiliations that break long religious sect and ethnicity—loss of the notion of collective action of uniting around principles or ideals.   And I really think you’re left with communities that are bereft of citizenship, sadly small.  Each community comes away with its own existential notion of itself, its very survival threatened by its own uniqueness.   I think U.S. policy most spectacularly in Iraq but also in Lebanon, Palestine and elsewhere deserves a large degree of blame for what’s been unleashed.  Even today, there’s a cynical ploy by U.S. policymakers to fan sectarian hatred for questionable, short-term goals.   But I think the Arab world is complicit too.  I think it’s a sad record for a region that was so courageous for so long in resisting colonialism. 

As I mentioned, I spent the past year working on another book. This one of course is far more personal.  It’s about Marja’oun, my family’s ancestral village.  It’s also a book about identity.  I just noticed that living there in Marja’oun the past year is that I see the same thing there that I see in Hamra, that I’d seen in Mutanabi Street, that I see in Egypt for instance and other places.  What I’m seeing is a place dying because it has no place left in the Arab world.  And I have to say that makes me very sad. 

At the beginning of the talk, I said I wanted to talk about loss.  I think indeed that’s what these places represent to me. Of all those who I think I feel most keenly,  the loss that comes from my friendship with this bookseller I mentioned in the beginning of this talk this man named Mohammad Hayawi. For brief moments in Baghdad, I think I saw life as it should have been in his shop in a country that has lost so much.  I saw life as it could’ve been and should’ve been.  And as I close up, I’d like to share a small recollection if I could, in a way a testament to what I’m talking about. Mohammad had worked at this bookstore all his life.  His father had founded it in 1954. He’d been there since 1993 when his father died.  Mohammad was Sunni.  It didn’t really matter to him.  He lived in a Shi’ite neighborhood.  He took pride in his independence of running a bookstore that was so eclectic.  I always thought he was making a statement with that.  It was much more than profit—his Mutanabi Street, his Baghdad and his Iraq would respect their diversity. 

The last time I saw him was in 2005.  He was sitting behind his desk sipping a cup of tea that cost ten cents.  There’s a pack of cigarettes next to it.  And as he did every morning, hour after hour, the money changer came into the bookstore.  “What’s the rate?” he would bellow.  The money changer would answer him. This went on, this rhythm of life that no longer exists with a cadence that I’ll probably never encounter again.  Two Kurdish booksellers came in from the north.  There was a conversation there.  People from the south followed.  The electricity cut off with no one seeming to notice, and they pulled out the water pipe and enjoyed the afternoon.  Last March, a car bomb detonated on Mutanabi Street a few doors down from the store, The Renaissance Bookshop.  At least 26 people were killed.  It was another attack on another day consigning yet more Iraqis to the anonymity that death brings there.  But not all were nameless.  I soon learned that Mohammad, this bookseller, was one of them.  He was buried in this bookstore that resisted the forces that killed him.  He was killed in Mutanabi Street that spoke to another Arab world before the deprivations of intolerance, of imperial arrogance, of hopelessness and loss. 

There’s a story that I find myself turning to often.  It’s about Baghdad’s destruction more than 700 years ago when the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258.  It was said that the Tigris ran red one day, black another.  The red came from the blood of the nameless victims who were massacred by the horsemen of the Mongols.  The black came from the ink of countless books from libraries and universities, the very stuff that made Baghdad one of the greatest cities the world has yet seen.  On that March day, the bomb on Mutanabi Street detonated at 11:40 a.m.; the pavement was smeared with blood.  Fires that ensued sent up columns of dark smoke fed by the plethora of paper that was in that street.  I wrote a story about his death, and I wanted to speak about him today because I think his face still haunts me.  You know, I guess if nostalgia is an appreciation of loss, memory can be an anecdote to it.  But I realized something also in reflecting on what he represented.  I realized the small moments of his life are going to be forever gone.  They were gently by the simple virtue of being ordinary.  I say those words again. They were gentle simply by virtue of being ordinary.  And now, they’re buried along that street—the street that died like Hamra has died, like Abu Nawas had died, like Marja’oun, a small village on the Israeli border, is dying.  It’s a life and culture of tolerance and diversity of cosmopolitanism again, for a lack of a better word, that I realize can never be the same.  And to me that’s the legacy of the past eight years, legacy of this decade.  It’s a trauma that I think we’re going to see play itself out over a generation but a trauma that’s never going to be fixed. 

Thank you.

Mr. Paul Findley:

Thanks for the introduction, and thank you, Mr. Shadid, for those kind words.  Now, I know you weren’t under oath when you said them, but if you’d write them down, I’d like to read them to my wife so she’ll understand how great I am.  

How many in this room have personally met Hisham Sharabi?  Far from a majority.  You have missed a great treat.  In my experience, Hisham Sharabi was one of the great people of this city and of humanity because of the leadership he gave without stint, without hesitation, without qualification for the human rights of Palestinians and other Arabs.  And when I entered this building today, it brought back memories of the occasions when I had a chance to be here in years past and have a discussion with Dr. Sharabi.  He certainly lives on in this institution, which I understand he arranged for its funding. [It] continues improving his work every year.  I enjoyed especially the discussion that occurred before we were introduced given by truly expert, intelligent people about what can be done about the Arab-Israeli dispute from nations in the region. 

I’m from mid-America, specifically the heartland of the land of [late U.S. President Abraham] Lincoln in Illinois.  As far from the oceans, as far from Eastern or Western influence, that is, I think, typically mid-America.  And I was rooted in that atmosphere except for an excursion in World War II in the South Pacific.  That’s where my home has always been.  So, I come here before a group of people who have such international experience and knowledge and understanding, and I’ve been given the assignment of talking to you for a few minutes.  The theme that we’d discussed so thoroughly a few minutes ago was the prospect for peace in the Middle East, and I must just admit, my simple, Midwestern conviction, that the road to peace in the Middle East still lies through Washington, D.C.  I believe there’s no escape from that fact.  I don’t come to that conclusion because of any special merit that our country has but because of a very deep-seeded, high cost relationship with the state of Israel.  In other words, the bias that we have pursued for about 40 years in our relationship with the State of Israel.  And this bias is well understood here in Washington, and it is certainly well understood among my colleagues in the Congress.  But it is not recognized beyond the city. If you visit the hamlets and small villages and majority cities of the Midwest and elsewhere in this country, you’ll find very few people that are aware of bias in U.S. policy that favors the State of Israel.  My guess is that maybe 90 percent of the U.S. population is totally unaware of the bias in our government policy towards Israel.  They don’t see any relationship between the behavior of the State of Israel and what’s happening in their own household.  They don’t feel that they have a major stake in whether this bias continues or not.  In fact, if the question is raised, most of them will simply say, “Well, there’s Israel, and they’ve had a tough time, the Holocaust, you know.  We have to support them.”  They don’t understand the implications of what U.S. policy has been. 

Now, the other 10 percent—the people that do comprehend the enormity of this bias, the enormity of the cost it places on every household in America, those who know, those who understand—simply are, for the most part, afraid.  They can find some excuse for not speaking up plainly and loudly and resolutely about this bias.  I use the word “fear” because I can’t think of any other word to express it properly.  It seems endemic in our society.  It applies not just to the average “Joe six-pack” as [Alaska Governor Sarah] Palin has described it but to the people in academia, the people in public schools, the people in business, the clergymen for the most part and sadly the journalists for the most part.  Mr. Shadid is a rare exception.  The voice of the Washington Post is so often clear about bias, but the Washington Post is sadly not normal reading matter for most of the country.  Perhaps, it was once.  There was a day when The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune were circulated widely around the country.  But that day has so far or temporarily disappeared.  So, these voices are heard by very few people.  I use the word “fear” to describe the people in academia.  Almost all of them are fully aware of what’s going on in the Middle East and what’s going on in the U.S. relationship to the Middle East.  And yet, it’s hard to find anyone in the field of academia who will speak out resolutely.  Now, one such person I was with last night [was] Steven Walt of Harvard and his colleague John Mearsheimer, who wrote a splendid book about the Israeli lobby and what it means to American foreign policy.  But they are so few in number. And I have not had a chance for candid discussion with Professor Walt, but my hunch is that his relationship with his colleagues in academia is a bit changed now that he and Mearsheimer have written this book. 

I like to say that the Congress of the United States is a great center of open and free debate on any topic, but it’s not.  They too are fearful.  I guess they see what happened to me when I spoke out.  They want none of that themselves, so they remain silent.  They are afraid of the punishment that may be meted out to them by the lobby for the State of Israel.  That punishment may be simply a guarded but never the less plain link with anti-Semitism, which is about the worst stain anyone could have placed upon him or her.  I’ve felt that stain.  I know what it’s like.  And of course, they read the political books.  Many of them read my book, They Dare to Speak Out, and they saw the problems I encountered and the problems that I encountered on Election Day.  So, this has a profound influence.  But you can go to the Department of Defense and find the same thing there and the State Department, the same thing there, and the White House, the same thing there, as if any criticism of the State of Israel is verboten.  It cannot be tolerated.  It’s indecent. It’s simply not done in polite company. The result is that the 10 percent of the people, by my estimate who really know the facts about the difficulty in our relationship with the Middle East, are for the most part unwilling to speak up and even less willing to act to do something to correct it. 

Now, is that a hopeless situation?  I would like to think not.  I believe there are people of commitment, of spirit, of anxiety about this throughout the country that if rallied behind a program of publicity can really get the message through.  It won’t be easy.  It won’t be cost free, and so far, I have not found anyone who has really grappled with this single problem in an effective way.  It may be that we have learned something in the presidential campaign that will help guide us to the right answer.  That answer could well be the internet and emails.  I’ve heard that Barack Obama’s supporters have over a million email addresses on their distribution list; there’s probably quite a few more than that.  Well, there are very few publications.  One of them is the Washington Post; the other one is the LA Times; the other one is The New York Times that can’t really represent and reach a million people.  But the internet can.  And surely there is a way that the message can be formulated in such a dramatic and effective way that it will reach a lot of people a lot of households that have been totally uninformed up until now.  The only hope for change in public policy on the Middle East by the United States is a grassroots movement, stirrings from the grassroots.  If the constituents are morally fearful of continuation of the bias toward Israel for their own family, then they are concerned about the welfare of someone presented for the State of Israel, then there will be change.  There will be new faces in Congress, and the new faces will hopefully bring about change. 

I guess I’m a dreamer.  I was in the House for 22 years, and that didn’t happen in my time. And the chambers of government are today more silent even then in my era about this fundamental question.  We have never had a president since Dwight Eisenhower who was willing to call a spade a spade in the Middle East.  And when he felt that Israel was doing the wrong thing, he insisted that Israel stop.  And Israel stopped.  They stopped the war against Egypt, who stopped the war against France and England.  All three nations had worked together during World War II, but they acted unwisely, and we had a president who had the wisdom and the courage to do something about it.  He threatened expulsion of Israel from the United Nations, and it got results.

In the absence of a grassroots movement, I’m deeply pessimistic about a change coming.  I’m a Republican. I voted for every Republican presidential candidate beginning with Wendell Willkie—can anybody match me in this crowd?—until [U.S. President] George Bush’s quest for a second term, and then I voted against him.  And this year, I will vote for [U.S. Senator] Barack Obama.   I know you didn’t come to hear me give you advice on how to vote, but I see Barack as a person who can bring differing parties together. He can be a healer, a uniter, and that is exactly what we need in the Middle East.  I know he’s made despicable remarks.  One of the representatives from this table used that word to describe Obama’s remarks about the Middle East, and I cringe every time I hear those remarks.  But I know also that he wouldn’t have a chance to be nominated by either party if he did not show his clear allegiance to the State of Israel prior to Election Day.  Now, will he change after the election?  Would John McCain change after the election? It’s hard to tell.  Who would have thought that in the last month our country would be in the throws of a threatening financial collapse?  Who would guess that the stock market would plunge as radically as it has?  The world looks different when you are a candidate and when you are in office.  And I’m sure that it looks very different when you step into the Oval Office as President of the United States.   Presidents change while they’re in office. They achieve understanding.  Most of them mature in my opinion. 

My favorite constituent in all my campaigns was Abraham Lincoln.  He was a big help to me too.  And I think a bit of Lincoln history is important.  Lincoln would never have made it to the White House had he been seen as a man who would abolish slavery.  He would not have been nominated.  He was nominated because he was not an abolitionist.  Now, he wasn’t a supporter of slavery, but he would support the containment of slavery beyond the existing limits of slavery within the Union.  And when he served one term as a member of Congress, he never said one word about slavery.  But he did write a bill to outlaw slavery within the District of Columbia, which certainly should be viewed as a modest reform.  But he never introduced it; he never argued for it.  Action on slavery was a topic yet to be faced for Abraham Lincoln, and when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, that proclamation didn’t free one single slave because it applied only to slaves in states then under rebellion.  But Lincoln chose to call it an act of military necessity.  That was the motivation he gave for his Emancipation Proclamation—military necessity.  And who knows what the next president will find in the way of military or economic or just plain political necessity. 

Obama’s despicable words will probably be forgotten by then, and if he’s president, it’s my fond hope that he will rise to the occasion, that he will disenthrall himself with such comments in the past and set a new course for the nation that will benefit not just America, not just Palestinians, not just the Lebanese but also the Israelis as they face a grim future unless a solution to this problem comes about.  And as I mentioned at the beginning of my remarks, I have always felt that the road to peace in the Middle East has to go through Washington.  There has to be a change there in public policy.  There has to be a change in the presidential outlook on the Middle East.  And I believe that just the simple facts of life should compel any president, even John McCain, to change his mind.  For example, the war in Iraq was a war for Israel.  There’s no doubt about it, and it cost a billion dollars.  Many billions of dollars.  It’s now up to a trillion dollars just for that one act of assistance to the State of Israel.  The Christian Science Monitor has kept tabs on the growing cost of U.S. aid to Israel, something quite apart from the war.  And the last time they updated the tab, it reached $1.4 trillion dollars since 1975.  That was all forms of aid to Israel from the U.S. Treasury compounded annually as they should be. 

Beyond that, think of the lives that are blighted by our war.  Certainly at least 30,000 Americans who’ve been maimed for life or killed and at least 100,000 lives among Iraqis, victims of the war we fought for Israel.  And if those would be put properly in the right column, then the financial cost of Israel, the cost in lives is simply overpowering.  If somehow we can send the message throughout the country, the message of the colossal cost of our aid to Israel so that we become the enabler of criminal activity on the part of the State of Israel, that reality if it can somehow be presented to the households of the nation, I think will surely bring an uprising.  And perhaps, one of the byproducts of the dreadful financial plight we’re going through today will be to reinforce the need to bring our financial, our budgetary and our White House back in order.  I would love it if Great Britain, France, the rogue countries, Germany, Scandinavian countries would combine to put heavy economic pressure on Israel to bring an end to their illegal behavior in respect to the Occupied Territories.  But I don’t see that happening because they probably rationalize that until a basic change comes in U.S. policy, why should they bother?  They could not prevail with this new line of policy if we continue our uncritical support for Israel, a support that I think has to be viewed as complicit in, as enabling criminal behavior. 

Now, I’ve used plain language here.  And I hope I haven’t overstayed my welcome.  I feel so grateful to be invited to the great halls that Sharabi made famous. Thank you.

Mr. Anthony Shadid is based in the Middle East for The Washington Post. Before joining the Post, Shadid worked as Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press based in Cairo and as news editor of the AP bureau in Los Angeles. In 2004, Shadid won the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for his coverage of the Iraq war. Mr. Paul Findley is a former United States Representative from Illinois. He is a cofounder of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington advocacy group. Mr. Findley has written many books including They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby and Deliberate Deceptions: Facing the Facts about the U.S.-Israeli Relationship.
 

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

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