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  • Biden Should Stop Payment on U.S. Funds to Sisi’s Egypt

    Credit: CODEPINK

    Under Donald Trump’s presidency, Egypt, as well as Saudi Arabia, Israel, the UAE, and other repressive regimes, had virtually free reign to commit unchecked human rights abuses without worry that they might be chastised or lose U.S. diplomatic and financial support. But when Joe Biden won the 2020 election, President Sisi of Egypt started to worry. That’s when he contracted lobbying powerhouse Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck for $65,000 a month.

    The pro-Cairo lobby team includes a number of former politicians, including former Republican congressman Ed Royce, who chaired the influential Foreign Affairs Committee from 2013-2018. The most shocking PR agent for the Egyptian regime, however, is Nadeam Elshami, former chief of staff for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi. “It’s inconceivable that a man who spent his younger years in Egypt, comes from a Muslim family that supported the 2011 Arab Spring and was a key Democratic staffer in the U.S. Congress would end up lobbying for a regime that jails, tortures and murders tens of thousands of Egyptians,” says Mohamed Ismail of  Egyptians Abroad for Democracy Worldwide.

    Brownstein boasts many accomplishments, including pushing Congress to obtain compensation on behalf of the hostages held in Iran in 1979, recovering artifacts plundered during the Armenian Genocide, securing compensation for housing developers who had to mitigate asbestos from former U.S. military sites, and securing increased funding for cancer research. Representing Egypt under President Sisi is unlikely to be something Browstein Hyatt Schreck will brag about.

    In July 2013, Sisi seized control of Egypt in a military coup that removed Mohammed Morsi, the country’s first democratically elected leader. The following month, on August 14, his military massacred approximately 1,000 civilians engaging in peaceful protest at Rabaa al-Adawiya Square. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth called the Rabaa massacre, “one of the worst killing of demonstrators in a single day in recent history,” pointing out that the violence was “intentionally planned at the highest levels of Egyptian society.” Between July 2013 and May 2014, Egyptian authorities detained, charged, or sentenced over 40,000 people. Many of the detainees — demonstrators, dissenters, and journalists — were held without trial. Others were tried without due process and sentenced to death.

    In 2015, President Sisi governed without an elected parliament, giving himself almost total impunity for the attacks he carried out against civil and political rights. Effectively, all of the human rights gains that had been achieved during the 2011 Arab Spring that ousted longtime Egyption ruler Hosni Mubarak were lost when Sisi took over. Sisi’s reign of power has continued in this fashion with Egyptians experiencing surging human rights abuses and a large-scale breakdown of civil society.

    In April 2019, Sisi’s government passed constitutional amendments allowing the leader to remain in power until 2030. In the fall of 2019, Egyptian authorities launched their biggest crackdown since Sisi seized power in 2013. According to Amnesty International, over 2,300 people, including more than 111 children, were taken into custody in sweeping and targeted arrests of peaceful protesters, journalists, human rights attorneys, politicians, and political activists. On January 13, 2020, Egyptian-born American citizen Mustafa Kassem died following more than six years of incarceration in Egypt. Kassem had been arrested in August 2013 in Cairo on claims that he had participated in protests against Sisi’s military regime. He suffered from beatings and was held in pretrial detention for over five years before finally, without due process, receiving a sentence of 15 years.

    The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the already abysmal prison conditions in Egypt and Sisi’s government has used the crisis as pretext to even further silence critics and make use of pretrial detention without judicial review.

    Egypt’s North Sinai, a sparsely populated area bordering Israel and the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, is a particularly egregious example of the country’s human rights abuses. Attacks by armed groups, including ISIS affiliates, on Egyptian government installations began to rise after the 2011 Arab Spring uprising but increased dramatically following Sisi’s 2013 coup. Instead of protecting Sinai residents in their fight against militants, the Egyption military has “shown utter contempt for residents’ lives, turning their daily life into a nonstop nightmare of abuses,” said Michael Page, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa.

    The Egyptian military in the Sinai has been engaging in torture, dissapearances (including of children as young as 12), mass arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, home demolitions, severe curfews resulting in food shortages, and air and ground attacks against civilians. According to Human Rights Watch, these actions amount to war crimes and, according to a 2020 report by the U.S. Department of State, Egypt has repeatedly refused U.S. requests to observe how its military equipment is being used in the Sinai.

    The history of U.S. financial support for Egypt dates back to the 1978 Camp David Accords and 1979 Egypt-Israel peace treaty, when the U.S. began to provide Egypt with aid in a 2:3 ratio in accordance with U.S. aid to Israel. According to the U.S. Department of State, since 1978, Egypt has received over $50 billion in military and $30 billion in economic assistance. Currently, the U.S. gives Egypt $1.3 billion per year ($3.56 million per day) in military aid, making Egypt the second largest recipient of U.S. military assistance after Israel.

    This largesse flowed during the reign of Hosni Mubarak and continues today, despite Sisi’s massive human rights abuses. Following the horrific 2014 Rabaa Square massacre, President Obama halted the delivery of U.S. tanks, missiles, fighter jets, and attack helicopters to Egypt. However, by 2015, he relented and lifted the arms hold, citing the need “to address the shared challenges to U.S. and Egyptian interests in an unstable region.” President Trump famously referred to Sisi as his “favorite dictator,” and praised Sisi for doing a  “fantastic job.” In August of 2017 the Trump administration did cut $96 million and delayed $195 million in military assistance to Egypt over the country’s failure to reduce its human rights abuses, a new law Sisi approved to restrict the activities of nongovernmental organizations, and Egypt’s relationship with North Korea. But these actions were not as tough on Egypt as they appeared to be. According to The New York Times: “by pausing the provision of $195 million in military funding, the Trump administration saved the money from expiring entirely on Sept. 30. This way, Egypt could eventually get the money if its record on human rights improves.” Indeed, the funding was later released without any change in Egypt’s policies.

    Some members of Congress have tried to take action. In October 2020, 56 representatives — 55 Democrats and one independent — released a letter urging Sisi to release prisoners “unjustly detained for exercising their fundamental human rights.” The call was echoed by over 220 European lawmakers. In 2014, Congress began implementing the Leahy Laws on a portion of aid money to Egypt. The law prevents U.S. security assistance to a foreign security force unit when there is credible information that the unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.

    In December 2020, Congress made $75 million (a small portion of the total $1.3 billion) conditional on human rights improvements, without the U.S. State Department being able to waive the conditions by citing U.S. national security interests.

    Unlike Trump, Joe Biden has been quite critical of Sisi. Commenting on the release of an Egypt-American medical student, then-candidate Biden wrote on Twitter: “Mohamed Amasha is finally at home, after 486 days in an Egyptian prison, for raising a protest banner. The arrest, torture, and exile of activists like Sarah Hegazy and Mohamed Soltan or threatening their families is unacceptable. No more blank cheques for Trump’s favorite dictator.”

    Shortly after it became apparent that Biden had won the 2020 U.S. election, Egypt began releasing some political prisoners, including three directors of the well-respected Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights — Gasser Abdel-Razek, Kareem Ennarah and Mohamed Basheer. On February 6, 2021, they released Al Jazeera journalist Mahmoud Hussein, who had been in prison since December 2016 for  “publishing false information and belonging to a banned group.” After Hussein was arrested, Sisi banned Al Jazeera and other news outlets critical of his rule. Reporters Without Borders has called Egypt one of the world’s biggest and worst jailers of journalists.

    Certainly President al-Sisi is afraid that his days of free rein to commit human rights abuses are over now that Trump is out of office. That’s why he is so desperate for the help of Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck to whitewash his image and keep U.S. military assistance flowing. But the Biden administration and Congress must not be swayed by Egypt’s release of a few select prisoners or the lobbying efforts of well-compensated Brownstein employees such as Pelosi’s former chief of staff Nadeam Elshami. They should put a “stop payment” on the U.S. taxpayer-funded check that has enabled Sisi to operate with impunity.

    This article was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2021 at 9:47am and is filed under Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Egypt, Human Rights, Joe Biden, Political Prisoners, President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Neoliberal Authoritarianism in Egypt

    The whiplash of authoritarianism is being ruthlessly used in Egypt. On January 6, 2021, Ahmed Khalifa, social news editor of Egypt 360 website, was arrested after publishing a series of reports on workers’ legitimate protests. He was falsely charged with joining a terrorist group and spreading fake news, and remains in detention to date. Before his arrest, Khalifa published articles about strikes at the state-owned ElDelta Company for Fertilizers and Chemical Industry.

    Turn of Events

    In 2011, bold protest chants flowed out from Tahrir Square: from “The people want the fall of the regime!” to “Down, down with military rule!” – everything seemed full of new possibilities. Today, all the dreams envisioned by those chants lie in tatters.  Egyptians have gone through an unprecedented and dizzyingly fast-paced trajectory.

    The Mubarak period (1981–2011) bore the stamp of neoliberal authoritarianism; the tumultuous 30-months long transition after his ouster (2011–13) was filled with hopes about a better future; the afterlife of a military coup (2013–present) has turned history full circle back to an authoritarian age of austerity and pervasive violence.

    Egypt’s short-lived democratic experience lasted one year, starting in 2012 with the presidential election victory of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi. Morsi clashed with the military, leading to his ouster by the latter in 2013.

    Whereas Mubarak’s ejection was a case of popular mobilization dismantling the executive power and the authority of the state’s ruling coalition, the protests that began on June 29, 2013, and culminated in Morsi’s arrest on July 3, can be traced to manipulation by the army, Interior Ministry, and General Intelligence Services.

    The military coup signaled the start of a grotesque wave of counterrevolution led by President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, where the opposition was legally crushed and the public sphere militarized. Post-2013 Egyptian politics has been marked with capricious state violence, trivial elections and a weakened political economy awash with aid rent, increased dependency on regional states such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), as well as financial strangulation by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

    Economic Problems

    Al-Sisi has left no doubt as to his economic stance, namely unadorned neoliberalism. His economic position crystallized in the organisation of the 2015 Sharm El-Sheikh Investment Conference, advertised to foreign investors and international financial institutions as the launch of Egypt’s new Economic Policy Program. Al-Sisi’s administration passed neoliberal tax and deregulatory investment reforms on the first day of the conference.

    The new tax reforms sliced taxes on higher income earners from 30% to 22.5%, including corporate profits and personal incomes, advertised several tax exemptions in new special economic zones, ended the judicial oversight over state contracts with private businesses and immunized investors from the judicial system in Egypt.

    In November 2016, the military regime took a loan of $12 billion from the IMF. Since then, it has been implementing austerity measures, increasing the assault on workers’ rights, issuing redundancy notices to many employees and eliminating subsidies even as it faces resistance.

    As part of the loan package, IMF also recommended spending cuts and the introduction of a value-added tax; by June 2017, it resulted in the rise of core inflation by 32%. The prices of other items like food, fuel, and electricity rose much faster. Egyptians saw the cost of bread and cooking gas go up by nearly 60%. To put this into perspective, in the year leading up to the 2011 Arab Spring, food prices in Egypt were subject to an annual increase of around 15%.

    Youth unemployment – a driver of the Egyptian rebellion – increased from 16% in 2010 to 42% by 2014. When Egyptians were asked about the major challenges facing the country in 2011, respondents – who were allowed to choose up to six challenges – felt that the economic situation was the most important. In 2011, 81.5% of respondents named the economic situation as the most important problem. By 2014, 90.3% of respondents felt the economic situation was of paramount importance.

    The great majority of 97 million Egyptians struggle to make ends meet in an economy that no leader wishes to reform and that has once again become subject to the dictates of imperialist institutions. Everyone is constantly absorbing shocks from perpetually deteriorating political, economic, and social conditions.

    The Egyptian state has abandoned most citizens in slums of penury, basing itself on a non-existent social contract. None of these outcomes were envisioned when Egypt’s uprising began in January 2011. At the conclusion of the uprising’s first eighteen days, indeed, everything but this disheartening outcome seemed possible.

    Authoritarianism

    Living in a highly unjust order, Egyptians inevitably feel angry at their corrupt dictators. This anger comes out in the form of dissidence. The military regime has assembled an entire police state for the silencing of this opposition. Human Rights Watch describes police stations and prisons in Egypt as having “an assembly line” of torture.

    In 2015, according to the now closed al-Nadim Center for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, almost 500 people died in custody while 676 more were tortured. The subsequent years have been terrible as well: in 2016, the Egyptian Coordination of Rights and Freedom reports, another 14 Egyptians died from torture while in custody and said their lawyers received 830 torture complaints.

    Forced disappearances, or being put “behind the sun” as this tactic is known in Egypt, are also skyrocketing. In a 2016 report, Amnesty International puts the number of people who disappeared in the 100s. The al-Nadim Center documented 464 cases of forcible disappearance at the hands of the state.

    Techniques of mass incarceration have been rapidly developed by the Al-Sisi administration. The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information states in its 2016 report:

    New prisons in Egypt came, unfortunately, not as a result of the increase in population, but rather due to a policy of random arrests, unfair trials and unjust laws passed after July 3, 2013, such as, the anti-protest law and the decision to increase pre-trial detention periods, as well as the widespread impunity policies.

    Wikithawra has documented the arrest and imprisonment of nearly forty-one thousand people between July 3, 2013, and May 2014. An additional 26,000 more were arrested between 2015 and 2016. It is estimated that roughly 60,000 prisoners in Egypt are being held for political views and actions rather than criminal activity. This figure accounts for nearly 56% of all people being warehoused in the country’s jails.

    Fragile State

    The current Egyptian state is extremely fragile. In February 2016, Al-Sisi warned detractors:

    Please, don’t listen to anyone but me. I am dead serious. Be careful. No one should try my patience or exploit my good manners in attempts to tear down the state. I swear to God that anyone who comes near the state, I will remove from the face of the earth. I am telling you this as the whole of Egypt is listening. What do you think you are doing? Who are you?

    Al-Sisi has good reasons to be scared and worried. On average, there have been five times as many collective labor actions and other protests per day under al-Sisi than there were in the 2008–10 period. The country is in dire straits. Sooner or later, there is bound to be another revolt for a more humane social order.

    This article was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2021 at 10:02pm and is filed under Authoritarianism, Egypt, Militarism, Neoliberalism, Political Prisoners, President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, Resistance, Torture.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Our Mutual Fight: The Case against Pakistani Normalization with Israel   

    The Pakistani government should never, under any circumstances and no matter the pressure, normalize with Israel. Doing so is not only dangerous – as it will embolden an already vile, racist, violent apartheid Israel – but it would also be considered a betrayal of a historic legacy of mutual solidarity, collective affinity and brotherhood that have bonded Palestinians and Pakistanis for many generations.

    The bond between Palestine and Pakistan is not one that is based on rhetoric. Rather, it is cemented through blood and sacrifice, as Pakistani fighters have taken part in the desperate Palestinian-Arab attempt at pushing back Zionist colonization of the Palestinian homeland in 1948. Whenever Palestinians think back of those who stood by their side during their times of hardship and collective pain, Pakistan always features prominently on the list.

    But it is not just this. The Pakistani Air Force also took part in the war of 1967 when Israel occupied the rest of historic Palestine and, more importantly, in the pivotal war of 1973, when Arabs and Muslims fought back. It was no surprise to learn that the Pakistani government recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the ‘sole and legitimate representative of the Palestinian people before the Arab League had done so at the Rabat Conference in Morocco in 1974.

    It is terribly sad to see that Morocco, despite the collective love shared between the Moroccan and the Palestinian people, has succumbed to Jared Kushner’s political designs to normalize with Israel. Trump’s son-in-law had launched a decided campaign to normalize Israel in the eyes of Arabs and Muslims, without forcing Tel Aviv to make a single political concession to the occupied and oppressed Palestinians. Countries like Morocco, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Sudan sold Palestine so cheaply, in exchange for limited, selfish and, worse, unguaranteed gains.

    Pakistan cannot join this misled club. A country of Pakistan’s size, of its large and vibrant population and of the kind of moral authority it possesses is not meant to be an American lackey, dancing to the drumbeats of the US administration, of Kushner-like politicians, who are unable to decipher the long-term consequences of their actions.

    If Pakistan normalizes with Israel through any kind of diplomatic, cultural or trade exchanges, it will send an unprecedented message to the rest of the Muslim Umma; in fact, to the whole world that Muslims are now willing to coexist in a reality in which injustice, in all of its manifestations is, simply, normal and acceptable.

    What kind of moral authority would that make Pakistan, especially as it is leading the fight against the occupation of Kashmir and the perpetual injustices and violence that is experienced daily by millions of Kashmiris?

    From a very young age, all Palestinians are reminded that the struggle for Palestine is part and parcel of the larger struggle against the evils of military occupation anywhere in the world, starting with Kashmir. Every Palestinian mosque often ends its Friday sermons with a heartfelt prayer to Allah, to bring to an end the woes of mankind, from Palestine to Kashmir, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, to Syria and so on. At times, this camaraderie is all that Palestinians are left with, as the so-called international community has long-turned its back on the Palestinian people and their seemingly endless tragedy.

    But what would Pakistan gain from normalization with Israel, anyway, aside from lofty promises that are likely to be forgotten as soon as the Joe Biden Administration takes over the White House? What did Egypt and Jordan gain from their normalization and diplomatic ties with Israel, over the course of 40 and 26 years, respectively? They are certainly not better off in any way. Since then, the Egyptian pound has been devalued numerous times against the US dollar; it is almost worthless. Jordan, on the other hand, has been reeling under a prolonged economic crisis, one that seems to worsen with time.

    Additionally, the geopolitics of the Middle East is in an unprecedented state of flux. Since the seismic American decision to ‘pivot to Asia’ in 2012, its ‘leadership from behind’ in the NATO-led war in Libya and every other major regional event since, it is crystal clear that the US is no longer the dominant party in the greater Middle East region. With its Asian domain evidently shrinking due to China’s growing economic and political might and outreach and its ‘scramble for Africa’ facing numerous obstacles, the US is no longer in a position to dictate, neither to Pakistan nor any other country, on how to conduct its foreign policy. The upcoming US administration is likely to be busy for years in a desperate attempt to stave off some of the damage inflicted by the Donald Trump Administration, starting with amending some of its ties with its European and NATO allies.

    This is not the time to join yet more American political gambles, lining up Arabs and Muslims on the side of Israel to fight some imagined Iranian threat. On the contrary, this is the time for influential and well-regarded countries like Pakistan to champion their own initiatives, with the help of other peace and justice loving countries, to force Israel to respect international law, to end its military occupation of Palestine and to dismantle its system of racist apartheid. This will certainly garner Pakistan the respect and leadership it deserves as a global Asian and Muslim power.

    The Palestinian and Pakistani peoples need each other as vanguards against racism, military occupation and injustice. They must remain united at the forefront of this defining fight, no matter the sacrifices and the pressures. If Pakistan abandons this noble fight, the pain of this loss will be felt most deeply in the heart of every Palestinian, for generations to come.

    Pakistan, please do not validate apartheid; do not make military occupation normal.

    This article was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2021 at 10:53pm and is filed under Apartheid, Bahrain, China, Donald Trump, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Militarism, Morocco, Occupation, Pakistan, Palestine, Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Politics, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, United States, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • “Long Live the (Dead) Peace Process”: Abbas Prioritizes US Ties over Palestinian National Unity 

    No one seemed as excited about the election of Joe Biden being the next President of the United States as Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas. When all hope seemed lost, where Abbas found himself desperate for political validation and funds, Biden arrived like a conquering knight on a white horse and swept the Palestinian leader away to safety.

    Abbas was one of the first world leaders to congratulate the Democratic President-elect on his victory. While Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, delayed his congratulatory statement in the hope that Donald Trump would eventually be able to reverse the results, Abbas suffered no such illusions. Considering the humiliation that the Palestinian Authority experienced at the hands of the Trump Administration, Abbas had nothing to lose. For him, Biden, despite his long love affair with Israel, still represented a ray of hope.

    But can the wheel of history be turned back? Despite the fact that the Biden Administration has made it clear that it will not be reversing any of the pro-Israel steps taken by the departing Trump Administration, Abbas remains confident that, at least, the ‘peace process’ can be restored.

    This may seem to be an impossible dichotomy, for how can a ‘peace process’ deliver peace if all the components of a just peace have already been eradicated?

    It is obvious that there can be no real peace if the US government insists on recognizing all of Jerusalem as Israel’s ‘eternal’ capital. There can be no peace if the US continues to fund illegal Jewish settlements, bankroll Israeli apartheid, deny the rights of Palestinian refugees, turn a blind eye to de facto annexation under way in Occupied Palestine and recognize the illegally-occupied Syrian Golan Heights as part of Israel, all of which is likely to remain the same, even under the Biden Administration.

    The ‘peace process’ is unlikely to deliver any kind of a just, sustainable peace in the future, when it has already failed to do so in the past 30 years.

    Yet, despite the ample lessons of the past, Abbas has decided, again, to gamble with the fate of his people and jeopardize their struggle for freedom and a just peace. Not only is Abbas building a campaign involving Arab countries, namely Jordan and Egypt, to revive the ‘peace process’, he is also walking back on all his promises and decisions to cancel the Oslo Accords, and end ‘security coordination’ with Israel. By doing so, Abbas has betrayed national unity talks between his party, Fatah, and Hamas.

    Unity talks between rival Palestinian groups seemed to take a serious turn last July, when Palestine’s main political parties issued a joint statement declaring their intent to defeat Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’. The language used in that statement was reminiscent of the revolutionary discourse used by these groups during the First and Second Intifadas (uprisings), itself a message that Fatah was finally re-orienting itself around national priorities and away from the ‘moderate’ political discourse wrought by the US-sponsored ‘peace process’.

    Even those who grew tired and cynical about the shenanigans of Abbas and Palestinian groups wondered if this time would be different; that Palestinians would finally agree on a set of principles through which they could express and channel their struggle for freedom.

    Oddly, Trump’s four-year term in the White House was the best thing that happened to the Palestinian national struggle. His administration was a jarring and indisputable reminder that the US is not – and has never been – ‘an honest peace broker’ and that Palestinians cannot steer their political agenda to satisfy US-Israeli demands in order for them to obtain political validation and financial support.

    By cutting off US funding of the Palestinian Authority in August 2018, followed by the shutting down of the Palestinian mission in Washington DC, Trump has liberated Palestinians from the throes of an impossible political equation. Without the proverbial American carrot, the Palestinian leadership has had the rare opportunity to rearrange the Palestinian home for the benefit of the Palestinian people.

    Alas, those efforts were short-lived. After multiple meetings and video conferences between Fatah, Hamas and other delegations representing Palestinian groups, Abbas declared, on November 17, the resumption of ‘security coordination’ between his Authority and Israel. This was followed by the Israeli announcement on December 2 to release over a billion dollars of Palestinian funds that were unlawfully held by Israel as a form of political pressure.

    This takes Palestinian unity back to square one. At this point, Abbas finds unity talks with his Palestinian rivals quite useless. Since Fatah dominates the Palestinian Authority, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Palestine National Council (PNC), conceding any ground or sharing leadership with other Palestinian factions seems self-defeating. Now that Abbas is reassured that the Biden Administration will bequeath him, once again, with the title of ‘peace partner’, a US ally and a moderate, the Palestinian leader no longer finds it necessary to seek approval from the Palestinians. Since there can be no middle ground between catering to a US-Israeli agenda and elevating a Palestinian national agenda, the Palestinian leader opted for the former and, without hesitation, ditched the latter.

    While it is true that Biden will neither satisfy any of the Palestinian people’s demands or reverse any of his predecessor’s missteps, Abbas can still benefit from what he sees as a seismic shift in US foreign policy – not in favor of the Palestinian cause but of Abbas personally, an unelected leader whose biggest accomplishment has been sustaining the US-imposed status quo and keeping the Palestinian people pacified for as long as possible.

    Although the ‘peace process’ has been declared ‘dead’ on multiple occasions, Abbas is now desperately trying to revive it, not because he – or any rational Palestinian – believes that peace is at hand, but because of the existential relationship between the PA and this US-sponsored political scheme. While most Palestinians gained nothing from all of this, a few Palestinians accumulated massive wealth, power and prestige. For this clique, that alone is a cause worth fighting for.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2020 at 5:27pm and is filed under Apartheid, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, Egypt, Exploitation, Fatah, Hypocrisy, Israel/Palestine, Joe Biden, Jordan, Mahmoud Abbas, Occupation, Palestinian Authority, Peace Agreement, Politics, Propaganda, United States, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.