Volunteers from several chapters of the American Muslims for Palestine participated in nearly 50 meetings on Capitol Hill on April 13 and 14, 2015.
WASHINGTON — The American Muslims for Palestine, a national organization launched in 2005, held a rare event last Tuesday: a day of meetings with congressional staff in the U.S. Capitol to advocate for Palestine.
“Legislators have told us that they don’t hear from Palestinian Americans on Palestine, so we decided it was time to organize and start bringing the Palestinian narrative to the halls of Congress,” Kristin Szremski, AMP’s national director of media and communications, told MintPress News.
AMP members from across the country, as well as supporters from the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, met officials from a dozen congressional offices a day after joining the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations, to which AMP belongs, for a larger round of meetings.
USCMO’s efforts on April 13 targeted racial and other forms of profiling by law enforcement agencies, as well as youth violence, which participants sought to counter through stronger after-school programs.
These domestic issues are familiar ones on which a number of constituents regularly engage members of Congress, staff on Capitol Hill say.
But Palestine is a different story.
“Whenever Israel comes up as an issue, the pressure from its supporters can be pretty overwhelming,” a senior staffer for a Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told MintPress, asking not to be identified by name.
“I know Palestine is a popular issue, especially among students and other young people,” the staffer said. “But honestly, that’s from following the news. We haven’t heard as much from them here.”
“The unique position to effect change”
While supporters of Palestine often protest in the streets of the nation’s capital, the first “Palestine Advocacy Day” marked an unusual detour into the corridors of power.
“The movement is maturing,” Szremski said. “More and more organizations are realizing that the U.S. is in the unique position to affect change by holding Israel accountable for its continual violation of international law and Palestinians’ human rights by using billions of dollars in U.S. foreign military financing as leverage. Educating lawmakers is one way we can pressure Congress to create a more fair and balanced foreign policy.”
The United States currently sends Israel $3.1 billion annually in direct military aid alone, and total U.S. support had exceeded $130 billion by 2014, including nearly $100 billion in military aid. This funding occupies a unique position among the range of issues addressed by growing numbers of Palestine supporters.
Nearly every group in solidarity with Palestinians opposes the funding, either as an explicit position or, in many cases, one assumed to be too obvious to need a public statement. Pro-Palestine activists agree that U.S. military aid to Israel is the linchpin of foreign support for the occupation of Palestine, enabling its attacks on Palestinians more directly than any other international tie.
Yet, at the same time, few organizations have actively campaigned against it.
After the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee appealed in 2011 for world governments to impose a comprehensive military embargo on Israel, the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a national coalition, launched a campaign opposing the military aid.
While some local groups have participated in the campaign, typically through advertisements intended to heighten public awareness, many more have focused their efforts elsewhere, on campaigns for boycotts and divestments by universities, churches and other institutions.
Many activists explain these priorities by citing the need to pick winnable campaigns that will help to build a movement capable of successfully challenging U.S. aid in the long term.
Challenging impunity
But opinions on U.S. support for Israel are shifting quickly, especially inside the Democratic Party, whose delegates shouted down a resolution declaring occupied Jerusalem the capital of Israel at the 2012 Democratic National Convention.
When the proposed amendment to the party’s platform probably failed to win a simple majority, and clearly lacked the required two-thirds of votes, presiding chair Antonio Villaraigosa, then-mayor of Los Angeles, nevertheless declared it passed after three disastrous attempts.
With the relationship between the Israeli and U.S. governments souring since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attempts to block the Obama administration’s nuclear negotiations with Iran, followed by his unguarded campaign statements against Palestinian citizens of Israel and an end to the military occupation of Palestinian territory, and with support for Palestinians, especially among young Americans, growing rapidly, U.S. aid no longer seems as remote of a target.
And when AMP members challenged the impunity of Israeli military units receiving it last Tuesday, few Congressional staff appeared surprised.
Seeking plausible goals while also facing the political behemoth of organized Zionism, AMP pressed Congress for the U.S. to simply follow its own existing laws and policies.
Citing the “Leahy Law,” which prohibits aid to military and security units credibly alleged to have violated human rights, activists asked that the State Department apply the measure to Israeli units, as it has to their counterparts in Colombia, India, Pakistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
While these other recipients of U.S. military aid must carefully account for it, Israel receives its whopping share in a single annual payment, which it allocates among its forces.
This lack of transparency has helped it to dodge sanctions under the Leahy Law, even as claims against its troops have mounted and the bill’s author and namesake, Vermont Sen. Pat Leahy, has pressed for its application against them.
A coalition of groups led by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation successfully advocated for changes to the law in the 2014 Consolidated Appropriations Act. The strengthened measure requires the State Department to develop a database through which human rights groups can report offenses; triggers the law after a single gross human rights violation, rather than a pattern of them; and requires countries to take all necessary steps to hold their forces accountable, rather than merely starting the process, to avoid sanctions.
As documentation of the Palestinian toll from Israel’s 2014 military operation against the besieged Gaza Strip continues to grow, the current provisions, if consistently applied, could take a considerable bite out of Israel’s $3.1 billion in annual military aid.
“Interesting to see”
The AMP members also advocated a resolution affirming longstanding U.S. policy that Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal, and investigating charities that use their 501(c)(3) status to fund them at taxpayer expense.
The policy itself has never changed, but the language used publicly by U.S. officials has shifted. Many now call the settlements “illegitimate,” impeding U.S. responses to their illegal construction and confusing members of the public.
While unprepared to offer commitments, congressional staff could suggest few reasons the U.S. should disregard its own law or subsidize the violation of its policies.
“This was the first time we had planned an event like this,” Szremski said. “We feel it went off quite well.”
She added that AMP hopes to make “Palestine Advocacy Day” one of its core projects. “Next year, we hope to increase the event significantly.”
“This was a good start,” the Senate staffer, who declined to be named, said. “It’s unusual in this country to see a cause that has as much public activism, but as little political advocacy, as Palestine. It will be interesting to see how the transition to policy works.”