Jadaliyya Co-Editor, Noura Erakat, Co-Chairs the Report of the Independent Task Force on National Security Memorandum 20, Biden Administration to Submit its Report on 10 May 2024

Jadaliyya Co-Editor, Noura Erakat, Co-Chairs the Report of the Independent Task Force on National Security Memorandum 20, Biden Administration to Submit its Report on 10 May 2024

Jadaliyya Co-Editor, Noura Erakat, Co-Chairs the Report of the Independent Task Force on National Security Memorandum 20, Biden Administration to Submit its Report on 10 May 2024

By : Jadaliyya Reports
On February 8th, the Biden administration legislated National Security Memorandum 20 (NSM 20), a reporting requirement that mandates the Departments of State and Defense submit a report to Congress assessing the use of US-provided weapons by a recipient state engaged in conflict within 90 days of exacting assurances from that state. Failure to comply with US and international law, including impeding access to humanitarian aid, should trigger a suspension in the transfer of arms to the country. The deadline for the administration to release its report is 8 May 2024. 

Wary that the Biden administration has already failed to act on credible reports of similar violations committed by Israel, Jadaliyya Co-Editor, Noura Erakat, together with Josh Paul, former Director of Congressional & Public Affairs in the Bureau of Political- Military Affairs in the U.S. Department of State, a position from which he resigned in October 2023, created and co-chaired an Independent Task Force on NSM20 in order to do the administration’s homework, so to speak. The Task Force comprised of former State Department officials, military experts, legal experts, and a team of legal researchers, submitted their findings to the White House on 18 April 2024. The report details a number of clear, compelling, and credible incidents that should be included in the administration’s report to Congress, including 16-specific incidents that violate US and international law as well as an 18-paged appendix of additional incidents worthy of scrutiny. The Task Force found that based on its aggregate data, Israel systematically targeted civilians and civilian objects, including those that are indispensable for the survival of the civilian population due to the steady and sure flow of U.S. weapons, relaxed rules of engagement, and reliance on AI technology with little to no human oversight.  

The Task Force briefed members of the House and the Senate in closed door briefings. The Senate briefing included 13 Senators, which Senator Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) told the Huffington Post, “We had a total of 13 members — that’s more members than you get for a regular hearing in the United States Senate. So I think it was an expression of the depth of concern.” In a press conference on 17 April 2024, Erakat, explained that the Task Force was adding to  mounting and overwhelming evidence submitted to the administration so that it had no excuse not to submit a robust report to Congress. “They can even submit the report that we wrote,” she added. Failure to do so would further reveal the Biden administration’s commitment to war against Palestinians, even in blatant violation of its own law. 

 

Media

Up Front With Marc Lamont Hill on Al Jazeera English: Arming genocide? New report documents use of US arms in Israeli war crimes | UpFront

France 24: Biden administration 'ignoring US laws' on arms transfers to Israel: Ex-senior official

VOA: US military aid to Israel under scrutiny as Biden signs $26 billion in new assistance

Politico: Van Hollen concerned over upcoming report on weapons for Israel 

AP: Another ex-State Department official alleges Israeli military gets ‘special treatment’ on abuses

MEE: War on Gaza: Israel violating international and humanitarian law with US weapons, task force says

Responsible Statecraft: Israel violating US and international law, ex officials say

Just Security (Co-authored op-ed with Josh Paul): Report of the Independent Task Force on National Security Memorandum-20 Regarding Israel

National Security Daily: Ukraine aid debate is over — for now

DOS Press Briefing: Department Press Briefing – April 24, 2024 

Forbes Magazine: What If The State Department Was Allowed To Do Its Job On Israel And Gaza? 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412