Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2021, pp. 48-51
2021 Conference Magazine
By Brian Baird
I WANT TO BEGIN MY remarks by stepping back in history to the early days of the Gaza invasion which is, if you recall, Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009). A few days into that there was a picture of three little boys. At the time my wife had just started our family, kind of late, and we had two twin boys who were about three-and-a-half. And there was a picture of three very small Palestinian boys lying down on a rug. If you just glance at it, you might think, oh, how precious that is. Those are wonderful little boys and they’re sleeping. Except that when you look further at the picture, there was a father beside them with his head in his arms and his hands in abject grief because those three little boys were dead. They had been killed by an American-made munition dropped by an American-made aircraft, by a country that we considered an ally.
When I saw that picture, I determined that I needed to go to Gaza personally. I reached out to my dear friend Keith Ellison who was a former member of Congress, now the Attorney General of Minnesota. Keith was thinking the same thing. The two of us decided that, first chance we would get, we would go to Gaza. No American elected official had been to Gaza in eight years. There were some incredibly courageous Americans working for UNRWA, Mercy Corps and other relief agencies in the field in the middle of the bombing. But we were the first Americans to go. Then John Kerry on a separate mission went in at the same time.
When we got to Gaza, it was a dysphoric day. The wind was blowing. The sand was in the air, very cold, and there was a yellow hue in the sky as the sand obliterated the light. Everywhere we looked there were blown up and destroyed buildings. We visited water treatment facilities that had been destroyed. We visited sewage treatment plants that had been destroyed. We visited bread-making factories that had been destroyed.
We went to al-Quds Hospital. At the top floor of al-Quds Hospital—I’m a clinical neuropsychologist by training. I work with people with disabilities and brain injuries. The top floor was this spectacularly beautiful resource for young children. It had Disney characters on the wall. There was Goofy and Minnie and Mickey Mouse. There were pits full of the plastic balls that kids can play in and all the therapeutic tools you can imagine. A wonderful facility except that it had been burned and almost completely destroyed by a white phosphorus bomb, which is contrary to international law. But white phosphorus bombs were dropped on a hospital or near enough to a hospital to incinerate that hospital and that resource for the kids.
Keith and I visited the mental health programs in Gaza where they talked about the trauma, how it affects children to hear rockets and bombs, and see tanks and see their parents being carted away without due process constantly, and wondering when they are going to die or their parents are going to be killed.
As you saw in the picture there, we also visited the American International School. This was a marvelous institution that taught an American curriculum. The kids were getting a fairly progressive education. The school had actually been criticized by Hamas because they were considered too western and too liberal. But it was an American-based curriculum in a lovely school. It, too, had been destroyed, tragically taking the life of the watchman who had been there to try to secure it as best he could. But he couldn’t secure anything against 500-pound bombs.
In the rubble of the American school, Keith Ellison and I walked around. I saw something that looked familiar in the rubble. Sure enough I took out a book and, as life would have it, that particular book I dug out was the Jackie Robinson story. The story of the first prominent Black American baseball player.
I opened it up. It was a teacher’s edition. I knew that because it had lots of sticky notes with markings. I just randomly opened it up. There was a passage that was highlighted and the teacher’s sticky note said what about this passage teaches you the meaning of prejudice. That was in the rubble of the American school. How fitting to connect that today to our discussion of apartheid.
I especially want to compliment the brilliant Susan Abulhawa for her insightful presentation summarizing the parallels between apartheid in South Africa and what unquestionably goes on in Israel today. I say unquestionably because, if you question it all, you get criticized as our prior speaker Walter Hixson just pointed out, as have others.
But finding that book in the rubble of Gaza was not the first time I had seen American weapons and American equipment used against civilians. Six years prior to that a wonderful young constituent of mine named Rachel Corrie was crushed to death beneath an American-made bulldozer for the audacious act of standing in front of the bulldozer to try to save a Palestinian home from destruction. They drove a bulldozer over her, put the blade down, backed up over top of her and scarcely cared about what happened to her.
When I tried to launch an investigation of this and introduced a congressional resolution, we were steadily blocked initially by Israel, by our own State Department and Congress to a large degree with some notable and courageous exceptions, I will say. There were some members of the State Department who did their best to help us out and I commend them. But within the Congress, instead of supporting a fellow member of Congress whose constituent has been killed by an ally and is simply requesting an investigation, a counter resolution was offered calling for an investigation of Americans who died due to terrorist attacks. Everyone flooded to that, but scarcely half a dozen people or so signed on to the investigation of Rachel Corrie, and Israel stonewalled it. I’ll talk more about that in a moment.
LESSON FROM THE “GOLDSTONE REPORT”
So you might say, well, how can this happen? An instructive lesson comes from what happened to the “Goldstone Report.” Justice Goldstone, as many of you know, a distinguished South African Jewish individual, was commissioned to conduct an investigation of Operation Cast Lead. I read his report twice front to back, the entire thing, and found it thoroughly consistent with what Keith and I had seen not only on one visit to Gaza. We made multiple visits to Gaza and to the West Bank. And for the record, we also visited the Israeli city of Sderot and other villages that had been rocketed from Gaza—launched rockets as well.
When the “Goldstone Report” came out, almost immediately there was a resolution introduced by the U.S. Congress to condemn the report. First of all, many of us said, well, let’s invite Justice Goldstone to come to Congress to explain his report. Perhaps not surprisingly, that offer was not taken up. When the vote came to the floor, I went to the floor and said something to the effect of the following:
Many of my colleagues today are about to come to this well of this House of Representatives and vote on a resolution that they have never read, about a report that they have never read, and about a place that they have never been. Yet most people who’ll do that will not seek to ask any of us who have been there, have read the report, have seen the evidence what it really means.
Sure enough, once the vote was called, members of Congress came to the floor of the House. We vote with little cards we stick in an electronic slot. We press yes, no, or present. You come in and people will look up at the board which illustrates what the content of the current vote is. You could hear people say, “AIPAC wants a yes on this vote.” Why yes? Because the vote was on condemning this report that people haven’t read. People wouldn’t necessarily say what’s in the report, what happened in Gaza, what is the resolution itself. They would just nod their head once they heard AIPAC is for it and they would vote yes on a resolution.
There were many, about three dozen I believe, courageous members of Congress who voted no on the resolution which is incredibly fraught with risks as an elected official in America. On top of that, there were several others who just did not attend the proceedings that day. But what does that tell you? What it tells you is members of Congress are willing to vote on things they haven’t read simply because an advocacy group tells them to vote that way even if what was done and what was being condemned by the resolution is contrary to American values and American foreign policy and domestic policy interests.
One of the other things I found remarkable in this experience was what happens when you confront members of the Israeli government with the evidence of the atrocities that had been committed in Gaza and also the abuses of human rights within the West Bank and within Israel proper against Palestinian residents of Israel. What I found was fascinating. The initial response of many pro-Israeli advocates domestically—I’m going to talk about that word, “pro-Israel,” in just a second. But the initial response is to assume that members of Congress must all support Israel because, after all, that’s what we assumed that we should do.
But it’s not just assumed that we all support Israel. It is assumed we will do so without question. We will just take what we’re told at face value, accept it, and vote as we are told or asked in polite terms without questioning it and without disagreement. If you begin to question, some interesting things happen. You are often looked at in somewhat of a condescending and patronizing way. As if you just don’t understand the issue. So the counter so-called evidence will be presented against what your question was about. But if you’ve really studied it, then you’re able to say, you know, I’ve heard that argument before but the evidence here says something else. Having been to Gaza, having been to the West Bank, we had a perspective that most members didn’t.
So then there is that kind of sense of, well, there are other sides to the story and perhaps there are things you are unaware of often, said in a condescending way. You’re just not informed. You’re just misguided. It will all work out. If you continue to press, something deeply troubling happens. If you press hard enough on many people within the Israeli administration, you encounter something rather shocking. Disdain. Disdain not just for those of us asking the question, but disdain for the United States of America itself. Disdain in several ways. One, look, what Israel does is no worse than what you did. You had launched the genocide against the tribes. We can do what we want to do. Listen, you don’t understand. You don’t understand the Holocaust. You don’t understand the neighborhood we’re in. So don’t tell us what to do. Literally the tone of voice takes the kind of tone of voice I’m using.
The rhetoric is often harsher than that and the consistent message is, implicitly, we are happy to take your money. Lots of it, billions of dollars a year. And we’re happy to take your weapons. But don’t you dare question anything we do. That is the underlying tone and it is disdain for America. To be honest, to a portion that disdain is justified. Why is it justified? Because the Israeli government knows and its advocates in the United States know that they can control members of Congress. And that is something possibly worthy of disdain.
How do they control this? This is not pleasant to say and I’m sorry to say it. As an American, as a patriot, as a person who represents his country and took an oath to defend the Constitution, I am profoundly sorry to say this. But you can categorize some of the things that guide decisions in Congress. They all begin with M. The first M is money. Anybody who says that money helps influence outcomes of votes regarding Israel is immediately branded anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic, both, or worse. That’s not true. It’s just simply reality.
Enormous amounts of money come into American political campaigns. Specific events are held where members of Congress are invited to express their fealty to Israel. I’ve had it happen. I know people who supported me and on almost every major domestic issue we were consonant. How did they feel about pro-environmental protection; how did they feel about women’s rights and women’s health? We’re consistent with that. How did we feel about education opportunities, how do we feel about mental health?
But for having stood up and asked for an investigation into the death/murder of my constituent at the hands of an Israeli bulldozer driver, those same people who supported me on almost every other issue no longer supported me financially in my reelection campaigns because I asked for the investigation of a constituent who had been murdered by our allies. So the first M is money.
The second M is mythology. People believe almost unquestioning the sort of David and Goliath myth, the beleaguered Israelis being besieged by all of the Arab nations.
On top of that, there is willful ignorance—if you will, a word for another M—an intentional myopia or intentional misunderstanding of what is actually happening on the ground. I took one colleague to the region where he heard about Israeli detention of youths taken from their homes in the middle of the night, without legal representation, without due process.
He heard this and he heard about the abuse of the Palestinians, the confiscation and destruction of olive groves, the sharpshooters assassinating peaceful protesters in Gaza, the blockade, the kind of things that we’ve heard about so eloquently before. He was overwhelmed with the reality that was disconsonant with the mythology he had come to believe and he just couldn’t accept it. There was almost a mental breakdown and a moment of, wait a minute, if all you’re saying is true, then my unquestioning acceptance of Israeli policy is problematic.
So then there is another M. I think that’s malfeasance. If a member of Congress unquestioningly supports something a lobby asks for, and part of the calculus is the financial contribution of the lobby, that’s malfeasance. Your first and most important priority is what is consistent with the United States Constitution and what is consistent with the values of our country. I will tell you the actions of Israel and the policies that Susan Abulhawa raised earlier are not consistent with our Constitution and not in our best interest.
On that front, let me say we should never use the words “pro-Israel” lobby. Because the actions of people who demand unquestioning obedience to Israel, even when its policies are anti-democratic, anti-human rights, inconsistent with our interests, they are also not pro-Israel because it is not good for Israel to engage in this kind of behavior. We cannot call it pro-Israel to blindingly accept policies that are counterproductive, counter our own Constitution, and counter international law and respect for human rights.
Finally, there is another M which is shocking to me. It’s millenarianism. Meaning the belief that we must support Israel in order to bring about the biblical end of times at which point virtually all the Jewish people as well as non-believing and non-Jewish people will burn in hell forever. While a small select group of people, the evangelical Christians in this model and the few Jews who convert to evangelism, will suddenly be whisked off to heaven.
Believe it or not, a portion of the United States Congress bases its domestic and foreign policy around the desire to see the end of the world occur. How ironic it is that if in our country you say, you know what, money influences American politics. That is considered anathema and something you should never say. But if you say our politics should lead to the end of the world, that’s perfectly fine. And it is somehow used to defend whatever Israel wants to do.
Let me close with a couple of thoughts. First of all, while I am strong in my belief that we have to be critical about Israeli policy, we haven’t spoken about it in this conference yet today. But there are many other countries in the region who are also richly deserving of opprobrium, disdain, criticism and investigation. While we must criticize Israel, we must also be equally ardent in our criticism and review of the policies of these other nations.
Brian Baird is a former Democratic U.S. Representative for Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, who served from 1999 to 2011. Baird entered politics in 1998 for the same reason he went into the field of clinical psychology: to answer the call to service. As a congressman, Baird traveled to Gaza five times, and was deeply disturbed by the destruction wrought by Israel’s relentless attacks on the besieged territory. Rep. Baird called on the U.S. State Department to investigate the death of his constituent, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old student who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in 2003. After leaving Congress, Baird served as president of Antioch University’s Seattle campus until 2015, and continues to contribute op-eds to The Seattle Times.
