Omar Yousef Shehabi: 7 Questions on Palestine

Join us for an insightful conversation with Omar Yousef Shehabi, an acting assistant professor at NYU School of Law and a JSD candidate at Yale Law School. With a wealth of experience working as a legal officer for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and other international organizations, Omar provides a unique perspective on the complexities and challenges faced by Palestinian refugees.

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Well, if the U.S. were serious about a two state solution and this administration believes that settlements are a principal, if not the principal obstacle to a two state solution, why are you reserving these travel bans and financial penalties only to violent settlers? This is not to forgive, but to understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Today we are joined by Omar Yousef Shehabi, assistant professor at New York University School of Law and Doctor of Juridical Science, candidate at Yale Law School with extensive experience in international law and human rights. He previously served as a legal officer with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Given your background and your work in history with UNWRA, the U.N. relief agency for Palestinian refugees in the Near East, can you share your insights and your experience with UNWRA as it has been very prominent in the news currently? Sure. Would you like to know what I did for UNWRA first? Absolutely. Okay. So I was a legal officer. The full name, by the way, is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. And the works part is is important, and I'll come on to why that's the case. But I was a legal officer for UNWRA on three separate occasions once in the West Bank field office, once in the Gaza field office, and once in the headquarters legal office. And my experience working for UNWRA was an entirely positive one, deeply meaningful for me because I am Palestinian myself. And I think really having worked also in the UN Secretariat, I think that UNWRA is a very lean organization that gets a lot done with an unstable funding base with 99% local Palestinian staff, of whom over 90% are refugees themselves, and that that component, the the works program, putting refugees to work in service of the refugees, providing their health care and their education, and the relief and social services it is unique in the U.N. and and is one of the things that would be lost if the functions of UNWRA were reassigned to other U.N. actors or other humanitarian actors, as there is some pressure to move in that direction. Do you have anything to say about the controversy recently regarding that organization? I have a lot to say about it. Well, let's start with the the allegation. And I believe it's still an allegation because my understanding from the report of the former French foreign minister who has been mandated to investigate allegations of involvement of UNRWA Staff in acts of terrorism, and in October the seventh in particular, and more broadly of membership or involvement with Hamas or other Islamic organizations or militant organizations, I believe all of that is heretofore unsubstantiated. Now, there have been audio recordings released that I've heard so some of them may well be credible. And I'm not trying to I'm not trying to minimize the severity of these allegations. If UNRWA staff members were, as is reported, involved in the acts of October the seventh, and without question, they should be they should be disciplined. But to impute UNWRA has something like 13,000 local Palestinian staff in Gaza, right, the vast majority of whom are teachers to impute, to punish, I should say, the 80% of the population of Gaza who are 1948 refugees and who really who receive primary health care, primary education and related social services from UNRWA to punish them for the acts of 12 individuals allegedly would be unconscionable. And, you know, members of the US Congress have said exactly that to the broader point, or I should say the broader allegation that a substantial percentage of UNWRA staff members belong to Hamas, whatever that means. They're card carrying members of a political party, but that a fair percentage of UNRWA's staff in Gaza may support Hamas and whatever that means, that would to me be an unremarkable proposition. You know, Hamas, whether you like them or not, I don't personally is a is a part of the Palestinian political fabric. And only one of our main political parties, that's the Fatah Party, which is the party that governs the pockets of the West Bank in the context of the Israeli occupation. Only Fatah is not banned by the US and the EU as a terrorist organization. The parties of the left, like the Popular Front Liberation of Palestine, also designated a terrorist organization. And so most of the Palestinian political spectrum has been proscribed, right, with the exception of Fatah. So you have the parties of the left, which are small at this point in time, not like they were historically, and you probably associate them most closely with the the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Right. And also to refocus the point of contestation around 1948, not just the occupation, but the overall dominance of Jewish Israelis over Arab Palestinians throughout mandatory Palestine. The center, if you will, is Fatah this is the party of negotiations, of diplomatic and legal maneuvers to try to pressure Israel to resume negotiations and to reach a two state solution. I worked on the last round of negotiations in 2013-14. That's a decade ago. Those negotiations never got far and were, in retrospect, fairly unserious. And so it's not a surprise to me or shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the path of negotiations is a fairly discredited one amongst the Palestinians. And then you have the path of armed resistance, and that's exemplified by Hamas and Islamic Jihad and these other militant organizations. So, Omar, you're talking about all of these different political factions within Palestine. And, you know, of course, they have different motives in this war. And I think one of my priorities is to be able to like, present this the complexity involved this war. For instance, we don't even we don't just have to parties here. We don't just have the Israelis on the Palestinian side, since you're speaking to us about Palestine and you know Palestine so well, I want you to be able to like tell us give us an overview about how the country's divided, not just, for instance, in the way you presented Hamas and Fatah, but also the people. Would you tell us a little bit about their allegiances and how they're divided about this war. About the war in particular. The war and basically probably what's been going on in terms of the conflicts, because, of course, we are we have a long history of conflicts in those lands. So if you could give us, for instance, an overview of how you see people divided over all of these big questions up to now. And I know this is a gargantuan task, but if you could like just give us a bit of an overview for the audience to understand the complexity involved. Yeah, it is a huge question and I will try my best to avoid delving too far back into history because our current fragmentation as Palestinians is pretty simple to understand. Historically, we have divides between urban people and rural folks. Some level of sectarianism, although not much, I would say, relative to other spaces in the Middle East. But today it's very much geography, right? In the Oslo Accords from 1993, the West Bank and Gaza are designated as a single territorial unit. That is the internationally accepted self-determination unit. The Palestinian people including East Jerusalem, which is part of the West Bank. The reality is most residents of the West Bank cannot enter Jerusalem except with a permit issued by the Israeli military in Gaza since 2007 has been effectively sealed off from the West Bank. So whereas once upon a time Gazans could go and study at universities in the West Bank and vice versa, that isn't possible anymore. And then of course, the refugees in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan cannot enter the West Bank or Jordan. Jordan, a bit of a special case, but certainly Lebanese and Syrian refugees cannot enter the Palestine refugees in Lebanon and Syria cannot enter the occupied Palestinian territory. So we have a physical fragmentation and that means that each segment of the Palestinian body politic will leave aside the diaspora, The wider diaspora from it has been left to develop its own homeostatic existence. Right? So I worked in Gaza in 2017 and 18 and Gaza was the place of a lot of privation certainly, but it was also a space that was free of an overt Israeli presence and in contradistinction to the West Bank where you can't go anywhere without coming across a settlement or a checkpoint or a military presence. So very different realities even within the occupied Palestinian territory and then very different experiences amongst the refugee population as well. The majority of Palestinian refugees in Jordan have Jordanian citizenship, whereas Palestinians in Lebanon, for instance, can't hold most professional jobs, which are reserved only for Lebanese and certain of the Palestinian refugee camps. There is no internal law and order. So Lebanese security forces maintain a perimeter or a cordon around the camp. But they don't they don't police the camp themselves. So the situation for refugees in Lebanon is especially dire. What about the Palestinians in terms of it is in Israel? Palestinians in Israel, right. Sorry, there are about 22% of the population of Israel. The majority of them identify as Palestinian citizens of Israel, not as not of as Arab-Israelis or other forms of identification Historically, they, from the establishment of Israel, 1948 until 1966, the Palestinian citizens lived under military rule, so they needed permits from the military to move. You know, in the mid to late 2000s, there was a push for a democratic constitution for Israel that would enshrine democratic citizenship not on the basis of Jewish or Arab identity. That was rejected by a majority of Israelis, which believe that Israel is a state of the Jewish people and not a state of its citizens. And since that time you have seen the proliferation of laws that entrench the Jewish character of the state at the expense of democratic institutions and democratic ideals. The second class status of Palestinian citizens of Israel has degraded over time, certainly over the past 20 years, the status of Palestinians in Israel have, who have never had distributive equality, increasingly have less and less status equality as well. So this fragmentation that you're talking about, I need to now jump to a very different place because we have a diaspora of Palestinians, too. And what I've been reading is along the lines of explaining how Palestinians. So let’s just speak about American Palestinians, because of course, you are familiar with that category as well. And they have their own views, too, about the ongoing war or about the past. And what I've been reading, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but and this is not just about Palestinians, but all survivors of genocide or mass atrocities in general, that the immediate victims, the immediate survivors of a genocide tend to be a bit more subdued, usually in terms of recounting whatever happened. And they tend to just shy away from discussing the matter in more and takes a lot for them to start writing about it. The second generation, however, that is, you know, the generation that comes after that is their descendants. They tend to be a bit more vociferous and as you go down the generations, the more removed it seems the descendants of survivors are, the other generations that come thereafter, they tend to become even more militant about what's going on. So what's been your experience of this and do you think there is any truth in what I just said? I do. What I would say about the Palestinian diaspora is that some of us and I would include myself in this category, have the luxury of shedding our Palestinian-ess, I was born in the US American citizenship by birth. A native English speaker, and if I chose to assimilate, I would have no trouble in doing so. If I had been born in Kuwait, for instance, as a Palestinian national, de facto stateless. But I could live and work my entire life in Kuwait, and this is true of all the Gulf countries really work my whole life. There, never acquire citizenship. And at the time of my retirement, I would be told you have 60 or 90 days to leave the country right? So there is no shedding of citizenship in parts of the world. So and I'm speaking entirely anecdotally here right in my circles, and it's a self-selecting circle because these are Palestinian Americans, Palestinian British, Palestinian Danish, you name it, who have decided to commit their energies towards working on the question of Palestine and working towards its resolution. The majority of my cousins, okay, they they feel an affinity for the Palestinian people, but they don't want they haven't devoted their lives to it. They're not they're not seeking out the cause. This generation, I am safe in saying, doesn't shy away from identifying as Palestinian like we certainly the generation before mine and maybe my generation where it may have been expedient to say I'm Middle Eastern, I'm Arab, you know, without specificity, I don't see that. But for those who and to your point, for those who do decide to commit their energies to the Palestinian cause, to the question of Palestine, then yes, I would say that they are all of the energy now is, as I mentioned, focus on returning to the original sin, right to the dispossession in exile the Palestinians in 1948 and hostilities that gave rise to the establishment of Israel and not to focus on simply the occupation as a an aberration that can be solved. If Israel were to withdraw from the occupied territory. Yeah, but that and I think that's the way I think that's a well-founded conclusion, because having worked on the last negotiations, Palestinian minimum requirements or minimum standards for a two state solution and Israeli maximum concessions in the direction of a two state solution are miles apart. So I think this generation of you, if you find them to be more vociferous or more militant, I would say it's only because they are they're paying attention to the facts and the details right. The just to take the the United States government, the Biden administration, its theory of the case is incoherent. And I think I think most well, most Americans who pay attention and certainly most of the young Americans who pay very close attention, see that. So just to give you an example, the Biden administration in the course of this attack on Gaza has banned or issued travel bans and financial sanctions on violent settlers or settler leaders in the West Bank. Well, if the U.S. were serious about a two state solution and this administration believes that settlements are a principal, if not the principal obstacle to a two state solution, why are you reserving these travel bans and financial penalties only to violent settlers? Why do they have to maim or kill Palestinians to be an obstacle to peace? Right. Their presence in the occupied territory, according to the administration's own theory of the case, their presence is the obstacle to peace. I think that young, younger folks, you know, the folks of a generation younger than mine who are active on the question of Palestine, see that? Recognize that the United States and also the states of the European Union are not good faith Actors do not have a program to get to their avowed objective of two states and have abandoned that as as the goal. And that was never a goal that was rooted in justice. That was a goal that was rooted in expedience. Nothing wrong, nothing wrong with expedience if you can get there. Right. I mean, I'm not I'm a pragmatist and I'm a small C conservative. I try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, but the good is not attainable. You mentioned the Biden administration's approach to sanctioning some Israeli settlers, as well as the Biden administration, cutting off aid to UNRWA to return back to the discussion of it. And and I was wondering if you can go ahead and comment on the recent reports that have been coming out in regards to the confessionals that UNWRA employees or other workers have given that may have been done so under duress and torture. Sure. And let me just say, as I should have said earlier, when speaking about UNWRA, that I don't work for UNWRA any longer and my positions are not those of the organization or the broader United Nations. I have seen those reports. I believe the commissioner general, the head of UNWRA himself said that the evidence that he has seen suggest that these some of these confessions, at least, were elicited by torture. You know, there is a a long and inglorious history of the use of methods of interrogation by the Israeli security forces that Israel's own judicial system has found to be, you know, tantamount to to torture. So I wouldn't I wouldn't be surprised by that. And I also wouldn't be surprised if subsequent to October the seventh, you've heard a fair amount of testimony by Israeli soldiers who have served in the most recent the ongoing military campaign, who have said, in essence, that the rules of engagement have been liberalized almost in the spirit of vengeance relative to prior military campaigns. So I wouldn't be surprised if the methods of interrogation have similarly been loosened as occurred in the United States after after September 11th. And that's part of the American inglorious legacy of torture as well. So what is it that you have experienced? And I think this is something that's important a question to you, because we're scholars here, and I often wonder the question, what what is all of this scholarship about? Where is it going towards in dealing with the ongoing conflicts, in dealing with the long debates about the Israel and Palestine question? My question then to you is because you've had some experience dealing with organizations at the practical level. What was your experience dealing with them where they tried to to solve the Israel and Palestine question? Do you think there is hope in them? Do you feel skeptical about their ongoing working in modus operandi? When the current Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, when he came into office in 2005, he said the alternative to negotiations is negotiations. In other words, the this is sort of in contradistinction to Arafat with his you know, I have an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter going in the other at the same well committed exclusively to the path of negotiations. And if we fail, we will just try again. So that was 2005. Yasser Arafat died in November 2004. Abbas became president in January 2005. So we are about to enter the almost the 20th year of his four year term. And in that time, there have been two rounds of negotiations in 2007-8, and in 2013-14. Whereas, the 2007-8 negotiations were somewhat substantive, although less than the the negotiations that were conducted at the end of the Clinton administration at Camp David and Taba, the 2013-14 negotiations on which I worked, in theory at least, were not substantive at all, or they were maybe that's uncharitable. They were substantive as between two parties as between Israel and the United States, in essence, standing in as a proxy for Palestinian interests and frontloading negotiations on on security issues. And then the the U.S. team headed by an American general which negotiated with the Israelis on behalf of the Palestinians then put the outcome of that to the Palestinian leadership and said, here's what we've negotiated on your behalf as regards the security, now we can move on to other issues like territory and refugees and water and Jerusalem. And that approach got nowhere. But the Palestinians were never really engaged in the negotiations. In 2013-14 other than to be presented with an American fait accompli and said, take it or leave it. And there's a reason why the Americans are that way, trying to resolve, trying to avoid the pitfalls in the last negotiation. But I don't I don't believe that there's any horizon for for negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. And so in so far as the current strategy of the Palestinian leadership is to sort of replicate the strategy of forcing South Africa to withdraw from Namibia, that is very much is the playbook. We can discuss that at length if you want. I think that is the right strategy. There's no negotiation that can be had from the place of historic weakness of the Palestinians currently occupied. Now, in theory, the United States, which has tremendous leverage over Israel, but is tragically afraid to exercise that as is being shown in the current horrors in Gaza. In theory, the U.S. could address the power imbalance by making demands of Israel and by conditioning military aid and diplomatic support on on Israel meetings, certain minimum standards for a Palestinian state. But that's not going to happen on 25 years of evidence. That's not going to happen. And so while the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinian government in the West Bank is unpopular and perhaps even discredited entirely, its strategy right now is, in my estimation, the right strategy, right. I wish there were more consistency in in following that strategy. There haven't been There have been unnecessary concessions made. There have been mistakes made. But, no, I don't believe that there's a political horizon now for negotiations and, you know, again, politics for the Palestinians is not based on infrastructure or schools or, you know, tax policy. It is based on subjugation or steps towards liberation. Right. And as we've discussed, there's only a certain number of routes or strategies one can pursue towards liberation. And if you are an average Palestinian and then you've seen the bankruptcy of 20 years or 25 years of negotiations, it would be insane to believe that the same strategy is going to yield dividends going forward. And most virtually all Palestinians don't, which is why when you see public polling of the Palestinian leadership, it's in, you know, low to mid single digits. So my question is now about how the scholarly community, generally speaking, I don’t want to make a generalization, but based on a lot of the articles I've been reading, the commentaries by them, they seem to have given up on the two state solution. And then sometimes it has. Well, when I say that, I also do have to mention that I do still see popping up on and off, but based on what you have, you have experience your commentaries just now on the practical realities of these organizations that have obviously failed in achieving their objectives is why we're here now. My question is again, probably going to be oriented towards now the future with all of the failings of these these activities, these organizations, these negotiations. And with the G-question right in front of us right now, the genocide question, what is your opinion about how we should move forward right now in terms of solving the problem? I would I would say two things. Two state solution is not a is not a single possible outcome. Right. Two state solution can mean any number of things, any number of in particular confederal arrangements. Right. So there could be a an Israeli-Palestinian confederal. And don't forget the partition plan of 1947. The General Assembly's partition plan was, in essence, a confederation. It was an Arab state and a Jewish state with an international zone for Jerusalem, with guaranteed rights for Jews who would remain in the Arab state and for Arabs would remain in the Jewish state, linked together by a customs union with free movement between them. You know what's old is new again. And you see a lot of promising thought and movement building around a confederal arrangement. Now, now, it seems in these genocidal times that may seem far fetched, but I would say I would suggest to you that it's no more far fetched than the idea of two states along the traditional model that was anticipated under the Oslo Accords of two separated states. Right. With, you know, with your normal sort of attributes of sovereignty. I, I don't think that that is a promising model anymore, principally. And that, of course, I'm a partizan, but principally because there is no I can't envisage an Israeli government in in 2024 or 2034 or 2044 that would ever agree to that. I mean, the population of settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is about 700,000 people now that is roughly 10% of the Jewish population of Israel. That block of settlers and their leadership play a kingmaker role in any Israeli government now. And the folks who lead the ideological wing of the settler movements, they and this is from the mouth of my of my Israeli friends and colleagues, they don't think of themselves as politicians. They think of themselves as biblical heroes. So if you were to ask these folks, Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, you know, how does it how does it end if we if we colonize the entirety of the West Bank and even reconstitute settlements in Gaza, and then we consign these the Palestinians to these archipelago, this archipelagic existence of the major Palestinian cities, you know, hemmed in by settlements. How how are we going to rule that in a way that isn't apartheid? And the answer of these folks is to point up and to say God will resolve it, you know, And if it means expulsion to Jordan, potentially, if it means some messianic war, so be it. But this is land promised to the Jewish people and we will. So these people are not these people on the far right. They this is something that my friends try to impress upon me they don't think as normal politicians. Right. They're taking preparatory steps for a messianic solution. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there will be a coalition that can form a government in Israel and exclude the far right. But I have trouble seeing it. So I think, Omar, you mentioned the apartheid, and I just want to speak from an audience perspective of things and I only started I mean, you know, I'm privy of course to the news. I don't have any direct connection with Israel and Palestine, but there are many terms now that we're struggling with, we're struggling with. We're trying to define these terms. For instance, we're trying to like write elaborate articles about what these tools mean and how they're misconstrued. So the fight between the war between Israel and Palestine and, you know, many, many terms have emerged. Zionism, anti-Semitism. We have also this controversy about the use or the reference of the of the Holocaust to whatever happened October seventh. And of course, on the Palestinian side, they're referring to the Nakba many times in a repetition of that. There's a new term that which we're using, which is what you mentioned, apartheid. So what do you what do you feel about the use and the circulation of these terms by the public, by the journalists, by the political factions involved? Any thoughts? I have no issue with the use of apartheid in this context. Apartheid is yes, it has. It elicits memories of South Africa. It has it comes from the Afrikaners language, but it's part of English as part of the International part of international law. Right. There is an apartheid convention, 1971. And so, look, genocide was not a concept in existence prior to Rafael Lemkin Right. So legal concepts are created and they may elicit memories of particular episodes in history. Right. But the, you know, the Turkish persecution of mass murder of Armenians was a genocide, although there was not a term yet coined for for that phenomenon. Right. And so there doesn't need to be complete analogy to South Africa for the situation in the combined space of Israel, Palestine to be a situation of apartheid. Now, we can we can debate and people on my side do debate whether the situation of apartheid exists only within the occupied Palestinian territory in the West Bank, specifically, where you have two national or racial groups living under two sets of laws with very different freedom of movement and and the like, or whether the entirety of Israel Palestine, including the condition of Palestinian citizens of Israel, is also part of that, whether in the entirety of mandatory Palestine or Israel, whether the the condition of Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs in that entire space is one of apartheid. Could you enlighten us a little bit about how similar you think the conditions are in Palestine, in the occupied territory and how different the from the apartheid we knew in South Africa? Well, I should I should give the caveat that I'm not an expert on apartheid South Africa, but I do think there is a similarity between the the past laws in South Africa and the lived reality that I experienced living in the West bank. And don't forget, I worked for the U.N., so I drove a unmarked car with a diplomatic a U.N. license plate which has diplomatic privileges, which means I breezed through every checkpoint in the West Bank. Libraries breeze in and out of Jerusalem. The cars, and stopped when, however, I was driving my private car. Very different experience right now. I had a car with the Israeli license plates, which are yellow, but I was stopped at a checkpoint, speak my broken checkpoint Hebrew, they called it. They would know that I was an Israeli Jew. I and then, you know, there was more questioning. The car would be inspected, opened the boot, opened the hood, step out. Where you going? These sorts of things. If I were a Palestinian with a West Bank I.D., it is this is not a Jerusalem ID, not an Israeli ID, but the Palestinian citizens have I would not be allowed out. I would not be allowed into Jerusalem and I would not be allowed into into Israel. Right. So I'd have a white plated car and that would that would restrict me to the Palestinian road network and it would prevent me from entering Israel. And it would also not allow me to use certain checkpoints, even where I could cross. There are certain places I could go. So there is very much a a border between the West Bank and Israel for for Arab Palestinians, there is no border for settlers or for Israelis. Right. And in fact, the settlements are serviced, especially the larger settlement blocks are serviced by these newly constructed three and four lane highways, which give uninterrupted access to and from Israel. Right. So for the settlers, there is no border. So the last time we spoke, you did mention something particular about the identity of the the people of Gaza. And you also spoke about how they excelled in certain domains. And I think this is something that that struck me because I don't think we think about this as outsiders and outsiders because, as I said, I'm not connected directly to Palestine and Israel. But I was really marked by what you said in terms of the struggles they go through. And I also want you to talk about, I think, was it in 2014 or 2017 that you you spoke about the additional restrictions that they had to endure in terms of their access to utilities, to electricity. And I think lastly, when you when you're talking about all of that, I also want to hear more about the involvement of other countries in the Gulf and and elsewhere that are trying to that have tried in the past to come to the aid of this goal of this community. Yeah. So when I when I lived in Gaza was in 2017-18, Gaza's only power plant, which is in the middle area, was significantly damaged in the 2014 war and did not produce enough electricity to meet needs. Now Israel provides some provided some power to the northern Gaza Strip, Egypt to the southern Gaza Strip. Most of the power came from this power plant, which was crippled in part. So the power in Gaza when I was there was between 4 hours a day and 8 hours a day and usually cut at night no matter what. And I think I told you before that in the two years that I was there, the highest score on the Palestinian matriculation exam, which is called the Tawjih came from Gazans, who, you know, who are, I guess, studying by flashlight and generators or whatever else. You know, it really is an impressive achievement that the education system has remained so intact despite the separation from the West Bank, despite the Israeli restrictions on the movement of persons and goods since 2007. So that the blockade has ebbed and flowed over time, you know, as has the maritime access. Obviously, the Gulf Coast is controlled by the Israeli navy, which is why these flotillas that are are scheduled to load from to set from Turkey to Gaza are are you know, they will be interdicted in the waters off of Gaza. Invariably. When I was there, it also overlapped with the. Speaking of blockades, the Saudi Egyptian blockade of Qatar and basically the the Saudis were trying to break the independent streak of the Qataris by not following sort of the Gulf consensus as it pertains principally to Iran, but its entire Qatar foreign policy, which is which is independent of the other GCC states. And that effort failed. But while I was there, there was a competition to between the countries and the Saudis to show their, you know, beneficence in in Gaza. Right. So there were rehousing projects funded by that were funded by the Saudis. There was road infrastructure and sewer infrastructure improvements funded by the Qataris And a fair amount of money was coming in at that time. And it was a was a competition for the hearts and minds of the Arab the wider Arab world with the Palestinians as the as a point real heartfelt commitment on the part of the Arab peoples. Right. However, UNWRA is in this dire position now with the U.S. having adopted an appropriation law that bars funding for UNWRA through at least the spring of 2025, and I've written about the need for UNWRA to break itself free of its of its history, which was intended to promote the resettlement of Palestinians into the neighboring Arab states at the expense of their repatriation or return to their former communities and mandatory Palestine or Israel. And UNWRA has tried over time to diversify its funding base and get more funding from, if not the Global South, from you know, the Gulf and from other non-Western wealthy states. And that effort has largely failed. The point I've made in my writing is that UNWRA has been trying to get money from the Gulf without really changing its orientation to from its very decided Western focus. Right. So what the the Gulf states would be funding if they funded UNWRA now would be funding a an organization that has been disfigured by the funding conditions imposed by the United States and by the European Union and by the major European donors individually. Right. So UNWRA, uniquely among U.N. system organizations, has this bloated bureaucracy that is there to ensure that the curriculum taught in UNRWA's schools teaches a so-called, you know, a curriculum of peace, right? Tolerance of, you know, universal values, humanist values. What that really means in practice. And I know because I was involved in this for for quite a long time, is it's pruning off parts of the of the Palestinian national narrative, which is one that is borne on rooted in dispossession and exile and suffering. And so no, we don't we don't want to teach that anymore. You know, but that is our national narrative. That is our tragic national history. You you spoke on the US's ability to go ahead and have this impact on UNWRA and. We can also go ahead and see the US potential leverage that it can have on Israel. Now the US is in that inaction in going ahead and taking this leverage against Israel. We can go ahead and see that there are grassroots movements, especially in the protests that are happening and current US campuses as well as abroad, and most recently in France and Australia, where the citizens of some of these nations are able to go ahead and put pressure or trying to put pressure upon and their institutions, whether universities or otherwise, to disinvest in Israel or in companies that are going ahead and funding or aiding in this in this conflict. And given your history and your experience with NYU, I understand, as well as your current affiliation at the Yale and the current protests happening in Yale being often often displayed on the news. Do you have any insight into how this is going ahead and then affecting the situation as it is right now? Well, I'm personally amazed by the level of student activism and then the intensity of the student activism in the face of an extremely illiberal response by these supposed, you know, bastions of liberal values. I, I can say that when I was an undergraduate 20 plus years ago, the organization that is now students for Justice in Palestine was a bunch of disaffected Arab men like me sitting around and airing grievances. It had no it had no political program. Whereas you compare that with what has replaced SJP and Jewish Voices for Peace at Columbia, which is this Columbia University divests update, which has a very clear, well formulated manifesto, if you will, a platform and is using these democratic institutions that Columbia has established to inform its investment decisions, you know, including referenda and putting Columbia in the awkward, in my mind, indefensible position of having to just ignore the will of the student body, which, you know, Columbia and Barnard have both previously adopted divestment resolutions. The the administration has ignored them. And now the administration is saying, well, it's divisive and there's no university consensus on these things. And so we're you know, so again, the student body is organizing these resolutions. What you see happening at NYU and at Yale has been much more direct action. And the the response of Yale and NYU. You know, of course, I've received the emails from the administration of the university and the school in both both places. And if you were to put the two responses from the university president side by side, I mean, they're almost indistinguishable, claiming that the protest has been infiltrated by outsiders from the community, that there have been reports of anti-Semitic chanting and conduct that makes pro-Israel students and including Jewish-American students feel unsafe. But we never see these statements as any kind of interrogation of the concept of unsafe. Right. What does unsafe mean? Is it you're getting vibes that you don't like because they they conflict with your ideology. That's what university is all about. It's interesting. We're talking about all of this. And listen to a very interesting program about the Scholasticide that happened in Palestine, where all the universities were destroyed by the Israeli forces. And so it's good that we're talking about this question, What can the world do? And I'm not just speaking about Americans, the world. I've been exposed to different countries and, you know, even Mauritius, where I come from, it's a divided society, right now on this question about the war. People are taking sides. And I've lived in Malaysia as well. Again, that's a very interesting country in terms of its own view on the war in Israel and Palestine. So my question to you is, a lot of us are, you know, our commitment, our commitment to our ethical commitment to nonviolence. We all want to do something. I don't think we just want to be consumers of what's going on there. And in terms of just watching these videos from morning to evening, what can we do to you to make sure that we are also showing our support for the victims, but for the families and for a future where there's going to be at least a ceasefire and where there's going to be an end to this is terrible carnage. I don't think I can offer you much optimism. You'd be sort of first talking about the Sholasticide. This is a term that has been coined recently, and I think it will probably be, you know, a term used in currency going forward. Yeah, I worked at UNWRA, the campus of Al-Azhar University and the Islamic University of Gaza are just across the street from UNRWA's headquarters in Gaza. So I know the area well, and I've seen the images of that space where I used to see students. They're not big. And so when in between classes, the campus would just be mobbed with students seeing the pictures that I've seen of that space now and the wreckage of the two universities and other universities in Palestine is heartbreaking, mean, I think in the immediate term, before those universities can be rebuilt. Don't forget, half of Gaza's population is under 18. So the school age and university age population is very large. There needs to be a concerted effort to find places in the in the neighboring states and in the West for students to continue with their education, while while Gaza has been rebuilt. As for how it is rebuilt, that is also going to be an issue of contestation. So after the 2014 war, there was this tripartite agreement between. Palestinian Authority, Israel and the United Nations called the Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism the GRM And it was this Byzantine system of tracking the import and the distribution of all material that Israel considered to be dual use, which was, in essence, anything other than wood and sand. So anything that had rebar or concrete or whatever was tracked through this elaborate computer system added layers and layers of bureaucracy and delay and impeded the reconstruction of Gaza. You know, if you're an out of work, humanitarian, professional, these things are great. If you are a Palestinian who needs to have your home rebuilt or your school rebuilt or your your office rebuilt, not so great. So we need to see a paradigm shift for reconstruction relative to what has occurred in the past in terms of what folks can do now, there are any number of charities doing their very best to distribute aid that is, of course, inhibited by a number of choke points, one being the the the crossing points into Gaza and the and the various security inspections and security requirements. Israel has as established. So you've heard reports of, for instance, little medical kits being entire truckloads be rejected because they carry medical kits. Medical kits have a pair of surgical scissors in them. In the entire consignment is is rejected and the truck has to go back. You have that. And and also issues of of of coordination and conflict, de-escalation to allow for convoys to go into areas of conflict zones and areas near conflict zones. Right. So when there is coordination like this World Central kitchen convoy that was blown up and they had coordination with the with the Israeli authorities, and that was a mistake, we are led to believe it's a mistake and these mistakes happen and they discourage other humanitarian actors from attempting to deliver those into those areas as well. So it's getting food into Gaza. The Gaza Strip is one thing, getting food and medicine and supplies, you know, essentials of life to the parts of Gaza that are, you know, at most acute risk of starvation is a different story. You still have to get somebody who's willing to risk their life to to drive the truck to to these communities that are under siege. But all I would tell you is, you know, if you do your homework on your on your charity of choice and and this is the best we can do at this point in time, and then when there's reconstruction, be done, contribute to that as well. Omar, thank you for speaking to us. I sincere sympathies go to the people of Palestine and Israel for all their sufferings because they have been victims on both sides. Thank you. This is not to forgive, but to understand with our guest, Omar Yousef Shehabi To our listeners, don't forget to like subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. Well, if the U.S. were serious about a two state solution and this administration believes that settlements are a principal, if not the principal obstacle to a two state solution, why are you reserving these travel bans and financial penalties only to violent settlers? This is not to forgive, but to understand. With your host, writer and scholar of genocide studies, Sabah Carrim. I am your co-host, Luis Gonzalez-Aponte. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Not to forgive, but to Understand. Today we are joined by Omar Yousef Shehabi, assistant professor at New York University School of Law and Doctor of Juridical Science, candidate at Yale Law School with extensive experience in international law and human rights. He previously served as a legal officer with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. We have the pleasure of having Ben Meiches today among us, and we will be speaking to him about one particular journal article which drew my attention and which has basically been published in the Journal of Genocide Research. It was published in 2022. Now the title of this journal article. And Ben, we will get back to the other works that you have written in a bit. You also have books that you would like to I'm sure you would like to tell us about, or rather we would get it out of you and delve into what different things you've been working on. But for now, as I said, what I find very intriguing about the work you've come up with is this particular paper titled Genocide and the Brain, Neuroscience, Mental Harm and International Law. And the reason this paper caught my attention is because it introduces the new epistemology of neuroscience into the corpus of material we now have on genocide studies. So could you tell us a little bit more about this work? Sure. So the article was sort of originated in the process of researching my book, The Politics of Annihilation, A Genealogy of Genocide, which was trying to look at a bunch of the debates and discussions around the formation of the concept of genocide. And one of the things that that was a kind of artifact of that project was an interest in The clause of the Genocide Convention in Article two that talks about causing bodily and mental harm as a potential act of genocide. And what I did in kind of the research there and reading through that is to discover that what I had kind of presumed on an initial take that article would be about and what sort of contemporary international courts have read and thought about is things like psychological harm, rape, trauma, torture acts along those lines. But the folks that were involved in the discussion and invention of that were thinking about narcotic use, widespread forced opiate use under Japanese occupation of China, etc. and their conception of what was dangerous about mental harm, was somewhat of a different notion from the way that I think it had been applied now, not to say that the acts that are being covered are the gendered forms of violence that the term has been applied to are not important or significant or that that wasn’t a productive development and it felt like an area that had a lot of potential because this notion that the sort of mind body dualism has been in question is very widespread in the social sciences. And I actually turned it to colleagues because I'm situated in an interdisciplinary program who are in neuroscience and do work in psychology and sort of said, what do you think about this idea and this sort of concept of mental harm? And what do you know about neuroscience? And I was supported by them very generously and giving some introductory resources that I had worked on in the background as I was sort of completing a book and in this interesting lull period and realized that actually I thought that there was an incredibly the connection between the notion of harm that was kind of originally articulated as the basis for this part of the article and some of the discoveries of contemporary neuroscience, because neuroscience very much teaches us that the brain is a part of an embodied self, it's part of an environment, it's interacting at a biological and social level simultaneously. It's necessary for the articulation of language and the construction of selfhood and memory, but it's also porous and vulnerable as a result, in ways that I don't think we previously would have sort of recognized, including kinds of harm that sort of fall below what the architect Eyal Weizman calls the threshold of detectability often. So there are things we don't initially think about as part of violence. And as a consequence, I thought it was really fascinating to say. Hey, here's this much broader in some ways more multidimensional understanding of harm that I think was part of the inspiration for a section of this international law. It resonates with a lot of what neuroscience has to say. And if we start to fold neuroscientific insights into genocide studies, what happens to our understanding of the form, the scale, the intensity of harm, its longevity as well as the way that we might then eventually have to sort of repair or recuperate that, which is a very different project. If genocide involves much more than sort of acts of physical killing and harm, and it stops at sort of the discrete temporal and spatial boundaries. So let me reiterate whatever you're seeing here, because I want to well, let's start from the beginning, as Julie Andrews like to say, likes to say it's a very good place to start. So basically genocide when we speak about genocide, unfortunately, as you said in your article, Jeffrey Bachman talks about that and says that genocide mainly focused on mass killing. And that's what, of course, most people think about when they think about genocide. That's what they refer to. However, what you bring out in your paper is that is the possibility of recognizing many forms of mental harm that one can endure as a consequence of being exposed to or genocidal scenarios. And what you are thinking of doing, what you did in this paper was to introduce or rather to speak about it. This is the very first paper that I've seen in the field that delves into this particular area whereby what you the idea you introduce is the possibility of including all the neurological harm or neurological disorders that can arise as a consequence of exposure to genocide and genocidal scenarios which have not so far been included overtly in the definition of genocide. So what you propose, therefore, is what you mentioned earlier about, you know, the Travaux Préparatoires that contain details about, you know, narcotics and other ways in which one can be harmed mentally. You propose the possibility of expanding, shall we say, that expanding the purview or the understanding we currently have of Article two, subsection B of the Geneva of the Genocide Convention on the Geneva Conventions of Genocide Convention, so which includes the two mental harm. So when when because it includes the word mental harm, you're thinking of expanding the purview of mental harm to include neuroscientific forms of harm that are now detected through, you know, we know MRI's and all of these newer scanning devices. Now then I would love you to tell us more about these types of harms that you have actually already identified and discussed in detail in this paper. This is not to forgive, but to understand with our guest, Omar Yusef Shehabi To our listeners, don't forget to like subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. Today we are joined by Omar Yousef Shehabi, assistant professor at New York University School of Law and Doctor of Juridical Science, candidate at Yale Law School with extensive experience in international law and human rights. He previously served as a legal officer with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Joining us today is Ari Modupe Nof, a Jewish-Israeli historian and essayist living in the U.S. He serves as an associate professor of history and international affairs, holding the Max ticket and chair of Israel studies at George Washington University. Among his publications are The intellectual biography Isaiah Berlin The Journey of a Jewish Liberal. Tracing the genealogy of the idea of partition and the British interwar imperial context. And Amos Oz's two pens between literature and politics dedicated to the late Israeli novelist and public intellectual. Please enjoy our conversation. This is not to forgive, but to understand with our guest, Omar Yusef Shehabi To our listeners, don't forget to like subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions. This is not to forgive, but to understand with our guest R.E.M. Do enough to our listeners. Don't forget to, like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions.