Tomorrow night in New York, there’s a chance to hear one of the legends of progressive Arab-American life speak: Abdeen Jabara will be leading a discussion of the Goldstone Report at the Brecht Forum.
Jabara is a civil rights attorney who helped found the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. And speaking personally, he has a decades-long history of reaching out to progressive American Jews to educate them about the Israel/Palestine conflict. I’m out in Michigan, where Jabara is from, and visiting with Barbara Harvey, a prominent civil rights attorney in Detroit whom Jabara helped enlighten on the issue back before the first intifadah. He opened her eyes. He first reached out to me at the Brecht Forum a couple of years ago, urging me to push the conversation inside the Jewish community, and in fact he was an impetus behind the book that will be discussed tomorrow night, The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict.
Jabara will moderate a stellar panel: Jamil Dakwar is director of the ACLU Human Rights Program and has broad experience of the conflict from a human rights perspective. Donna Nevel is a community psychologist and a veteran activist on the issue, a leader of Jews Say No, someone I see mostly in the last year on freezing New York sidewalks standing up against Islamophobia. Then there’s Andrew Kadi, a member of Adalah who has contributed to our site in many ways; here’s a rivetting story from Sheikh Jarrah a year back. And finally, Adam Horowitz, co-editor of this site and of the Goldstone Report book. Adam has a master’s from NYU in Near East Studies and has led numerous tours to the region.
Brecht Forum, 451 West Street, between Bank and Bethune. 7:30 PM. From the release:
The landmark United Nations report on Israel’s war against Gaza charged Israel, along with Hamas, with crimes against humanity. Spearheaded by the prominent South African anti-apartheid jurist, Richard Goldstone, it sparked increased international condemnation of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. While the American public was able to catch a glimpse of the international reaction to the release of the report, the Obama Administration continued to run interference for Israel, and elements of the pro-Israel legal community quickly mounted a defensive action by organizing conferences denouncing the Goldstone Report and international humanitarian law.
The Goldstone Report assesses the legacy of this investigation and the impact that it continues to have on U.S. policy towards Israel and Palestine as well as popular movements to end the occupation and achieve Palestinian self determination. The panel of editors and contributors for this book will discuss the impact of the Goldstone report in the context of current developments in the debate and on the ground, especially the revolutions rocking the Middle East.
