“But it was so long ago when she said that. Eighteen years! Can’t people change?” Yes, we’ll get to that excuse a bit later on. “Reema Dodin to be first Palestinian-American White House staffer,” by Tzvi Joffre, Jerusalem Post, November 25, 2020:
Reema Dodin is a Palestinian-American who will serve alongside Shuwanza Goff as a deputy director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, President-elect Joe Biden announced on November 23.
Dodin will be the first Palestinian-American to serve as a White House staffer, according to Palestinian media.
The new White House staffer was born to Jordanian-Palestinian immigrants in the US. Dodin’s family is originally from Dura, near Hebron, according to Palestinian media.
Why is Dodin not a “Jordanian-American,” or more accurately still, simply an “American”? It’s because the “Palestinian” refugee identity has uniquely been treated as something that can be handed down from generation to generation. Henry Kissinger is a German Jewish refugee. His son, born in America, is not. Vladimir Nabokov was a Russian refugee; his son Dmitri, born in Berlin, was not. But the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren, and so on, apparently forever, of “Palestinian refugees” – born and raised all over the world – continue to be considered “Palestinian refugees,” and remain, most beneficially for themselves, on UNRWA’s rolls. Of the tens of millions of refugees since World War II, only one group – the “Palestinians” – have this amazing ability to inherit from their parents and grandparents the status of “Palestinian refugees.” Only 30,000 real refugees – those who left Mandatory Palestine/Israel between 1947 and 1949 – are still alive. But according to the U.N., once you count up all the descendants of those who left Mandatory Palestine/Israel, there are five million “Palestinian refugees.” Indeed, Reema Dodin herself could right now be on those rolls and receive aid from UNRWA, for she, too, counts as a “Palestinian refugee,” despite her parents being Jordanian citizens and she herself being born in the U.S.
Dodin served as deputy chief of staff to Democratic Senator Richard Durbin and has also served on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law, among other positions.
She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also a Truman National Security Fellow, a New Leaders Council Fellow, an Aspen Socrates alum, a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Jenkins Hill Society – a consortium of women in politics supporting female politicians.”
A careerist, forsooth, a winner of fellowships in an age of hypertrophied insistence upon “diversity and inclusiveness,” and a joiner, who knows just what to join, someone who unobtrusively climbs, step after step, the ladder of political success. A cheerful, smiling, industrious and eye-on-the-main-chance Palestinian-American Sammy Glick. So ask yourself: what makes Reema run?
During the Second Intifada, in 2002, Dodin spoke about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict with residents of Lodi, California, saying that “suicide bombers were the last resort of a desperate people,” according to the Lodi News-Sentinel.
In 2001, Dodin took part in a demonstration at UC Berkeley calling for the university to divest from Israel, according to the Berkeley Daily Planet, a local news publication. The demonstrators compared Israel to apartheid South Africa….
What shall we say about this appalling choice? Yes, I know, she’s not being made Secretary of State or National Security Adviser, but as one of two deputy directors of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, she will be in a position to keep track of proposed or impending or about-to-be-voted on legislation about Israel, Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the whole Middle Eastern works. She will know which Congressmen are “on our [Palestinian] side,” who can be persuaded to move toward the Palestinian position, who supports Israel and cannot be moved; she’s in the perfect place to inform or warn her allies in the pro-Palestinian camp of what’s to come, and how best to promote or stop it. She’ll know what’s going on in each office in Congress: who’s in, who’s out, and where are the snows of yesteryear. Halie Soifer, a former Hill aide who now serves as executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, referred to Dodin as “a fixture of the Senate, who knows what’s happening in the Senate before most senators do.” Think about that last remark for a minute.
For several years, she worked as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Senator Dick Durbin, who tweeted his pleasure over the appointment: “Excited that my Floor Director, Reema Dodin, will be joining President-elect Biden’s Leg Affairs team. She is smart, trusted, & has the respect of members on both sides of the aisle. Reema is just what our new President needs to help him in the Senate. Thrilled with the appointment.”
Durbin used to be a strong supporter of Israel. But in the last few years, he has become noticeably less so. He did not vote to condemn UNSC Resolution 2334, a grotesque anti-Israel resolution adopted by the Security Council’s kangaroo court on Dec. 23, 2019, after Samantha Power did as instructed from Washington, and abstained, rather than veto the bill. A parting fillip to Israel by Barack Obama. Durbin even held up a Senate resolution to condemn UNSC Resolution 2334, as was revealed by his fellow Democrat, Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico. Durbin voted “Nay” on the Strengthening America’s Security in the Middle East Act of 2019, which had mainly to do with military aid to Israel. He was one of only 23 Senators to do so, with almost all the pro-Israel Senators voting for the bill. Durbin now believes the “settlements are illegal.” He has never mentioned, and appears unaware of, the significance of the Mandate for Palestine and the territories assigned by the League of Nations to the future Jewish National Home, which include all of Judea and Samaria (a/k/a the “West Bank”). Nor does he appear to understand what U.N. Resolution 242 was all about – as explained by its author, British Ambassador to the U.N. Lord Caradon – which was to ensure that Israel could retain territories won in the “recent conflict” (the Six-Day War) that it needed if it was to have, in that Resolution’s key phrase, “secure [i.e. defensible] and recognized boundaries.”
I suspect Senator Durbin has been greatly influenced by in recent years by his Deputy Chief of Staff, the “Jordanian-Palestinian” or “Palestinian-American” Ms. Reema Dodin, articulate, well-organized, a master of parliamentary procedure, a pleasure to work with, who has provided Senator Durbin with a different “perspective” on the Arab-Israeli dispute. Now he has been told, I have a feeling, from Ms. Dodin, of the “terrible plight” of the “Palestinian people,” knows that there are things he can learn from the personal testimony she is ready to provide – goodness, what luck to have someone who can testify, almost at first-hand, about what the “Palestinian people” have endured. Reema Dodin is pleased to set him straight. To wit, I would guess, she’s explained that “settlements are illegal” as “the U.N. has said so many times,” that “if there is ever to be a genuine peace,” then Israel must go back to something close to the 1949 armistice lines, back to that nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, that the “Palestinian people” have suffered terribly; that the only way that peace will come is if there are “two states, living side by side in peace,” and it’s long past time that Israel accepted “the outstretched hand of peace that the Palestinians have been offering for so long.” Just imagine over how many weeks, months, years of working so diligently for him, how many occasions there must have been for her to provide a stealthy stillicide of misrepresentation and misinformation. Reema Dodin has managed as a real “Palestinian” to serve as his native informant, all the while gently, carefully, first a little thence to more, providing her impressionable boss with the Palestinian Received Version of the Arab-Israel. dispute. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” someone in Ramallah must be saying on hearing the news of her appointment, and as for CAIR, how could it not be delighted?
Given her intolerable remark, her appointment raises questions.
Did Biden not know when he appointed Reema D., that she had once offered an appeal for “understanding” suicide bombers – almost justifying them as driven to such acts because there was simply no other way for them to express their despair: “suicide bombers are the last resort of a desperate people”? Or did he not know, which raises questions about the transition team’s vetting of candidates? Think about that. Suicide bombers are the last resort of a “desperate people.” There are hundreds of millions of desperate people in this world, and they do not resort to “suicide bombings.” Think of the Christians persecuted in many Muslim lands: Pakistan, Egypt, Iran, Nigeria.. Have any of them ever resorted to “suicide bombings”? When Jewish refugees were desperate to get to Mandatory Palestine, before, during, and after World War II, but were prevented from doing so by the British – in direct violation of Great Britain’s duty as Mandatory to “facilitate” Jewish immigration — did any those tragic Jewish refugees turned back ever become “suicide bombers”? Did Zionists in England, driven half-mad by the British refusal to rescue their coreligionists by letting them into Palestine, ever engage in the “suicide bombing” of crowds in Selfridges or Oxford Street or the Burlington Arcade or the Victoria-and-Albert Hall? Do the truly desperate people, far more wretched and desperate than the Palestinians – in Bolivia or Haiti or the Congo or Nepal, blow themselves up in a crowd of visiting NGO dignitaries because they needed to be heard, and that was only way they could get the indifferent world’s attention, with this “last resort of a desperate people”?
Of course, the Palestinians are not exactly “desperate” in the sense of not being attended to. Their cause is a regular item on the U.N.’s docket; it’s discussed, as Agenda Item #7, at every session of the UNHRC (U.N. Human Rights Council). The Palestinians are the object of more sympathetic attention than any other group in the world; they are not “desperate” for attention. Palestinian suicide bombers don’t need to attract the world’s attention — they already have that — they simply want to kill as many Jews as they can.
Let’s keep in mind that what Reema Dodin said was much more sinister than her expressing her support for the Palestinian Arabs, or her conviction – assuming she has it — that Israel was built on “occupied land,” or that Israel must “return to the 1949 armistice lines.” No, she said that she understood what led Palestinians to become suicide bombers – these were the “last resort of a desperate people.” Reema Dodin was explaining — and justifying — the cold-blooded murder of innocent civilians.
COLUMN BY
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