Thoughts on Israel

Zionism and the Palestinians

2008-06-04T04:43:00.000-07:00

Zionism and the Palestinians
Mike Marqusee
New Humanist, 3 June 2008

Israel’s 60th birthday is being celebrated lavishly in Britain. The programme includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades in London and Manchester.

Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, without the benefit of state support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they are seeking to remind the world of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.

In 1947 there were 1,293,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32 per cent of the population, the UN partition plan (agreed in November 1947) assigned them 55 per cent of the country, including the economically developed citrus-growing plains. Israel’s Declaration of Independence on 15 May 1948 was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new state and its Arab neighbours.

In April and May, before the expiry of the British mandate, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa fell to Jewish forces, and more than 100,000 Palestinians fled. To the north, in Galilee, the Haganah – the mainstream Zionist defence force – systematically conquered clusters of villages, emptying them of inhabitants and often levelling them. In June, the Israelis advanced further into territory designated for the Arab state, capturing the towns of Lydda and Ramle where they killed 250 Palestinians and expelled almost all the rest – 40,000 – at gunpoint.

In the course of 1948, 531 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed. In the Jaffa area, 96 per cent of the villages were totally erased. As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the UN-allotted borders of the Jewish state, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population.

When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish state had acquired 78 per cent of Palestine. 180,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish state. 750,000 had been made refugees.

The homes and lands they left behind were quickly occupied by Jewish settlers and the new Israeli parliament passed laws confiscating their property. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property. In 1954 more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property. Conquest and expulsion provided the material base for the building of the Jewish state.

For many years Zionists claimed that the Palestinians had left voluntarily, at the behest of Arab leaders. That myth has been repeatedly disproved: there’s no evidence of so much as a single broadcast or leaflet telling people to abandon their homes. There is, on the other hand, a great deal of evidence that the Zionists used the war to alter the demographic facts on the ground. On April 6, for example, David Ben-Gurion told a Zionist meeting: “We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area, even if only in an artificial way, in a military way … I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population.”

The facts of the Nakba are now well documented and beyond serious dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and shamefully acceptable in polite circles. That is partly because its victims have been so demonised and dehumanised. Acknowledgement of the Nakba is also resisted because it undermines Israeli and Jewish self-definitions; for many, it is a truth that simply cannot be assimilated.

The Nakba is far more than a historical controversy. It’s an unresolved and pressing global issue. The Palestinian refugee population – descendants of those driven out in 1948 – now numbers more than five million, one half of whom live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. One million remain stateless, with no form of identification other than a card issued by UNWRA, the United Nations refugee agency. This is the world’s largest and oldest continuing refugee crisis. Each year since December 1948, the UN General Assembly has reconfirmed Resolution 194, which enshrines the refugees’ right to return and compensation. The right of refugees to return to their homes is a necessary protection for all civilian populations in times of war. Without it, ethnic cleansing would be encouraged. Yet those who press for the implementation of that right are denounced as extremists who refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

There is today a huge Jewish population in Palestine whose rights as human beings must be recognised, but why should anyone anywhere be compelled to recognise the “right to exist” of a particular state formation? What’s being demanded here is ideological conformity: support for the right of the Jewish state to exist, in perpetuity, in Palestine, regardless of what that fact entails for others (or indeed for the welfare of Jews). For Palestinians, recognising Israel’s right to exist – as opposed to the fact of its existence – is tantamount to an historical seal of approval on the Nakba. Those who refuse to certify as legitimate a national project built on dispossession and ethnic supremacy are condemned as “anti-Semites” or, if they are Jews, as “self-haters”. The allegations rest on a false conflation of Israel and “the Jews”, one propagated by Zionists, who use it to exempt the Jewish state from the requirements of international standards of human decency.

Israel is “Jewish” in a sense that no existing state is Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. Though these religions are privileged in various states, none of those states claims to be the sole global representative of the faith; none grants citizenship to people solely because of their religion (without regard to place of birth or residence). Maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine means maintaining a sizeable Jewish majority population which enjoys privileged access to land, work and civic rights.

The founders of Israel were secularists; they saw Jewishness as a national rather than religious identity. Many were atheists and contemptuous of rabbinical culture. Like MA Jinnah, the secular Muslim founder of Pakistan, they would be shocked and dismayed if they could see the influence obscurantist religious sects now wield in the polities they established.

From the beginning, the notion that the State of Israel could be both “Jewish” and “democratic” was unsustainable, and was seen as such by significant numbers of diaspora Jews. Indeed, it’s important to remember that anti-Zionism was a Jewish ideology long before it was anything else. But in the wake of the Holocaust, and with the evolution of big power politics in the Middle East, Zionism came to dominate the diaspora. And the truth of the Nakba was shrouded beneath the myth of Israel’s “David versus Goliath” struggle for survival against irrationally hostile Arabs.

But what of the plight of the Jewish refugees in postwar Europe? Without Israel, what would have become of them? The answer is that they would have shared the same variety of fates as the general refugee population of Europe, of which they were part. The roots of that crisis lay in the refusal of the US, Britain and other countries to admit large numbers of displaced persons. It could not be resolved by allocating each group a “state of their own”, inevitably at the expense of another people. The right of refuge is a universal right (and need) but instead of shouldering that collective responsibility, the Western powers, with the support of the Soviet Union, dumped it on Palestine, demanding that a people who bore no responsibility for the Holocaust make way for its victims.

Many Zionists who do acknowledge the Nakba characterise it as tragic but “irreversible”. The Nakba was not, however, an isolated episode; it was a paroxysm in a process that continues to this day. The Jewish state remains incompatible with Palestinian rights and increasingly the very existence of Palestinians, as illustrated by the current siege of Gaza and the continuing assault on Palestinian society on the West Bank through the construction of the apartheid wall and the extension of Jewish settlements.

It has become ever more apparent that Zionism will not tolerate any meaningful form of Palestinian independence. The exigencies of maintaining a Jewish state will not allow it. Within Israel, expansionist claims – in which the Jews are declared the rightful owners of the whole of the West Bank and even beyond – are commonplace, as are calls for the permanent transfer of the remaining Palestinian population. Some respectable voices speak openly of the need to finish the work left undone in 1948 – in order to ensure the survival of “the Jewish state”.

As ever, much of this is cloaked in Biblical sources. The paradox of Zionism was always that it was a secular ideology whose foundation lay in a religious discourse. At its heart is an obscurantist claim to historic territory. There is indeed much in the Hebrew Bible that gives succour to the wilder Zionist ambitions. But there is also another strand, one that warns against the menace of marrying religion to the state. In particular the Prophet Amos, a champion of the universality of ethical standards, explicitly denies the exclusivism of the Zionist claim to Palestine:

To Me, O Israelites, you are
Just like the Ethiopians – declares the Lord.
True I brought Israel up
From the land of Egypt,
But also the Philistines from Caphtor
And the Arameans from Kir.

New Humanist

www.mikemarqusee.com

Voices - Elders of Zionism debate ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, furthering Jewish domination in America, Europe

2007-07-17T15:55:00.000-07:00

Voices - Elders of Zionism debate ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, furthering Jewish domination in America, Europe

Elders of Zionism debate ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, furthering Jewish domination in America, Europe
Khalid Amayreh in Occupied East Jerusalem

Zionist leaders from around the world are debating ways and means to effect further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as well as consolidating Jewish influence and domination in the western hemisphere, especially North American and Europe.

Participating in the three-day conference, organized by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (JPPPI), are leaders of major Jewish organizations in the United States and Canada as well academics, rabbis and Jewish business tycoons from around the world.

Speakers at the conference will include, among others, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, opposition head MK Binyamin Netanyahu, JPPPI Board Chairman and former US ambassador Dennis Ross, Jewish Agency Chairman Ze'ev Bielski, and Brandeis University President Jehuda Reinharz.

One paper to be discussed during the conference, entitled "The Jewish People in 2030," suggests that the world is unlikely to see a significant increase in the number of Jews.

Furthermore, the paper states that "the Jewish people is facing a serious problem of high quality leadership, spiritual, political and professional with no clear trend of improvement."

According to the Israeli media, participants, dubbed as the crème de le crème of the Jewish people, are discussing three main themes: growing western opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, which many delegates viewed as expression of "anti-Semitism," strengthening Israel's Jewish identity, an implicit reference to Israeli efforts and plans to check Palestinian demographic growth, and assimilation of Jews in the West.

Speakers have castigated "voices critical of Israel" at the American arena, an apparent reference to a recent study by two prominent American academics which claimed that the American policy in the Middle East was largely determined by Israel and its powerful Jewish lobby and also to the recent publication of a book, carrying the same message, by former President Jimmy Carter.

According to reporters covering the conference (Palestinian reporters are barred from accessing West Jerusalem) , Zionist leaders from North America argued that "a wise but effective approach" ought to be adopted in order to isolate "these non-conformist voices" and forestall the possibility of "snowballing."

"We should do everything possible to prevent these voices from evolving into a phenomenon, but without appearing as silencing freedom of speech," Dennis Ross, President Clinton's former peace envoy to the Middle East reportedly said. Ross is the JPPPI Chairman.

Ross reportedly avoided calling the two American professors, John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago and Steven Walt from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, anti-Semites.

However, he suggested that their incrimination of the Jewish lobby could mushroom into a wider opposition to Israel and her influence inside the United States.

Both Mersheimer and Walt spoke of a consortium of Zionist American groups and individuals that has forced successive American administrations to support Israel in contravention of American national interests.

With regard to "Israel's shrinking demographic advantage in Palestine," Zionist leaders reportedly proposed a "set of measures" to check the "worrying trend," including encouraging higher birth rates among Jews by offering financial and other inducements, exploring ways and means to lower the Arab birth rate especially in Israel proper and encouraging Palestinians to emigrate as well as promulgating laws that would strengthen Israel's Jewish identity.

Some speakers suggested that economic and financial inducements be channeled exclusively to Jews in Israel through special non-governmental agencies in order to avoid the appearance of adopting discriminatory policies against Israel's Arab minority. Arabs in Israel constitute nearly a quarter of the country's population.

The conference was due to debate the contentious issue of anti-Semitism.

Some Zionist leaders, like former Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, reportedly suggested that Israel and Zionism stood to actually benefit from the anti-Jewish and anti-Israeli atmospheres in Europe and even in North America.

Netanyahu's argued that anti-Semitism had always been and continued to be "a key reason" behind "the return of Jews to their ancestral land."

However, many Jewish leaders in North America and some in Europe had serious reservations about Netanyahu's views, calling them "paradoxical" and "un-Jewish," on the ground that most Jews living in the West don't wish to immigrate to Israel and are well-integrated in their respective societies.

No mention of "Peace"

Interestingly, peace between Israel and the Palestinian people was conspicuously absent from the deliberations of the conference.

According to Rene Shmuel, the former Chief Rabbi of France who is participating in the conference, the issue of making peace with Israel's neighbors had no place on the conference's agenda.

Rene protested that the word "peace" seemed to have been a "four-letter word" in Jewish public discourse.

"Without peace, the Jewish people have no future," Ha'aretz quoted Rene as saying.

The JPPPI was founded in 2002 by the Jewish Agency as an independent institution tasked not with research, but with using available information to conduct planning for the Jewish people as a whole.

-###-

July 12, 2007 © 2007 Khalid Amayreh

Avraham Burg's New Zionism

2007-06-15T17:47:00.000-07:00

Avraham Burg’s New Zionism
Editor’s Notebook
J.J. Goldberg | Wed. Jun 13, 2007

Zionism has meant many things to many people over the past century. To Theodor Herzl and the founders of the Zionist movement, it meant creating a national home to gather in the Jewish people — to some minds, as a refuge from antisemitism; for others, as a fulfillment of an ancient promise. To Herzl’s great critic, the essayist Asher Ginsberg, better known as Ahad Ha’am, Zionism meant building a cultural and spiritual center in Israel to enrich the lives of Jews wherever they live.
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To David Ben-Gurion and generations of Israelis after him, it meant the act of settling in Israel and building it, brick by brick. To millions of Jews around the world, it meant providing material and moral backing for that effort. To Palestinians and other Arabs, it meant assault and dispossession. To much of the outside world, it has come to mean the seed of seemingly endless conflict.

To Avraham Burg, former Knesset speaker, former chairman of the World Zionist Organization and son of one of Israel’s founding fathers, it is all of those things and more. In a new book, “Defeating Hitler,” and in a much-discussed interview in Ha’aretz last week, Burg argues that the time for Herzl’s Zionism is past. Now it is time for Ahad Ha’am’s Zionism, for Israel as a spiritual beacon.

Israel has lived long enough in the shadow of trauma and fear, he argues. Now is the time for trust — trust in Israel’s place in the world, in the possibility of coexistence, in the moral legacy of Judaism.

That, at least, is how Burg describes his message. You’d hardly know it, though, from the Ha’aretz interview and the response it’s gotten in Israel and the broader Jewish world. The interviewer, Ari Shavit, read the book and admits he detested it.

As Shavit reads it, Burg’s book rejects the very notion of a Jewish state, claims that Israel has no moral core and has become a brutal Sparta fast sliding toward Nazism. In the interview, Burg tries gamely to answer Shavit’s objections, to explain what he meant, but Shavit won’t have it. Burg is talking spiritual philosophy, and Shavit is tasting red meat.

They go at each other for 4,500 words (2,800 in the abridged English translation), but the casual reader needn’t wade through it all. Shavit and his editors sum up the main points — abandoning Zionism, rejecting Israel — in the headlines and bold print.

“He did something I’ve never experienced before in journalism,” Burg told the Forward in a telephone interview this week. “He read my book and got angry, and then sat with me for what was supposed to be an interview and argued with me.”

Reading the interview, after hearing it discussed endlessly online and in synagogues over the weekend, is an almost psychedelic experience. Shavit starts out by telling Burg that he saw the book as a “farewell to Zionism” and asks, “Are you still a Zionist?” Burg explains his belief that it’s time to move from Herzl to Ahad Ha’am.

Shavit promptly informs Burg that Zionism “means belief in a Jewish national state,” and that he, Burg, no longer believes in that.

Burg: “Not in its current definition. A state in my eyes is a tool,” not a spiritual or religious value. “To define Israel as a Jewish state and then to add the words ‘the first dawning of our redemption’” — a quote from the chief rabbis’ Prayer for the State of Israel, and the core principle of settler messianism — “is explosive. And to add to that the attempt to embrace democracy, it’s just impossible.”

Shavit: “Then you no longer accept the notion of a Jewish state?” Burg: “It can’t work.” (The English version, by the way, skips over Burg’s warning about messianism and the state as a tool, and cuts straight to “explosive” and “can’t work.”)

I phoned Burg because the interview looked fishy to me. I hadn’t read his new book, but I know Burg.

Is it true, I asked, that he believes Israel can no longer be a Jewish state?

“I think Israel should be defined not as a Jewish state, but as a state of the Jewish people,” Burg said. “What I mean is that the significance of the state’s content, its culture and ethos and so on, should be placed on the shoulders of every one of us. We shouldn’t be on automatic pilot.” “I see Israel as a state that was created by the Jewish people, as the expression of thousands of years of yearning,” he said. “Its governing structures should be democratic. Its content should be created by its people. When you create something called a Jewish state and then leave it on automatic pilot, the individual bears no responsibility for its content and character.”

Burg has harsh words for Israel’s current character. He believes that years of confrontation and fear have spawned a militaristic spirit and a widespread contempt for universal norms like human rights. In one of his most controversial assertions, he compares Israel today to Germany in the years before the Nazi takeover. Shavit hammers him on that one.

Is Shavit exaggerating the point? “Yes and no,” Burg said. “Not every comparison to Germany means gas chambers. There is a long history to the rise of German nationalism, beginning with Bismarck.”

It’s also true, Burg said, that important elements of Israeli society and culture are drawn from German culture. “From the beginning, Max Nordau and Theodor Herzl were deeply influenced by the awakening of German nationalism.”

Still, he said, “It’s important to recognize that there are some difficult processes underway in Israel. What I’m saying is that we’re living in a society that is becoming more militaristic, and it’s important to pay attention to the process. That means looking at similarities elsewhere.”

Burg, 52, is used to raising eyebrows and stirring outrage, and he seems to get a kick out of it. The son of Yosef Burg, the longtime leader of Israel’s National Religious Party, he gained almost instant notoriety in 1982, when he helped lead a soldiers’ protest against the first Lebanon War. He quickly entered politics, serving as an aide to Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, while also hosting an improbably popular weekly biblical-portion show on television.

Elected to the Knesset in 1988, he resigned in 1995 to run for chairman of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency for Israel, a post traditionally reserved for washed-up ex-politicians. In 1999, he returned to politics. Riding that year’s Labor Party election victory, he became speaker of the Knesset.

In the fall of 2003, a few months after leaving the speaker’s post, Burg gained international notoriety for an article that was published in Yediot Aharonot, translated by the Forward and then reprinted worldwide, in which he claimed that Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was undermining the moral foundations of Zionism. That was taken, by Israel’s friends and enemies alike, to mean that Zionism had lost all moral justification — something he never said. Soon afterward, he left politics entirely and entered business.

His latest outing in Ha’aretz seems like a rerun of his 2003 misadventure — especially the part where his provocative thesis is circulated in a slightly garbled version and makes him a bete noire. He claims to be annoyed, but he seems at least a bit amused at the same time.

During the interview with Shavit, he recalled with a chuckle, “I got him angry when I said, ‘You have abandoned Judaism. You have an Israeli identity without Jewish content. You identify Judaism with narrow particularism and settlements. I suggest you go to see places where Judaism is a universalistic ideal. Go and learn the meaning of Reform and Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism.’”

“What I want to do is to expand the borders of Israel beyond land and location to include universalism and spiritual search,” Burg told me. “We were raised on the Zionism of Ben-Gurion, that there is only one place for Jews and that’s Israel. I say no, there have always been multiple centers of Jewish life.”

And what about Shavit’s claim — repeated in a headline — that Burg favors abolishing Israel’s Law of Return?

“I never said ‘abolish’,” Burg replied. “I said ‘rethink.’ Look, in the parliamentary mythology of Israel, the Law of Return is an answer to the Nuremberg Laws. That’s not its actual origin, but that’s how it has come to be seen. Whomever Hitler would have killed, we will accept as a Jew. And I say Hitler will not define me and who I am.” Hence the book’s title, “Defeating Hitler.”

“If a state is Jewish,” Burg said, “it is founded on a certain measure of holiness. Moses himself defined holiness as an ongoing process of actions, of behavior toward others and toward God. I am very afraid of automatic holiness. It can lead to chauvinism, to exclusivism, to all kinds of negative ramifications in relations between individuals and between nations. The Jewish people after 60 years of statehood cannot allow itself to take its holiness for granted. It has to question itself every day.”
Wed. Jun 13, 2007

on the academic boycott of Israel by Virginia Tilley

2007-05-28T17:35:00.000-07:00

Subject: FW: V Tilley - on the academic boycott of Israel

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6955.shtml

On the Academic Boycott of Israel
Virginia Tilley, The Electronic Intifada, 27 May 2007

Academics don't like academic boycotts. In fact, we detest external limits of any kind. We treasure our own universities for offering precious sanctuary for critical debate (even though they rarely do) and we don't like to see any of them banned, even for ostensibly laudable reasons. Sure, universities in some countries are little more than fig leaves for their regimes. But that's not usually their fault. So we avoid the lectures of state hacks rather than denounce them and we protect the universities so that they can nurture that rare point of light.

Still, in very exceptional cases, an academic boycott comes onto our agenda. This happens when a country's universities are recognized as central players in legitimizing a regime that systematically inflicts massive human rights abuses on its own people and any pretence that the universities are independent fortresses of principled intellectual thought becomes too insulting to the human conscience. But since universities in many oppressive regimes fit those criteria, in practice a second condition is required: their faculties have the freedom to act differently.

In democratic countries where human rights abuses abound as rampantly as in Israel, it is not tenable that faculty entertain and promote the notion that their institutions -- cranking out the architects and professional foot soldiers of occupation -- have no role in those abuses and can join in mixed company as fine upstanding members of the international scholarly club. It is especially not tenable when universities themselves perpetrate discrimination in their research and their grants and admission policies. University faculties are supposed to hold their institutions accountable to basic standards of objectivity, fairness, and non-discrimination. Where they are capable of acting on those standards and refuse, the hack becomes the hypocrite. Moral paralysis becomes moral culpability.

On this reasoning, back in the 1980s offended foreign academics launched an academic boycott of apartheid South Africa, whose universities were finally rightly identified as bastions of white supremacy and whose white faculties, privileged by racial democracy, could be held accountable. Similarly, we now see a boycott of Israeli universities being urged by, among others, Britain's University and College Union. Israeli academics, naturally enough, are appalled by the idea of a boycott and the Israeli government is worried that the idea is gaining momentum. Hence an Israeli academic delegation has to come to England to wage battle against the boycott, and all the old banners once waved by apartheid's defenders -- 'academic freedom', 'balance', 'proportionality' -- are being waved again in this one.

Israeli academic arguments are indeed too reminiscent of apartheid South Africa to escape the comparison. Especially, South African academics trying to defeat the boycott typically avoided discussing the abuses of apartheid. Israeli academic arguments against the boycott also do not discuss the reason for it, which is Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories and the subjugation of almost four million civilians under military rule. Instead, they stress the need for 'balance' -- which, in Israeli parlance, is a code word for shifting attention entirely away from the occupation to reiterate a tired canon of Israeli innocence, victimhood, and deniability. And because they do not discuss the occupation, they do not address their own universities' responsibility for it.

Whatever our conceits of political neutrality, academics never work in a vacuum. In conflict zones, our work is as inherently political as any other activity. For example, let us briefly suspend disbelief and accept Ben-Gurion University Professor Zvi Hacohen's claim, cited in Ha'aretz (15 May 2007) that 'there is widespread cooperation between our universities and Palestinian and Jordanian universities', although he does not specify what this 'widespread' cooperation is. His argument is hardly supported by Palestinian faculty, whose only public voice on the question has been to support the boycott.

But in any case, he cannot pretend that such collaboration is apolitical when Palestinian research partners are held captive under draconian military rule by his own government and the occupation is wrecking their families' hopes and lives, their institutions' viability, and their entire community's basic safety. Nor can he pretend that his own university is politically neutral when it subsists partly on privileges gained by such appalling human rights violations and conducts research designed to preserve and strengthen those privileges.

Ignoring such complicity is not neutral: it is enabling. It promotes a veneer of normalcy over a ghastly human rights situation and so helps shelter it from scrutiny.

Israel's defenders in this controversy also protest that a boycott violates the moral economy of academic work. 'Communication, understanding and international collaboration is what this field is all about,' said Professor Miriam Schlesinger of Bar Ilan University, who was asked to resign from the board of a translation journal because she is Israeli. Yet the ethic of communication, understanding, and collaboration with Palestinian universities is precisely what Israeli universities have unacceptably abandoned. Instead, Israeli scholars are casually allowing Palestinian institutions to crumble on their doorsteps, at the hands of their own government, while they themselves share elevated discussions in the paneled salons of Oxford and Cambridge.

A third argument is that a boycott is too sweeping, punishing Israel's intellectual progressives along with nationalist reactionaries and passive enablers. Schlesinger even calls it 'collective punishment' -- an unfortunate reference, since Israel's occupation and brutalization of some 4 million people is often denounced as collective punishment and the phrase suggests, again, that peculiar Israeli interpretation of the word 'balance'. Yet collective punishment is wrong where collective responsibility is lacking. Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp are not capable of controlling and therefore not responsible for what some militants do to resist occupation, and resisting occupation is a human right in any case. Israeli professors have the capacity to take a stand against human rights abuses furthered by their own institutions and therefore have the moral responsibility to do so.

Hence it is also false moral symmetry for Dr. Schlesinger to equate her right to serve on the board of an academic journal with the right of Palestinian students to university education. She was denied her board position not just because she is Israeli but because she is complicit, through the privileges and power she enjoys through her nationality and her job, with a brutal occupation. Palestinians are being denied their right to education solely because they are not Jews. The former ban, even if controversial, is a moral gesture; the latter ban is a racist one.

A fourth argument is that Israel is being unfairly singled out. For example, since the US and Britain have recently teamed up to kill, or cause to die or be killed, hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, surely a better case can be made for boycotting them. This argument trips over the grave of South African apartheid, however, for South Africa attempted the same claim of proportionality and the world had none of it. For one thing, state sins are not measured by death counts alone, nor are they ranked by their measurable gravity. If they were, we would focus on just one conflict at a time.

For another, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip is not a foreign policy gone wrong. The entire Israeli state system -- its laws, its policies, its ideology of Jewish statehood, the privileges that serve its Jewish-national society -- is implicated in a grand demographic strategy to exclude, imprison, and subjugate some 50 percent of the state's own territorial population solely on the basis of their ethnic identity. This distinguishes Israel from other states behaving badly by casting it into the particular moral abyss of an apartheid state.

And there's the rub. The small but growing international boycott of Israel signals that the political ground is shifting -- that its occupation is sliding conceptually, if not yet legally, into an apartheid model. The UN International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid defines 'the crime of apartheid' as 'inhuman acts' similar to apartheid, such as 'the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups' by denying 'the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality [citizenship], the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association'. The Convention particularly prohibits any measures 'designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos'.

If this package does not sound like Israel's military rule over Palestinians, it is hard to imagine what apartheid outside South Africa would look like or how the Convention might ever be applied again.

Israel hotly rejects the apartheid analogy, of course, partly on grounds that Palestinians are not a racial group but a national or ethnic group (defined in the negative, as non-Jews). Also, Palestinians are not supposed to be Israel's citizens, but rather are considered citizens of some nonexistent state that may exist some time in the future. But no one looking at the dismembered and walled West Bank enclaves now left to the Palestinians can imagine that these prison camps are intended to constitute a state, and the distinction between ethnicity and race in this context is losing all meaning. The A-word is everywhere now, and the boycott is one signal that the apartheid paradigm is seeding broadly into international civil society. Israel's hapless academics are fast losing ground fast to its growth.

Because they are in denial about the horrors of the occupation itself, Israeli academics protesting the boycott may not grasp its real purpose, which is to force them to confront those horrors. It is not acceptable for them to insist on ivory-tower privileges with so terrible a human rights catastrophe as the occupation stark on their doorstep, perpetrated by their own government and involving their own institutions in its cruelties and deceptions. When Dr. Schlesinger protests that being treated according to her nationality rather than her individual character 'was a blow,' she misses the entire point. To claim a right to principled treatment, one must extend it to others. Israeli academics must become serious about according their Palestinian colleagues the dignity and respect they expect themselves. When they do, given their formidable talents and resources, the occupation will face its toughest opponents.

Virginia Tilley is a US citizen now working as a senior researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council in Pretoria. She is the author of The One-State Solution: A Breakthrough for Peace in the Israeli-Palestinian Deadlock.

Two States or One: full transcript of debate between Avnery and Pappe in

2007-05-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

Gush Shalom Forum

“Two States or One State”
A debate between
former Knesset Member Uri Avnery
and
Doctor Ilan Pappe
moderator:
Professor Zalman Amit

Zalman Amit: Greetings to you all, and thanks for coming to be with us this evening.

First of all, I would like to thank Teddy Katz, who initiated this event and did a large part of the logistics involved.

I would not be exaggerating in stating that the subject we discuss today is the most important and most difficult question facing people on the left side of the political spectrum, and those whom we could broadly call the people of the peace movement. I also think we are lucky in having tonight two speakers who are perhaps the most clear representatives, respectively, of the two approaches and worldviews to whose debate this evening is devoted.

To my right is Dr. Ilan Pappe, historian of Exeter University, formerly of Haifa University. [Pappe corrects: Not yet formerly]. To my left is Uri Avnery, former Knesset Member, former editor of Haolam Hazeh Weekly, and present activist in Gush Shalom.

As agreed, the debate will be conducted as follows: First, Pappe will speak for twenty minutes and Uri Avnery will answer in a similar period of time.

Then, both will speak again for ten minutes each. Then will come the time for questions and answers, and I as moderator promise to exercise no censorship. Finally, Ilan and Uri will have five minutes each for summation.

I now ask Ilan to start the first round.

Ilan Pappe: I would like to thank Gush Shalom for this event, for the initiative and the willingness to discuss such an important subject in such an open forum. I hope that this is just the beginning of discussing this subject, not a one time event – since the subjects with which we will deal tonight are vital to us, and clearly a single evening would not be enough to thoroughly discuss them, reach personal and collective decisions and develop our strategy as a Peace Camp. Whatever the differences between us, we all belong to the Peace Camp, the camp which believes in reconciliation between the Palestinian People and Israel, and we all want to work together to promote that cause.

Zionism was born out of impulses. Fair impulses, natural impulses, impulses which can be understood against the background of the period when this movement was born, the reality of East and Central Europe at the end of the Nineteenth Century.

The first impulse was the desire to try to confront the waves of anti-Semitic persecutions and harassment - and possibly also a premonition that there was even worse to come. Therefore, there started a search for a safe haven where European Jews could live without fear for their lives, property and dignity.

The second impulse was influenced by "The Spring of the Peoples" in the mid-Nineteenth Century. The leaders of the Zionist Movement thought that it was possible to redefine Judaism as a nationality rather than only a religion. That, too, was an idea widely circulating at the time, and more than a few ethnic or religious groups re-defined themselves as nations. When the decision was taken - for reasons which into which there is no time to go into here – to implement these two impulses on the soil of Palestine, where nearly a million people already lived, this reply to impulses turned into a colonial project.

The moment it was decided that the only territory where Jews could be assured of a safe haven, the only territory where a Jewish nation state could be created was in Palestine, this humanistic national movement turned into a colonial project. Its colonial character became all the more pronounced after the country was conquered by the British in the First World War.

As a colonial project, Zionism was not a big success story. When the British Mandate came to its end, no more than six percent of the territory of Palestine were in Jewish hands. Zionism also succeeded in bringing here only a relatively small number of Jewish immigrants. In 1948, Jews constituted no more than a third of the population of Palestine.

Therefore, as a colonial project, a project of settling and displacing another people, it was was not a success story. But the problem - and the source of the Palestinian tragedy - was that the leaders of Zionism did not want only to create a colonial project, they also wanted to create a democratic state. And why was it a Palestinian tragedy that Zionism at its early career wanted to be democratic? Because it still wants to be democratic. Because if you put together Zionist colonialism, Zionist nationalism and the impulse for democracy, you get a need which still dictates political positions in Israel up to the present - from Meretz in the Zionist Left to the National Union party on the Extreme Right. It is the need to have an overlapping between the democratic majority and the Jewish majority. Every means is fair to ensure that there will be a Jewish majority, because without a Jewish majority we will not be a democracy. It is even permissible to expel Arabs in order to make us a democracy. Because the most important is to have here a majority of Jews. Because otherwise the project will not be a democratic project.

It is not surprising that not far from here, in the Red House on the seashore of Tel Aviv, eleven of the leaders of Zionism gathered in 1948 and decided that if you want to create a democratic state and also to complete the Zionist project, i.e. to take over as much as possible of the land of Palestine, and if you have no majority and you are only a third - than the only choice is to implement an ethnic cleansing, remove the Arab population from the territory you intend for a Jewish State.

In March 1948, under the leadership of Ben Gurion, the Zionist leadership decided that in order to have here a democratic Jewish state it was necessary to expel a million Palestinians. Immediately after the decision was taken, they have embarked on systematically expelling the Palestinians. Cruelly they passed from from house to house, from village to village, from neighborhood to neighborhood. When they were done, nine months later, they left behind them 530 empty villages and eleven destroyed towns. Half the population of Palestine had been expelled from its homes, fields and sources of livelihood - more than 80 percent of the population in the territory they conquered. Half of the cities and villages of Palestine were destroyed, and their ruins planted with forests or settled with Jews.

This was the only way in which a demographic Jewish state could have been created - the kind of state which is the common rallying call of the Zionist consensus, from then until the present.

Had this act of the Zionist movement taken place now, no international body would have hesitated to label it a Crime Against Humanity. The eleven Zionist leaders who took the decision were, indeed, criminals according to the criteria of International Law. Sixty years later it is a bit difficult to prosecute them, all the more as none of them is among us any more.

The UN Partition Resolution of November 1947 and the attempts to effect a division of the land after the 1948 War were not based on the ideals of Justice - i.e., there is justice and rights to the indigenous people, most of whom had been expelled, and there is justice to the new settlers. No. The basis for the impulse to effect a Two State Solution then, as at the basis of this impulse now, there was the idea that the Zionist Minotaur could be satisfied by letting the Jewish state have control over only part of Palestine - not the whole.

The UN had proposed giving 50 percent of Palestine. For the Zionists that was not enough and they took 80 percent of Palestine, and there was a feeling that that would be enough for them.

But we know that this territorial hunger did not end in 1948. When the historic opportunity came, a hundred percent of Palestine came under the rule of the Jewish State.

But here the great Palestinian tragedy manifests itself once again. Even after 100 percent of Palestine became the Jewish state, there is still a real impulse to create and preserve a democratic state. This is the background for the creation of a special kind of peace process, a peace process based on the assumption that the Zionist territorial hunger and democratic wishes can be assuaged by leaving part of Palestine - the West Bank and Gaza - out of Israeli control.

This gives a double profit: on the one hand, the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs is not disturbed; on the other hand, the Palestinians are imprisoned where they would no longer threaten the Zionist project.

But as we know, the situation on the ground became increasingly complicated. Perhaps this is the time to mention Meron Benvenishti, one of the first to point out to us the facts on the ground which made this, too, into a pipedream.

Already in the 1980s, the mantra of the Palestinian State beside the Israeli State - as a good solution to the conflict or as a way to assuage the territorial hunger of the Zionist movement and preserve Israel as a Jewish state - this mantra was encountering increasing difficulties.

One factor was that the 'facts on the ground' were steadily reducing the Palestinian territory, by creating and extending settlements. And from a different direction, there was the natural wish of the political movements to extend the ranks of those who supported the Two States Solution. Gradually, they found new partners, and these new partners gave new meanings to the term 'A Palestinian State'. In fact, the connection gradually disappeared between the Two States idea on the one hand and the idea of solving the conflict on the other.

Suddenly, the Two States Solution became a way of arranging some kind of separation between occupier and occupied, rather than a permanent solution which should have dealt with the crime committed by Israel in 1948, with the problems of the twenty percent of Palestinians inside Israel, and with the refugee population which has steadily increased since 1948.

In the 1990s, and since the beginning of the present century, the Two States idea has become common currency. The respectable list of its supporters finally came to include, among others, Ariel Sharon, Binyamin Netanyahu and George W. Bush.

When your idea gains such adherents, that is far from a bad historical moment to rethink the entire idea. When the Two States idea became the basis for the Peace Proces, it gave an umbrella to the Israeli occupation to continue its operation without any apprehension. That was because official Israel, regardless of who was Prime Minister, was supposed to be involved in a Peace Process - and you can't make criticism of a country which is involved in a Peace Process.

Under cover of the Peace Process, you can say under the cover of the slogan of Two States for Two Peoples, the settlements were extended, and the harassment and oppression of the Palestinians were deepened. So far so that the `facts on the ground' have reduced to nothing the area intended for the Palestinians. The Zionist racist and ethnic hunger got legitimacy to extend itself into nearly half of the West Bank.

It was impossible to remain unimpressed by the impressive presence of the Peace Camp in the demonstration in support of Ariel Sharon, at the time of the Gaza Disengagement.

The connection between the Two States for Two Peoples formula and the Peace Process logically led to peace activists who believe in Two States would cry out in the city square - How is that Square called? The Rabin Square? - that they would gather in the Rabin Squaare and cry out: Long Live Sharon, Long Live Disengagement, which means "long live the imprisonment of Gaza in the biggest concentration camp of the Twenty-First Century!" That is what they would cry out, that is the concern of the Sharon-supporting Peace Camp.

On the one hand, this formula makes it possible to continue the occupation by other means, in order to silence the outside criticism of the acts of the occupation. On the other hand, it enabled the State of Israel to create facts on the ground.

In any case, by 2007 you can admit: there is not a single stone visible, in what is now called the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which can serve in the construction of a Palestinian state.

How do you choose to look at this?

If the principle of Justice be the basis for those who support the partition of this country, there is no formula more cynical than the Two States Solution, as it is now presented in the Peace Camp. 80 percent of the country to the occupier, and twenty percent to the occupied. That is, 20 percent in the best and utopian case. More likely, no more than 10 percent, a dispersed and surrounded ten percent, to the occupied.

Moreover, where in this solution do you find a solution for the refugee problem, to where will return those who were the victims of the ethnic cleansing of 1948?

Where will their second and third generation return to, if indeed Justice is the guiding principle?

On the other hand, if pragmatism and "Realpolitik" be our guiding lights, and all that we wish is to assuage the Zionist State's territorial hunger with a demographic efficiency, why offer only 80 percent? If brute force alone is to determine the solution, God Almighty, there is no need today to offer the Palestinians even half a percent. You can move Wadi Ara [Arab-inhabited region of Israel] to the West Bank, you can annex half the West Bank to [the settlement of] Ma'aleh Adumim and give the Palestinian in exchange some sandbags from [the Negev desert region of] Halutza, you can do a lot, lot more. If we trust in the international and regional balance of forces as the decisive factor we would give the Palestinians a tiny piece of land, hermetically enclosed with barriers and walls. Because we are not guided by moral principles, we are pragmatic people.

It's true, there are Palestinians in Ramallah who are willing to rest content with that. We know there are, and they deserve to have their voice heard - but it is utterly unacceptable to silence the voices of the Palestinian majority in the refugee camps, in the diasporas, in the Occupied Territories and among the internal refugees in Israel who want to be part of a state - not a state erected on 20 percent of the land, but of a future state which will include the whole of the country which was once Palestine. There will be neither reconciliation here, nor justice or a permanent solution, if we don't let these Palestinians have a share in solving the questions referring to reconciliation and to defining the sovereignty, the identity and the future of this country.

Unlike many other groups in the Western World, and possible against the historical logic of those who were the victims of a hundred years of Zionist disregard, these Palestinians surprisingly want to include in defining the future state a recognition of the right of the Jews living here to take part in that future.

Even the Jews who came yesterday from St. Petersburg and who pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, even the presence of these Jews is acceptable to the Palestinians. So we are not willing to let these Palestinians return? They, who are willing to let Lieberman stay?

Let's involve them. Let's respect their aspirations. Let's not say: "It's we who decide, we in Tel Aviv and Ramallah. No. They decide, too.

Let's at least check the applicability of the idea. At least try out two ideas and give both a chance, the Two States Idea side by side with the One State Idea.

Let's give some respect to the new idea. The old idea, the idea of partition, we have tried for sixty years. The result was exile, occupation, oppression, discrimination. Peace it did not bring. Let's give something else a chance.

Let's not offer drafts of a democratic constitution which would be applicable only to Western Bak'ah [Arab town inside Israel] and say that we don't care about the future of Eastern Bak'ah [originally part of the same town, which is across the line in the West Bank]. Eastern Bak'ah could be imprisoned in an enclave, as far as we are concerned, or languish under a dictatorship. We want Western Bak'ah as part of the State of All it Citizens which we want Israel to become, but Eastern Bak'ah we will leave outside the fence, perhaps under a continuing occupation. How can we?

We have relations of blood, relations of blood and relations of common tragedy which cannot be divided. We are all in one political imbroglio.

The one who expelled and his sons and grandsons, and the one who was expelled with sons and grandsons and granddaughters, all of them together must take part in the negotiations on the future of the entire country.

Our political elites are incompetent in the best case and corrupt in the worst, in all that pertains to finding a solution to the conflict. The elites which accompany us in the Western World and the Arab World are just as bad. When these elites masquerade as Civil Society, simply because there are some politicians who happen not to hold office at a certain moment, the Geneva bubble is floated and the situation becomes even worse and peace even more far off.

We will find an alternative model. All of us, including the old settlers and the new - even those who got here yesterday - including the expellees with all their generations and those who were left after the expulsions. We will ask all of them what political structure fits all of them, which would include the principles of justice, reconciliation and coexistence.

Let's offer them at least one more model, in addition to the one which failed. In Bil'in we are fighting shoulder to shoulder against the occupation - can we not live together with Bil'in in the same state? Who do we want more as our neighbors, Bil'in or Matityahu Mizrah? [The settlement expanding at the expanse of Bil'in lands].

In conclusion: in order for this dialogue to start and flourish, let's admit one more thing. Let's admit that the occupation which they are increasing daily, we - with all our important efforts - can't stop from here. The occupation is part of the same ideological infrastructure on which the ethnic cleansing of 1948 was built, for which the Arabs of Kufr Qassem were massacred [in 1956], for which lands are confiscated in both the Galilee and the West Bank, for which detentions and killings without trial are committed. The most murderous manifestation of this ideology occurs now in Greater Jerusalem and the West Bank. In order to stop the extension of these war crimes, the extension of this criminal behavior, let's admit that we need external pressure on the State of Israel. Let's thank the associations of journalists, physicians and academics who call for a boycott on Israel as long as this criminal policy continues. Let us use the help of civil society in order to make the State of Israel a pariah state, as long as this behavior continues. So that we here, everybody who belongs and who wants to belong to this country, could conduct a constructive and fruitful dialogue.

The aim should be to create a political structure which will once and for all absolve us from the need to live under a conflict, and make it possible to build a better future. Thank you.

Zalman Amit: I give the floor to Uri Avnery.

Uri Avnery: It is a great privilege to speak to such an audience, in which there are many veterans of the struggle for peace.

This is not a gladiatorial fight to the death in a Roman arena. Ilan Pappe and me are partners in the struggle against the occupation. I respect his courage. We are in a common struggle but we have a sharp debate about the way to win it. What do we debate about?

We have no debate about the past. I am wholeheartedly willing to sign everything Ilan said on that. There can be no dispute that Zionism, which had implemented a historical project, had also caused a historical injustice to the Palestinian People. There can be no dispute that ethnic cleansing took place in 1948 - though allow me to remark, in parenthesis, that the ethnic cleansing was on both sides, and that there was not a single Jew left residing in whatever territory was conquered by the Arab side.

Occupation is a despicable condition which must be terminated. There is certainly no debate about that. We might have no debate about the far future, either, about what we would like to see happening a hundred years from now. Perhaps we will have a chance to talk about that, too, later this evening.

We do have a debate about the forseeable future. About the solution of the bleeding conflict, within a of range twenty, thirty or fifty years. This is not a theoretical debate. You can't just say "Live and let live, each according to their beliefs, and let the Peace Movement live in peace." There can be no compromise between these alternatives, because each of them dictates a different strategy and different tactics. Not the day after tommorow, not tommorow, but here and now.

The difference is important. It is crucial. For example: should we concentrate our efforts in the struggle for the Israeli public opinion, or give up the struggle inside the country and struggle abroad, instead?

I am an Israeli. I stand with both legs on the ground of the Israeli reality. I want to change this reality from one side to the other, but I want this state to exist.

Those who deny the existence of the state of Israel, as an entity expressing our Israeli identity, deny themselves the possibilty of being active here. All their activity here is foredoomed to failure.

A person might despair and say that there is nothing to do, everything is lost, we have passed the point of no return. As Meron Benvenishti said many years ago, the situation is irreversible, we have nothing more to do in this state.

It happens that you sometimes despair. Each one of us had such moments. Despair destroys any chance of action. Despair must not be made into an ideology. I say: there is no place for despair, nothing is lost. Nothing is irreversible, except for life itself. There is no such thing as a point of no return.

I am 83 years old. In my lifetime I have seen the rise of the Nazis and their fall, the peak of the Soviet Union's power and its sudden collapse. One day before the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was not a single German believing this would happen in his lifetime. The experts did not forsee it - none of them. Because there are subterranean currents which act below the surface, and which nobody sees in real time. That's why theoretical analyses come true so rarely.

Nothing is lost until the fighters raise their hands in surrender. Hands up is not a solution, nor is it moral. In our situation, a despairing person has three choices: (A) Emigration; (B) Internal Emigration, that is to sit at home and do nothing; or (C) Run away to an ideal world of messianic solutions. The third possibility is the most dangerous, because the situation is critical - especially to the Palestinians. There is no time for a solution which will be implemented in a hundred years. There is needed an urgent solution, a solution which could be implemented within a few years - even if it is not ideal.

I heard people say: Avnery is old, he sticks to old ideas and cannot absorb a new one. And I wonder: A new idea? The idea of a Single Joint State of Jews and Arabs was old when I was a boy. It flourished in the 1930s. Among others, it was inscribed on the banner of the movement whose headquarters we meet in today, Hakibbutz Ha'artzi Movement. But that idea went bankrupt and it was the idea of the Two States which flourished in the new reality.

If I may make a personal remark: I am no historian. I have seen things with my own eyes, heard them with my own ears, felt them as they were happening. As a soldier in the 1948 war, as a newspaper editor for forty years, as a Knesset Member for ten years, as an activist of Gush Shalom. I am in the thick of things, from different and changing points of view. I have my hand on the public pulse.

There are three basic questions about the One State Idea.

First: Is it possible at all.
Second: If it were possible, is it a good idea.
Third: Will it bring a just peace.

About the first question, my answer is clear and unequivocal: No, it is not possible.

Anybody who is rooted in the Israeli-Jewish public knows that this public's deepest aspiration - and here it is permissable to make a genralization - the far far deepest aspiration is to maintain a state with a Jewish majority, a state where Jews will be masters of their fate. This takes precedence over any other wish and aspitaration, it takes precedence even over wanting to have a Greater Israel.

You can talk of a Single State from the Meditteranean to the Jordan River, define it as bi-national or supra-national - whatever the term used, in practice it means the dismantling of the State of Israel, destruction of all that was built for five generations. This must be said out loud, without any evasions. That is exactly how the Jewish public sees it, and certainly also a large part of the Palestinian public. This means the dismantling of the State of Israel. I am a bit disturbed by the fact that these words are not said explicitly.

We want to change very many things in this country. We want to change its historical narrative, its commonly held definition as "Jewish and democratic." We want to end occupation outside and discrimination inside. We want to build a new framework in the relations between the state and its Arab-Palestinian citizens. But you cannot ignore the basic ethos of the vast majority of the citizens of Israel. 99.99% of the Jewish public do not want to dismantle the state.

There is an illsusion that you can achieve this by outside pressure. Would outside pressure force this people to give up their state? I suggest a very simple test. Think for a moment about your neightbors at home, colleagues at work, fellow students. Would any of them give up the state because somebody outside demands it? Pressure from Europe, even pressure from the White House? Short of a decisive military defeat on the battlefield, nothing will induce Israelis to give up their state. And if Israel is militarily defeated, our debate will become irrelevant anyway.

The Palestinian People want a state of their own, too. This is needed in order to satisfy their most basic aspirations, the restoration of their national pride and the healing of their trauma. Even the Hamas leaders with whom we spoke want it. Those who think otherwise engage in daydreams. There are Palestinians who speak of a Single State, but for most of them this is simply a code word for the dismantling of Israel. And even they know it is an utopia.

There are those who delude themselves that if they speak of a bi-national state, that would frighten the Isralis so much that they will immediately consent to the creation of a Palestinian State at the side of Israel. But the result will be the opposite. This frightens the Israelis, that's true - and pushes them into the arms of the right-wing. This arouses the sleeping dog of ethnic cleansing. About this I agree with Ilan: this dog is sleeping, but it is still there.

All over the world, the trend is opposite: not the creation of multi-national states but on the contrary the division of states into national units. This week the elections in Scotland were won by a party seeking to separate from Britain. The French-speaking minority in Canada is always hovering on the point of secession. Kosovo is about to become independent of Serbia. The Soviet Union broke into pieces, and Chechnia seeks to separate from Russia. Yugoslavia fell apart. Cyprus fell apart. The Basques want independence. In Sri Lanka there is a civil war, as in Sudan. In Indonesia the seams are coming apart in a dozen places.

There is no example in the world of two different peoples voluntarily agreeing to live in one state. There is no example in the world, except for Switzerland, of a really functioning bi-national or multi-national state. And the example of Switzerland, which has grown for hundreds of years in a unique process, is the exception which proves the rule.

After 120 years of conflict, after a fifth generation was born into this conflict on both sides, to move from total war to total peace in a Single Joint State, with a total renunciation of national independence? This is total illusion.

How is this supposed to be implemted in practice? Ilan did not talk about it. This worries me. I suppose it should look like this: The Palestinans will give up their independence struggle and their wish for a national state of their own. They will announce that they want to live in a Single Joint State. After that state is created, they would have to struggle in its framework for their civil rights. Many good people around the world will support that struggle, as they did in the case of South Africa. Israel will be boycotted. Israel will be isolated. Millions of refugees will return to the country, until the wheel turns a full circle and the Palestinians assume power.

If that was possible at all, how much time would it take? Two generations? Three genrations? Four generations? Can anybody imagine how such a state would function in practice? An inhabitant of Bil'in paying the same taxes as an inhabitant of Kfar Sava? Inhabitants of Jenin and of Netanya together formulating a constitution for the state? The inhabitants of Hebron and the Hebron settlers serving side by side in the same army, the same police, obey the same laws? Is this realistic? This is not realistic today, nor would it be realistic tomorrow.

There are those who say: It already exists. Israel alreay rules one state from the sea to the river, you only need to change the regime. So, first of all: Tthere is no such thing. There is an occupying state and an occupied territory. It is far easier to dismantle a settlement, to dismantle settlements, to dismantle ALL the settlements - far easier than to force six million Jewish Israelis to dismantle their state.

No, the Single State would not come about. But let us ask ourselves - should it somehow be erected, would that be a good thing? My answer is: absolutely not.

Let's try to imagine this state - not as ideal creation of the imagination, but as it might be in reality. In this state the Israelis will be dominant. They have an enormous dominance in nearly all spheres: standard of living, military power, level of education, thechnological capacity. Israeli per capita income is 25 times - 25 times! - that of the Palestinians, 20,000 dollars per year compared to 800 Dollars a year. In such a state the Palestinians will be "cutters of wood and hewers of water" for a long, long time.

It will be occupation by other means, a disguised occupation. It will not end the historical conflict, but just move it to a new stage. Would this solution bring about a just peace? In my view, exactly the opposite. This state would be a battlefield. Each side will try to take over a maximum of land. Bring in a maximum number of people. The Jews would fight by all possible means in order to prevent the Palestinians from gaining a majority and taking power. In practice, it would be an Apartheid state. And if the Arabs do become a majority and seek to gain power democratically, there would start a struggle which might reach the scale of a civil war. A new version of 1948.

Also those who support this solution know that this struggle would last several generations, that a lot of blood might be shed and that there is no knowing the result. It is an utopia. In order to achieve it, you need to replace the people - perhaps the two peoples. To produce a new kind of human being. This is what the Communists tried to do, in the early years of the Soviet Union. Also the founders of the Kibbutz. Unfortunately, you can change many things, but humans don't change their basic nature.

Precisely a beautiful utopia can bring about terrible results. In the vision of "The Wolf lying down with the Sheep" there would be needed a new sheep every day. The Two State Solution is the only practical solution, the only one which is within the bounds of reality. It is ridiculous to say that this idea was defeated. In the most important sphere, the sphere of consciousness, it is growing ever stronger.

After the war of 1948, when we raised that banner, we were a small handful, which could be counted on the fingers of a single hand. Everybody denied the very existence of a Palestinian People. I remmeber how, in the 1960s, I was running around Washington, talking with people in the White House and the National Security Council. Nobody wanted to hear of it. Now, there is a world-wide concensus that this is the only solution. The United States, Russia, Europe, the Israeli public opinion, the Palestinian public opinion, the Arab League. You should grasp what this means: the entire Arab World now supports this solution. This has enormous importance for the future.

Why did it happen? Not becauase we are so clever and talented that we convinced the whole world. No. The internal logic of this solution is what conquered the world. True, some of the declared adherents are only paying lip service. It is quite possible that they use it to distract attention from their true purposes. Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert pretended to be supporters of this idea, while their true intention was to prevent the abolition of the occupation. But precisely the fact that such people need to resort to such a pretence, that they are now outwardly committed to it, exactly that proves that they realize it would be futile to go on fighting it. When all peoples, the whole world, recognize that this is the practical solution, it would finally be implemented.

The parameters are well-known, and about them too there is a worldwide agreement.

One: A Palestinian State will be created, side by side with Israel.

Two: The border between them will be based on the Green Line [pre-1967 border], possibly with agreed excahnges of territory.

Three: Jerusalem will be the capital of both states.

Four: There will be an agreed solution to the refugee problem - meaning that an agreed number will return to Israel, and the others will be absorbed in the Palestinian State or in the present places of habitation while getting generous compensations, for example like what the Germans paid us.

I am not against asking the refugees. Let us put on the table the solution which will be agreed upon - a detailed, clear solution, so that each of the refugees would know the choices they could make - and ask them. Neither Ilan nor me can speak authoritatively in the name of the refugees. (I did talk with some refugees in Lebanon when I was there, at the time of Sharon's previous adventure.)

In my view the great majority of refugees, if you give them the compensations they truly deserve, the great majority would prefer to stay where they are. Because they live there for sixty years already, their sons and dughters got married there, they have opened businesses there.

I think there will remain a problem of some hundreds of thousands for whom a solution will have to be found, and I am in favor of us being full partners and finding a solution. I also don't think it would be so difficult. When everything else is solved and only the Refugee Problem is left on the table, the public wil agree to a compromise. I think that is a country which already has a million and quarter Arab Palestinian citizens - and I think it is good that there are - some addition will not make a big difference.

Five: There will be an economic partnership between the two states, in whose framework the Palestinian Government will be able to defend the interests of the Palestinian People, unlike the present situation. The very existence of two states will to some degree diminish the gap in the imbalance between the two sides. This imbalance exists. We can complain about it, we can cry salty tears about it, but this balance exists - and we need to find a solution in the real existing world, not in an imaginary world which we would have liked to come into existence. We have to find a solution in the real world.

Six: In the longer range, there should be a Middle-Eastern Union on the European model, which might eventually include also Turkey and Iran.

There are big obstacles. They are real. Real obstacles can be overcome. They are as nothing - I want to emphasize this - they are as nothing compared with the obstacles on the way to a Single State. I would say that it is in the order of one to thousand. Opting for the One State since it is diffcult to gain the Two States is like being unable to beat a lightweigt boxer and therefore choosing to contend with a heavyweight; or failing to run a hundred metres, and therefore shifting to the marathon; or being unable to attain the peak of Mont Blanc, and therefore trying the Everest instead.

There can be no doubt that the One State Idea gives its holders a moral satisfaction. Somebody told me: OK, perhaps it is not realistic but it is moral. This is where I want to stand. I respect this, but I say: this is a luxury we can't afford. When we deal with the fate of so many people, a moral position which is not realistic is immoral. It is important to repeat this: a moral stance which is not realistic in immoral. Because the final result of such a stance is to perpetuate the existing situation

Ilan Pappe: The One State idea does not proceed from despair. There is indeed despair of the political elites, that is true - but no despair of human nature or of civil society. The despair is felt from politicians who sell and commercialize and resell again and again the Two State Solution for sixty years already - and the results are visible on the ground: more occupation, more injustice, greater and ever more systematic violation of human rights and civil rights.

There is hope. You can see it, for example, in the Galilee - where Jews and Arabs live in a region relatively free from state interference.

It is interesting to note that exactly where there is a demographic balance between Jews and Arabs, there are also business partnerships, joint schools, suddenly there is a budding common life of the two nationalities. It turns out that you can fight segregation.

Why is it possible to fight it? Do you know why? Because the idea that nationalism is bound to win around here is the result of manipulation and education - not of human nature. You can educate otherwise.

It's true - there is an enormous difference between the Two State Solution and the One State Solution. For two states you need politicians, for one state you need educators. Educators are people who don't expect to see results within a year or two. It can also happen that the educators will not see the results within their lifetime. What Yossi Beilin can't afford, I can: to die without knowing whether or not the seeds of education for one common state of Jews and Arabs would bear fruit. A politician can't afford such a thing - not because he wants the conflict to end, but because he does not want his political career to end.

If this unrealistic Two State formula which says that settlements can be dismantled is indeed realizable, who is going to dismantle Gilo? Is anybody going to dismantle Gilo? What are we talking about? And who is going to dismantle Ma'ale Adumim? What are we talking about? What settlements are going to be dismantled? These are not "settlements" in the Israeli public mind which Uri is talking about. Deep, deep in the public consciousness Gilo is an inseparable part of the state of Israel - and if Gilo is not dismantled, it's no use to talk about two states at all.

If somebody could tell me under which conditions Gilo could be dismantled, I am willing to start again talking of two states. Without that, there is nothing to talk about. An exchange of territory is an invention of Israeli diplomats. No sane Palestinian could accept that, on such a small territory.

The real Two States formula - not the utopian one in which Gilo becomes part of the Palestinian state, but the real Two States formula - is the one which we see being implemented in front of our eyes. It means fifty percent of the West Bank annexed to Israel, and the other fifty percent as a Bantustan surrounded by walls and fences, but with a Palestinian flag. That is the state, with apparently some kind of tunnel connecting it to the other concentration camp which is called the Gaza Strip.

This is what will be signed in a ceremony on the White House lawn, about which the Zionist Peace Camp will come and say: nevertheless, this is a bit better than what we had until now.

We have already seen the results of this kind of thinking .

There is a need for persons who struggle with their society. The kind of person who says to his society: I am sorry, the collective ideological identity which you have chosen is despicable and impossible to maintain. It does not stand the test of Judaism or of common morality.

This idea that Jews have an ethnic preference, ethnic majority, ethnic superiority - for a state which is supposed to represent the victims of the Holocaust. Am I supposed to accept all this because the majority thinks so? Because this is the result of past education? Even if I am left as the only Israeli who thinks otherwise, I will go on saying it!

What are you trying to say? That in the name of the collective consciousness as it was under the Apartheid Regime, it was forbidden for a white person to come and say out loud what certainly did not sound realistic in the 1960s and 1970s - that Apartheid was a despicable ideology?

Zionism is not the ideology of a national movement. It is an ethnic ideology of dispossessing the indigenous people and denying them the possibility of going on living here. If we do not start changing the discourse, the general public certainly will not.

There ARE points of no return in history. Yes, there are points of no return in history. I am sorry to say, Uri, that genocide is a point of no return, an irreversible act. There is no lack of examples.

Let me tell it to you as a historian, there is no lack of historical examples where ethnic cleansing turned into genocide. You should give a thought to the depths of this national consciousness, this Jewish consciousness from which you draw such hope for the implementation of the Two State solution. I don’t like to contemplate these depths, the possible transition from ethnic cleansing to ethnic extermination.

From the audience: Where does it not exist? It is like this all over the world?

Ilan Pappe: I want to tell you the worst of all. If within twenty years we will not come up with an alternative solution, and indeed the Israeli balance of power will stabilize a situation where half of the West Bank will be annexed to Israel and in the other half the people just could not go on sustaining themselves, it is quite possible that we will wipe the Palestinians out of history. It is possible that we will wipe them out of all consciousness - but then the Arab and Muslim World will wipe us out, even if it takes a hundred or two hundred years.

We have to think of a long-term solution, not only in order to end the occupation, not only in order to find a solution for Jews and Arabs in this country, but because the entire future of the Jewish people will be in danger if the Zionist Project will succeed to get itself completed. The Zionist Project will only be completed if the majority of this country will be Jewish, and there will be as few Palestinians as possible.

As to what the refugees want, there is - by the way - a project which tries to check their political will. It is called CIVITAS. If you look at the results, Uri, you will see uncomfortable things. Most of the refugees want to return. Most of the refugees don't want money.

But perhaps the most important thing which we can see in the process of democratization which is now beginning in the refugee community is that the most important question where they are concerned is not to return or not return, to take compensations or not to take compensations.

The most important question that they ask themselves is: why are we not allowed to take part in defining the future of out homeland.

Not if we return, even if we don’t return - let us take part in the decision! Not only the inhabitants of Jenin and the inhabitants of Jaffa, let us also take part in defining the future of the country!

Ten minutes have passed, so I will say two more sentences.

Is it possible? It is not possible tomorrow, nor is it possible the day after tomorrow. I am sorry to say that it is far more possible that the Zionist Project will succeed to create here a state without Arabs. This is far more possible. It is on the cards, among other things because of the mistake of the peace camp and the support for "Two States for Two Peoples". Because with the help of the slogan of "Two States for Two Peoples" it is possible to start talking of a transfer of population, it is possible to talk of reducing the Palestinian territory, it is possible to cleanse the Israeli territory of Palestinians. "We are here and they are there" said Ehud Barak. They can also cleanse the Palestinian minority in Israel, in the name of the sublime idea of Two States.

By the way, I don't think that pressure from the outside is what will finally bring about the creation of one state. That is not what I said. I said that pressure from outside can bring about the end of Israeli military presence in the lives of the Palestinians. But the end of this military presence would not be the end of the conflict.

That was the pipedream of Camp David 2000, that an end to the occupation would be the end of the conflict. No. The end of the occupation would just make possible a real, full, just discussion of the end of the conflict. The end of the conflict in this small country could be brought about on the basis of one joint state.

Historical examples can be cited against it, but contrary historical examples can be also be cited. The same is true for contemporary examples, some can be cited on the one side and others on the contrary side. What is most important is the questions which we ask ourselves - exactly we, who are partners for a joint struggle with the Palestinians. Do we have no partners on the Palestinian side for building here a joint state? Are there no Palestinians in Israel with whom we want to build a joint state? Are there no Jews in Israel with whom we DON'T want to build a joint state? So let us already make the division as between normal Jews and Arabs on the one hand and Jews and Arabs who are bastards on the other side. Let us stop dealing with the nationalist discourse which perpetuates occupation, alienation and oppression. Thank you.

Zalman Amit: Second round, Uri Avnery has ten minutes for a reaction.

Uri Avnery: I am in a bit embarrassing situation - because in the debate between emotion and logic, it is always emotion which gets the applause. In the debate between absolute morality and relative morality, absolute morality gets - and rightly so - the applause.

I have listened attentively to what you said, Ilan, but I also listened attentively to what you did NOT say. You did not say how you can bring about the dismantling of the State of Israel. You did not say how the one state will come about. You did not describe how it will look in reality.

You have described ideal things. Excuse me for making such a comparison,

but you reminded me a little bit of the utopian book "Altneuland" by the Founding Father of Zionism. But we live in reality, and we know how things look in reality. How they can be in reality and what can be created in reality - and that is what counts.

There are many good people in Israel. Many, who do good things. There are a hundred peace organizations and more, each one of which does important things in its own way. There are teachers who educate for Jewish-Arab coexistence, there are kindergartens which start this even earlier in life, all true. But you yourself said that the solution which you propose will not come about in their lifetime. You propose planting an almond tree of which your grandchildren will get to eat.

But God Almighty, all this frightens me terribly. You talk of ethnic cleansing, of the terrible danger of ethnic cleansing. You talk of the terrible dangers which threaten the Palestinian people in the present reality, and I see this situation as darkly as you see it. I am even more somber than you. In this reality, we have no fifty years to wait for a solution!

I said that there can be no compromise between out positions. But let's offer you a compromise anyway: work with us for the creation of the two states. After the two states will be there, after these dangers would be averted, go on struggling to get them united into a single state.

I say this seriously. Struggle for it that the two states will become one, voluntarily. I personally hope very much - and I talked about that with Arafat, more than once or twice - that between the Israeli state and the Palestinian state there will a kind of federation, a partnership between two states with an open border and a joint economy - of course, with safeguards for the Palestinian economy.

The first time that I met Arafat, during the Siege of Beirut, he talked of a "Benelux" style solution (the older among you would remember Benelux, the united framework of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg).

Arafat meant a triangular alliance of Israel, Palestine and Jordan, and possibly including Lebanon too. During our last meeting, he still talked of that.

This is, indeed, an important and worthy vision. But meanwhile, we have a patient lying in front of us, a severely wounded and bleeding patient. The most urgent thing is to stop the bleeding, to find a solution which is not ideal, which is real and can be implemented.

To end this part of the debate: I don’t think that the Peace Camp was defeated, nor that it failed. There is a far more complicated process going on here. There are things which happen on the ground, and things which happen below the surface.

It is absolutely true: On the ground we see that reality is terrible, that it is even getting worse - if that is possible, and we know that it is always possible. We deal with all that every day.

But below the surface other things are happening.

There was a time when 99% of the Jewish-Israeli public denied the very existence of the Palestinian People - now, nobody speaks like that any more. Once, the big majority opposed the idea of creating a Palestinian state. Now, according to all opinion polls, the great majority in Israel accepts this idea as part of the solution.

When we said that Israel should talk with the PLO, they said we were traitors. Afterwards, the government made an agreement with the PLO. Now we say that there should be talks with Hamas. I am sure that Israel is going to talk with Hamas, and that it will not even take too long before that happens.

We said that Jerusalem was going to be the capital of two states. That was terrible, unacceptable. Jerusalem is the Eternal Undivided Capital of Israel, blah, blah, blah. But when Ehud Barak proposed a kind of partition of Jerusalem - and it does not matter whether he meant iit or not, and precisely what he meant - what was the public reaction? The public was silent.

Something is changing in this country. The changes in the depth of public opinion are vital on the way to the solution. I think we are winning, I think that the historical development is leading in our direction.

It is not easy, the obstacles are enormous. But I am not mindlessly optimistic. I am optimistic on the basis of reality. I think that we will get to the creation of a Palestinian state, side by side with Israel. And I think that Palestine will be a proud national state.

I know that for many people the word "National", the word "Nationalism", are dirty words. You can open a big additional debate on that, and take up a whole new evening with it, but I will say only this: anybody who ignores the enormous power of national feeling lives in an unreal world. Reality is nationalist.

National feeling is far too deep to be uprooted from people's hearts. It will not take a month, nor a year or two. It is a matter for centuries. Even in Europe, sixty years after European unification has started, look at what is happening in the football stadiums. See what happens when national feeling is hurt - even in Europe. Nationalism is an existing fact, which must be taken into consideration.

Ignoring the irrational element in politics is not a rational behavior. Irrationality exists. It is rational to take the irrational into account. We need to think how, despite this irrationality, we can reach a solution which can be lived with.

Zalman Amit: Now we get to the part where I start earning my bread as moderator. I tell you in advance that not all questions can be presented, that would take far more than the fifty minutes allotted to questions and answers, but I will try my best and hope for your help.

The first question is for Ilan, from Moshe Bokai: "UN Resolution 181 is the document on whose basis the State of Israel was declared. That resolution also defined borders for two states. Can anybody but the United Nations abolish that resolution?"

Ilan Pappe: Can anyone but the UN abolish that resolution? Certainly. The Israelis and the Palestinians can abolish this resolution through any joint historical process, if they just want to.

There is no problem. There is nothing sacred about that resolution, nothing - unless you repeat the mistake which was in the base of that resolution. The mistaken idea that, though the country's original population, 66% of the whole, did not accept a certain solution - nevertheless the International Community and the United Nations felt justified in imposing on the indigenous population a solution which they found unacceptable. Therefore, of course this solution can be abolished. It has no legally-binding status, it has no special status. What will ultimately decide is what the inhabitants who were here and the inhabitants who are here will decide.

Zalman Amit: Another question to you - you talk of a criminal colonialism of the Jewish People, in the form of Zionism. Does that not mean that you deny the rights of the Jewish People in the past, and naturally also today? Does this not mean that there should be no talk of One State for Two Peoples, but just of one state for a single people, the Palestinian People?

Ilan Pappe: I do not deny the right of the Jewish People to a state, as I do not deny the right of the Palestinian People to a state. I do deny the the right of the Jewish People to dispossess the Palestinian People of their homeland. If the political solution which is being proposed would enable the Jewish People to continue dispossessing the Palestinian People, this is not only morally unacceptable - it also means that the conflict would be perpetuated. Therefore, what I seek is a solution which in the final account will enable everybody who lives here to feel that their historical rights are respected, and that their civil and human rights are respected, too. If this sounds like absolute morality, I shudder to think what relative morality would consist of.

Zalman Amit: The next question is for Uri Avnery. Considering that Jews had been persecuted all along their history, does the existence of a state with a Jewish majority not invite a new Holocaust, under the shadow of the Iranian threat?

Uri Avnery: We cannot in this evening devote the time for a detailed discussion of what happened in this country in the past hundred and twenty years. It is a long story, a complicated story, a difficult story, a tragic story - and not one story but two stories, two narratives, an Israeli one and a Palestinian one. Thoroughly analysing it requires a whole evening to itself, or perhaps a week or a month.

We in Gush Shalom, in the brochure which is on the table outside, entitled "Truth against Truth ", have made an effort to write a draft for a joint Israeli-Palestinian narrative about how the conflict was born and developed up to the present. Whoever wants can read it.

About the Iranian Bomb: well, when part of the Jews decided that they want to be a nation and create a state, they took a very grave risk. There had been a traditional Jewish way of life, and it was very simple - when Jews were in danger, they packed their belongings and ran away to another country. They have survived very well that way - perhaps not very well, but they survived that way for two thousand years.

When our ancestors decided to be a nation and create a state, they took a calculated risk. They have gone back to the arena of history, and the arena of history is a dangerous place.

Every people faces dangers. During the Cold War the United States was at every single moment faced with the danger that, in case of a nuclear war breaking out, two hundred million Americans would be killed within five minutes. That is the price of living in history.

I am not afraid of the Iranian Bomb. I think this is mostly a fabricated hysteria, part of the demonization of the Iranian People. Iranians are a normal people, like every other. The Iranian People are no more insane than the Israeli People.

Ilan Pappe: That's not saying much.

Uri Avnery: True. The Iranian regime is not crazy, even if their president sometimes behaves a bit strange. If they gain a nuclear bomb - not that I wish for that - if they gain a nuclear bomb, they will not use it. They will have a Bomb and we will have a Bomb. They will not use theirs because they will know the price, and we will not use ours because we will know the price. We will live in danger like many other nations live under various dangers.

The greatest danger is the manipulation of the Holocaust. Anybody who mentions the Holocaust in any political context should be condemned. By the way, if you want a direct testimony about Iran, read what this guy said who this week landed by mistake in Teheran and was treated like a prince - though they knew he was Israeli.

Zalman Amit: Stay there a moment, there is another question addressed to you - from Rami Nashef of the Machsom news website - How would you define the status of Arab citizens in a Jewish state which is part of the Two State Solution. Would Arab Knesset Members be expecting a future like that of Azmi Bishara now?

Uri Avnery: I live in this state from its first day, and from its first day I objected to its being defined as " A Jewish State". I don't know what that means. I don't know what is a Jewish state. Nobody ever explained to me what is a Jewish state. For ten years of being in the Knesset I never was in any serious discussion defining what is a Jewish state.

What is it? A state expressing Jewish values? A state based on the Jewish religion? A state in which there is a Jewish majority? A state belonging to all the Jews in the world, eleven million people - some of whom are part of the American nation, while others are part of the French nation (and have voted this week for Sarcusi)? What is a Jewish state?

Many years ago, when I was still on speaking terms with Ariel Sharon, we had a very intense debate on this exact point - is this a Jewish state or an Israeli state. I am part of a group of citizens who lodges and appeal to the Supreme Court to remove the definition "Nationality: Jewish" from our identity cards and replace it with "Nationality: Israeli". Therefore, for me this question is almost irrelevant.

The Arab document which was recently published in Nazareth is to a great degree acceptable to me. I think it is a basis for serious discussion.

Earlier, I said that there should be set out a new framework for the relations between the state and its Arab citizens. I think that discussion of this new basis can start from this document. I can only flatter its authors.

Zalman Amit: I have two questions for Ilan. The first one in fact consists of three small questions by Yehezkel Dolev - When did the longing for Zion and the desire to resettle the country start; are the Arabs in Eretz Yisrael the descendants of the Philistine People who were three thousands ago exterminated by King Saul and King David; and does the Koran contain any mention for the rights of the Jewish People over the Holy Land?

Ilan Pappe: The ideal of a Jewish longing for Zion, as a national vision, begins in 1882 - with some precursors a few years earlier.

Are the Palestinians of today descendants of people exterminated by King Saul? Look, I have encountered two interesting encyclopedias: The Hebrew Encyclopedia and the Palestinian Encyclopedia. The Palestinian Encyclopedia asserts that the Palestinians are the descendants of Cana'anites, the Hebrew one holds that the Jews here are descendants of the ancient Hebrews. Both assertions are utter bullshit.

About the Koran: no, the Koran does not recognize the right of the Jewish People for this land, nor does it recognize the right of the Palestinian People for this land. The Koran was created in the Seventh Century. At that time there were no Peoples or national movements - and surprisingly, at that time nobody was especially interested in Palestine.

The Koran was mainly concerned with finding a place in the world at the side of two well-established and quite strong Monotheistic religions. In that it succeeded quite well.

In the state which will be established here we will have to take into consideration all these positions: those who think they are descendants of somebody exterminated here three thousand years ago, those consider themselves descended from somebody expelled from here two thousand years ago, and those who think that the have a Divine Promise denied to everybody else. As is well known, the Zionist Movement does not believe in the existence of God, but strongly holds to His having promised this land to the Jews.

Zalman Amit: A question from our common friend Teddy Katz - what gives Jews, who themselves have a sovereign state, any moral, or other authority to impose on the Palestinians a supposedly common state, under conditions defined and dictated by the Jews themselves?

Ilan Pappe: There would have been neither hope not meaning for the idea of a joint, common Jewish-Arab state, if it was solely initiated by a group of Jews. I completely agree with that. I would not have presented myself here, to say what I say, if I had not felt certain that I am representing a common activity of Jews and Palestinians together.

This action must be common, with its basic idea standing in contradiction to the Two States idea. The idea in its base is not that in one part of the country - 80 percent - Jews decide what will happenn, while Palestinians take the decisions for the other 20 percent. No. I want Palestinians and Jews to take together the decisions for a hundred percent of the country.

Zalman Amit: Two questions to Uri Avnery. First, having seen in your lifetime so many phenomena which nobody predicted and nobody believed could happen, why can't you accept the possibility that the nationalist ideas - Zionist as well as Palestinian - will swiftly pass away like smoke?

Uri Avnery: I do accept the possibility, except for the word "swiftly". I remember one evening when I sat in a Ramallah restaurant, drank a bit of good arak, ate and drank while surrounded by the good Palestinian people of Ramallah. Feeling elated with the arak I thought: what a wonderful country this could have been, if there was peace. Everybody could have travelled everywhere in the country. I just think - and that is my main difference with Ilan - that it will not happen in a single joint state, because such a single joint state will simply not come into being.

I think that it CAN happen in two states, with each people having a state and a flag. They will have their state and their flag, and we will have our - different - state and flag, and each side will have its own football team, and the border will be open. The people of Ramallah would be able to swim in the Mediterranean, and we could - if we want - bath in the Jordan River.

These will not be mutually hostile states. Hostile states would not come into being, because the Two State solution can only be implemented with the agreement of both peoples. That, the agreement of both peoples to the proposed solution, was Ilan's last sentence, and I completely agree with it.

The solution which you propose like the solution which I propose have one thing in common: neither could be implemented except with the common consent of Israelis and Palestinians. Anything but that would mean either the destruction of Israel or the perpetuation of Israeli occupation.

This solution or that, the one you consider realistic and the one I consider to be such - both need the consent of both peoples. And if you want to include the refugees in the decision, too, I am certainly not opposed to that. I think that any reasonable overall solution should provide the refugees with a reasonable solution for their problem. It would not be an ideal solution, but they would be able to live with it. We will place on the table the solution agreed on in negotiations, and they will approve it.

Zalman Amit: Uri, the next question - what if in the far future the number of Palestinians in Israel will exceed fifty percent, how will the State of the Jews be preserved then?

Uri Avnery: When the State of Israel was created, there were in it twenty percent Arab citizens. Now, after sixty years, there are still twenty percent Arab citizens. This is a statistical miracle, considering the enormous birth rate of the Muslim Arab citizens (the Christian Arabs have a lower birth rate than the Jews).

I think that what you speak about will not happen, but if it does - God will provide. If it happens in fifty years, the demographic balance will no longer be so important. It is not completely indispensable that there will always be four Jewish citizens for every Arab one. What we need to do now is push the demographic demon back into the bottle. At this moment it is a national feeling which cannot be dispensed with, but if after fifty years of common life in the State of Israel the demographic balance will change, than it will change. Many things change in the world.

In America, too, there is such a process. If fifty years ago somebody would have told the Americans: let's create here a Hispanic majority, an uprising would have broken out. But later the Hispanics came and slowly increased, and quite soon there will be more Hispanics than White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. There are things which change in the course of a lifetime, there are natural processes, which should not be opposed.

In this debate we are talking about today, about the present consciousness of both peoples, on the solution which both peoples must achieve today, tomorrow, or the morning of the day after tomorrow. So, I am not among the people disturbed by this question.

Zalman Amit: Another question, a bit connected to the earlier one - if there will be two states, where will the Israeli Arabs be? In which one of them?

Uri Avnery: I would like to draw your attention to a very interesting phenomenon, which is hardly talked about. Some Fascists, Lieberman as well as Effie Eitam, have come up with a revolutionary proposal, a supposedly humane proposal. The Arabs in the towns and villages of the "Triangle" area of Israel will stay where they are, but the entire region will be transferred to the Palestinian state which will be created - and in exchange, the settlers will be annexed to Israel. Not a single Arab citizen of Israel had come forward to support this. Not a single one. Also not my friend Azmi Bishara.

Think about what this means. The great majority of the Arabs in Israel are nationalist Arabs. They are proud of being part of the Palestinian People, but they want to go on being citizens of Israel. Even as a minority.

Zalman Amit: One more question, then I pass the floor to Ilan. What does it mean a struggle abroad? Is the struggle not here, on the land which we live on - not for a state abroad. And in continuation, in English: "You may say I am dreamer, but I am not the only one"? [English in the original].

Uri Avnery: I am a dreamer too [English in the original], but I try to dream dreams which can be implemented.

My reference to -a struggle abroad- was not a reaction to something which Ilan said here tonight, but to something which was said by another activist - also an Israeli Jew - at a very intense debate which we had on this subject a month ago, at a conference in Ramallah. He said something like: the struggle inside the country is lost. Israeli public opinion cannot be influenced. The entire struggle is redundant, completely without any chance. What we, the Israeli Peace Movement, should do is to move abroad and influence the international public opinion to pressure Israel, impose an international boycott on Israel, and so forth.

I think that our struggle is here, our battlefield is here. The Peace Movement should wage its struggle here. All of us, by the very act of conducting a daily activity here, confirm the fact that our battlefield is here.

I oppose the opinion that Israelis can, by acting abroad to encourage international pressure, positively influence the Israeli public opinion.

In one of the debates Adam Keller asked: The Palestinians live in terrible misery, and the entire world is monstrously boycotting them to the point of starvation in order to force them to give up their dreams - and nevertheless they do not yield. How, then, can you expect the Israeli public, which is a thousandfold times stronger economically, to yield to outside pressure?

I have yesterday received an interesting letter from a man who had participated in the struggle at South Africa. There are those who claim that south Africa can serve as our model. I think that there is no similarity between the two problems.

This man, evidently an expert on South African issues, is the opinion that it is wrong to attribute the fall of Apartheid mainly to the effects of the international sanctions. He considers the boycott as rather marginal, the decisive factor being the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Simply put, America had for many years supported the dastardly Apartheid regime, because of regarding it as a stronghold in the struggle against Communism. With Communism off the scene, the US had no further interest in propping up such a regime in South Africa, and it immediately collapsed.

American-Israeli relations are an important subject in itself, but those who expect the United States' attitude to Israel to change within a few years do not understand the ideological depths of the American-Israeli connection.

The American national narrative is parallel to the Israeli one. There is the Jewish Lobby. There is the enormous power of the Evangelists, 80 million fanatics who believe that we are placed here in the Holy Land in order to implement their Messianic dreams. There is no similarity.

Zalman Amit: Two questions to Ilan, one shorter and one longer. The first one is in English: "Do you agree that there is irreversible contradiction between a Jewish state and a democratic state?" [English in the original].

Ilan Pappe: Yes. I think there is a clear contradiction between a Jewish State and a Democratic State. I think there is also an inherent contradiction between democratic ideals and having a Jewish State at the side of a Palestinian State. I share the position of Uri, that we would not want to see the [Arab Israeli] communities of Wadi Ara being forcible annexed to a Palestinian state, we all rightly protest this idea. But it is very interesting to note the position taken by the inhabitants of places like Eastern Bak'ah. Read the Palestinian press about this. They say: look how Zionism had won! Our friends in Bak'ah Al Garbiya, Western Bak'ah, think that it would be a disaster to live again in a united town of Bak'ah, because that would mean that they - Israeli citizens - would become part of the the West Bank [where eastern Bak'ah is located]. This is what zionism has done. It has created separated Palestinian identities. As if one type of Palestinians with one kind of identity can have a place only in the Palestinian state which Gush Shalom is offering, while another type of Palestinians will live in democratic Israel.

There is an inherent contradiction between the Two States idea and the idea of Democracy. Not because there is any possibility of Palestinians being fifty percent in Israel, Uri. Ethnic cleansing will start long before they get that far, it could start when they are just 23 percent. I don't want to rely on the medical miracle which you believe in. You spoke about how wonderful it is that the Palestinians, though most of them are Muslims, have not passed the 20 percent level. How will it go on? Shall we send inspectors to make sure that they never will pass the 20 percent level? Go into bedrooms? Do you start realizing where you get when this the basis of your mental structures? We are dealing with something of which only one other people in history dealt with concerning the Jewish People.

To start counting how many Jews there are and how many Arabs. Even with a Two states solution, we will not for one moment stop counting how many Arabs there are in this country. Because otherwise, what is the whole idea of having such a state? If it would not be a Jewish State, why not have already a joint state?

Zalman Amit: Dr. Hemi Yehezkel asks if in your view, in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict all the badness and evil are on the Israeli side. He wants an answer in one word, if possible.

Ilan Pappe: if he wants one-word answers let him go to a court of law. With all due respect, I will ignore this request. And for the questions itself: No, badness and evil are not entirely on the Israeli side. There is quite a lot of them on the Palestinian side. You might not believe it, but they are human beings, too. They have perpetrated massacres, they have hurt innocent civilians, they did many stupid things which hurt themselves as well as others. The thing is that even they don't deserve what Zionism did to them.

Therefore, Uri, the story is not complicated - unlike what you say and what is written in this brochure prepared by Gush Shalom. The story here is a simple story, a story of white people who were persecuted in Europe and who drove away the black people who used to live here. It happened in many places. The difference is that here the white people stayed, and surprisingly the black people who are left here are willing to build a single state together with them. So, we should be grateful to them for that, rather than start accusing them again and look for ways of locking them into impossible enclosures.

Zalman Amit: Ladies and Gentlemen, the time allotted for questions is over, and I can assure you that if we had wanted to take all the questions posed we would have needed another another hour and half at least.

There was still left one question of Dr. Yehezkeli, to Uri Avnery. Also of you he asks a short answer. He asks you if a Palestinian national Movement really exists - that is, a movement of people who declare themselves as belonging to the Palestinian Nation, or who appeal to the Palestinian Nation to declare itself as being separate from the Arab Nation. He asks for a one-word answer.

Uri Avnery: In one word, the answer is "perhaps". Look, the issue of Palestinian Nationalism and its relation to Arab Nationalism is very complicated. To very much oversimplify: there is a specific Palestinian National Movement, within the larger, All-Arab National Movement. In the Arab language there are different words. There is "Watan", which should be translated as "Nation"; and there is "Umma", which is linguistically the same word as the Hebrew word for "Nation", but which actually refers to the entire Arab World, or sometimes to the entire Muslim World.

How did a Palestinian Nation form here? Golda Meir had said that there is no such thing as a Palestinian People, and many had said it before. The specific Arab-Palestinian National Movement took form in this country, following the Zionist attack on the Arab people who lived in the country then.

The fate of the Arab People here was ever since then completely different from that of the Arab People in Syria, Lebanon or Egypt.

Here, a completely different problem was created. Here, the Palestinian People found itself faced with a formidable movement which progressively took over the country.

I define this historic, tragic and painful conflict (to whose Jewish side I am also sensitive) as a collision between an unstoppable force and an immoveable mass.

It is, in my view, not a completely one-sided story. When you, Ilan, show high sensitivity to the injustice done to the Palestinians, I accept this fully and more than fully. But when you completely ignore the fact that there is a Jewish side to that story, I don’t think this is true. And it is also not useful.

You could not effect the Jewish-Israeli public if you have no sensitivity to what this public thinks, to its fears and anxieties. All this exists. It exists, and you must take it into account, if you want to influence these people. Also to influence in your direction, also to bring six million Israelis to dismantle this state and accept a common state with another nation - a nation which they now hate and fear.

If you want to influence the Israeli public, you must understand these fears, understand where they come from. Only if we look at both peoples, see them at every moment of our struggle, see their anxieties and aspirations - only then do we have a chance of succeeding.

Zalman Amit: With your permission, I will go over to the final round, five minutes' summations. Ilan, please.

Ilan Pappe: We said what needed to be said, and there should be no repetitions. Of course, the solution must contain the anxieties as well as the aspirations of both Jews and Arabs. I quite agree.

That is precisely what I think that the kind of political structure which was proposed in the past sixty years is a failure. Because it does not answer the aspirations of the people on both sides. That is the reason why the Peace Camp failed. Because its proposed solution does not answer the fears, does not dissipate the anxieties. Neither those of the Jews nor those of the Palestinians. Exactly the opposite.

This solution - the only solution, the only purpose for which the International Community is willing to pressure the sides, the only one which the Quartet is willing to go for - this solution only increases the anxieties, drives the fears deeper and deeper, increases the hatred, causes ever higher waves of violence. We have no time to try another ten years of this solution, another Road Map and another Oslo Agreement.

The Palestinians in the Territories don't have enough people to pay for the continuing failures of the political elites which lead the Two States move.

It is always the occupier, the dispossessor, the oppressor who claims that the story is complicated. The victim always says: In fact, it is not so complicated. You have taken my home, you imprison me, you don't let me breath - all this does not sound complicated to mme. It is hard, it is terrible and horrible, but it is not complicated. The occupier says: it is complicated, it is far more complicated, you have to understand also my side. The side of the occupier is something to which we will show understanding when the occupation is over - not a minute before.

There is another thing. Do we decide - and we must decide - what kind of game it is that we are playing. If as Uri says, we are really out to satisfy national feelings, then tell me, Uri: what National Movement which you know about would have concluded that now is the time to lay aside the Kalachnikov gun and the bomb, to end the struggle, because we have gotten the most realistic and normal solution which a national movement can ask for: twenty percent of the homeland. Let's end the struggle, we got twenty percent!

True,these twenty percent are divided in two. True, ten percent of the twenty percent are divided again, in five. True, we are not really politically independent, even less do we have control over our economy, and the refugees have nowhere to return to. But how lucky it is that we are thinking in nationalist terms!

This, yes this is the Palestinian Nation State. This is what we fought for, for twenty percent of the soil. How can anybody speak in nationalist terms and not offer the Palestinians at least fifty percent of their homeland! What Palestinian will sit down with you, except the well-fed elites of Ramallah?

Now, you say: let's agree about creating the Two States, and from there go on to building the Single State. Except that I, just like you, am afraid for what will happen within the Israeli State. Because it is clear that if we are talking not only in national terms but also in pragmatic political terms, we want - and you say we have a strong chance - to succeed in convincing the Israeli society of something which it is capable of accepting, not to talk to Israelis of a version which is beyond their comprehension. Fine.

We know what is the element in the Two States Solution which appeals to Israelis: "We are Here, They are There". We can't include the Arab in the "Here", he does not fit in. Because then Yossi Beilin will correctly ask you: If you speak in nationalistic terms, why should the Palestinians have a state to themselves "there", while "here" there would be a state with Arabs as well as Jews? Where is the logic in this? And the only logic which barely works is the logic of keeping the Palestinian inhabitants permanently at the twenty percent level.

When they pass above that level, even the most fanatic supporters of the Two States Solution will say that the principle of keeping an absolute Jewish demographic majority takes precedence over any other principle - also over Democracy or Human Rights or Civil Rights.

Anybody who supports the Two States Solution would not be able to refute this logic.

In summation, I agree with you that we have two agendas: a long term, principled agenda, and an immediate, vital; emergency agenda. I agree to that. The emergency agenda is to put an end to the Israeli oppression in the Occupied Territories.

But to come and say to achieve this is a struggle from the inside? To say this, after forty years of occupation? Are you trying to convince us that the Great Israeli Peace Camp is the force which would put an end to the daily Israeli crimes in the Occupied Territories? Or even the Palestinian National Movement? Is that what you learned from the past forty years?

Did the internal forces succeed in ending the occupation? Did they avert one day of occupation? Of injustice? Of oppression?

There is no National Movement which achieved its aim, no injustice to which and end was put, without a serious involvement of the outside world. There never was. We need the outside world in order to end the occupation. We need public opinion in Europe, in the United States. After forty years we have the right to say that we need an outside pressure on Israel in order to end the occupation, that we don't want to wait for another forty years.

We have the right to say this. The inside and the outside - each has its own role to play. International public opinion has its role to play, and outside government have their role - just as the internal Israeli struggle and the internal Palestinian struggle have their own roles.

There is only one way to deal with a regime like the Israeli regime, which is based on an ideology which creates a separation between the Jewish population and the local population - a population whose cleansing started in 1948 and never stopped for a single day since then. There is only one way of conveying that the message that this ideology does not pay, that the occupation is too expensive to sustain. The only way is a clear message from conscientious people, of peace movements all over the world.

Israel should get the same message which was delivered to South Africa: "You will stay a pariah state as along as you continue committing these crimes". This is an important message, a message which should be supported. It does not contradict the Palestinian struggle, it does not contradict the peace struggle. On the contrary, it strengthens these struggles, it gives it a chance. Without that, the first victims will be the Palestinians but we too will be victims, everybody in this room.

Uri Avnery: The issue is not to do one thing and stop doing another thing.

We need to make a simple strategic choice: where do we direct our main thrust. Nobody is saying: don’t go to international conferences. I do that all the time. Nobody says: don’t talk to the international public opinion. I talk to the international public opinion every week. The question is where the Israeli Peace Movement should direct its main thrust, its main effort. Where is its main battlefield. I say, unequivocally: that is here, in this country.

As to outside pressures: there are pressures which can help, and there are pressures which might cause damage, even grave damage.

If the outside pressure would be of such a kind as to make normal, sane Israelis feel that the entire world is ganging up on us because we are Jews, this pressure will bring an opposite result. If the pressure will be selective, if the boycott will be focused on bodies which support the occupation and take part in it, then it would be excellent. I am all for that. In fact, Gush Shalom pioneered this way, calling already ten years ago for boycott of settlement products.

Occupation will not end without peace. We have to see that in the most clear way possible: there is no way of putting an end to all this injustice, of ending the occupation, except in the framework of peace.

This was clear from the first moment, and is clear also now.

That is why it is so important to reach peace quickly. It is possible and realistic. Without achieving peace, the occupation will go on and on and on, and your plan will achieve the exact opposite of what you hope for.

Therefore, formulating a clear peace plan, which has a chance to be accepted, is not a theoretical matter.

You should be careful about the use of words. Sometimes, people throw words whose meaning they don’t understand. For example, "Bantustan". In South Africa there were blacks who became agents of the racist regime, who took upon themselves to manage regions which were nothing but Apartheid concentration camps.

To say that the Palestinians who seek a state of their own are like the black servants of the racist regime - that is a terrible insult to the Palestinian People. The Palestinian People have risen up in two intifadas, they have shown in countless struggles that they do not yield to the occupation. You can defame Yasser Arafat as much as you want, but he was the national leader of a fighting people. Also today I think that signing the Oslo Agreement was a right decision for the Palestinians to take. That is hotly debated. But to say that the Palestinians who seek to create a state of their own are Israeli agents, like the heads of the South African Bantustans, is very insulting and very incorrect. There might be one person among the Palestinians today who might take up a role similar to that of the Bantustan leaders - and even about him I am not sure.

Demographic problems exist in many countries. Israel is not the only country which wakes up and rushes to count births. There had been elections in France just now, of which the main issue was the increase of the Muslim population in the country. There is in the United states an enormous debate about the Blacks and Hispanics, with demographic calculations being made all the time.

For myself, I reject any demographic way of thinking. I would say that politics plus demographics equals Fascism. Every thinking based on demographic calculations reeks of Fascism. Let's meet again in a hundred years and see how the composition of the population in this country has developed.

Ilan Pappe: You should make some plans for a shorter range.

Uri Avnery: Let me tell you what I find most frightening in your proposal, more than anything else. You say that the Two States Solution is inherently bad and should be rejected. Your alternative is a solution which 99 percent of Jewish Israelis do not want, and which has no chance to be accepted. What does that leave? It leaves the slogan of the Israeli right wing: that there is no solution to this conflict.

That is what I am afraid of: of those who say that "There is no solution to the conflict", the conflict will last forever, that it is our fate to suffer an eternity of it. This is what I am afraid of, because it can serve as justification to all horrors, up to and including ethnic cleansing.

To sum up: I am not pessimistic. I am optimistic. I think that nearly everything is possible. The one thing which is not possible to convince the Israelis to dismantle the state of Israel. This simply will not happen, not under any conceivable set of circumstances, even in situations which go beyond the most wild imaginations. It will not happen in the forseeable future. Well, it might happen beyond the forseeable future. For me, personally, that is not so interesting.

From the audience: It is the default option. There will be a Single State, whether we like it or not.

Uri Avnery: A single state means the dismantling of the State of Israel. The adherents of this idea should say this loud and clear. You cannot walk around on a tiptoe and wrap it in a million disguises. What is up for discussion on the table the existence of the State of Israel. Nothing else. If anybody here has found the way how to convince six million Israelis to dismantle the State of Israel for which five generations had fought, I raise my hat to them.

There is no such way. There are two things which we did not hear today, and I want to repeat them in the hope that they will remain engraved on your memories: First, we did not hear how a Single State will come about. Second, we did not hear what will be the situation in the Single State. These are two things for which you need to get a clear answer in order to convince anybody of this idea.

As I said, I am optimistic. I believe that the Two States Solution will be implemented. I think it is a solution for the forseeable future.

In any case, I have promised myself to stay alive until it happens.

Zalman Amit: This is not the end of this debate, in the larger sense, but the time has come to conclude this evening's event. Thank you all for being an excellent audience. Good Evening.

One state solution not abortive and dangerous illusions - Answer to Uri Avnery

2007-04-29T13:09:00.001-07:00

One state solution not abortive and dangerous illusions - Answer to Uri Avnery

By: Ilan Pappe [ ::: Zionism ::: ]
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Uri Avnery accuses the supporters of the One State solution of forcefully imposing the facts onto the "Bed of Sodom" (22 April, 2007). He seems to regard these people best as day dreamers that do not understand the political reality around them and are stuck in a perpetual state of wishful thinking. We are all veteran comrades in the Israeli Left and therefore it is quite possible that in our moments of despair we fall into the trap of hallucinating and even fantasizing while ignoring the unpleasant reality around us.

And therefore the metaphor of the Bed of Sodom may even be fitting for lashing out at those who are inspired by the South African model in their search for a solution in Palestine. But in this case it is a small cot of Sodom compared to the king-size bed onto which Gush Shalom and other similar members of the Zionist Left insist on squeezing their two states' solution. The South African model is young - in fact hardly a year has passed since it was seriously considered - the formula of two states is sixty years old: an abortive and dangerous illusion that enabled Israel to continue its occupation without facing any significant criticism from the international community.

The South African model is a good subject matter for a comparative study - not as an object for a hallow emulation. Certain chapters in the history of the colonization in South Africa and the Zionization of Palestine are indeed nearly identical. The ruling methodology of the white settlers in South Africa resembles very closely that applied by the Zionist movement and late Israel against the indigenous population of Palestine since the end of the 19th century. Ever since 1948, the official Israeli policy against some of the Palestinians is more lenient than that of the Apartheid regime; against other Palestinians it is much worse.

But above all, the South African model inspires those concerned with the Palestine cause in two crucial directions: it offers a new orientation for a future solution instead of the two states' formula that failed - by introducing the one democratic state - and it invigorates new thinking of how the Israeli occupation can be defeated - through Sanctions, Boycott and Divestment (the BDS option).

The facts on the ground are crystal clear: the two states' solution has dismally failed and we have no spare time to waste in a futile anticipation of another illusory round of diplomatic efforts that would lead to nowhere. As Avnery admits, the Israeli peace camp has failed, so far, to persuade the Israeli Jewish society to try the road of peace. A sober and critical assessment of this camp's size and force leads to the inevitable conclusion that it has no chance what so ever against the prevailing trends in the Israeli Jewish society. It is doubtful whether it will even keep its very minimal presence on the ground, and there is a great concern it will disappear all together.

Avnery ignores these facts and alleges that the One State Solution is a dangerous panacea to offer to the critically ill patient. All right, so let us prescribe it gradually, but for God's sake let us remove the patient from the very dangerous medicine we have been forcing down his throat for the last sixty years and which is about to kill him.

For the sake of peace, it is important to expand our research on the South African model and other historical case studies. Because of our failure, we should study carefully any other successful struggle against oppression. All these historical case studies show that the struggle from within and from without reinforced each other and were not mutually exclusive. Even when the sanctions were imposed on South Africa, the ANC continued its struggle and white South Africans did not cease from their attempt to convince their compatriots to give up the Apartheid regime. But there was not one single voice that echoes the article of Avnery who claimed that a strategy of pressure from the outside is wrong because it weakness the chances of change from within. Especially when the failure of the inside struggle is so conspicuous and obvious. Even when the De Klerk government negotiated with the ANC the sanctions regime still continued.

It is also very difficult to understand why Avnery underrates the importance of world public opinion. Without the support this world public opinion gave to the Zionist movement, the Nakbah would not have occurred. Had the international community rejected the idea of partition, a unitary state would have replaced Mandatory Palestine, as indeed was the wish of many members of the UN. However, these members succumbed to a violent pressure by the US and the Zionist lobby and retracted their earlier support for such a solution. And today, if the international community alters its position once more and revises its attitude towards Israel, the chances for ending the occupation would increase enormously and by that maybe also help to avert a colossal bloodshed that would engulf not only the Palestinians but also the Jews themselves.

The call for a One State Solution, and the demand for sanctions, boycott and divestment, has to be read as a reaction against the failure of the previous strategy. A strategy upheld by the political classes but never fully endorsed by the people themselves. And any one who rejects the new thinking out of hand and in such a categorical manner, may be less bothered by what is wrong with this new option and far more troubled by his own place in history. It is indeed difficult to admit personal as well as collective failure; but for the sake of peace it is sometimes necessary to put aside one's ego. I am inclined to think that way when I read the false narrative Avnery concocted about the Israeli peace movement's ‘achievements' so far. He announces that ‘the recognition of the existence of the Palestinian people has become general, and so has the readiness of most Israelis to accept the idea of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as the capital of both states'. This is a clear case of amputating both the leg and the hand of the patient to fit him to the Bed of Sodom. And even more far fetched is the declaration that ‘We have compelled our government to recognize the PLO, and we shall compel them to recognize Hamas' - now the rest of patient's limbs were dispensed with (sorry for the gruesome metaphor but I am forced into it by Avnery's choice). These assertions have very little in common with the position of the Jewish public in Israel towards peace from 1948 until today. But facts can sometime confuse the issue.

But in order to stifle any debate on the One State Solution or the BDS option, Avnery draws from his magic hat the winning card: ‘but beneath the surface, in the depths of national consciousness, we are succeeding'. Let us thus provide the Palestinians with metal detectors and X-ray equipment - they may discover not only the tunnel, but also the light at its end. The truth is that what lies in the deepest layers of the Israeli national consciousness is far worse from what appears on the surface. And let us hope that it remains their forever and does not bubble to the surface. These are deposits of dark and primitive racism that if allowed to flow over will drown us all in a sea of hatred and bigotry.

Avnery is right when he asserts that ‘there is no doubt that 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want the State of Israel to exist as a state with a robust Jewish majority, whatever its borders'. A successful boycott campaign will not change this position in a day, but will send a clear message to this public that these positions are racist and unacceptable in the 21st century. Without the cultural and economical oxygen lines the West provides to Israel, it would be difficult for the silent majority there to continue and believe that it is possible both to be a racist and a legitimate state in the eyes of the world. They would have to choose, and hopefully like De Klerk they will make the right decision.

Avnery is also convinced that Adam Keller debunked most successfully the argument for a boycott by pointing out that the Palestinians in the occupied territories did not give in to boycott. This is indeed a fine comparison: a political prisoner lies nailed to the ground and dares to resist; as a punishment he is denied even the meager food he received hitherto. His situation is compared to a person who occupied illegally this prisoner's house and who for the first time is facing the possibility of being brought to justice for his crimes. Who has more to loose? Where is the threat mere cruelty and where is it a justified mean to rectify a past evil?

The boycott will not happen, states Avnery. He should talk with the veterans of the anti-Apartheid movement in Europe. Twenty years passed before they convinced the international community to take action. And they were told, when they began their long journey: it will not work, too many strategic and economic interests are involved and invested in South Africa.

Moreover, adds Avnery, in places such as Germany the idea of boycotting the victims of the Nazis would be rejected out of hand. Quite to the contrary. The action that already has been taken in this direction in Europe has ended the long period of Zionist manipulation of the Holocaust memory. Israel can not justify anymore its crimes against the Palestinians in the name of the Holocaust. More and more people in Europe realize that that the criminal policies of Israel abuse the Holocaust memory and this is why so many Jews are members in the movement for boycott. This is also why the Israeli attempt to cast the accusation of anti-Semitism against the supporters of the boycott had met with contempt and resilience. The members of the new movement know that their motives are humanist and their impulses are democratic. For many of them their action are triggered not only by universal values but also by their respect for the Judeo-Christian heritage of history. It would have been best for Avnery to use his immense popularity in Germany to demand from the society there to recognize their share not only in the Holocaust but also in the Palestinian catastrophe and that in the name of that recognition to ask them to end their shameful silence in the face of the Israeli atrocities in the occupied territories.

Towards the end of his article, Avnery sketches the features of the one state solution out of the present reality: and thus because he does not include the return of the refugees or a change in the regime as components of the solution, he describes today's dismal reality as tomorrow's vision. This is indeed an unworthy reality to fight for and nobody I know is struggling for it. But the vision of a One State Solution has to be the exact opposite of the present Apartheid state of Israel as was the post-Apartheid state in South Africa; and this is why this historical case study is so illuminating for us.

We need to wake up. The day Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush declared their loyal support for the two states' solution, this formula became a cynical means by which Israel can maintain its discriminatory regime inside the 1967 borders, its occupation in the West Bank and the Ghettoization of the Gaza Strip. Anyone who blocks a debate in alternative political models allows the discourse of two states to shield the criminal Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories.

Moreover, not only there are no stones left in the occupied territories with which to build a state - after Israel ruined the infrastructure there in the last six years - a reasonable partition is not offering the Palestinian a mere 20 percent of their homeland. The basis should be at least half of their homeland, on the basis of the 181 map, or similar idea. Here is another useful avenue to explore, instead of embroiling for ever inside the Sodom and Gomorrah stew that the two states solution has produced so far on the ground.

And finally, there will be no solution to this conflict without a settlement of the Palestinian refugees problem. These refugees can not return to their homeland for the same reasons that their brothers and sisters are being expelled from Greater Jerusalem and alongside the wall and their relatives are discriminated against in Israel. They can not return for the same reason that every Palestinian is under the potential danger of been occupied and expelled as long as the Zionist project has not been completed in the eyes of its captains.

They are entitled to opt for the return because it is their full human and political right. They can return because the international community had already promised them that they could. We as the Jews should want them to return because otherwise we will continue to live in a state where the value of ethnic superiority and supremacy overrides any other human and civil value. And we can not promise ourselves and the refugees such a fair and just solution within the framework of the two states' formula.

Ed Lasky on Barack Obama

2007-04-23T18:19:00.000-07:00

April 23, 2007
If Ed Lasky of the American Thinker, a right-wing think tank doesn't like Obama because he is too 'even handed' about Israel, it makes me more open to Obama (a recommendation of sorts).

Dan Burnstein

March 22, 2007
Barack Obama and Israel
By Ed Lasky
Senator Barack Obama has become the rarest of politicians: a man who has seemingly come out of nowhere to ascend to the top rank of Democratic Presidential candidates. He has parlayed a unique life story, capitalizing on personal scandals that have destroyed his opponents, with an inspiring speaking style and heartwarming platitudes, to generate a great deal of support among Democratic partisans and independents.

His success is even more impressive when one considers that he has very little record to run on. He has been a United States Senator for only two years and much of that time has been spent promoting his books and his candidacy. However minimal, the fact is that he does have a record; not an easy one to uncover, yet a record nevertheless and one that should give pause to those who support the American-Israel alliance.

Obama's spiritual mentor

Obama has given a great deal of credit to the influence his church and his minister have had upon him. While his campaign has called his church the United Church of Christ and thus characterized it as just one of many mainstream churches within that denomination, it is in fact the Trinity United Church of Christ and follows a particularly Afro-centric view of Christianity, emphasizing a Black Work Ethic, commitment to a Black Value System, and an allegiance to all Black Leadership that follows the Black Value System. A brief review of its philosophy shows that this is not your everyday Christian parish and perhaps accounts for his campaign's dropping of the name "Trinity" when discussing his church membership.

This racialist belief system stands in stark contrast to Obama's rhetoric regarding the need and desirability of racial and religious inclusiveness. The church's principles seem to belie Obama's platitudes about the need for all people - of whatever race or religion - to come together as one. Recall this excerpt from his now legendary 2004 Democratic National Convention speech:

"There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America"

Given the anti-Semitism that is sadly so often associated with other leaders and groups that have emphasized black separatism and empowerment (think Louis Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton) perhaps some qualms might be warranted, particularly given some of the actions and statements of the Church's minister.

Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr. is the long-time Pastor of Obama's church, and Obama has credited him as being an inspiration and guiding light for him. He is a spiritual mentor to Obama and coined the term the "audacity of hope" that Obama has essentially made a theme of his campaign as well as the title of a book. He also has, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, a militant past.

Moreover, Pastor Wright has beliefs that might disturb some of Obama's supporters. He is a believer in "liberation theology," which makes the liberation of the oppressed a paramount virtue. The language of liberation all too often veers off into anti-Jewish rants. For example, one of the founders of the movement, Gustavo Gutierrez, has stated that the infidelities of the Jewish people made the Old Covenant [between the Jews and God] invalid." Pastor Wright is also a supporter of Louis Farrakhan, and in 1984 traveled with him to visit Col. Muammar al-Gadaffi, an archenemy of Israel's and America and a firm supporter of terror groups.

Wright has also been a severe critic of Israel. In his own words,

The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian territories for almost 40 years now. It took a divestment campaign to wake the business community up concerning the South Africa issue. Divestment has now hit the table again as a strategy to wake the business community up and to wake Americans up concerning the injustice and the racism under which the Palestinians have lived because of Zionism.

The Divestment issue will hit the floor during this month's General Synod. Divesting dollars from businesses and banks that do business with Israel is the new strategy being proposed to wake the world up concerning the racism of Zionism. That Divestment issue won't make the press either, however.

Once this history came to light, Obama started publicly distancing himself from his spiritual mentor, disinviting Wright from various Obama campaign events. Wright rationalized his current persona non grata status by stating that otherwise

"a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell"

Wonder why?

Pastor Wright is not the only person from whom Obama tactically distances himself during political campaigns.

Obama's anti-Israel friends

Ali Abunimah is a well-known Chicago-based activist for Palestinian causes. He has a harshly anti-Israel attitude. He has also written that he had met Obama about half a dozen times at various Palestinian and Arab-American events, including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which the late Edward Said was the keynote speaker (there is a photo of Said with Senator Obama and his wife).

Edward Said was a severe critic of Israel; he developed a school of study about the Middle East based on denunciation of so-called "Orientalism" that has influenced many Middle Eastern professors to take an anti-Israel view. The entire field of Middle Eastern studies has been so corrupted that Congress has raised an alarm about federal funding going to professors with an anti-American, anti-Israel agenda. These are the ideological heirs of Edward Said.

Abunimah recently wrote an article critical of Obama's very recent and somewhat lukewarm outreach to the Israel's supporters. He wrote that years ago Obama had been forthright in his criticism of American foreign policy and had called for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israel conflict. But Abunimah detected a change as Obama began his Senate run. He met Obama at an event that occurred in the midst of the Senator's primary campaign for Senate. Abunimah writes,

Obama said, "Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front." He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to the Chicago Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, "Keep up the good work!"

Could Obama's outreach to the pro-Israel community during his Presidential run just be a reprise of his actions during his Senate campaign? True, Abunimah may not be the most reliable source, but the picture of Obama together with one of Israel's harshest critics in America, Edward Said, gives scant reason for comfort regarding Obama's true beliefs.

Obama as Senator

Most candidates for the highest office in the land have a long legislative or executive record to run on. Since Barack Obama has been a U.S. Senator for only two years there is not much of a history that can be relied upon. He has very little experience on foreign policy. One of his supporters, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (who strongly believes that America is too close to Israel and needs to reevaluate its relationship and who has been roundly criticized for manipulating information and) has absurdly written that in foreign policy, Mr. Obama

“would bring to the White House an important experience that most other candidates lack: he has actually lived abroad. He spent four years as a child in Indonesia and attended schools in the Indonesian language, which he still speaks”

He lived in Indonesia between the ages of 6 and 10. By his own admission, he was a “Jakarta street kid”. Does this unique qualify him over other contenders to run the foreign policy of America? How many great American Presidents have not lived overseas when they were children? All of them-however you may choose them. So one has to look at his brief record in the Senate and pronouncements he has made that may shed light on his views.

Most Congressmen have a solid legislative record on bills considered important to the American-Israel relationship-after all, most Americans have a very favorable view towards Israel. Most legislative acts regarding the American-Israel relationship are uncontroversial-which is the reason one often sees such votes as being supportive of the alliance between the two nations. He has, to repeat, been a member of the Senate for all of two years and his record is thus very thin in this regard.

However, Obama has already compiled one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate (even more liberal than Ted Kennedy) and a great deal of his most fervent support has come from the left-wing of the party, who have turned against Hillary Clinton. As many have commented - including Democrats Martin Peretz and Lanny Davis - this is precisely the wing of the Party that has been increasingly corrupted by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activists. Of course, Senator Obama is an individual and holds his own views and one should not impute the views of some of his supporters to him. Nevertheless, it is not improper to look at the base of his support, either.

But what are his views?

One disquieting aspect comes from his career as a state senator. He took a decidedly very soft approach on bills dealing with drug, gang and gun control issues and many feel this will become fodder for his critics. A man who takes a soft on crime approach towards criminals may give some qualms when trying to foresee how he will deal with those who commit terrorist acts-especially those who justify their criminal acts as acts of “liberation” (see above).

In an interview he gave prior to the U.S. Senate primary election with the Chicago Jewish News published in March 2004, when asked about the Israeli security fence, Obama replied: “the creation of a wall dividing the two nations is yet another example of the neglect of this Administration in brokering peace.”

The security fence has saved the lives of many innocent people: terror attacks against Israelis have plummeted. After suffering waves of suicide bombings, losing more than 900 people and after suffering thousands of casualties, Israel learned that indeed “fences can be good neighbors”. One wishes that Senator Obama could appreciate the toll that this endless wave of terror had on the men, women and children who had to bear it. Furthermore, it is not a wall (except for a small part, comprising less than 5% of the length) and there are not two nations involved in the dispute-there is no Palestinian nation, as of yet.

Ben Shapiro of The Conservative Voice noticed something rather distrurbing, indicating Obama's fundamental attitude toward the handling of terrorists.

In his new forward to "Dreams From My Father," Obama writes,

"I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi -- how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder -- alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a stead [sic] unthinking application of force, of more sophisticated military hardware -- is inadequate to the task."

This sounds like boilerplate rhetoric. It is not. It is the theory of appeasement, stated clearly and succinctly.

One other aspect of Obama's support that is cause for some discomfort is the fact that he has the seal of approval from Jimmy Carter and billionaire George Soros-both influential and powerful people who take an unseemly glee in trying to undermine the American-Israel alliance.Soros has been funding powerful 527 groups, donating to candidates and others-such as Wes Clark-who are severe critics of Israel, and has tried to organize a lobbying group designed to erode support for Israel in America. He recently wrote an essay harshly critical of the ties between America and Israel. Some Democratic politicians-since he is a major supporter of the Democratic Party-have recently distanced themselves from that particular essay. Some politicians denounced Soros’s views personally - Congressmen Wexler and Engle; Senator Obama campaign spokeswoman did so.

Are we also to be concerned that Congressman Neil Abercrombie-who has one of the worst anti-Israel records and refused to support Israel efforts to defend itself from Hezbollah, was close friends with Barack's father and has been a lifelong friend and supporter of Barack's? People are often judged by the company they keep and the quarters from which they receive support.

For all the lofty sentiments and inspiring rhetoric propelling his career, at times Obama has been compelled to actually address the issues that a President may face, and there are grounds to be concerned.

He recently gave a speech before a group of supporters of Israel, at an AIPAC meeting in Chicago, that left many nonplussed. This speech was, in part, prompted by his knowledge that a panel of experts in Israel considers him to be the candidate that would support the state of Israel the least. While his supporters naturally heaped praise, when a more careful analysis of the speech is made, there is very little of substance regarding his support for our ally, Israel.

He stated that efforts to achieve peace with its neighbors “begin with a clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel”. Is this a breakthrough for Senator Obama as it has been so hailed? Israel is the only true ally of America in the region, a fellow democracy and a Western nation. Shouldn’t Senator Obama believe that such a commitment to its security be important as opposed to security for Hezbollah, Hamas, or Iran, or any of the anti-American dictatorships that plague the region?

He criticized Holocaust deniers. That is certainly not such a radical position (unless you live in Iran) yet then advocated more talks with Iranian President Ahmadinejad-who not only denies the Holocaust but also promises a new one to come. He noted how Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon led to the rise of an enemy on its northern border. But then he seemed to be encouraging Israel to make even more such gestures. For instance, he praised past Israeli leaders for gestures of peace they have made towards the Palestinians-but refused to recognize that these previous moves have just led to more violence and death for the Israelis. For instance, the Oslo Accords led to the rise of a terror empire in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza has led, a la Lebanon, to another base of terror-this time on Israel’s southern flank. Yet Senator Obama seems to ignore this recent history while calling for a repeat of past mistakes. Does he not see that the Palestinians have just pocketed these gains and used them to empower terrorists? Not a good sign.

This was not a gaffe on his part but seems to reflect a view that the Israelis should bear the burden and take the risky steps for peace. Shortly after his Chicago speech he appeared before a group of Iowa Democrats, during which he showed a disturbing lack of familiarity regarding the basic principles that the international community has agreed must guide future diplomacy between the Israelis and Palestinians (the so-called Road Map).

Or perhaps it was that among Democratic partisans he felt a greater freedom to disclose his views. He stated that the

"Israel government must make difficult concessions for the peace process to restart".

This position contradicts the key principle of the Road Map that states that steps must be taken by both the Palestinians and the Israelis in parallel. Israel, contrary to Obama's views, is not responsible for taking the first steps to restart the peace process.

Furthermore, Obama stated that he supports a resumption of aid to the Palestinian government (there has been a non-stop flow of humanitarian aid) provided the government "renounces terrorism." This also ignored the few simple conditions that the international community has laid down for such resumption of aid to continue: not only must the Palestinians renounce terrorism, but they also must stop it (Arafat repeatedly denounced terrorism in English, while praising and planning for it in Arabic); Palestinians also must respect and abide by previous agreements made with Israel and they must accept the right of Israel to exist. These conditions Senator Obama would seemingly waive as long as Palestinians made noises about "renouncing terrorism" - which they certainly have experience doing!

If Obama professes ignorance of these conditions, that would come as a telling shock: not only have they been repeatedly announced in the media and on Capitol Hill, but Senator Obama serves on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations! Has he just been to busy promoting his books or his Presidential campaign to learn about these basic diplomatic principles involving one of the most heated issues of the day? When George W. Bush was asked during his first campaign in 1999 who the President of Chechnya was or the name of the new leader of Pakistan, he was widely ridiculed for not having the answer at his fingertips. Yet, when Senator Obama does not know the principles of the Road Map or the few simple words that are the conditions for aid to be resumed to the Palestinians, he gets a free pass. He is apparently the Teflon Candidate.

Senator Obama also stated during his Iowa trip, "Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people" which not only ignores the Israelis who have been terrorized and killed for years but also ignores refugees from the genocide in Darfur or the daily terror the Iraqis are experience from Muslim on Muslim violence. Instead, by identifying the Palestinians as suffering, he implicitly seems to be blaming the Israelis for their plight (though he did mention their own government failures).

His moral compass seems a bit out of kilter: In another recent speech, he declared our enemies are not

"just terrorists, it's not just Hezbollah, it's not just Hamas, it's also cynicism"

How can one possibly equate that elastic term cynicism with terror groups that have killed thousands of innocent people and have guiding charters filled with hate and calls for violence? Similarly, his use of the now discredited term "cycle of violence" displays an approach that equates Palestinian terror attacks with Israeli defense actions. If Obama were true to his rhetoric of peace and the need to come together, why has he remained silent about Palestinian textbooks that teach children to hate and that celebrate martyrdom? (Even Hillary Clinton has done so)

Perhaps this reflects a worldview that Barack Obama has developed from his own history.

Obama began his career as a community activist, working to help poor residents of a public housing project to get asbestos removed from their buildings. He later labored on behalf of other disadvantaged people. This activity was a life-altering experience for him and he is clearly proud of it. Will this history predispose him to the view that Palestinians are the weaker party in their dispute with the Israelis (ignoring hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world who support them-let alone much of Europe)? The aphorism "if you are a hammer, everything seems like a nail" comes to mind. Will he absolve them of their own responsibility for their situation and place the blame mostly or solely on the Israelis? Will his views converge with those of many in Europe who place the blame for the Palestinians plight on the Israelis? Will he come naturally to favor the Palestinians over the Israelis? There are reasons to at least wonder.

Some may offer in support of Obama that he is a tad inexperienced and has yet to appreciate the complexities involved in the Middle East. This may very well be true. However, if this is the case, does he have the foreign policy credentials that qualify him to be President (regardless of Kristof’s assertion that he accumulated such credential between the ages of 6 and 10 in Indonesia)? He should be, prepared, especially after serving two years on the Senate Foreign Relation Committee, to explain current American and international policy regarding one of the most important foreign policy issues today. Furthermore, why does almost every off the cuff remark he makes-remarks that spring from his heart as much as from his brain-have an anti-Israel slant? Anyone see a pattern here? Anyone? Are these actually closer to the nature of the policies he would follow as President?

Barack Obama has enjoyed a wave of early popular support that seems to break with all the traditions of politics in America. Despite a meager record to run on, with virtually no executive experience, he may very well become President. His story is eerily similar in many ways to the story of Chance the Gardener, the main character in the book and movie, Being There. In that story by Jerzy Kosinski, a man literally comes from nowhere to become a Presidential candidate.

The key to his success: a freshness, a lack of record to run on, the constant repetition of simple feel-good platitudes that lull listeners into a sense of trust and induce in them a yearning to believe.

No wonder Barack Obama is so popular among denizens of Hollywood: they certainly have an eye for those who can create an image, can generate a buzz that compels others to suspend their disbelief, and who can induce a trance-like stargazing.
But the fact is that Barack Obama does have a record to run on and it is a record that should be of concern to those who support America's relationship with Israel.

Ed Lasky is news editor of American Thinker.

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John Spritzer replies to Avnery

2007-04-22T21:06:00.001-07:00

Dear friends,

Uri Avneri, in his The Bed of Sodom, attacks the idea of a One-State Solution to the Palestine/Israel conflict, i.e. the solution that says make all of historic Palestine from the Jordan river to the Sea be a single democratic state with equal rights for all regardless of ethnicity or religion. Avneri also attacks the idea of a general boycott of Israel. He doesn't mind a boycott of specific Israeli companies, or settlers, to force Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian land outside its 1967 borders, but he does oppose a general boycott of Israel aimed at causing the state of Israel to collapse (like the apartheid state of South Africa did after it was boycotted by the world) and be replaced by One-Democratic State.

Avneri is wrong. But to see why, one must get out of the reformist box that so much of the discourse on this topic resides in, and think about these questions from a revolutionary point of view. This is the perspective from which I will refute Avneri's arguments. First, what exactly are his arguments?

Here are Avneri's reasons for opposing the One-State Solution:

1. It "diverts the effort from a solution that has now, after many years, a broad public basis [the 'Two-State Solution'--JS], in favor of a solution that has no chance at all."

2. It has no chance at all because "There is no doubt that 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want the State of Israel to exist as a state with a robust Jewish majority, whatever its borders."

3. And even if it did come to pass, it would be bad because: "it is a dangerous idea, especially for the Palestinians. Statistically, the Israeli Jews constitute, as of now, the absolute majority between the sea and the river. To that, one must add an even more important fact: the average annual income of an Arab Palestinian is about 800 dollars, that of a Jewish Israeli is about 20,000 dollars - 25 times (!) higher. The Israeli economy is growing every year. The Palestinians would be 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'. That means that if the imaginary joint state did indeed come into being, the Jews there would wield in it absolute power. They would, of course, use this power to consolidate their dominance and prevent the return of refugees."

And here are his reasons for opposing a general boycott of Israel:

1. The general boycott of Israel idea is based on a false premise, says Avneri, and the false premise goes like this: "The problem is the very essence of Israel as a Zionist state. This essence is unchangeable as long as the state exists. No change from the inside is possible, because in Israel there is no essential difference between Right and Left. Both are accomplices in a policy whose real aim is ethnic cleansing, the expulsion of the Palestinians not only from the occupied territories, but also from Israel proper."

On the contrary, says Avneri, "it is possible to change the historical direction of Israel" from within. His evidence for this is the fact that the Israeli peace movement has already "attained impressive achievements: the recognition of the existence of the Palestinian people has become general, and so has the readiness of most Israelis to accept the idea of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as the capital of both states. We have compelled our government to recognize the PLO, and we shall compel them to recognize Hamas."

2. Furthermore, argues Avneri, a general boycott will never work: "The entire world has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the state?"

3. And besides, Avneri says, even if it would work, a general boycott is impossible to pull off in the first place: "In any case, such a boycott is quite impossible. Here and there, an organization can declare a boycott, small circles of justice-lovers can keep it, but there is no chance that in the coming decades a world-wide boycott movement, like the one that broke the racist regime in South Africa, will come about. That regime was headed by declared asmirers of the Nazis. A boycott of the "Jewish State", which is identified with the victims of the Nazis, just will not happen. It will be enough to remind people that the long road to the gas chambers started with the 1933 Nazi slogan 'Kauft nicht bei Juden' ('Don't buy from Jews')."

WHAT'S WRONG WITH AVNERI'S ARGUMENTS?

The key flaw in Avneri's case is that he completely ignores the fact of class conflict. He ignores the class conflict that rages within Israel among the mainly Jewish population (described below) as well as the class conflict that rages in all of the rest of the Middle East among the mainly non-Jewish population (for example Iran and Saudi Arabia, whose governments oppress their own workers with assistance from the Israeli regime.) Assessing the possibilities for solving the conflict in Palestine/Israel while ignoring this key aspect of reality--class conflict--is as bound to lead to wrong and fundamentally pessimistic conclusions as a doctor, who is ignorant of the fact that a patient has an immune system that fights invading organisms, assessing the possibility of saving the patient's life.

Avneri's world view resides in a reformist box, inside of which one takes capitalist class inequality as a permanent, uncontroversial, given fact of nature. His world view is therefore blind to the ways in which working class Jewish Israelis, despite the undeniable fact that many of them fear Palestinians more than their own rulers, are nonetheless already engaged in a fight against their Zionist rulers over issues that separate people according to their basic values: equality versus inequality, competition versus solidarity, democracy versus rule by an elite--in other words working class values versus capitalist values. It is blind to the implicitly revolutionary conflict between what ordinary Jews actually want versus what their Zionist leaders actually want. It is blind to the fact that when people are forced to fight against their leaders they may start to question the lies their leaders tell them to control them, like the Big Lie about Palestinians wanting to "drive the Jews into the sea." And it is blind to the potential for revolutionary change that can take place when people start to see through the racist lies that they formerly believed. Some people, of course, like to stay in the reformist box, and they like to be blind (or keep others blind) because they don't want the capitalist system of class inequality to be abolished. They don't want others to see the possibilities for optimism and hope that lie outside the box, where one can see the implicitly revolutionary aspirations for a better world that are shared by millions of working class people regardless of their race or religion or nationality.

Some may ask, "What class conflict inside Israel?" Well, follow these links to read about it if you are skeptical.

Read about how Israel is not really a "Jewish state" but rather a "rich Jews' state."

Read how the upper class is driving down the rest of the people.

Read in The Jewish Daily Forward how

"Israel’s growing population of retirees has been reduced to a state of profound economic insecurity in recent years, as self-styled economic reformers have hollowed out the Jewish state’s time-honored system of care for the elderly. Pensions have been frozen. Social security payments, known in Israel as national insurance, have been relentlessly whittled away — cut by 35% in a single decade. Health care and prescription drug coverage have been slashed, along with funds for senior housing and assisted living. It’s part of a deliberate move by Jerusalem policy-makers to modernize Israel’s economy, by which they mean to remodel it along American lines. Determined to bury the socialist ethos of Israel’s founders, successive governments since the mid-1980s have slashed income supports and welfare payments even as they’ve privatized and deregulated industries, opened capital markets to international competition and reduced workers’ job security (they call it “liberalizing labor laws”). Over the past three years, under the economic leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the reforms have been ramped up to a revolution."

The Forward explains the "meteoric rise of the Pensioners' Party" in the April, 2006 election this way: "And then there was the simple, glaring fact of poverty. Too many Israelis had reached the point where their own personal security seemed more precarious than their country’s."

Read in the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California about: "Poverty in Israel — Hunger and homelessness surge in the Jewish state"

Read how "Recent measures taken by Israel’s government to undermine the welfare state have harmed women first of all, both Arab and Jewish. Of the Jewish, many who in the past had gained a foothold in the middle class find themselves shunted to the margins of society. The income supplements they depended on have been whisked out from under them. The same cuts have worsened the plight of Arab women. Despite the fact that both groups, indeed the lower classes in general on both the Arab and Jewish sides, suffer from an erosion in living-standards – and often for identical reasons – there is an utter lack of dialogue between them."

But Israelis are resisting this capitalist attack on their lives, in many different ways:

Read Jenny Cohen-Khallas's description of "Penury and Hunger in Israel" and how "vociferous segments of the public are demanding that governmental resources be channeled to welfare and other domestic resources, rather than to strengthening settlements beyond the green line."

Read about single mothers, the homeless and the unemployed camping out in front of Israel's Finance Ministry and in Tel Aviv: "The choice of place is no accident," says Israel Twito, 38, a divorcee who is bringing up three daughters alone. "The contrast between our miserable campsite and the neighbourhood’s luxury shops and apartment blocks symbolises the ever-widening abyss between rich and poor."

Is it any wonder, then, that one can read how more people are leaving Israel than entering it, and how " Almost half of the country's young people were thinking of leaving the country" because of "dissatisfaction with the government, the education system, a lack of confidence in the political ruling class and concern over the security situation"?

Read about the way working class Israelis have been forced to engage in large strikes to protect themselves, not from "the Arabs" but from their Jewish ruling class:

On September 21, [2004] the Israeli General Federation of Labour (Histadrut) held a general strike in protest against the ongoing failure of the government to pay wages to local authorities’ employees. Some 400,000 public sector workers across 265 municipalities came out, bringing the state to a halt. Flights, seaports, railways, post offices, banks and the stock exchange were all shut down, whilst hospitals and the fire service operated on an emergency footing. Schools, day-care centres, kindergartens, and universities were also affected.

The strike also included the Israeli Electrical Corporation, Mekorot National Water Company, oil refineries, public works departments, and the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company. Border crossings were closed, and all government offices including civilian employees in the Israeli Defence Force and at the Negev Nuclear Research Plant were on strike.

Calling the strike was forced upon Histadrut by the depth of opposition and anger amongst workers. Histadrut’s chief and Member of the Knesset Amir Peretz said, “I used to believe in the prime minister, the Knesset, and the courts, yet when I realised there are Israelis hungry for bread, I decided to act.”

“No one, not even the Prime Minister, has the right to set any conditions whatsoever for payment of many months of salaries owed to the workers,” Peretz noted. “The government is turning wages into charity. Wages are not a favour, they are a legal obligation. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Minister of Finance Benjamin Netanyahu, and Minister of Internal Affairs Avraham Poraz are not enforcing the law. They’re turning Israel into a third world country.”

WHY AVNERI IS WRONG ABOUT THE ONE-STATE SOLUTION BEING IMPOSSIBLE

Where, we might ask Avneri, is it written in stone that Arabs and Jews in Palestine, who suffer at the hands of the same Israeli ruling class, will never start talking to each other about their shared problem--the Israeli ruling class--and their shared aspirations for a decent life for themselves and their children--a life in a society with peace and security, one where half the youth aren't thinking about leaving and where people don't have to camp out in protest or wage general strikes to defend themselves against a rapacious government serving billionaires and generals while it does everything it can to foment a war of Orwellian social control between Jews and non-Jews in Palestine/Israel? Where is it written that working class Jews will never understand that their Zionist leaders tell them lies about Palestinians--especially the Big Lie that Palestinians want to "drive the Jews into the sea"--purely for the purpose of making Israeli Jews easier to control and exploit?

What about Avneri's first two arguments against the One-State Solution--that it diverts from the Two-State Solution, which is the only practical one because 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want a Jewish state with a robust Jewish majority? From inside the reformist box, where there is no conflict in people's minds, or in society, between working class and capitalist values like equality versus inequality, this statement seems reasonable. But let's look outside the box. The same kind of statement that Avrneri makes about "99.99% of Jewish Israelis" could have been made about white South Africans overwhelmingly wanting apartheid before South Africa's President deKlerk, as a result of the world wide boycott against apartheid South Africa, decided to give white South Africans, for the very first time, a green light to express their true feelings about apartheid. Prior to this, any white person who expressed a criticism of apartheid was accused of being "anti-Christian" and therefore many just kept their mouths shut. But when they were allowed to speak more freely this is what happened. In 1992, the BBC reported on how whites voted on the referendum, supported by the de Klerk government, to abolish apartheid:

White South Africans have backed an overwhelming mandate for political reforms to end apartheid and create a power-sharing multi-racial government.
In a landslide victory for change, the government swept the polls in all four provinces, and all but one of 15 referendum regions.

It won 68.6% of the vote in a record turn-out, which, in some districts exceeded 96%.

What about Avneri's third argument against the One-State Solution--that, since Jews are currently a majority in all of Palestine, and since the income of Jews is much greater than non-Jews, then if all of Palestine were one democratic state the "Palestinians would be 'hewers of wood and drawers of water'. That means that if the imaginary joint state did indeed come into being, the Jews there would wield in it absolute power. They would, of course, use this power to consolidate their dominance and prevent the return of refugees."

Inside Averneri's reformist box, where class conflict does not exist, sure, of course, "Jews would consolidate their dominance." But outside the box one can see that working class Jews (as opposed to their rulers) are NOT dominant even today, never mind the notion of their "consolidating" their dominance in the future democratic state.

It is indeed curious that Avneri doesn't talk about class inequality in this context EXCEPT to use his supposed worry about some people being "hewers of wood and drawers of water" as an argument against our movement aiming for a single democratic state where all have equal rights. Acording to Avneri, in order to prevent some people from being dominated by others we need to aim for--what else can one call it other than apartheid?--two separate states, one with a guaranteed robust Jewish majority, and one for the non-Jews.

From outside the reformist box, the answer to the problem of some people being other people's "hewers of wood and drawers of water"--in other words the problem of some people being the wage slaves of a capitalist class--is social revolution against the capitalist system of wage slavery. The answer to the problem of inequality in society is to build a movement that is explicitly for equality, and for overthrowing the power of the ruling class that defends inequality and uses it to pit people against each other in order to more easily control them.

From inside the box, this kind of social revolution is so impossible and out of the question that it is foolish to even think about it. From outside the box, however, one can see that it is the commonsense solution to what most ordinary people, be they Jewish or not, really want. Orwellian wars of social control, like the Jews versus non-Jews war in Palestine that is ruining the lives of Jews and Palestinians, are what ruling elites foment in order to control ordinary people who, in a genuine democracy, would create a more equal society in which people helped each other instead of being pitted against each other as today. Those who wish to maintain a social system based on class inequality, who treat class inequality as a permanent fact of life and who want everybody else to see it the same way, meaning to not see it at all, the way fish don't see the water, tell us that it is foolish to aim for a non-capitalist society based on equality and solidarity. Why should we believe them? Building such a society is perfectly possible, and one glimpse of how it might be done is offered in After the Revolution, What?

But let us place on hold the question of whether a sweeping social revolution is possible. There is a huge here-and-now reason why our movement should advocate the One-State Solution. Quite simply, advocating the One-State Solution is a winner when it comes to persuading the public in countries like the United States that their government should stop supporting Israel, and advocating the Two-State Solution is a loser. And we all can agree that if countries like the U.S. stopped supporting Israel then the forces of justice and decency in Palestine/Israel would gain strength relative to their foes.

Why is it so much more effective to advocate the One- versus the Two-State Solution? This is why. The One-State Solution appeals to the basic universal value of equality that working class people around the world believe in very strongly. When we say to people: "The problem in Palestine/Israel is that Israel is based on ethnic cleansing and the obvious solution is for Israel to stop it, and to allow the refugees to return to their homes inside of Israel, and yes, this would be the end of a robust Jewish majority inside Israel but so what?, it is racist to insist that any particular religion or ethnic group must be the majority inside a state--its KKK thinking!--, and besides, the Israeli rulers only push this "We need a Jewish state of our own" idea as a way to destroy solidarity between working class Jews and working class non-Jews" then it resonates with people; they nod their heads in agreement; it makes sense to them; it seems right; they see exactly why their government should not support Israel.

I know this from much personal experience talking to people going door to door in Somerville, Massachusetts. On one occasion I rang the doorbell and an elderly (white) woman answered, and she told me she knew nothing about what was going on in Israel, but she'd like to talk with me about it; fifteen minutes later her husband came by and asked her what we were talking about and she proceeded to explain to him the root of the conflict in Israel/Palestine with confidence, based, by the way, on her experience of class conflict in her own life, and her knowledge of how employers control working people with lies and manipulation. These kinds of conversations can only happen if we get outside the reformist box and talk to people about the class conflict over values that they understand very well from their own personal experience.

If, on the other hand, we stay inside the box and talk about a Two-State Solution, then we're talking about separating the Jews from the non-Jews, we're ignoring the fact that working class Jews and working class non-Jews have more in common with each other than with their ruling elites, we're avoiding even mentioning the basic fact of life--class conflict--and we're turning the question into a dispute over where the border between two hostile peoples should be drawn in a far-away part of the world that it is impossible to really know much about, and since the Jews and the non-Jews are so inherently hostile to each other that they cannot even live in the same state with each other it must follow that they need protection from each other, and since the Jews are the perpetual victims of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, well then, why SHOULDN'T our government provide support to Israel? If this isn't a loser of an argument I don't know what is!

WHY AVNERI IS WRONG IN OPPOSING A GENERAL BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL

The first reason Avneri gives for opposing a general boycott of Israel is that it is based on a false premise, namely the premise that only pressure external to Israel can make things improve because there is no positive force inside Israel itself. Avneri says that there is, indeed, a positive force internal to Israel (by which he means his Peace movement), as evidenced by its "impressive achievements:" getting Israelis to recognize the existence of the Palestinian people and making them ready to accept a Palestinian state and, he predicts, a willing soon to recognize Hamas.

What a muddle Avneri has created on this question!

First, the issue isn't whether or not there is a positive force inside Israel; the issue is a disagreement over what that positive force is. Avneri says it is the force that is willing to accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel so that Israel can maintain its robust Jewish majority. But the positive force inside Israel is, on the contrary, the Israeli working class that opposes class inequality and that fights the Israeli ruling class over this issue, even while being weakened greatly by the influence of Zionist racist propaganda telling them that the Palestinians are their real enemy. Avneri says that the thing to do is to strengthen the forces who want a separate Jewish and Palestinian state. On the contrary, the thing to do is to strengthen the political clarity and understanding of the Israeli working class so they will be able to win the fight that they are in against the Zionist ruling class by rejecting the Zionist ideology and seeing who their real allies (non-Jewish working class people) are in the struggle that they are, in fact, presently fighting.

Second, a general boycott of Israel does not, as Avneri claims, rest on the premise that there is no positive force inside Israel. It rests on the premise (at least when one gets outside of the reformist box) that a general boycott of Israel will strengthen the positive force inside of Israel. (This is what happened in the case of South Africa, so the burden of proof would seem to fall on those who deny it, not those who affirm it.)

Which leads us to Avneri's second argument for opposing a general boycott of Israel.

Avneri says, "The entire world has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the state?"

The difference between the blockade on the Palestinian people and a boycott of Israel is not obvious to Avneri because he is inside the reformist box, where class conflict does not exist and people think of themselves as being "a Palestinian" or "a Jew." But outside the reformist box, in the real world in other words, people think about what is right and what is wrong, about what conforms to their working class values of equality and democracy and what conforms to the elitist values of inequality and anti-democracy of their capitalist rulers.

When people come under attack they care about why. The Palestinians know that the blockade against them is part of an effort to deny them their right of return and their right to be equals with Jews in Palestine. This is the obvious reason why they do not fall to their knees in response to the blockade. But when people are attacked because they, or their government, are committing something morally wrong, they don't automatically increase their resolve to remain strong and unbowed.

Consider, as a sharp illustration of this fact, the American GIs in Vietnam who came under violent attack by the Viet Cong. They started to wonder, "Why are we being attacked when, as we have been told, we are in Vietnam to help the Vietnamese have freedom and democracy?" They figured out that they had been lied to, and that the reason they were being attacked was because they were actually being used to suppress a peasant revolt against a repressive U.S.-backed regime. GIs then started to refuse to fight, in many different ways, from going out and only pretending to engage the "enemy," to fragging "gung-ho" officers who ordered them to fight, to getting stoned on drugs; and their refusal grew so widespread that it was one of the main reasons why Nixon withdrew from Vietnam--the generals knew that they could no longer rely on American soldiers to fight the war.

This shows that what is key in determining how people respond to an attack on themselves or their government--be the attack in the form of a bullet or a boycott--is how they view the moral rightness or wrongness of what their attacker is trying to accomplish. So even if a general boycott caused problems for working class Jews in Israel, as it might, it would not be as sharp an attack on them as the bullets the Viet Cong fired at GIs, and so it seems reasonable to expect that Israeli working class Jews would respond by asking, Why are they boycotting Israel?, and that they would, like the American GIs, figure out that the boycott was to make the world more equal and democratic, and that it was therefore a good thing.

Finally, what about Avneri's third and last argument against a general boycott of Israel. He writes: "A boycott of the 'Jewish State', which is identified with the victims of the Nazis, just will not happen. It will be enough to remind people that the long road to the gas chambers started with the 1933 Nazi slogan 'Kauft nicht bei Juden' ('Don't buy from Jews')."

Again, Avneri's logic only seems right inside the reformist box, where Jews are indistinguishable by class, and where gentiles around the world cannot see class distinctions either. Only in this box do the Zionist leaders of Israel, and their "Jews versus gentiles" ideology, seem to be alligned with the admirable sympathy that people have for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Outside the box, in the real world, is the fact that the Zionist leaders who became Israel's leaders betrayed the European Jews during the Holocaust by opposing all rescue efforts that did not focus on bringing Jews to Palestine. Outside the box is the fact that Zionist leaders in 1948 were essentially fascists in attacking Jewish as well as non-Jewish working class people. Outside the box is the fact that Israel's ruling class betrayed Russian Jews in the 1980's by working to get other countries to restrict immigration of Russian Jews so they would be forced to go to Israel when they fled anti-Semitism in Russia. We can easily show the public in places like the United States that supporting the Israeli ruling class and its ethnic cleansing is actually supporting the very people who betrayed European victims of the Holocaust, and who have nothing but contempt for the survivors of the Holocaust, one third of whom live in poverty in Israel.

LET'S LEARN SOMETHING IMPORTANT FROM URI AVNERI

We can learn something very important from Uri Avneri. In order to move forward and overcome the arguments people like him will hurl against us, we will need to get outside the reformist box and adopt a frankly revolutionary outlook, one that clearly sees the class conflict that rages all around us, that speaks to people about it directly, that asks people to evaluate ideas and events in light of their own insights into the world based on their personal experience of the class war, and that aims not merely to act as a cheerleader for this or that "lesser evil" scheme of our capitalist rulers but to win the class war so that ordinary people can shape society by their positive values. The One-State Solution and a general boycott of Israel are excellent ideas, but they will only be successful if we use them and advocate them in an openly revolutionary manner. Otherwise, the Uri Avneri's will befuddle us and millions of others with wrong-headed thinking that only makes sense in the fantasy world inside the reformist box.

Lerner and Avnery on One-State Solution

2007-04-22T06:39:00.000-07:00

[I disagree with the reasoning of Lerner and Avnery, and will answer their arguments in the near future]

Uri Avnery argues agaisnt some of the anti-Israel ideas like "one state solution" that are growing in popularity among the international Left. With an introductory note from Rabbi Lerner.

How an anti-Israel Left helps perpetuate the Occupation

We at Tikkun have recently been discussing how to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Occupation of the West Bank. Like most other liberals and progressives, we see the Occupation as a terrible blight on the history of the Jewish people and an important source for growing anger at those Jews who give blind support to Israeli policies. While the
distortions in consciousness that have permitted the Occupation were already present in the right-wing of the Zionist movement, the willingness of the American Jewish community and sections of the Labor Party in Israel to justify and implement the Occupation has transformed Jewish life, often turning major segments of the Jewish world and Judaism into a cheering squad for the policies (including torture and assassination of “suspected militants”) of a particular nation state rather than as a witness to the God of the universe and the possibility of a world based on justice, love, generosity and peace.
Unfortunately, the Left that criticizes Israel has often itself manifested dramatic distortions. For one thing, it seems as if every group of Jews who come to an understanding that Israeli policy is immoral and self-destructive simultaneously develop their own rationale for why they can’t work with other Jewish and non-Jewish groups that have these same ideas. The result is a cacophony of voices that could, if united, work in a powerful way.
But united around what? It can’t be around the dissolution of the State of Israel envisioned by many who are currently planning a set of demonstrations against Israel June 10-12 coordinated by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and the United for Peace and Justice, two organizations to which Tikkun belongs and which oft en do valuable work. The reason we can’t join them is the same reason the Tikkun Community couldn’t join the Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP): the willingness of all these organizations to keep alive as an option the notion that the solution to Israel/Palestine peace lies in the dissolution of a Jewish state, using the language of “one state solution” as the way to signal to many who never thought the Jewish people never deserved a state at all. Now, don’t get us wrong. We are not pro-states at all, and at Tikkun we are working for a 21st century in which nation states are supplanted by regional and global arrangements and nationalism and nationalist wars disappear. But as long as the world does have states, we think the Jewish people have one of the better cases in the history of the modern world for having the protections that a state entails. That’s one reason why we are strongly critical of Israeli policy, but not in favor of destroying or politely eliminating a Jewish state. But our other reasons for opposing a one-state solution have to do with the well-being of the Palestinian people. And these are articulated below by the leader of the most progressive and yet rational peace movement in Israel, Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom. 1. Ask Palestinians to bet on a one state solution and you ask them to continue the occupation for the next twenty years at least, because almost no one in Israel feels safe enough in the world to eliminate the security that they feel from having a Jewish state. 2. Most Israelis and Palestinians would oppose it. 3. If implemented, it would lead to a real apartheid state.
We want to protest Israeli policy and build an alternative to AIPAC, but it cannot be done unless it is based on unequivocal acceptance of the right of both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own economically, politically and culturally viable states. As Avnery points out below, anything less than that actually plays into the hands of those who seek to perpetuate the occupation.
These arguments are made in very summary form here, but if you disagree with them, I urge you to read my two books that explore these issues in greater detail: Healing Israel Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003) and The Geneva Accord and Other Strategies for Middle East Peace (North Atlantic Books, 2004).
And please read Uri Avnery’s powerful article, below.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun (www.tikkun.org)
P.S. Have you signed the ad about how to end the War in Iraq? It’s not too late to sign it and donate to it (though you can sign without donating). www.tikkun.org/iraqpeace.

Uri Avnery
21.4.07

The Bed of Sodom

IN HEBREW legend, the bed of Sodom is a symbol of evil.

The Bible tells how God decided to obliterate Sodom because of the wickedness of its people (Genesis, 18). The legend gives us an example of this wickedness: the special bed for visitors. When a stranger came to Sodom, he was put in this bed. If he was too tall, his legs were shortened. If he was too short, his limbs were stretched to fit.

In political life, there is more than one bed like this. On the Right and on the Left, there are people who put every problem in such a bed, cut off limbs and stretch limbs, until reality matches theory.

From the sixties on, doctrinaire leftists tended to put every situation into the bed of Vietnam. Everything - be it the murderous tyranny in Chile or the American threats against Cuba - had to fit the Vietnam example. Applying this model, it was easy to decide who were the good guys and who the bad, what to do and how to solve the problem.

That was convenient. It is much easier to draw conclusions when there is no need to consider the complexities of a particular conflict, its historical background and its local circumstances.

LATELY, A NEW bed of Sodom has gained currency: South Africa. In some circles of the radical Left there is a tendency to force every conflict into this bed. Every new case of evil and oppression in the world is seen as a new version of the apartheid regime, and it is decided accordingly how to solve the problem and what to do to achieve the desired end.

True, the South African situation arose in particular historical circumstances that took centuries to mature. It was not identical with the problem of the aborigines in Australia or the settlement of the Whites in North America, nor to Northern Ireland or the situation in Iraq. But it is certainly convenient to give one and the same answer to all problems.

Of course, there is always a superficial similarity between different regimes of oppression. But if one is not ready to see the differences between the diseases, one is liable to prescribe false medicines - and risk killing the patient in the process.

NOW THIS is happening here.

It is easy to put the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the South African bed, since the similarities between the symptoms are obvious. The Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories has been going on for 40 years now, and almost 60 years have passed since the Naqba - the armed conflict of 1948 in which the State of Israel came into being and in which more than half the Palestinians lost their homes and land. Relations between the settlers and the Palestinians are in many ways reminiscent of apartheid; and even in Israel proper, the Arab citizens are far from real equality.

What to do? One has to learn from South Africa that there is nothing to be gained from appealing to the conscience of the ruling people. Among the white minority in South Africa, there was no real difference between Left and Right, between open racists and liberals, who were but better disguised racists, with the exception of a few white heroes who joined the fight for freedom.

Therefore, redemption could only come from the outside. And indeed, world public opinion saw the injustice of apartheid and imposed a world-wide boycott on South Africa, till in the end the white minority capitulated. Power in the united South African state passed into the hands of the black majority, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and became president, and all this took place - wonder of wonders - without bloodshed.

If this happened in South Africa, the proponents of this view say, it must happen here, too. The idea of establishing a Palestinian state next to the State of Israel (the "Two-State Solution") must be discarded, and the single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River (the "One-State Solution") must become the aim. This must be achieved by the ultimate weapon which proved itself in South Africa: boycott.

This is how it is going to happen: justice-lovers throughout the world will convince world public opinion to impose a general boycott on the State of Israel. The state will collapse and disintegrate. Between the sea and the river there will come into being one single state, in which Israelis and Palestinians will live peacefully together, as equal citizens. The settlers can stay where they are, there will be no problem of borders, and all that remains is to decide who will be the Palestinian Mandela.

THIS WEEK I listened to a lecture by Professor Ilan Pappe of Haifa University, one of the leading spokesmen for this idea. The audience consisted of Palestinian, Israeli and international activists in Bil'in, the village that has become a symbol of resistance to the occupation. He presented a well-structured set of ideas, expressed with eloquence and enthusiasm. These were the principles:

There is no sense in opposing just the occupation, nor any other particular policy of the Israeli government. The problem is the very essence of Israel as a Zionist state. This essence is unchangeable as long as the state exists. No change from the inside is possible, because in Israel there is no essential difference between Right and Left. Both are accomplices in a policy whose real aim is ethnic cleansing, the expulsion of the Palestinians not only from the occupied territories, but also from Israel proper.

Therefore, everyone who strives for a just solution must aim at the establishment of a single state, to which the refugees of 1948 and 1967 will be invited to return. This will be a joint and egalitarian state, like today's South Africa.

There is no sense in trying to change Israel from the inside. Salvation will come from the outside: a world-wide boycott of Israel, which will cause the state to collapse and convince the Israeli public that there is no escape from the One-State Solution.

It sounded logical and convincing, and the speaker did indeed gain applause.

THIS THEORETICAL structure contains several assumptions with which I have no quarrel. The Zionist Left has indeed collapsed in the last few years, and its absence from the field of struggle is a painful and dangerous fact. In today's Knesset, there is no effective Zionist party that is seriously fighting for real equality for the Arab citizens. Nobody is able today to call out into the street hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands, in order to pressure the government to accept the peace proposal of the whole Arab world.

There is no doubt that the real disease is not the 40-year long occupation. The occupation is a symptom of a more profound disease, which is connected with the official ideology of the state. The aim of ethnic cleansing and the establishment of a Jewish State from the sea to the river is dear to the hearts of many Israelis, and perhaps Rabbi Meir Kahane was right when he asserted that this is everybody's unspoken desire.

But unlike professor Pappe, I am convinced that it is possible to change the historical direction of Israel. I am convinced that this is the real battlefield for the Israeli peace forces, and I myself have been engaged in it for decades.

Moreover, I believe that we have already attained impressive achievements: the recognition of the existence of the Palestinian people has become general, and so has the readiness of most Israelis to accept the idea of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as the capital of both states. We have compelled our government to recognize the PLO, and we shall compel them to recognize Hamas. True, all this would not have happened without the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and (sometimes) favorable international circumstances, but the contribution of the Israeli peace forces, which pioneered these ideas, was significant.

Also, the notion has lately gained acceptance in Israel and other countries, that peace will be achieved only if we succeed in overcoming the gap between the Israeli and the Palestinian narratives and in integrating them into one single historical account, which will recognize the injustices which have been committed and which are still going on. Nothing is more important. (Our path-breaking booklet "Truth Against Truth" was the beginning of this process.)

On the surface, it appears that we have failed. We have not succeeded in compelling our government to stop the building of the wall or the enlargement of the settlements, nor to restore to the Palestinians their freedom of movement. In short, we have not succeeded in putting an end to the occupation. The Arab citizens of Israel have not attained real equality. But beneath the surface, in the depths of national consciousness, we are succeeding. The question is how to turn the hidden success into an open political fact. In other words: how to change the policy of the Israeli government.

THE IDEA of the "One-State Solution" will harm this effort very much.

It diverts the effort from a solution that has now, after many years, a broad public basis, in favor of a solution that has no chance at all.

There is no doubt that 99.99% of Jewish Israelis want the State of Israel to exist as a state with a robust Jewish majority, whatever its borders.

The belief that a world-wide boycott could change this is a complete illusion. Immediately after his lecture, my colleague Adam Keller asked the professor a simple question: "The entire world has imposed a blockade on the Palestinian people. But in spite of the terrible misery of the Palestinians, they have not been brought to their knees. Why do you think that a boycott would break the Israeli public, which is far stronger economically, so that they would give up the Jewish character of the state?" (There was no answer.)

In any case, such a boycott is quite impossible. Here and there, an organization can declare a boycott, small circles of justice-lovers can keep it, but there is no chance that in the coming decades a world-wide boycott movement, like the one that broke the racist regime in South Africa, will come about. That regime was headed by declared asmirers of the Nazis. A boycott of the "Jewish State", which is identified with the victims of the Nazis, just will not happen. It will be enough to remind people that the long road to the gas chambers started with the 1933 Nazi slogan "Kauft nicht bei Juden" ("Don't buy from Jews").

(The obnoxious fact that the government of the "State of the Holocaust Survivors" had close relations with the Apartheid State does not change this situation.)

That is the problem with the bed of Sodom: one size does not fit all. When the circumstances are different, the remedies must be different, too.

THE IDEA of the "One-State Solution" can attract people who despair of the struggle for the soul of Israel. I do understand them. But it is a dangerous idea, especially for the Palestinians.

Statistically, the Israeli Jews constitute, as of now, the absolute majority between the sea and the river. To that, one must add an even more important fact: the average annual income of an Arab Palestinian is about 800 dollars, that of a Jewish Israeli is about 20,000 dollars - 25 times (!) higher. The Israeli economy is growing every year. The Palestinians would be "hewers of wood and drawers of water". That means that if the imaginary joint state did indeed come into being, the Jews there would wield in it absolute power. They would, of course, use this power to consolidate their dominance and prevent the return of refugees.

Thus the South African example could come true retroactively: in the Single State, an apartheid-like regime would indeed come into being. Not only would the Israeli-Palestinian conflict not be solved, but on the contrary, it would move into an even more dangerous phase.

Pappe put forward an argument that looked a bit strange to me: that a Single State already exists in practice, since Israel rules from the sea to the river. But that is not so. There is no single state, neither formally nor in practice, but one state occupying another. Such a state, in which a dominant nation controls the others, will eventually disintegrate - as did the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The One State will not come into being. Not only the Israelis, but most of the Palestinians, too, will not give up their right to a national state of their own. They can applaud an Israeli professor who advocates the dismantling of the State of Israel, but they have no time to wait for utopian solutions that could be realized in a hundred years. They need an end to the occupation and to achieve a solution to the conflict here and now, in the near future.

ALL WHO wholeheartedly want to help the occupied Palestinian people would be well advised to keep well away from the idea of a general boycott of Israel. It would push all Israelis into the arms of the extreme Right, because it would reinforce the right-wing belief that "All the world is against us" - a belief that took root in the years of the Holocaust, when "all the world looked on and kept silent". Every Israeli child learns this in school.

A focused boycott against specific organizations and corporations that actively contribute to the occupation can indeed help in convincing the Israeli public that the occupation is not worthwhile. Such a boycott can achieve a specific aim - if it is not aimed at the collapse of the State of Israel. Gush Shalom, to which I belong, has for 10 years been organizing a boycott of the products of the settlements. The aim is to isolate the settlers and their accomplices. But a general boycott on the State of Israel would achieve the very opposite - to isolate the Israeli peace activists.

THE "TWO-STATE SOLUTION" was and still is the only solution. When we put it forward immediately after the 1948 war, we could be counted on the fingers of two hands not only in Israel but in the entire world. Now there exists a world-wide consensus about it. The path to this solution is not smooth, many dangers lurk on the way, but it is a realistic solution that can be achieved.

One can say: OK, we will accept the Two-State Solution because it is realistic, but after its realization we shall endeavor to abolish the two states and establish one joint state. That is alright with me. As for myself, I hope that in the course of time a federation of the two states will come into being, and relations between the two will become close. I also hope that a regional union, like the EU, will be established, consisting of all the Arab states and Israel, and perhaps also Turkey and Iran.

But first of all we must treat the wound from which we are all suffering: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not by patent medicines, certainly not by a bed of Sodom, but with the medicines that are on the shelf.

THE 18th CHAPTER of Genesis tells of Abraham trying to convince the Almighty not to obliterate Sodom. "Peradventure there be fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou also destroy and not spare the place for the fifty righteous that are therein?"

God promised him not to destroy the town if there were 50 righteous in it. Abraham haggled and brought the Almighty down to 45, then 40, 30 and 20, finally settling for 10. But in Sodom there were no 10 righteous to be found, and so its fate was sealed.

I believe that in Israel there are many, many more than ten righteous people. All public opinion polls show that the great majority of Israelis not only want peace, but are ready to pay its price. But they are afraid. They lack trust. They are shackled by the beliefs they acquired in early childhood. They must be freed from them - and I believe that it can be done.

A Jewish Plea

2007-04-19T17:34:00.001-07:00

> CounterPunch, Weekend Edition
> April 7 / 8, 2007
> http://www.counterpunch.org/roy04072007.html
>
> A Jewish Plea
>
> By SARA ROY
>
> We have nothing to lose except everything. - Albert Camus
>
>
> During the summer my husband and I had a conversion ceremony for our
> adopted daughter, Jess. We took her to the mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath
> where she was totally submerged in a pool of living water -- living
> because it is fed in part by heavenly rain -- and momentarily suspended
> as we are in the womb, emerging the same yet transformed. This ritual
> of purification, transformation and rebirth is central to Judaism and
> it signifies renewal and possibility.
>
> The day of Jess's conversion was also the day that Israel began its
> pitiless bombing of Lebanon and nearly three weeks into Israel's
> violent assault on Gaza, a place that has been my second home for the
> last two decades. This painful juxtaposition of rebirth and destruction
> remains with me, weighing heavily, without respite. Yet, the link
> deeply forged in our construction of self as Jews, between my
> daughter's acceptance into Judaism and Israel's actions-between Judaism
> and Zionism -- a link that I never accepted uncritically but understood
> as historically inevitable and understandable, is one that for me, at
> least, has now been broken.
>
> For unlike past conflicts involving Israel and the Palestinian and Arab
> peoples this one feels qualitatively different -- a turning point --
> not only with regard to the nature of Israel's horrific response -- its
> willingness to destroy and to do so utterly -- but also with regard to
> the virtually unqualified support of organized American Jewry for
> Israel's brutal actions, something that is not new but now no longer
> tolerable to me.
>
> I grew up in a home where Judaism was defined and practiced not so much
> as a religion but as a system of ethics and culture. God was present
> but not central. Israel and the notion of a Jewish homeland were very
> important to my parents, who survived Auschwitz, Chelmno and
> Buchenwald. But unlike many of their friends, my parents were not
> uncritical of Israel. Obedience to a state was not a primary Jewish
> value, especially after the Holocaust. Judaism provided the context for
> Jewish life, for values and beliefs that were not dependent upon
> national or territorial boundaries, but transcended them to include the
> other, always the other. For my mother and father Judaism meant bearing
> witness, raging against injustice and refusing silence. It meant
> compassion, tolerance, and rescue. In the absence of these imperatives,
> they taught me, we cease to be Jews.
>
> Many of the people, both Jewish and others, who write about
> Palestinians and Arabs fail to accept the fundamental humanity of the
> people they are writing about, a failing born of ignorance, fear and
> racism. Within the organized Jewish community especially, it has always
> been unacceptable to claim that Arabs, Palestinians especially, are
> like us, that they, too, possess an essential humanity and must be
> included within our moral boundaries, ceasing to be "a kind of
> solution," a useful, hostile "other" to borrow from Edward Said. That
> any attempt at separation is artificial, an abstraction.
>
> By refusing to seek proximity over distance, we calmly, even gratefully
> refuse to see what is right before our eyes. We are no longer
> compelled, if we ever were, to understand our behavior from positions
> outside our own, to enter, as Jacqueline Rose has written, into each
> other's predicaments and make what is one of the hardest journeys of
> the mind. Hence, there is no need to maintain a living connection with
> the people we are oppressing, to humanize them, taking into account the
> experience of subordination itself, as Said would say. We are not
> preoccupied by our cruelty nor are we haunted by it. The task,
> ultimately, is to tribalize pain, narrowing the scope of human
> suffering to ourselves alone. Such willful blindness leads to the
> destruction of principle and the destruction of people, eliminating all
> possibility of embrace, but it gives us solace.
>
> Why is it so difficult, even impossible to incorporate Palestinians and
> other Arab peoples into the Jewish understanding of history? Why is
> there so little perceived need to question our own narrative (for want
> of a better word) and the one we have given others, preferring instead
> to cherish beliefs and sentiments that remain impenetrable? Why is it
> virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism,
> repression and injustice almost anywhere in the world and unacceptable
> -- indeed, for some, an act of heresy -- to oppose it when Israel is
> the oppressor, choosing concealment over exposure? For many among us
> history and memory adhere to preclude reflection and tolerance, where,
> in the words of Northrop Frye, "the enemy become, not people to be
> defeated, but embodiments of an idea to be exterminated."
>
> What happens to the other as we, a broken and weary people, continually
> abuse him, turning him into the enemy we now want and need, secure in a
> prophecy that is thankfully self-fulfilling?
>
> What happens to a people when renewal and injustice are rapturously
> joined?
>
> A new discourse of the unconscious
>
> We speak without mercy, numb to the pain of others, incapable of being
> reached-unconscious. Our words are these:
>
> * " . . . [W]e must not forget,' wrote Ze'ev Schiff, the senior
> political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "the
> most important aspect of this war: Hezbollah and what this terrorist
> organization symbolizes must be destroyed at any price. . . .What
> matters is not the future of the Shiite town of Bint Jbail or the
> Hezbollah positions in Maroun Ras, but the future and safety of the
> State of Israel." "If Israel doesn't improve its military cards in the
> fighting, we will feel the results in the political solution."
>
> * "We must reduce to dust the villages of the south . . ." stated
> Haim Ramon, long known as a political dove and Israel's Minister of
> Justice. "I don't understand why there is still electricity there."
> "Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to
> Hizbollah. . . What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge
> firepower before a ground force goes in." Israel's largest selling
> newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth put it this way: "A village from which
> rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire. This
> decision should have been made and executed after the first Katyusha.
> But better late than never."
>
> * "[F]or every katyusha barrage on Haifa, 10 Dahiya buildings will
> be bombed," said the IDF Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz. Eli Yishai,
> Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, proposed turning south Lebanon into a
> "sandbox", while Knesset member Moshe Sharoni called for the
> obliteration of Gaza, and Yoav Limor, a Channel 1 military
> correspondent, suggested an exhibition of Hezbollah corpses followed by
> a parade of prisoners in their underwear in order "to strengthen the
> home front's morale."
>
> * "Remember: distorted philosophical sensitivity [sic] to human
> lives will make us pay the real price of the lives of many, and the
> blood of our sons," read an advertisement in Ha'aretz.
>
> * "[A]ccording to Jewish law," announced the Yesha Rabbinical
> Council, "during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as
> 'innocents of the enemy'."
>
> * "But speaking from our own Judaic faith and legal legacy," argued
> the Rabbinical Council of America, "we believe that Judaism would
> neither require nor permit a Jewish soldier to sacrifice himself in
> order to save deliberately endangered enemy civilians. This is
> especially true when confronting a barbaric enemy who would by such
> illicit, consistent, and systematic means seek to destroy not only the
> Jewish soldier, but defeat and destroy the Jewish homeland. New
> realities do indeed require new responses."
>
> * The Israeli author, Naomi Ragan, after learning that many of the
> war dead in Lebanon were children, wrote "Save your sympathy for the
> mothers and sisters and girlfriends of our young soldiers who would
> rather be sitting in study halls learning Torah, but have no choice but
> to risk their precious lives full of hope, goodness and endless
> potential, to wipe out the cancerous terrorist cells that threaten
> their people and all mankind. Make your choice, and save your tears."
>
> Many of us, perhaps most, have declared that all Palestinians and
> Lebanese are the enemy, threatening our -- Israel and the Jewish
> people's -- existence. Everyone we kill and every house we demolish is
> therefore a military target, legitimate and deserving. Terrorism is
> part of their culture and we must strengthen our ability to deter.
> Negotiation, to paraphrase the Israeli scholar, Yehoshua Porat, writing
> during the 1982 Lebanon war, is a "veritable catastrophe for Israel."
> The battlefield will preserve us.
>
> The French critic and historian, Hippolyte Taine, observed:
>
> "Imagine a man who sets out on a voyage equipped with a pair of
> spectacles that magnify things to an extraordinary degree. A hair on
> his hand, a spot on the tablecloth, the shifting fold of a coat, all
> will attract his attention; at this rate, he will not go far, he will
> spend his day taking six steps and will never get out of his room."
>
>
> We are content in our room and seek no exit.
>
> In our room, compassion and conscience are dismissed as weakness, where
> pinpoint surgical strikes constitute restraint and civility and
> momentary ceasefires, acts of humanity and kindness. "Leave your home,
> we are going to destroy it." Several minutes later another home in
> Gaza, another history, is taken, crushed. The warning, though, is not
> for them but for us-it makes us good and clean. What better
> illustration of our morality: when a call to leave one's home minutes
> before it is bombed is considered a humane gesture.
>
> Our warnings have another purpose: they make our actions legitimate and
> our desire for legitimacy is unbounded, voracious. This is perhaps the
> only thing Palestinians (and now the Lebanese) have withheld from us,
> this object of our desire. If legitimacy will not be bestowed then it
> must be created. This explains Israel's obsession with laws and
> legalities to insure in our own eyes that we do not transgress, making
> evil allowable by widening the parameters of license and transgression.
> In this way we insure our goodness and morality, through a piece of
> paper, which is enough for us.
>
> What are Jews now capable of resisting: tyranny? Oppression?
> Occupation? Injustice? We resist none of these things, no more. For too
> many among us they are no longer evil but necessary and good-we cannot
> live, survive without them. What does that make us? We look at
> ourselves and what do we see: a non-Jew, a child, whose pain we inflict
> effortlessly, whose death is demanded and unquestioned, bearing
> validity and purpose.
>
> What do we see: a people who now take pleasure in hating others. Hatred
> is familiar to us if nothing else. We understand it and it is safe. It
> is what we know. We do not fear our own distortion -- do we even see
> it? -- but the loss of our power to deter, and we shake with a violent
> palsy at a solution that shuns the suffering of others. Our pathology
> is this: it lies in our struggle to embrace a morality we no longer
> possess and in our need for persecution of a kind we can no longer
> claim but can only inflict.
>
> We are remote from the conscious world -- brilliantly ignorant, blindly
> visionary, unable to resist from within. We live in an unchanging
> place, absent of season and reflection, devoid of normality and growth,
> and most important of all, emptied-or so we aim -- of the other. A
> ghetto still but now, unlike before, a ghetto of our own making.
>
> What is our narrative of victory and defeat? What does it mean to win?
> Bombed cars with white civilian flags still attached to their windows?
> More dead and dismembered bodies of old people and children littered
> throughout villages that have been ravaged? An entire country disabled
> and broken? Non-ending war? This is our victory, our achievement,
> something we seek and applaud. And how do we measure defeat? Losing the
> will to continue the devastation? Admitting to our persecution of
> others, something we have never done?
>
> We can easily ignore their suffering, cut them from their food, water,
> electricity, and medicine, confiscate their land, demolish their crops
> and deny them egress -- suffocate them, our voices stilled. Racism does
> not allow us to see Arabs as we see ourselves; that is why we rage when
> they do not fail from weakness but instead we find ourselves failing
> from strength. Yet, in our view it is we who are the only victims,
> vulnerable and scarred. All we have is the unnaturalness of our
> condition.
>
> As an unconscious people, we have perhaps reached our nadir with many
> among us now calling for a redefinition of our ethics-the core of who
> we are -- to incorporate the need to kill women and children if Jewish
> security required it. "New realities do indeed require new responses,"
> says the Rabbinical Council of America. Now, for us, violence is
> creation and peace is destruction.
>
> Ending the process of creation and rebirth after the Holocaust
>
> Can we be ordinary, an essential part of our rebirth after the
> Holocaust? Is it possible to be normal when we seek refuge in the
> margin, and remedy in the dispossession and destruction of another
> people? How can we create when we acquiesce so willingly to the
> demolition of homes, construction of barriers, denial of sustenance,
> and ruin of innocents? How can we be merciful when, to use Rose's
> words, we seek "omnipotence as the answer to historical pain?" We
> refuse to hear their pleading, to see those chased from their homes,
> children incinerated in their mother's arms. Instead we tell our
> children to inscribe the bombs that will burn Arab babies.
>
> We argue that we must eliminate terrorism. What do we really know of
> their terrorism, and of ours? What do we care? Rather, with language
> that is denuded and infested-give them more time to bomb so that
> Israel's borders can be natural-we engage repeatedly in a war of
> desire, a war not thrust upon us but of our own choosing, ingratiating
> ourselves with the power to destroy others and insensate to the death
> of our own children. What happens to a nation, asks the Israeli writer
> David Grossman, that cannot save its own child, words written before
> his own son was killed in Lebanon?
>
> There are among Israelis real feelings of vulnerability and fear, never
> resolved but used, intensified. Seeing one's child injured or killed is
> the most horrible vision -- Israelis are vulnerable, far more than
> other Jews. Yet, we as a people have become a force of extremism, of
> chaos and disorder, trying to plow an unruly sea-addicted to death and
> cruelty, intoxicated, with one ambition: to mock the pauper.
>
> Judaism has always prided itself on reflection, critical examination,
> and philosophical inquiry. The Talmudic mind examines a sentence, a
> word, in a multitude of ways, seeking all possible interpretations and
> searching constantly for the one left unsaid. Through such scrutiny it
> is believed comes the awareness needed to protect the innocent, prevent
> injury or harm, and be closer to God.
>
> Now, these are abhorred, eviscerated from our ethical system. Rather
> the imperative is to see through eyes that are closed, unfettered by
> investigation. We conceal our guilt by remaining the abused, despite
> our power, creating situations where our victimization is assured and
> our innocence affirmed. We prefer this abyss to peace, which would hurl
> us unacceptably inward toward awareness and acknowledgement.
>
> Jews do not feel shame over what they have created: an inventory of
> inhumanity. Rather we remain oddly appeased, even calmed by the
> desolation. Our detachment allows us to bear such excess (and commit
> it), to sit in Jewish cafes while Palestinian mothers are murdered in
> front of their children in Gaza. I can now better understand how horror
> occurs-how people, not evil themselves, can allow evil to happen. We
> salve our wounds with our incapacity for remorse, which will be our
> undoing.
>
> Instead the Jewish community demands unity and conformity: "Stand with
> Israel" read the banners on synagogues throughout Boston last summer.
> Unity around what? There is enormous pressure -- indeed coercion --
> within organized American Jewry to present an image of "wall to wall
> unity" as a local Jewish leader put it. But this unity is an illusion
> -- at its edges a smoldering flame rapidly engulfing its core -- for
> mainstream Jewry does not speak for me or for many other Jews. And
> where such unity exists, it is hollow built around fear not humanity,
> on the need to understand reality as it has long been constructed for
> us -- with the Jew as the righteous victim, the innocent incapable of
> harm. It is as if our unbending support for Israel's militarism
> "requires putting our minds as it were into Auschwitz where being a Jew
> puts your existence on the line. To be Jewish means to be threatened,
> nothing more. Hence, the only morality we can acknowledge is saving
> Israel and by extension, ourselves." Within this paradigm, it is
> dissent not conformity that will diminish and destroy us. We hoard our
> victimization as we hoard our identity -- they are one -- incapable of
> change, a failing that will one day result in our own eviction. Is this
> what Zionism has done to Judaism?
>
> Israel's actions not only demonstrate the limits of Israeli power but
> our own limitations as a people: our inability to live a life without
> barriers, to free ourselves from an ethnic loyalty that binds and
> contorts, to emerge, finally, from our spectral chamber.
>
> Ending the (filial) link between Israel and the Holocaust
>
> How can the children of the Holocaust do such things, they ask? But are
> we really their rightful offspring?
>
> As the Holocaust survivor dies, the horror of that period and its
> attendant lessons withdraw further into abstraction and for some Jews,
> many of them in Israel, alienation. The Holocaust stands not as a
> lesson but as an internal act of purification where tribal attachment
> rather than ethical responsibility is demanded and used to define
> collective action. Perhaps this was an inevitable outcome of Jewish
> nationalism, of applying holiness to politics, but whatever its source,
> it has weakened us terribly and cost us greatly.
>
> Silvia Tennenbaum, a survivor and activist writes: "No matter what
> great accomplishments were ours in the diaspora, no matter that we
> produced Maimonides and Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn and hundreds of
> others of mankind's benefactors -- not a warrior among them! -- we look
> at the world of our long exile always in the dark light of the Shoah.
> But this, in itself, is an obscene distortion: would the author . . .
> Primo Levi, or the poet Paul Celan demand that we slaughter the
> innocents in a land far from the snow-clad forests of Poland? Is it a
> heroic act to murder a child, even the child of an enemy? Are my
> brethren glad and proud? . . . And, it goes without saying, loyal Jews
> must talk about the Holocaust. Ignore the images of today's dead and
> dying and focus on the grainy black and white pictures showing the
> death of Jews in the villages of Poland, at Auschwitz and Sobibor and
> Bergen-Belsen. We are the first, the only true victims, the champions
> of helplessness for all eternity."
>
> What did my family perish for in the ghettos and concentration camps of
> Poland? Is their role to be exploited and in the momentary absence of
> violence, to be forgotten and abandoned?
>
> Holocaust survivors stood between the past and the present, bearing
> witness, sometimes silently, and even in word, often unheard. Yet, they
> stood as a moral challenge among us and also as living embodiments of a
> history, way of life and culture that long predated the Holocaust and
> Zionism (and that Zionism has long denigrated), refusing, in their own
> way, to let us look past them. Yet, this generation is nearing its end
> and as they leave us, I wonder what is truly left to take their place,
> to fill the moral void created by their absence?
>
> Is it, in the words of a friend, himself a Jew, a "memory manufactory,
> with statues, museums and platoons of 'scholars' designed to preserve,
> indeed ratchet up Jewish feelings of persecution and victimhood, a
> Hitler behind every Katyusha or border skirmish, which must be met with
> some of the same crude slaughterhouse tools the Nazis employed against
> the Jews six decades ago: ghettos, mass arrests and the denigration of
> their enemy's humanity?" Do we now measure success in human bodies and
> in carnage, arguing that our dead bodies are worth more than theirs,
> our children more vulnerable and holy, more in need of protection and
> love, their corpses more deserving of shrouds and burial? Is meaning
> for us to be derived from martyrdom or from children born with a knife
> in their hearts? Is this how my grandmother and grandfather are to be
> remembered?
>
> Our tortured past and its images trespass upon our present not only in
> Israel but in Gaza and Lebanon as well. "They were temporarily buried
> in an empty lot with dozens of others," writes a New York Times
> reporter in Lebanon. "They were assigned numbers, his wife and
> daughter. Alia is No. 35 and Sally is No. 67. 'They are numbers now,'
> said the father. There are no names anymore."
>
> "They were shrunken figures, dehydrated and hungry," observes the
> Washington Post. "Some had lived on candy bars, others on pieces of dry
> bread. Some were shell-shocked, their faces blank . . . One never made
> it. He was carried out on a stretcher, flies landing on lifeless eyes
> that were still open."
>
> As the rightful claimants to our past we should ask, How much damage
> can be done to a soul? But we do not ask. We do not question the
> destruction but only our inability to complete it, to create more
> slaughter sites.
>
> Can we ever emerge from our torpor, able to mourn the devastation?
>
> Our ultimate eviction?
>
> Where do Jews belong? Where is our place? Is it in the ghetto of a
> Jewish state whose shrinking boundaries threaten, one day, to evict us?
> We are powerful but not strong. Our power is our weakness, not our
> strength, because it is used to instill fear rather than trust, and
> because of that, it will one day destroy us if we do not change. More
> and more we find ourselves detached from our past, suspended and
> abandoned, alone, without anchor, aching-if not now, eventually-for
> connection and succor. Grossman has written that as a dream fades it
> does not become a weaker force but a more potent one, desperately clung
> to, even as it ravages and devours.
>
> We consume the land and the water behind walls and steel gates forcing
> out all others. What kind of place are we creating? Are we fated to be
> an intruder in the dust to borrow from Faulkner, whose presence shall
> evaporate with the shifting sands? Are these the boundaries of our
> rebirth after the Holocaust?
>
> I have come to accept that Jewish power and sovereignty and Jewish
> ethics and spiritual integrity are, in the absence of reform,
> incompatible, unable to coexist or be reconciled. For if speaking out
> against the wanton murder of children is considered an act of
> disloyalty and betrayal rather than a legitimate act of dissent, and
> where dissent is so ineffective and reviled, a choice is ultimately
> forced upon us between Zionism and Judaism.
>
> Rabbi Hillel the Elder long ago emphasized ethics as the center of
> Jewish life. Ethical principles or their absence will contribute to the
> survival or destruction of our people. Yet, today what we face is
> something different and possibly more perverse: it is not the
> disappearance of our ethical system but its rewriting into something
> disfigured and execrable.
>
> As Jews in a post-Holocaust world empowered by a Jewish state, how do
> we as a people emerge from atrocity and abjection, empowered and also
> humane, something that still eludes us? How do we move beyond fear and
> omnipotence, beyond innocence and militarism, to envision something
> different, even if uncertain? "How," asks Ahad Haam, the founding
> father of cultural Zionism, "do you make a nation pause for thought?"
>
> For many Jews (and Christians), the answer lies in a strong and
> militarized Jewish state. For others, it is found in the very act of
> survival. For my parents-defeating Hitler meant living a moral life.
> They sought a world where "affirmation is possible and . . . dissent is
> mandatory," where our capacity to witness is restored and sanctioned,
> where we as a people refuse to be overcome by the darkness.
>
> Can we ever turn away from our power to destroy?
>
> It is here that I want to share a story from my family, to describe a
> moment that has inspired all of my work and writing.
>
> My mother and her sister had just been liberated from concentration
> camp by the Russian army. After having captured all the Nazi officials
> and guards who ran the camp, the Russian soldiers told the Jewish
> survivors that they could do whatever they wanted to their German
> persecutors. Many survivors, themselves emaciated and barely alive,
> immediately fell on the Germans, ravaging them. My mother and my aunt,
> standing just yards from the terrible scene unfolding in front of them,
> fell into each other's arms weeping. My mother, who was the physically
> stronger of the two, embraced my aunt, holding her close and my aunt,
> who had difficulty standing, grabbed my mother as if she would never
> let go. She said to my mother, "We cannot do this. Our father and
> mother would say this is wrong. Even now, even after everything we have
> endured, we must seek justice, not revenge. There is no other way." My
> mother, still crying, kissed her sister and the two of them, still one,
> turned and walked away.
>
> What then is the source of our redemption, our salvation? It lies
> ultimately in our willingness to acknowledge the other-the victims we
> have created-Palestinian, Lebanese and also Jewish-and the injustice we
> have perpetrated as a grieving people. Perhaps then we can pursue a
> more just solution in which we seek to be ordinary rather then
> absolute, where we finally come to understand that our only hope is not
> to die peacefully in our homes as one Zionist official put it long ago
> but to live peacefully in those homes.
>
> When my daughter Jess was submerged under the waters of the mikvah for
> the third and final time, she told me she saw rainbows under the water.
> I shall take this beautiful image as a sign of her rebirth and plead
> desperately for ours.
>
> ========================================================================
> ==============
>
> Sara Roy is Senior Research Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studie,
> Harvard University. "A Jewish Plea" will be published in The War on
> Lebanon: A Reader . Nubar Hovsepian (ed), Interlink Publishing, Spring
> 2007.

Ha'aretz- The Holocaust as political asset

2007-04-19T16:08:00.000-07:00

The Holocaust as political asset
By Amira Hass

The cynicism inherent in the attitude of the institutions of the Jewish state to Holocaust survivors is not a revelation to those born and living among them. We grew up with the yawning gap between the presentation of the State of Israel as the place of the Jewish people's rebirth and the void that exists for every Holocaust survivor and his family. The personal "rehabilitation" was dependent on the circumstances of each person: the stronger ones versus the others, who did not find support from the institutions of the state. During the 1950s and 1960s we saw the demeaning view of our parents as having gone "like sheep to the slaughter," the shame of the new Jews, the Sabras, over their misfortunate, Diaspora relatives.

It can be argued that during the first two decades, much of this attitude could be attributed to the lack of information and the very human lack of an ability to grasp the full meaning of the industrialized genocide perpetrated by Germany. But the awareness of the material aspects of the Holocaust started very early, with Jewish and Zionist institutions starting in the early 1940s to discuss the possibility of demanding reparations. In 1952, the reparations agreement with Germany was signed, by which that country agreed to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel to cover the absorption costs of the survivors and pay for their rehabilitation. The agreement obligated Germany to compensate survivors individually as well, but the German law differentiated between those who belonged to the "circle of German culture" and others. Those who were able to prove a connection to the superior circle received higher sums, even if they emigrated in time from Germany. Concentration camp survivors from outside the "circle" received the ridiculous sum of 5 marks per day. The Israeli representatives swallowed this distortion.

This is part of the roots of financial cynicism that the media is being exposed to today, due to several reasons: the advanced age and declining health of survivors, the intentional weakening of the welfare state, the presence of survivors from the former Soviet Union who are not included in the reparations agreement, the media activism of nongovernmental welfare organizations and the welcome enlistment of social affairs journalists.

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They are shocked by the gap between the official appropriation of the Holocaust, which is perceived in Israel as understood and justified, and the abandonment of survivors.

Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred.

The phrase "security for the Jews" has been consecrated as an exclusive synonym for "the lessons of the Holocaust." It is what allows Israel to systematically discriminate against its Arab citizens. For 40 years, "security" has been justifying control of the West Bank and Gaza and of subjects who have been dispossessed of their rights living alongside Jewish residents, Israeli citizens laden with privileges.

Security serves the creation of a regime of separation and discrimination on an ethnic basis, Israeli style, under the auspices of "peace talks" that go on forever. Turning the Holocaust into an asset allows Israel to present all the methods of the Palestinian struggle (even the unarmed ones) as another link in the anti-Semitic chain whose culmination is Auschwitz. Israel provides itself with the license to come up with more kinds of fences, walls and military guard towers around Palestinian enclaves.

Separating the genocide of the Jewish people from the historical context of Nazism and from its aims of murder and subjugation, and its separation from the series of genocides perpetrated by the white man outside of Europe, has created a hierarchy of victims, at whose head we stand. Holocaust and anti-Semitism researchers fumble for words when in Hebron the state carries out ethnic cleansing via its emissaries, the settlers, and ignore the enclaves and regime of separation it is setting up. Whoever criticizes Israel's policies toward the Palestinians is denounced as an anti-Semite, if not a Holocaust denier. Absurdly, the delegitimization of any criticism of Israel only makes it harder to refute the futile equations that are being made between the Nazi murder machine and the Israeli regime of discrimination and occupation.

The institutional abandonment of the survivors is rightly denounced across the board. The transformation of the Holocaust into a political asset for use in the struggle against the Palestinians feed on those same stores of official cynicism, but it is part of the consensus.

2007-04-18T00:19:00.000-07:00

[I met Amzi Bishara with the www.ffipp.org trip to Israel and Palestine 4 years ago. He was rushing between appointments and busy as most members of the Knesset would be in the political season. He was gracious, articulate and passionate in his speach to our group of US college and university faculty.]

What the persecution of Azmi Bishara means for Palestine

By Ali Abunimah

The Electronic Intifada
16 April 2007

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6798.shtml

The Israeli state and the Zionist movement have begun
their latest assault in their century-long struggle to rid
Palestine of its indigenous people and transform their
country into a Jewish supremacist enclave: the persecution
of Azmi Bishara, one of the most important Palestinian
national leaders and thinkers working today. This case has
enormous significance for the Palestinian solidarity
movement.

Bishara is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, one of more
than one million who live inside the Jewish state, who are
survivors or their descendants of the Zionist ethnic
cleansing that forced most Palestinians to leave in
1947-48. Elected to the Knesset in 1996, Bishara is a
founder of the National Democratic Assembly, a party which
calls for Israel to be transformed from a sectarian
ethnocracy into a democratic state of all its citizens.

On Sunday, Bishara appeared on Al-Jazeera, after weeks of
press speculation that he had gone into exile and would
resign from the Knesset. He revealed that in fact he is
the target of a very high level probe by Israeli state
security services who apparently plan to bring serious
"security" related charges against him. Censorship on this
matter is so tight in "democratic" Israel that until a few
days ago Israeli newspapers were prohibited from even
mentioning the existence of the probe. They are still
forbidden from reporting anything about the substance of
the investigation, and Ha'aretz admitted that due to
official censorship it could not even reprint much of what
Bishara said to millions of viewers on television.

Bishara himself was vague about the allegations. If he
even knows all the details, he could place himself in
greater jeopardy by talking about them. He said he is
still thinking about his options, including when to return
to Israel. While he questioned the value of spending years
proving his innocence of things he does not consider
illegal, such as maintaining broad contacts with the Arab
world of which he feels a part, he poignantly reflected
that ultimately he faced a choice between prison, exile or
martyrdom. These indeed are the only choices Israel has
ever placed before Palestinians who refuse to submit to
the racist rule of Zionism.

What he was clear about was that he is the target of a
campaign, coordinated at the highest levels of the Israeli
state to destroy him and his movement politically. He is
undoubtedly right about this and there is long precedent.
In 2001, Israel's attorney general Elyakim Rubinstein
charged Bishara with "endangering the state" because of
comments he made during a visit to Syria, and the Knesset
voted for the first time in its history to lift the
immunity of one of its members so Bishara could be
prosecuted. In 2003, the Israeli Central Elections
Committee attempted to disqualify Bishara and his party
from standing in national elections, on the grounds that
the party did not adhere to the dogma that Israel must
remain a "Jewish state." Under Israeli law all parties are
required to espouse the dogma that Israel must always
grant special and better rights to Jews, meaning truly
democratic parties are always flirting with illegality.
That decision was eventually overturned by the courts.
(Though it should be noted that the ban was supported by
former attorney general Rubinstein, who is now a Supreme
Court judge!). Such persecution against Palestinians in
Israel has been the norm since the state was founded.
Until 1966, they lived under "military government," a form
of internal military occupation similar to that
experienced by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza
today. Laws, practices and policies that continue to deny
their fundamental human rights are well described in
Jonathan Cook's recent book Blood and Religion: Unmasking
the Jewish and Democratic State. In recent years opinion
polls show that a majority of Israeli Jews consistently
support government efforts to force Palestinians citizens
out of the country. (In recent weeks, former Israeli prime
minister and current Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu
declared that it would be best if Bishara never returned).

Bishara sees Israel's latest gambit as signalling a change
in the "rules of the game." If he, an elected official, a
well-known public figure can face such tactics, what will
the rest of the community face? Indeed, the recent
publication by leading Palestinians in Israel of a report
calling for mild reforms to the Israeli state prompted
Israel's secret police, the Shin Bet (which operates
torture and death squads in the occupied territories) to
warn that it would "disrupt the activities of any groups
that seek to change the Jewish or democratic character of
Israel, even if they use democratic means" ("Arab leaders
air public relations campaign against Shin Bet," Ha'aretz,
6 April 2007). (There is precedent for such disruption not
only against Palestinians, but even against Israel's
Mizrahi Jews whose attempts to organize against Ashkenazi
discrimination were destroyed by the Shin Bet -- see
Joseph Massad's book The Persistence of the Palestinian
Question.)

Palestinian solidarity activists must understand and act
on the signal Israel is sending by persecuting Bishara.
For years, the mainstream Palestinian movement and its
allies have buried their heads in the slogan "end the
occupation." If it ever was, this vision is no longer
broad enough. We must recognize that Israel's war against
Palestinians does not discriminate among Palestinians,
sparing some and condemning others. It does however take
different forms, depending on where Palestinians are.
Those in East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza Strip live
under an extreme form of military tyranny now often called
"apartheid," though it is increasingly apparent that it is
something even worse. Palestinians inside Israel's 1948
borders live under a system of laws, policies and
practices that exclude them politically and oppress them
economically and socially. Millions of Palestinians
outside the country are victimized by racist laws that
forbid their return for the sole reason that they are not
Jews.

In practice this means that the Palestinian solidarity
movement needs to fashion a new message that breaks with
the failed fantasy of hermetic separation in nationalist
states. It means we have to focus on fighting Israeli
racism and colonialism in all its forms against those
under occupation, against those inside, and against those
in exile. We need to educate ourselves about what is
happening all over Palestine, not just in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip. We need to stand and act in solidarity
with Azmi Bishara and all Palestinians inside the 1948
lines who have for too long been marginalized and
abandoned by mainstream Palestinian politics. Support for
the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment
and sanctions is particularly urgent (see
http://www.pacbi.org/). In practice we need to start
building a vision of life after Israeli apartheid, an
inclusive life in which Israelis and Palestinians can live
in equality sharing the whole country. If Sinn Fein's
Gerry Adams and hardline Northern Ireland Unionist leader
Ian Paisley can sit down to form a government together, as
they are, and if Nelson Mandela and apartheid's National
Party could do the same, nothing is beyond the realm of
possibility in Palestine if we imagine it and work for it.

Azmi Bishara is the only Palestinian leader of
international stature expressing a vision and strategy
that is relevant to all Palestinians and can effectively
challenge Zionism. That is why he is in fear for his life,
safety and future while the quisling "president" Mahmoud
Abbas in Ramallah receives money and weapons from the
United States and tea and cakes from Ehud Olmert.

Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and
author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006)

a dialogue of Temple Sinai members: Ken Freedman, Michael Nam-Krane

2007-04-13T07:08:00.000-07:00

From Ken Freedman to Dan Burnstein

I am very low tech. In fact, I am below tech. Although I have heard the term, I am not at all sure that I know exactly what a blog is. You may forward anything I write to any blog you want. I am not looking for credit, I am merely attempting to clarify what I consider to be misconceptions and double standards routinely applied to Israel over the last 60 years or so.

There are Jewish crazies and there are Arab crazies. Here is the difference. When that jackass doctor from Brooklyn shot up the mosque in Hebron, he wasn't hailed as a national hero. His picture wasn't painted on the walls of his town, he wasn't put in the history books as someone to emulate, and the government did not drop off a $20,000.00 check at his home (the going rate for "shaheeds" under Yasir). Israel does not turn a blind eye to its Jewish crazies.

I had high hopes a couple of years ago. Someone undoubtedly with a false sense of right and wrong got on a bus in northern Israel and started shooting. He killed four or five before being killed by a cop. For a change, he wasn't hailed as a hero. They couldn't even find a cleric to officiate at his funeral or even a place to bury him. It gave me hope. The only trouble was that he was Jewish and had killed Arabs. He is not a hero. He is just another dead asshole. When people who shoot up or blow up bus stops, Passover Seders and pizza parlors are no longer treated as heroes in the Arab world I will know that the other side is ready to talk. And, I might add, those weren't Jews photographed dancing in the street on 9/11 - until the cameras were confiscated and the reporters thrown out of Nablus, of course.

To answer the points you made:

1. Neither Syria, Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen, or Egypt, last I looked has any significant oil. I do not believe that oil had yet been discovered in Libya at that time, but that did not stop them from doing the same thing in the late 40's. In other words, it did not stop them from throwing out virtually all of their Jews since 1947 with only the clothes on their back. You don't have to be an oil oligarchy to treat your Jews badly. For every Palestinian who fled for whatever reason, 1.5 Jews were forced out of homes they had occupied in some cases for millennia. To the best of my knowledge, they have never returned to those places to blow people up. To the best of my knowledge these Jews have not wasted away in so called refugee camps for two generations bemoaning their fate and sucking on the United Nations tit.

2. It is a ridiculous fact that Israel's indigenous Arabs have more day to day freedom in Israel than they would in any Arab country. They are virtually the only Arabs in the world that can freely elect members to a free parliament. They are the only Arabs in the world who can stand up in a public place and say that the head of their government is a no good so and so without fear that they and their loved ones will be taken away in the middle of the night. They are the only Arabs in the world who have complete and unfettered access to great education and cradle to grave health care.

3. The checkpoints have everything to do with security as does the fence. If the Pals acted like a country and did their job, there would be absolutely no need for the checkpoints or the wall. May that day come soon.

3. The sewage treatment plant that croaked last month was built by Israel. It had not been serviced whatsoever since the pull out. The earthen dams holding in the waste had been greatly weakened by Pal building contractors literally stealing the earth to use on their own projects. And the cost to have prevented this by routine police work would have been........ I know that Israel has seen fit to withhold $ from the Pal. govt. that will not so much as recognize them or keep their word from earlier "agreements" to reign in their crazies, but, if they can afford bombs and bullets for offensive actions, it’s a tough sell to say they can not afford to inspect a dam once every few months or so (drowning in human waste - yech!). If countries such as Saudi Arabia who can forward unlimited funds for AK47's earmarked a few of those $ for a factory, for example. the jobs provided by the factory would provide hope to the latest wasted generation of Pals and that would be a good thing. I do not see it happening yet, do you? Maybe they could even earmark a few bucks to hire Halliburton to inspect their waste treatment plants since they will soon be headquartered in the same neighborhood.

Israel is far from perfect, but in that neighborhood they are just about perfect by comparison. They are a successful nation that literally made the desert bloom. They should be emulated and not attacked. I am not holding my breath, though.

If the Arabs had won in 1947, how many Jews do you think would be allowed to live there?

I am reading the Koran and I recommend that you do to. Peaceful religion????? Wanna buy a bridge?

Ken Freedman

----- Original Message -----
From: Dan Burnstein
To: Ken Freedman
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 11:42 PM
Subject: Re: an fascinating eyewitness story about Jews in Iraq and the early days of Israel

I wish you would post your comments at thoughts-on-israel.blogspot.com

I will invite you (in a few minutes) to be an author or you can just send your stuff to me privately and lose the chance to influence others.

Dan

----- Original Message -----
From: Ken Freedman
To: Dan Burnstein ; Michael A. Nam-Krane
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 6:57 PM
Subject: Re: an fascinating eyewitness story about Jews in Iraq and the early days of Israel

And the place in the Arab world where democracy has ever operated is ...?

no where, but those are our US allies, right?

And the place in the Arab world where minorities are treated with equality is......?

no where, but those are the oil-ogharcies we support, right?

And the place in the Arab world where average Arabs have more day to day freedoms than they do in Israel is .........?

I don't know about the day to day stuff, not having been to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, etc.

Quoting Tony Judt and quoting Noam Chomsky (who spoke at Newton South High School yesterday) is ridiculous. They are both charter members of the "Israel Sucks" network.

What do you think about Israel?

Everyone knows where the final line will be. As soon as the Pals. give up their right of return dream and agree to control their crazies, they can have 93-95% of the West Bank. Jews will never beg anyone for access to the Temple Mount again, so they can forget that portion of the Old City. The Wall/Fence will come down when it is no longer necessary to protect Jewish lives. I am truly sorry that the Pals are inconvenienced by the checkpoints. I am even sorrier that they feel the necessity to lob rockets and bullets into Israel on a regular basis.

Crazies like the guy that shot up the mosque? the guy that killed Rabin? which crazies.

The interior checkpoints have nothing to do with security - and everything to do with harrassing the middle class Pals - they keep the drivers waiting 4-6 hours and let the walkers through and the donkeys with riders through and often don't even check them... what is that about?

I was fascinated a couple of weeks ago when five Gazans drowned in human waste. They couldn't be bothered maintaining their infrastructure, but, as long as there is enough $ for rockets and rifles, who cares. By the way, the medical aid for the most seriously wounded and the pumps to aid in the cleanup came from Israel.

Israel is holding onto hundreds of millions of dollars - that could have gone to infrastructure, right?

Original Message -----
From: Dan Burnstein
To: Michael A. Nam-Krane
Sent: Thursday, April 12, 2007 7:11 PM
Subject: Re: an fascinating eyewitness story about Jews in Iraq and the early days of Israel

Mike,

I've been thinking on what you wrote below to me and many Temple Sinai members 8 weeks ago. I felt the anger of your response to the account of a former member of the Jewish underground, Naeim Giladi, whose account you discard because his "source list is a little too sparce to be serious."

You wrote your email to just about everyone at Temple Sinai, so I wanted to digest what you wrote and then send this ONE email response with my thoughts to them also for this ONE-TIME, as you did.

I am writing a little long email than you sent everyone, but as Mark Twain once wrote, "If I had more time my letter would have been shorter."

I hope you reply, but not to the list (see about the blog below). I have been thinking about the issues you raised for two months and I think you deserve this ONE-TIME reply.

With respect to the Giladi account, he fought to create the state of Israel, and yes, I do consider him credible since he lived through his experiences, and I am not sure one needs footnotes if one's account is first person. If you lived the history that Giladi lived - and risked his life for the founding of Israel, I would not demand footnotes from you.

You ask if I want to give Israel back to the Arabs? Well, some day I'd like to see a real US style democracy take root in the region with one person one vote, and with protections for all religious, ethnic and seculars, especially Jews. I would like to see a separation of Church and State, as we have under our Constitution. Some day, I hope Israel's many factions write a Constitution that is similar to ours. But lets be realistic - Israel today, about 60 years post its founding is as fractious as the US was around 1840 when it was spit on questions of expansion, slavery, women's rights, etc., etc.

I personally think that any state, such as Iran or Saudi Arabia, that bases its citizenship on membership in one or another faith is a terrible idea, and I think that the idea of a Jewish state in the age of the Internet, with national boundaries and sharp divisions based on race, religion or ethnicity should be re-thought - because there are always large groups of second class citizens who don't feel that they are full members of that state if race, religion or ethnicity are the founding principles - it just leads to instablity and a feeling of injustice, even if there is justice amongst those not seen as "privileged."

At the time of our search for a new Rabbi to replace the retiring Frank Waldorf about 80 of the Temple Sinai parents gathered in some 10 big round tables in the auditorium and there were many many opinions expressed, but the one consistent idea from each of the tables was that we did not want an ardent Zionist as our next Rabbi. So at least at Temple Sinai, at that moment, my concerns about Zionism was a mainstream concern.

Surprisingly, and unlike Israel, this sort of debate is rare in organized US Jewish circles. In fact a talk by Tony Judt, a Jewish professor at NYU and son of Holocaust survivors was cancelled due to pressure from organized pro-Zionist circles and Shulamith Reinharz, a professor at Brandeis and wife of the president of Brandeis, has suggested that any Jew who questions Israel's actions is anti-Semitic. I suggest that any community that restricts a respectful and vigorous debate is wrong. I have even taken the time to set up a blog to take this discussion off-line at http://thoughts-on-israel.blogspot.com/

I don't condem our people and see the 'others' as angels. I personally feel closer to the Jews than the Arabs given my family background. I think there are Jews to be found on all sides of these very complicated matters. And, yes, I do condemn the Arab countries around Israel for helping to send unguided missiles by the hundreds meant to terrorize the citizens. Let me be clear - suicide bombers and missles are war crimes. And, yes, I value the vigorous debates of Israel and its vibrant newspapers, which one never sees this sort of debate in Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and on and on. Of course it was illegal to talk to the PLO for decades but things are much more open now.

You commented: "If you do not like what it takes to get a little respect in this world then I hope you're happy in the Diaspora and I hope you'll be happy when our cousins in Israel are all dead because that is what is at stake." I find this highly ironic.

If you think establishing a military occupation of 3.5 million Palestinians and carpet bombing civilians with cluster bombs in Southern Lebanon and setting up 400+ checkpoints INSIDE of the West Bank is what "gets respect," than I respectfully disagree, as would Lt. Grossman, a Zionist and IDF member, who spoke at Temple Israel a few years ago.

I think that it was a myth to say Israel was a land without people for a people without a land. I think that was part of wiping off of the maps of Israel some 400 Palestinian towns and taking over that land for settlement by Jews is a history that is hard to sweep under the mythic rug. Even Jews such as the Oxford academic Martin Gilbert, agree that 3/4s of a million Palestinians were displaced at the founding of Israel. Is there a simple solution to this 'demographic problem' as it is called in Israel? NO! These Palestinians did not just feel anxious, but they felt compelled for whatever reasons to become refugees - something Rabbi Waldorf said generally is not an easy step to take.

But I do think it is worthy of respectful discussion for the sake of our cousins, of Judaism and of world peace. This displacement of Palestinians, is obvious to non-Zionists, but not to you.

I was surprised you copied so many people, most of which would rather not be a part of our discussion - and the Rabbi asked me to not write Temple Sinai members. I believe in vigorous debate and the first amendment, as I am sure you do, but the Rabbi is right. Even though he wants to raise money for an ambulance in the midst of a war, and to conduct trips to Israel, I wonder if the average member of Temple Sinai would rather not have these hard questions come to them. Maybe that is why not so many signed up for the trip. We as a Temple community have complicated feelings about Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians (perhaps even more complicated feelings than about the Germans who actually were the ones who perpetrated the Holocaust).

In light of these sensitivities raised I have set up an open blog that anyone can add his or her comment, and anyone can be an author (if you just let me know). I invite all Temple Sinai members listed above to contribute to this blog on Israel, Judaism and Zionism.

I suspect almost all will not comment, nor read any comments if they are posted. As Barry Shrage once said to me, there are many Jews who get to a story on Israel in the Boston Globe and just turn the page and not even read the story. I sense that is not true of you, which I respect.

I suggest that there are also those, at CJP and elsewhere, who circle the wagons and automatically defend Israel. On a community level, I love the people of Israel as well as the communities of Druze, Christians, Muslims, and secular folks of the Middle East. I feel the pain of all those communities. I believe there will be a solution once THEY decide that continued bloodshed is less preferable to some sort of power-sharing.

No one, no one thought that Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams would ever sit at the same table and agree to govern Northern Ireland after over 90 years of sectarian killing, but it happened a few weeks ago. Millions of French and Germans were killed by each other over 60 years ago and now they don't even stamp each other's passports.

For hundreds of years, all the major cities of Italy engaged in killing sprees up to about 1860. To this day the citizens of Florence, Rome, Milan, etc. do not really like each other, or each other's wine and regional dishes, but they stopped the killing with the help of leadership who had a constructive vision, a vison like the one of Rabin, who was shot down by certain right-wing elements in Israel.

Yes, time does heal if there is leadership, vision, and a willingness to take a risk for a peace with justice for all those involved and not just some of those involved.

Mike, I deeply appreciate our discussion in bible class over many years, and even your email copied to so many Sinai members, because you wrote them and expressed your deepest concerns and fears.

While it is true that I disagree with that solution, I love the vigor of your email, and hope you go to the blog at http://thoughts-on-israel.blogspot.com/ and post your same or amended comments. I will make you, and anyone else,an author of the blog who indicates that they wish to be an author on the blog. I am new to blogging, but from what I can understand, Blogspot.com doesnt let everyone automatically be an "author," but I can invite anyone and in the meantime everyone can post a comment. I will only invite you, Sheila, Rabbi Vogel since you are the only ones who responded in substantive manner to the article below.

BTW, if you think I am alone in the world questioning the moral posture of Zionism and Israel, take a look at the most recent March 2007 poll by the BBC (remember that England is a strong ally of the US in the Middle East under Blair).

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A majority of people believe that Israel and Iran have a mainly negative influence in the world, a poll for the BBC World Service suggests.

It shows that the two countries are closely followed by the United States and North Korea .

The poll asked 28,000 people in 27 countries to rate a dozen countries plus the EU in terms of whether they have a positive or negative influence.

Canada, Japan and the EU are viewed most positively in the survey. http://news. bbc.co.uk/ 2/hi/middle_ east/6421597. stm

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't know about you, but I find the idea of Israel and Iran and the US tied for negative last places to be deeply upsetting!

Again, Michael, I invite you and everyone who has steam, and even fire coming out of their ears, their pens or word processors, to post their responses at http://thoughts-on-israel.blogspot.com/ and I beg you NOT to send a "reply all" to all of the folks here at Temple Sinai, the majority of which, probably don't want to hear about it, and are very, very busy to boot.

However, I do know many of the lurkers have important things to express, to get off of their chests on the subject of Israel, Judaism and Zionism, and would like a safe, non-spamming place to have this much needed discussion. I have made that blog to not be listed publically.

I am glad you wrote me and everyone else, but I don't think we should continue this dialogue here, but instead please jump to http://thoughts-on-israel.blogspot.com/. Sorry to be so slow in responding, but each decade my mind seems to work more and more slowly.

Shalom,

Dan Burnstein

cc: members of Temple Sinai copied by Michael

ps, to be honest I don't expect hardly anyone to contribute at the blog, but I would love to be shocked by a vigorous and thoughtful discussion there, one worthy of the vigorous and thoughtful members of Temple Sinai.

----- Original Message -----

From: Michael A. Nam-Krane
To: Dan Burnstein;
Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2007 11:19 AM
Subject: Re: an fascinating eyewitness story about Jews in Iraq and the early days of Israel

OK Dan even if everything here were true (which I doubt) what do you want to do? Give Israel back to the Arabs? We need a safe place. If you do not like what it takes to get a little respect in this world then I hope you're happy in the Diaspora and I hope you'll be happy when our cousins in Israel are all dead because that is what is at stake. Frankly I think this whole story is just that. That source list is a little too sparce to be serious. You should want more before you condemn our people.

Dan Burnstein wrote:
THE JEWS OF IRAQ
By Naeim Giladi
Of course I thought I knew it all back then. I was young, idealistic, and more than willing to put my life at risk for my convictions. It was 1947 and I wasn't quite 18 when the Iraqi authorities caught me for smuggling young Iraqi Jews like myself out of Iraq, into Iran, and then on to the Promised Land of the soon-to-be established Israel.
I was an Iraqi Jew in the Zionist underground. My Iraqi jailers did everything they could to extract the names of my co-conspirators. Fifty years later, pain still throbs in my right toe, a reminder of the day my captors used pliers to remove my toenails. On another occasion, they hauled me to the flat roof of the prison, stripped me bare on a frigid January day, then threw a bucket of cold water over me. I was left there, chained to the railing, for hours. But I never once considered giving them the information they wanted. I was a true believer.
My preoccupation during what I refer to as my "two years in hell" was with survival and escape. I had no interest then in the broad sweep of Jewish history in Iraq even though my family had been part of it right from the beginning. We were originally Haroons, a large and important family of the "Babylonian Diaspora." My ancestors had settled in Iraq more than 2,600 years ago, 600 years before Christianity, and 1,200 years before Islam. I am descended from Jews who built the tomb of Yehezkel [The Prophet Ezekiel], a Jewish prophet of pre-biblical times. My town, where I was born in 1929, is Hillah, not far from the ancient site of Babylon.
The original Jews found Babylon, with its nourishing Tigris and Euphrates rivers, to be truly a land of milk, honey, abundance-and opportunity. Although Jews, like other minorities in what became Iraq, experienced periods of oppression and discrimination depending on the rulers of the period, their general trajectory over two and one-half millennia was upward. Under the late Ottoman rule, for example, Jewish social and religious institutions, schools, and medical facilities flourished without outside interference, and Jews were prominent in government and business.
As I sat there in my cell, unaware that a death sentence soon would be handed down against me, I could not have recounted any personal grievances that my family members would have lodged against the government or the Muslim majority. Our family had been treated well and had prospered, first as farmers with some 50,000 acres devoted to rice, dates and Arab horses.
Then, with the Ottomans, we bought and purified gold that was shipped to Istanbul and turned into coinage. The Turks were responsible in fact for changing our name to reflect our occupation-we became Khalaschi, meaning "Makers of Pure."
I did not volunteer the information to my father that I had joined the Zionist underground. He found out several months before I was arrested when he saw me writing Hebrew and using words and expressions unfamiliar to him. He was even more surprised to learn that, yes, I had decided I would soon move to Israel myself. He was scornful. "You'll come back with your tail between your legs," he predicted.
About 125,000 Jews left Iraq for Israel in the late 1940s and into 1952, most because they had been lied to and put into a panic by what I came to learn were Zionist bombs. But my mother and father were among the 6,000 who did not go to Israel. Although physically I never did return to Iraq-that bridge had been burned in any event-my heart has made the journey there many, many times. My father had it right.
I was imprisoned at the military camp of Abu-Greib, about 7 miles from Baghdad. When the military court handed down my sentence of death by hanging, I had nothing to lose by attempting the escape I had been planning for many months.
It was a strange recipe for an escape: a dab of butter, an orange peel, and some army clothing that I had asked a friend to buy for me at a flea market. I deliberately ate as much bread as I could to put on fat in anticipation of the day I became 18, when they could formally charge me with a crime and attach the 50-pound ball and chain that was standard prisoner issue.
Later, after my leg had been shackled, I went on a starvation diet that often left me weak-kneed.The pat of butter was to lubricate my leg in preparation for extricating it from the metal band.The orange peel I surreptitiously stuck into the lock on the night of my planned escape, having studied how it could be placed in such a way as to keep the lock from closing.
As the jailers turned to go after locking up, I put on the old army issue that was indistinguishable from what they were wearing-a long, green coat and a stocking cap that I pulleddown over much of my face (it was winter). Then I just quietly opened the door and joined the departing group of soldiers as they strode down the hall and outside, and I offered a "good night" to the shift guard as I left. A friend with a car was waiting to speed me away.
Later I made my way to the new state of Israel, arriving in May, 1950. My passport had my name in Arabic and English, but the English couldn't capture the "kh" sound, so it was rendered simply as Klaski. At the border, the immigration people applied the English version, which had an Eastern European, Ashkenazi ring to it. In one way, this "mistake" was my key to discovering very soon just how the Israeli caste system worked.
They asked me where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I was the son of a farmer; I knew allthe problems of the farm, so I volunteered to go to Dafnah, a farming kibbutz in the high Galilee. I only lasted a few weeks. The new immigrants were given the worst of everything. The food was the same, but that was the only thing that everyone had in common. For the immigrants, bad cigarettes, even bad toothpaste. Everything. I left.
Then, through the Jewish Agency, I was advised to go to al-Majdal (later renamed Ashkelon), an Arab town about 9 miles from Gaza, very close to the Mediterranean. The Israeli government planned to turn it into a farmers' city, so my farm background would be an asset there.
When I reported to the Labor Office in al-Majdal, they saw that I could read and write Arabic and Hebrew and they said that I could find a good-paying job with the Military Governor's office.The Arabs were under the authority of these Israeli Military Governors. A clerk handed me a bunch of forms in Arabic and Hebrew. Now it dawned on me. Before Israel could establish its farmers' city, it had to rid al-Majdal of its indigenous Palestinians. The forms were petitions to the United Nations Inspectors asking for transfer out of Israel to Gaza, which was under Egyptian control.
I read over the petition. In signing, the Palestinian would be saying that he was of sound mind and body and was making the request for transfer free of pressure or duress. Of course, there was no way that they would leave without being pressured to do so. These families had been there hundreds of years, as farmers, primitive artisans, weavers. The Military Governor prohibited them from pursuing their livelihoods, just penned them up until they lost hope of resuming their normal lives. That's when they signed to leave.
I was there and heard their grief. "Our hearts are in pain when we look at the orange trees that we planted with our own hands. Please let us go, let us give water to those trees. God will not be pleased with us if we leave His trees untended." I asked the Military Governor to give them relief, but he said, "No, we want them to leave." I could no longer be part of this oppression and I left. Those Palestinians who didn't sign up for transfers were taken by force-just put in trucks and dumped in Gaza. About four thousand people were driven from al-Majdal in one way or another. The few who remained were collaborators with the Israeli authorities.
Subsequently, I wrote letters trying to get a government job elsewhere and I got many immediate responses asking me to come for an interview. Then they would discover that my face didn't match my Polish/Ashkenazi name. They would ask if I spoke Yiddish or Polish, and when I said I didn't, they would ask where I came by a Polish name. Desperate for a good job, I would usually say that I thought my great-grandfather was from Poland. I was advised time and again that "we'll give you a call."
Eventually, three to four years after coming to Israel, I changed my name to Giladi, which is close to the code name, Gilad, that I had in the Zionist underground. Klaski wasn't doing me any good anyway, and my Eastern friends were always chiding me about the name they knew didn't go with my origins as an Iraqi Jew.
I was disillusioned at what I found in the Promised Land, disillusioned personally, disillusioned at the institutionalized racism, disillusioned at what I was beginning to learn about Zionism's cruelties. The principal interest Israel had in Jews from Islamic countries was as a supply of cheap labor, especially for the farm work that was beneath the urbanized Eastern European Jews. Ben Gurion needed the "Oriental" Jews to farm the thousands of acres of land left by Palestinians who were driven out by Israeli forces in 1948.
And I began to find out about the barbaric methods used to rid the fledgling state of as many Palestinians as possible. The world recoils today at the thought of bacteriological warfare, but Israel was probably the first to actually use it in the Middle East. In the 1948 war, Jewish forces would empty Arab villages of their populations, often by threats, sometimes by just gunning down a half-dozen unarmed Arabs as examples to the rest. To make sure the Arabs couldn't return to make a fresh life for themselves in these villages, the Israelis put typhus and dysentery bacteria into the water wells.
Uri Mileshtin, an official historian for the Israeli Defense Force, has written and spoken about the use of bacteriological agents. According to Mileshtin, Moshe Dayan, a division commander at the time, gave orders in 1948 to remove Arabs from their villages, bulldoze their homes, and render water wells unusable with typhus and dysentery bacteria.
Acre was so situated that it could practically defend itself with one big gun, so the Haganah put bacteria into the spring that fed the town. The spring was called Capri and it ran from the north near a kibbutz. The Haganah put typhus bacteria into the water going to Acre, the people got sick, and the Jewish forces occupied Acre. This worked so well that they sent a Haganah division dressed as Arabs into Gaza, where there were Egyptian forces, and the Egyptians caught them putting two cans of bacteria, typhus and dysentery, into the water supply in wanton disregard of the civilian population. "In war, there is no sentiment," one of the captured Haganah men was quoted as saying.
My activism in Israel began shortly after I received a letter from the Socialist/Zionist Party asking me to help with their Arabic newspaper. When I showed up at their offices at Central Housein Tel Aviv, I asked around to see just where I should report. I showed the letter to a couple of people there and, without even looking at it, they would motion me away with the words, "Room No. 8." When I saw that they weren't even reading the letter, I inquired of several others.But the response was the same, "Room No. 8," with not a glance at the paper I put in front of them.
So I went to Room 8 and saw that it was the Department of Jews from Islamic Countries. I was disgusted and angry. Either I am a member of the party or I'm not. Do I have a different ideology or different politics because I am an Arab Jew? It's segregation, I thought, just like a Negroes' Department. I turned around and walked out. That was the start of my open protests. That same year I organized a demonstration in Ashkelon against Ben Gurion's racist policies and 10,000 people turned out.
There wasn't much opportunity for those of us who were second class citizens to do much about it when Israel was on a war footing with outside enemies. After the 1967 war, I was in the Army myself and served in the Sinai when there was continued fighting along the Suez Canal. But the cease-fire with Egypt in 1970 gave us our opening. We took to the streets and organized politically to demand equal rights. If it's our country, if we were expected to risk our lives in a border war, then we expected equal treatment.
We mounted the struggle so tenaciously and received so much publicity that the Israeli government tried to discredit our movement by calling us "Israel's Black Panthers." They were thinking in racist terms, really, in assuming the Israeli public would reject an organization whose ideology was being compared to that of radical blacks in the United States. But we saw that what we were doing was no different than what blacks in the United States were fighting against-segregation, discrimination, unequal treatment. Rather than reject the label, we adopted it proudly. I had posters of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and other civil rights activists plastered all over my office.
With the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Israeli-condoned Sabra and Shatilla massacres, I had had enough of Israel. I became a United States citizen and made certain to revoke my Israeli citizenship. I could never have written and published my book in Israel, not with the censorship they would impose.
Even in America, I had great difficulty finding a publisher because many are subject to pressures of one kind or another from Israel and its friends. I ended up paying $60,000 from my own pocket to publish Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews, virtually the entire proceeds from having sold my house in Israel.
I still was afraid that the printer would back out or that legal proceedings would be initiated to stop its publication, like the Israeli government did in an attempt to prevent former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky from publishing his first book. Ben Gurion's Scandals had to be translated into English from two languages. I wrote in Hebrew when I was in Israel and hoped to publish the book there, and I wrote in Arabic when I was completing the book after coming to theU.S. But I was so worried that something would stop publication that I told the printer not to wait for the translations to be thoroughly checked and proofread. Now I realize that the publicity of a lawsuit would just have created a controversial interest in the book.
I am using bank vault storage for the valuable documents that back up what I have written. These documents, including some that I illegally copied from the archives at Yad Vashem, confirm what I saw myself, what I was told by other witnesses, and what reputable historians and others have written concerning the Zionist bombings in Iraq, Arab peace overtures that were rebuffed, and incidents of violence and death inflicted by Jews on Jews in the cause of creating Israel.
The Riots of 1941
If, as I have said, my family in Iraq was not persecuted personally and I knew no deprivation as a member of the Jewish minority, what led me to the steps of the gallows as a member of the Zionist underground? To answer that question, it is necessary to establish the context of the massacre that occurred in Baghdad on June 1, 1941, when several hundred Iraqi Jews were killed in riots involving junior officers of the Iraqi army. I was 12 years of age and many of those killed were my friends. I was angry, and very confused.
What I didn't know at the time was that the riots most likely were stirred up by the British, in collusion with a pro-British Iraqi leadership.
With the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following WW I, Iraq came under British "tutelage." Amir Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein who had led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman sultan, was brought in from Mecca by the British to become King of Iraq in 1921. Many Jews were appointed to key administrative posts, including that of economics minister. Britain retained final authority over domestic and external affairs. Britain's pro-Zionist attitude in Palestine, however, triggered a growing anti-Zionist backlash in Iraq, as it did in all Arab countries. Writing at the end of 1934, Sir Francis Humphreys, Britain's Ambassador in Baghdad, noted that, while before WWI Iraqi Jews had enjoyed a more favorable position than any other minority in the country, since then "Zionism has sown dissension between Jews and Arabs, and a bitterness has grown up between the two peoples which did not previously exist."
King Faisal died in 1933. He was succeeded by his son Ghazi, who died in a motor car accident in 1939. The crown then passed to Ghazi's 4-year-old son, Faisal II, whose uncle, Abd al-Ilah, was named regent. Abd al-Ilah selected Nouri el-Said as prime minister. El-Said supported the British and, as hatred of the British grew, he was forced from office in March 1940 by four senior army officers who advocated Iraq's independence from Britain. Calling themselves the Golden Square, the officers compelled the regent to name as prime minister Rashid Ali al-Kilani, leader of the National Brotherhood party.
The time was 1940 and Britain was reeling from a strong German offensive. Al-Kilani and the Golden Square saw this as their opportunity to rid themselves of the British once and for all. Cautiously they began to negotiate for German support, which led the pro-British regent Abd al-Ilah to dismiss al-Kilani in January 1941. By April, however, the Golden Square officers had reinstated the Prime Minister.
This provoked the British to send a military force into Basra on April 12, 1941. Basra, Iraq's second largest city, had a Jewish population of 30,000. Most of these Jews made their livings from import/export, money changing, retailing, as workers in the airports, railways, and ports, or as senior government employees.
On the same day, April 12, supporters of the pro-British regent notified the Jewish leaders that the regent wanted to meet with them. As was their custom, the leaders brought flowers for the regent. Contrary to custom, however, the cars that drove them to the meeting place dropped them off at the site where the British soldiers were concentrated.
Photographs of the Jews appeared in the following day's newspapers with the banner "Basra Jews Receive British Troops with Flowers." That same day, April 13, groups of angry Arab youths set about to take revenge against the Jews. Several Muslim notables in Basra heard of the plan and calmed things down. Later, it was learned that the regent was not in Basra at all and that the matter was a provocation by his pro-British supporters to bring about an ethnic war in order to give the British army a pretext to intervene.
The British continued to land more forces in and around Basra. On May 7, 1941, their Gurkha unit, composed of Indian soldiers from that ethnic group, occupied Basra's el-Oshar quarter, a neighborhood with a large Jewish population. The soldiers, led by British officers, began looting. Many shops in the commercial district were plundered. Private homes were broken into. Cases of attempted rape were reported. Local residents, Jews and Muslims, responded with pistols and old rifles, but their bullets were no match for the soldiers' Tommy Guns. Afterwards, it was learned that the soldiers acted with the acquiescence, if not the blessing, of their British commanders. (It should be remembered that the Indian soldiers, especially those of the Gurkha unit, were known for their discipline, and it is highly unlikely they would have acted so riotously without orders.) The British goal clearly was to create chaos and to blacken the image of the pro-nationalist regime in Baghdad, thereby giving the British forces reason to proceed to the capital and to overthrow the al-Kilani government.
Baghdad fell on May 30. Al-Kilani fled to Iran, along with the Golden Square officers. Radio stations run by the British reported that Regent Abd al-Ilah would be returning to the city and that thousands of Jews and others were planning to welcome him. What inflamed young Iraqis against the Jews most, however, was the radio announcer Yunas Bahri on the German station "Berlin," who reported in Arabic that Jews from Palestine were fighting alongside the British against Iraqi soldiers near the city of Faluja. The report was false.
On Sunday, June 1, unarmed fighting broke out in Baghdad between Jews who were still celebrating their Shabuoth holiday and young Iraqis who thought the Jews were celebrating the return of the pro-British regent. That evening, a group of Iraqis stopped a bus, removed the Jewish passengers,murdered one and fatally wounded a second.
About 8:30 the following morning, some 30 individuals in military and police uniforms opened fire along el-Amin street, a small downtown street whose jewelry, tailor and grocery shops were Jewish-owned. By 11 a.m., mobs of Iraqis with knives, switchblades and clubs were attacking Jewish homes in the area.
The riots continued throughout Monday, June 2. During this time, many Muslims rose to defend their Jewish neighbors, while some Jews successfully defended themselves. There were 124 killed and 400 injured, according to a report written by a Jewish Agency messenger who was in Iraq at the time. Other estimates, possibly less reliable, put the death toll higher, as many as 500, with from 650 to 2,000 injured. From 500 to 1,300 stores and more than 1,000 homes and apartments were looted.
Who was behind the rioting in the Jewish quarter? Yosef Meir, one of the most prominent activists in the Zionist underground movement in Iraq, known then as Yehoshafat, claims it was the British. Meir, who now works for the Israeli Defense Ministry, argues that, in order to make it appear that the regent was returning as the savior who would reestablish law and order, the British stirred up the riots against the most vulnerable and visible segment in the city, the Jews. And, not surprisingly, the riots ended as soon as the regent's loyal soldiers entered the capital.
My own investigations as a journalist lead me to believe Meir is correct. Furthermore, I think his claims should be seen as based on documents in the archives of the Israeli Defense Ministry, the agency that published his book. Yet, even before his book came out, I had independent confirmation from a man I met in Iran in the late Forties.
His name was Michael Timosian, an Iraqi Armenian. When I met him he was working as a male nurse at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in Abadan in the south of Iran. On June 2, 1941, however, he wasworking at the Baghdad hospital where many of the riot victims were brought. Most of these victims were Jews.
Timosian said he was particularly interested in two patients whose conduct did not follow local custom. One had been hit by a bullet in his shoulder, the other by a bullet in his right knee. After the doctor removed the bullets, the staff tried to change their blood-soaked cloths. But the two men fought off their efforts, pretending to be speechless, although tests showed they could hear. To pacify them, the doctor injected them with anesthetics and, as they were sleeping,Timosian changed their cloths. He discovered that one of them had around his neck an identification tag of the type used by British troops, while the other had tattoos with Indian script on his right arm along with the familiar sword of the Gurkha.
The next day when Timosian showed up for work, he was told that a British officer, his sergeant and two Indian Gurkha soldiers had come to the hospital early that morning. Staff members overheard the Gurkha soldiers talking with the wounded patients, who were not as dumb as they had pretended. The patients saluted the visitors, covered themselves with sheets and, without signing the required release forms, left the hospital with their visitors.
Today there is no doubt in my mind that the anti-Jewish riots of 1941 were orchestrated by the British for geopolitical ends. David Kimche is certainly a man who was in a position to know the truth, and he has spoken publicly about British culpability. Kimche had been with British Intelligence during WW II and with the Mossad after the war. Later he became Director General of Israel's Foreign Ministry, the position he held in 1982 when he addressed a forum at the British Institute for International Affairs in London.
In responding to hostile questions about Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the refugee camp massacres in Beirut, Kimche went on the attack, reminding the audience that there was scant concern in the British Foreign Office when British Gurkha units participated in the murder of 500 Jews in the streets of Baghdad in 1941.
The Bombings of 1950-1951
The anti-Jewish riots of 1941 did more than create a pretext for the British to enter Baghdad to reinstate the pro-British regent and his pro-British prime minister, Nouri el-Said. They also gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq, first in Baghdad, then in other cities such as Basra, Amara, Hillah, Diwaneia, Abril and Karkouk.
Following WWII, a succession of governments held brief power in Iraq. Zionist conquests in Palestine, particularly the massacre of Palestinians in the village of Deir Yassin, emboldened the anti-British movement in Iraq. When the Iraqi government signed a new treaty of friendship with London in January 1948, riots broke out all over the country. The treaty was quickly abandoned and Baghdad demanded removal of the British military mission that had run Iraq's army for 27 years.
Later in 1948, Baghdad sent an army detachment to Palestine to fight the Zionists, and when Israel declared independence in May, Iraq closed the pipeline that fed its oil to Haifa's refinery. Abd al-Ilah, however, was still regent and the British quisling, Nouri el-Said, was back as prime minister. I was in the Abu-Greib prison in 1948, where I would remain until my escape to Iran in September 1949.
Six months later-the exact date was March 19, 1950-a bomb went off at the American Cultural Center and Library in Baghdad, causing property damage and injuring a number of people. The center was a favorite meeting place for young Jews.
The first bomb thrown directly at Jews occurred on April 8, 1950, at 9:15 p.m. A car with three young passengers hurled the grenade at Baghdad's El-Dar El-Bida Café, where Jews were celebrating Passover. Four people were seriously injured. That night leaflets were distributed calling on Jews to leave Iraq immediately. The next day, many Jews, most of them poor with nothing to lose, jammed emigration offices to renounce their citizenship and to apply for permission to leave for Israel. So many applied, in fact, that the police had to open registration offices in Jewish schools and synagogues.
On May 10, at 3 a.m., a grenade was tossed in the direction of the display window of the Jewish-owned Beit-Lawi Automobile Company, destroying part of the building. No casualties were reported.
On June 3, 1950, another grenade was tossed from a speeding car in the El-Batawin area of Baghdad where most rich Jews and middle class Iraqis lived. No one was hurt, but following the from Iraq be increased.
On June 5, at 2:30 a.m., a bomb exploded next to the Jewish-owned Stanley Shashua building on El-Rashid street, resulting in property damage but no casualties.
On January 14, 1951, at 7 p.m., a grenade was thrown at a group of Jews outside the Masouda Shem-Tov Synagogue. The explosive struck a high-voltage cable, electrocuting three Jews, one a young boy, Itzhak Elmacher, and wounding over 30 others. Following the attack, the exodus of Jews jumped to between 600-700 per day.
Zionist propagandists still maintain that the bombs in Iraq were set off by anti-Jewish Iraqis who wanted Jews out of their country. The terrible truth is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews.
Among the most important documents in my book, I believe, are copies of two leaflets published by the Zionist underground calling on Jews to leave Iraq. One is dated March 16, 1950, the other April 8, 1950.
The difference between these two is critical. Both indicate the date of publication, but only the April 8th leaflet notes the time of day: 4 p.m. Why the time of day? Such a specification was unprecedented. Even the investigating judge, Salaman El-Beit, found it suspicious. Did the 4 p.m. writers want an alibi for a bombing they knew would occur five hours later? If so, how did they know about the bombing? The judge concluded they knew because a connection existed between the Zionist underground and the bomb throwers.
This, too, was the conclusion of Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), whom I had the opportunity to meet in New York in 1988. In his book, Ropes of Sand, whose publication the CIA opposed, Eveland writes:
In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. . . . Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti-Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had "rescued" really just in order to increase Israel's Jewish population."
Eveland doesn't detail the evidence linking the Zionists to the attacks, but in my book I do. In 1955, for example, I organized in Israel a panel of Jewish attorneys of Iraqi origin to handle claims of Iraqi Jews who still had property in Iraq. One well known attorney, who asked that I not give his name, confided in me that the laboratory tests in Iraq had confirmed that the anti-American leaflets found at the American Cultural Center bombing were typed on the same typewriter and duplicated on the same stenciling machine as the leaflets distributed by the Zionist movement just before the April 8th bombing.
Tests also showed that the type of explosive used in the Beit-Lawi attack matched traces of explosives found in the suitcase of an Iraqi Jew by the name of Yosef Basri. Basri, a lawyer, together with Shalom Salih, a shoemaker, would be put on trial for the attacks in December 1951 and executed the following month. Both men were members of Hashura, the military arm of the Zionist underground. Salih ultimately confessed that he, Basri and a third man, Yosef Habaza, carried out the attacks.
By the time of the executions in January 1952, all but 6,000 of an estimated 125,000 Iraqi Jews had fled to Israel. Moreover, the pro-British, pro-Zionist puppet el-Said saw to it that all of their possessions were frozen, including their cash assets. (There were ways of getting Iraqi dinars out, but when the immigrants went to exchange them in Israel they found that the Israeli government kept 50 percent of the value.) Even those Iraqi Jews who had not registered to emigrate, but who happened to be abroad, faced loss of their nationality if they didn't return within a specified time. An ancient, cultured, prosperous community had been uprooted and its people transplanted to a land dominated by East European Jews, whose culture was not only foreign but entirely hateful to them.
The Ultimate Criminals
Zionist Leaders. From the start they knew that in order to establish a Jewish state they had to expel the indigenous Palestinian population to the neighboring Islamic states and import Jews from these same states.
Theodor Herzl, the architect of Zionism, thought it could be done by social engineering. In his diary entry for 12 June 1885, he wrote that Zionist settlers would have to "spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country."
Vladimir Jabotinsky, Prime Minister Netanyahu's ideological progenitor, frankly admitted that such a transfer of populations could only be brought about by force.
David Ben Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, told a Zionist Conference in 1937 that any proposed Jewish state would have to "transfer Arab populations out of the area, if possible of their own free will, if not by coercion." After 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted and their lands confiscated in 1948-49, Ben Gurion had to look to the Islamic countries for Jews who could fill the resultant cheap labor market. "Emissaries" were smuggled into these countries to "convince" Jews to leave either by trickery or fear.
In the case of Iraq, both methods were used: uneducated Jews were told of a Messianic Israel in which the blind see, the lame walk, and onions grow as big as melons; educated Jews had bombs thrown at them.
A few years after the bombings, in the early 1950s, a book was published in Iraq, in Arabic, titled Venom of the Zionist Viper. The author was one of the Iraqi investigators of the 1950-51 bombings and, in his book, he implicates the Israelis, specifically one of the emissaries sent by Israel, Mordechai Ben-Porat. As soon as the book came out, all copies just disappeared, even from libraries. The word was that agents of the Israeli Mossad, working through the U.S. Embassy, bought up all the books and destroyed them. I tried on three different occasions to have one sent to me in Israel, but each time Israeli censors in the post office intercepted it. British Leaders. Britain always acted in its best colonial interests. For that reason Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour sent his famous 1917 letter to Lord Rothschild in exchange for Zionist support in WW I. During WW II the British were primarily concerned with keeping their client states in the Western camp, while Zionists were most concerned with the immigration of European Jews to Palestine, even if this meant cooperating with the Nazis. (In my book I document numerous instances of such dealings by Ben Gurion and the Zionist leadership.) After WW II the international chessboard pitted communists against capitalists. In many countries, including the United States and Iraq, Jews represented a large part of the Communist party. In Iraq, hundreds of Jews of the working intelligentsia occupied key positions in the hierarchy of the Communist and Socialist parties. To keep their client countries in the capitalist camp, Britain had to make sure these governments had pro-British leaders. And if, as in Iraq, these leaders were overthrown, then an anti-Jewish riot or two could prove a useful pretext to invade the capital and reinstate the "right" leaders.
Moreover, if the possibility existed of removing the communist influence from Iraq by transferring the whole Jewish community to Israel, well then, why not? Particularly if the leaders of Israel and Iraq conspired in the deed.
The Iraqi Leaders. Both the regent Abd al-Ilah and his prime minister Nouri el- Said took directions from London. Toward the end of 1948, el-Said, who had already met with Israel's Prime Minister Ben Gurion in Vienna, began discussing with his Iraqi and British associates the need for an exchange of populations. Iraq would send the Jews in military trucks to Israel via Jordan, and Iraq would take in some of the Palestinians Israel had been evicting. His proposal included mutual confiscation of property. London nixed the idea as too radical.
El-Said then went to his back-up plan and began to create the conditions that would make the lives of Iraqi Jews so miserable they would leave for Israel. Jewish government employees were fired from their jobs; Jewish merchants were denied import/export licenses; police began to arrest Jews for trivial reasons. Still the Jews did not leave in any great numbers. In September 1949, Israel sent the spy Mordechai Ben-Porat, the one mentioned in Venom of the Zionist Viper, to Iraq. One of the first things Ben-Porat did was to approach el-Said and promise him financial incentives to have a law enacted that would lift the citizenship of Iraqi Jews.
Soon after, Zionist and Iraqi representatives began formulating a rough draft of the bill, according to the model dictated by Israel through its agents in Baghdad. The bill was passed by the Iraqi parliament in March 1950. It empowered the government to issue one-time exit visas to Jews wishing to leave the country. In March, the bombings began.
Sixteen years later, the Israeli magazine Haolam Hazeh, published by Uri Avnery, then a Knesset member, accused Ben-Porat of the Baghdad bombings. Ben-Porat, who would become a Knesset member himself, denied the charge, but never sued the magazine for libel. And Iraqi Jews in Israel still call him Morad Abu al-Knabel, Mordechai of the Bombs. As I said, all this went well beyond the comprehension of a teenager. I knew Jews were being killed and an organization existed that could lead us to the Promised Land. So I helped in the exodus to Israel. Later, on occasions, I would bump into some of these Iraqi Jews in Israel. Not infrequently they'd express the sentiment that they could kill me for what I had done.
Opportunities for Peace
After the Israeli attack on the Jordanian village of Qibya in October, 1953, Ben Gurion went into voluntary exile at the Sedeh Boker kibbutz in the Negev. The Labor party then used to organize many buses for people to go visit him there, where they would see the former prime minister working with sheep. But that was only for show. Really he was writing his diary and continuing to be active behind the scenes. I went on such a tour.
We were told not to try to speak to Ben Gurion, but when I saw him, I asked why, since Israel is a democracy with a parliament, does it not have a constitution? Ben Gurion said, "Look, boy"-I was 24 at the time-"if we have a constitution, we have to write in it the border of our country. And this is not our border, my dear." I asked, "Then where is the border?" He said, "Wherever the Sahal will come, this is the border." Sahal is the Israeli army.
Ben Gurion told the world that Israel accepted the partition and the Arabs rejected it. Then Israel took half of the land that was promised to the Arab state. And still he was saying it was not enough. Israel needed more land. How can a country make peace with its neighbors if it wants to take their land? How can a country demand to be secure if it won't say what borders it will be satisfied with? For such a country, peace would be an inconvenience. I know now that from the beginning many Arab leaders wanted to make peace with Israel, but Israel always refused. Ben Gurion covered this up with propaganda. He said that the Arabs wanted to drive Israel into the sea and he called Gamal Abdel Nasser the Hitler of the Middle East whose foremost intent was to destroy Israel. He wanted America and Great Britain to treat Nasser like a pariah.
In 1954, it seemed that America was getting less critical of Nasser. Then during a three-week period in July, several terrorist bombs were set off: at the United States Information Agency offices in Cairo and Alexandria, a British-owned theater, and the central post office in Cairo. An attempt to firebomb a cinema in Alexandria failed when the bomb went off in the pocket of one of the perpetrators. That led to the discovery that the terrorists were not anti-Western Egyptians, but were instead Israeli spies bent on souring the warming relationship between Egypt and the United States in what came to be known as the Lavon Affair.
Ben Gurion was still living on his kibbutz. Moshe Sharett as prime minister was in contact with Abdel Nasser through the offices of Lord Maurice Orbach of Great Britain. Sharett asked Nasser to be lenient with the captured spies, and Nasser did all that was in his power to prevent a deterioration of the situation between the two countries.
Then Ben Gurion returned as Defense Minister in February, 1955. Later that month Israeli troops attacked Egyptian military camps and Palestinian refugees in Gaza, killing 54 and injuring many more. The very night of the attack, Lord Orbach was on his way to deliver a message to Nasser, but was unable to get through because of the military action. When Orbach telephoned, Nasser's secretary told him that the attack proved that Israel did not want peace and that he was wasting his time as a mediator.
In November, Ben Gurion announced in the Knesset that he was willing to meet with Abdel Nasser anywhere and at any time for the sake of peace and understanding. The next morning the Israeli military attacked an Egyptian military camp in the Sabaha region.
Although Nasser felt pessimistic about achieving peace with Israel, he continued to send other mediators to try. One was through the American Friends Service Committee; another via the Prime Minister of Malta, Dom Minthoff; and still another through Marshall Tito of Yugoslavia. One that looked particularly promising was through Dennis Hamilton, editor of The London Times. Nasser told Hamilton that if only he could sit and talk with Ben Gurion for two or three hours, they would be able to settle the conflict and end the state of war between the two countries. When word of this reached Ben Gurion, he arranged to meet with Hamilton. They decided to pursue the matter with the Israeli ambassador in London, Arthur Luria, as liaison. On Hamilton's third trip to Egypt, Nasser met him with the text of a Ben Gurion speech stating that Israel would not give up an inch of land and would not take back a single refugee. Hamilton knew that Ben Gurion with his mouth had undermined a peace mission and missed an opportunity to settle the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Nasser even sent his friend Ibrahim Izat of the Ruz El Yusuf weekly paper to meet with Israeli leaders in order to explore the political atmosphere and find out why the attacks were taking place if Israel really wanted peace. One of the men Izat met with was Yigal Yadin, a former Chief of Staff of the army who wrote this letter to me on 14 January 1982:
Dear Mr. Giladi:
Your letter reminded me of an event which I nearly forgot and of which I remember only a few details.

Ibrahim Izat came to me if I am not mistaken under the request of the Foreign Ministry or one of its branches; he stayed in my house and we spoke for many hours. I do not remember him saying that he came on a mission from Nasser, but I have no doubt that he let it be understood that this was with his knowledge or acquiescence....

When Nasser decided to nationalize the Suez Canal in spite of opposition from the British and the French, Radio Cairo announced in Hebrew:

If the Israeli government is not influenced by the British and the French imperialists, it will eventually result in greater understanding between the two states, and Egypt will reconsider Israel's request to have access to the Suez Canal.

Israel responded that it had no designs on Egypt, but at that very moment Israeli representatives were in France planning the three-way attack that was to take place in October, 1956. All the while, Ben Gurion continued to talk about the Hitler of the Middle East. This brainwashing went on until late September, 1970, when Gamal Abdel Nasser passed away. Then, miracle of miracles, David Ben Gurion told the press:

A week before he died I received an envoy from Abdel Nasser who asked to meet with me urgently in order to solve the problems between Israel and the Arab world. The public was surprised because they didn't know that Abdel Nasser had wanted this all along, but Israel sabotaged it.

Nasser was not the only Arab leader who wanted to make peace with Israel. There were many others. Brigadier General Abdel Karim Qasem, before he seized power in Iraq in July, 1958, headed an underground organization that sent a delegation to Israel to make a secret agreement. Ben Gurion refused even to see him. I learned about this when I was a journalist in Israel. But whenever I tried to publish even a small part of it, the censor would stamp it "Not Allowed." Now, in Netanyahu, we are witnessing another attempt by an Israeli prime minister to fake an interest in making peace. Netanyahu and the Likud are setting Arafat up by demanding that he institute more and more repressive measures in the interest of Israeli "security." Sooner or later I suspect the Palestinians will have had enough of Arafat's strong-arm methods as Israel's quisling-and he'll be killed. Then the Israeli government will say, "See, we were ready to give him everything. You can't trust those Arabs-they kill each other. Now there's no one to even talk to about peace."
Conclusion
Alexis de Tocqueville once observed that it is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth. Certainly it has been easier for the world to accept the Zionist lie that Jews were evicted from Muslim lands because of anti-Semitism, and that Israelis, never the Arabs, were the pursuers of peace. The truth is far more discerning: bigger players on the world stage were pulling the strings.

These players, I believe, should be held accountable for their crimes, particularly when they willfully terrorized, dispossessed and killed innocent people on the altar of some ideological imperative.

I believe, too, that the descendants of these leaders have a moral responsibility to compensate the victims and their descendants, and to do so not just with reparations, but by setting the historical record straight.

That is why I established a panel of inquiry in Israel to seek reparations for Iraqi Jews who had been forced to leave behind their property and possessions in Iraq. That is why I joined the Black Panthers in confronting the Israeli government with the grievances of the Jews in Israel who came from Islamic lands. And that is why I have written my book and this article: to set the historical record straight.

We Jews from Islamic lands did not leave our ancestral homes because of any natural enmity between Jews and Muslims. And we Arabs-I say Arab because that is the language my wife and I still speak at home-we Arabs on numerous occasions have sought peace with the State of the Jews. And finally, as a U.S. citizen and taxpayer, let me say that we Americans need to stop supporting racial discrimination in Israel and the cruel expropriation of lands in the West Bank, Gaza, South Lebanon and the Golan Heights.
ENDNOTES
Mileshtin was quoted by the Israeli daily, Hadashot, in an article published August 13, 1993. The writer, Sarah Laybobis-Dar, interviewed a number of Israelis who had knowledge of the use of bacteriological weapons in the 1948 war. Mileshtin said bacteria was used to poison the wells of every village emptied of its Arab inhabitants.
On Sept. 12, 1990, the New York State Supreme Court issued a restraining order at the request of the Israeli government to prevent publication of Ostrovsky's book, "By Way of Deception: The Making and Unmaking of a Mossad Officer." The New York State Appeals Court lifted the ban the next day.
Marion Woolfson, "Prophets in Babylon: Jews in the Arab World," p. 129
Yosef Meir, "Road in the Desert," Israeli Defense Ministry, p. 36.
See my book, "Ben Gurion's Scandals," p. 105.
Wilbur Crane Eveland, "Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East," NY; Norton, 1980, pp. 48-49.
T. Herzl, "The Complete Diaries," NY: Herzl Press & Thomas Yoncloff, 1960, vol. 1, p. 88.
Report of the Congress of the World Council of Paole Zion, Zurich, July 29-August 7, 1937, pp. 73-74.

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