May 14, 2007: Celebrate the release of Overcoming Zionism and We Begin Here

Salam Alrawi, Alwan for the Arts, Ramsey Clark, Sara Flaunders, Abdeen Jabara, DeeDee Halleck, Ahmed Issawi, Mona Khalidi, Clark Kissinger, Emily Kunstler, Dan Meyers, Ralph Poynter, Michael Ratner, Margaret Ratner Kunstler, Michael Steven Smith, and Lynne Stewart invite you to attend a book party to celebrate the release of:

Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine,
by Joel Kovel

&

We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon,
Edited by Kamal Boullata and Kathy Engel

Monday, May 14, 2007, 5:30PM
Mamlouk
211 East 4th Street

Joel Kovel, Kathy Engel and others will read from their works.

Both books will be available for purchase

Refreshments will be provided by MAMLOUK

In Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine, Kovel confronts the unfortunate confusion between Jews, Judaism, Zionism, and the State of Israel as the basis for systematic manipulation by the imperialist power system. He argues that the inner contradictions of Zionism have led Israel to a “state-sponsored racism” fully as incorrigible as that of apartheid South Africa and deserving the same resolution. Only a path toward a single-state secular democracy can provide the justice essential to healing the wounds of the Middle East.

Joel Kovel is a well-known writer on the Middle East conflict. He has written ten books which include The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World, White Racism a Psychohistory; Red Hunting in the Promised Land: Anti-communism and the Making of America. He is a professor of social science at Bard College and edits Capitalism, Nature and Socialism. He was a candidate for the Green nomination for US President in 2000.

We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, contains poems written in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon together with poems offered in support of the Palestinian and Lebanese people following the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, and others written about the U.S. war and occupation of Iraq. Following a great tradition of poetry throughout history, this book shows the vast conscience and lyrical spirit of resistance on the part of poets in support of the dignity, rights, and humanity of the Palestinian and Lebanese people.

Kathy Engel is a poet, creative and communications consultant for peace, social justice and human rights groups, and currently an adjunct professor at NYU. Her emphasis is connecting the imagination and art to work for social justice and peace. Her books include Banish The Tentative, 1989 and Ruth's Skirts, 2007. She is co editor of We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, 2007. She has founded and co founded organizations including MADRE, Riptide Communications, East End Women in Black, Hayground School. She serves on the Advisory Board of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

Zionism its Role in World Politics

Şenay Yeğin

Tuesday , 24 April 2007

Author: Hyman Lumer. New York: International Publishers, 1973. 152 pages. ISBN 0-7118-0383-X

In the 8th Century, after the exile of Jews from Jerusalem by the Romans, the word “Zion” has been uttered by the Jews to emphasize their longing for the Promised Land: Palestine. Today, the word Zion is being used as a modern term, Zionism which is the name given to the movement of the Jews who are in Diaspora to gather on the land of Palestine again. Zion has become an ideology as Zionism; but it did not serve to the civilization development in the Middle East. Instead Middle East came out to be a deadlock. Is it a deadlock because of pure Zionist intentions or imperialist missions? The American Marxist Hyman Lumer in his book “Zionism Its Role in World Politics” answered this question by defining Zionism as a nationalist movement serving to imperialism and US aims over the oil territories.

It is easy to understand the message that Lumer tries to give from the cover of the book on which there is a shape of world circled by “Zionism”. Lumer’s thesis in his book is that Zionism is not only gathering of Jews in the Promised Land but its support to imperialism which is a big actor in world politics. In the first part of his book, Lumer introduces Zionism by explaining its roots and nature, its contribution to the establishment of Israel, and its socialist side. In the second part, his emphasis is on the purpose of Zionism which is being in the service of imperialism. He supports his arguments by questioning how Zionism got support from imperialist powers, what kind of an expansionist policy it had and its imperialist policies over Africa. In the third part, Lumer elaborates on the Zionist organizations in the US and on the role of monopoly capital. In the next part, he emphasizes that Zionism was a nationalist movement and he explains that Zionism’s reaction was the formation of a fascist organization, the Jewish Defense League. In the fifth part, he points to the Soviet Jews in Israel and in the last part; he emphasizes the reaction of Jews in the US and in Israel to Zionism.

In the first part, Lumer defines political Zionism by the creation and perpetuation of a Jewish state and makes a distinction with its religious definition which is the belief in an eventual return to the Holy Land upon the coming of the Messiah. The two most important forerunners of Zionism were Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl who wrote books about it after the development of anti-semitism with the upsurge of imperialism and racism in the 19th Century. According to Lumer, as a political ideology Zionism was based on two points which were that the Jews throughout the world form a nation and that anti-semitism is eternal. He emphasized that Zionism is not only an ideology, but it is also an organized movement which is based on the principle of the establishment of a state which is purely Jewish to escape anti-semitism. However while escaping anti-semitism; Lumer emphasizes that Jews treated Israeli Arabs as second-class citizens.

In the first part, Lumer emphasizes that there were also socialist trends in a nationalist movement like Zionism in the beginning of 1900s. The supporters of socialist Zionists in the tsarist Russia had gathered under organizations like Workers of Zion which supported a socialist Jewish state in Palestine. Moreover Lumer emphasizes that today; there are socialist developments in Israel like kibbutz, which is the communal enterprise whose members in return provided only by the necessities of life. He emphasizes that 58.5 percent of Israel’s economy is private sector which belongs mostly to foreign capital.

In the second part of the book, Lumer is supporting his argument that, Zionism is serving to imperialism because of Israel’s will of all of Palestine, its expansionist policies and its relations with Africa. Israel willed not only to possess their homeland but all of Palestine. Herzl wanted Jews to be backed by imperialist countries such as the Ottoman Empire, Germany, Russia and France for possessing the land of Palestine. Other than these countries Britain and the USA supported Jews for their mission, too. By the Balfour Declaration in 1917, with the invasion of Palestine by Britain, Jews were assisted by Britain. Besides Britain a committee in the USA, American Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs, was founded for the establishment of a Jewish commonwealth.

Between 1958 and 1966, Israel implemented expansionist policies; forming ties with 39 countries in Africa, 23 in Latin America, 11 in Asia and 8 in Mediterranean. Israel supported French imperialism against the independence movements of Algerians and it joined to Britain’s and France’s invasion of Egypt in 1956. In 1958, after the leadership of an anti-imperialist regime in Iraq, Israel supported Britain and US when their troops landed to protect Jordan and Lebanon from the regime. In 1967, Israel used its expansionist policies by invading Egypt. However its expansionist policies were not only for Arab countries but also for African countries. Israel was basically an associate of South Africa which had an apartheid regime. However, it gave military aid to national liberation fronts in Africa for presenting Israel as a socialist but not communist and more acceptable than imperialist powers.

In the third part, Lumer emphasizes that Zionism is in association with the US by explaining Zionist organizational movements there, US aid to Israel and its dependence on US capital. In the US, Zionism did not have many followers in the beginning of the 19th Century, because the ones who did not support it thought the return to the homeland could only occur by the upcoming of the Messiah. However after the Holocaust and the upsurge of Jewish nationalism, organizations were founded some of which were Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Zionist Organization of America and United Labor Organization of America. Moreover, the US Jews aided Israel’s political parties and the institutions that support their policies since the establishment of Israel, under the umbrella organization called The United Jewish Appeal. Furthermore, Lumer emphasizes that US imperialism shows itself in the Israeli economy, by saying that a vast part of investments are owned by Ford, Motorola and other US companies. Eighty percent of Israel’s foreign debt is also owned by US government which makes Israel dependent on the foreign capital of the US imperialism. Moreover, the main point of the book is given in this part which is that US is trying to use Israel as a weapon against Arab liberation movement and its threat to US oil investments by making it dependent on its capital. Especially after the 1967 war with Egypt Israel became highly dependent on US.

Besides, Lumer’s emphasize on Israel’s dependence on the US capital, in the fourth chapter, he raises the point that Zionism became a reactionary movement and that it supported racism by forming an ultra-racist organization which tried to combat Soviet Russia, blacks and Arabs. According to Lumer, if a country is capitalist it uses racial or nationalist oppression to prevail its exploitation. For the Jewish question, there are Marxist and Zionist views. According to the Marxist point of view Jewish question is based on the recognition of the class roots of anti-semitism and working class unity. On the other hand, the Zionists view anti-semitism as everlasting and a distinctive form of repression. Moreover, he gives the example of the Soviet Russia which resolved the Jewish question by eliminating the capitalist roots of racism. According to Lumer, the incline of Jewish nationalism after the 1967 war caused the establishment of Jewish Defense League (JDL) in 1968. The shift to right among Zionists is being criticized by Lumer. He says that racism fosters the exploitation of workers and anti-semitism only occurs in the societies of class exploitation. According to Lumer, it was a reactionary movement that was founded for protecting Jews from blacks in New York. JDL was found guilty because of the bomb attacks. Some of the targets of the attack were against Soviet News Agency, Soviet Embassy, and Palestinian Liberalization Organization. Moreover, Lumer emphasizes that JDL was used as a tool for CIA’s anti-Soviet operations.

In the fifth part, Lumer singles out the point that the difficulties that Jews came across in the Soviet Union are only lies. The Jews in the Soviet Russia came across with Zionist hostility especially after the 1967 war. The Soviets were accused by implementing discriminatory laws to the Jews like not allowing them leave the country or by forcing them to carry domestic passports to expose Jews to discrimination. In the Soviet Russia, Jews’ religious freedom was restricted, too. However, Lumer emphasizes that the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights invoked the Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel. However after the immigration Jews wanted to return to Soviet Russia, because it was hard to live in a capitalist system. Moreover, he points out that there is a big lie which claims that the Jews in the Soviet Russia were treated intolerably by the Russians.

In the last part, Lumer is making emphasize on the point that there is a rising opposition to Zionism in the USA and Israeli policies in Israel. There is an incline of peace movements in Israel which are usually against Israeli imperialist policies. The opposition in the US is generally among the young Jews who have leftist political views. It is not only among Jews but also among non-jews, too.

As far as Lumer has Marxist point of views and that he was one of the editors in the Political Affairs Magazine which is a publication of the Communist Party in the USA, it must be considered that a Marxist point of view can not be neutral for criticizing a nationalist movement of the Jews. It must be noted that this book was published in 1973, while the Soviet Union was still alive. So as a Marxist author in a capitalist country, the longing for a communist regime and also criticizing Zionism as a servant of imperialism are both inevitable. However, when the policies of Israel are compared with its current policies, it is noteworthy that Israel is still making attempts to invade its neighbors and it is still a major ally of the US.

Privileges and Principles in Palestine/Israel

April 13, 2007

" . . . a solution divorced from the context of its problem is a solution built on quicksand" (Khalidi xxiv).

Since many Palestinian-Americans find the "old country" somewhat provincial compared to our adopted homes in Europe and North America, we find it humorous when European and North American Jews, with no previous ties to historic Palestine, wax eloquently about "home" upon first stepping foot on Ben Gurion (Lod) airport soil.

In no time the "olim," (newcomers to Israel) are swapping hummus and falafel recipes, which has been appropriated as "Israeli" food. One Palestinian woman lamented recently that she had to pull out a history book to convince an American friend that falafel was an Arabic dish. In just a matter of time, the recent immigrants, or "transplants," as a Palestinian journalist refers to them, are calling one another "habbibi," Arabic for darling, and filling up comments boxes on their blogs with "yallas," and "ya annis" (other appropriated Arabic sayings).

No one will ever convince me that a privileged American or European Jew has a right to freely immigrate to Israel, or for that matter 1,156,977 Russians since 1948, when people with keys and deeds to their houses, not to mention hundreds, if not thousands, of years of continuous living in historic Palestine, do not. The Palestinians preceded the Jews in Palestine and never left Palestine, until three-quarters of them were ethnically cleansed, to enter again. In addition to preceding both Jew and Muslim in Palestine, the Palestinian-Arab incorporates them (Khalidi xxviii).

In 1897, Theodor Herzl convened a Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland. What must be seeded in one's mind in order to circumvent the baffling charges and countercharges, the diversions and the circular arguments that inform the Palestine/Israel issue are the words of the eminent Palestinian historian, Walid Khalidi:

The Palestine tragedy--of which the current Middle East crisis is but the latest chapter--has, unlike most great upheavals in history, a specific starting point: the year 1897 (Khalidi xxii).

He continues:

All the poignant crises that have rent Palestine and the Middle East since then--the great Palestine Rebellion against the British in 1936-9, the Palestine War and Exodus of the Palestine Arabs of 1948, the Israeli invasion of Egypt in 1956, and the Arab-Israeli War since 1967--flow directly or indirectly from the Basle Congress of 1897. Behind the seemingly labyrinthine complexities of the so-called Arab Israeli conflict and the baffling maze of claims and counter-claims, there lies a continuous and continuing dual process. On the one hand, Zionist determination to implement, consolidate and expand the Basle 'vision', irrespective of the Arab character and patrimony in Palestine and its hinterland; on the other a corresponding development of Arab resistance to Zionist encroachment and self-fulfilment at Arab expense (Khalidi xxii).

Principled Palestinians consider the "right of return" as the heart and soul of the issue, even more so than the status of Jerusalem. As a literature teacher, I know that "reconciliation" is a major theme in works of literary merit. Ethnic cleansing is a war crime. Denial of right of return for Palestinians is colluding with a war crime. Dr. Salman Abu Sitta writes:

If a robber destroys a home or builds another floor on it, is he entitled to it? In that case, under what premise did the European Jews recover their homes and property, up to the last painting, from their European fellow citizens after half a century?

In the book of human rights and even in national laws nothing supercedes the sanctity of private property and the right to return to it.

More and more principled Israelis are also calling for a right to return and are also calling attention to Palestinian ethnically cleansed and destroyed and defaced villages. One such Israeli is Uri Zackhem, who has filmed several demolished Palestinian villages. Uri writes:

I'm Israeli, Jewish and live in Kfar Saba.

I like to help documenting the landscape, especially all the things (buildings, roads, railways, ..etc.) which are taken for granted and which are not taught at Israeli schools.
For me gaining knowledge about the past is one important step. Working for equality and justice is the next one.
My wish is one or two states between the sea and the river. I want Israel (or whatever it will be called) to be socialist, multiethnic and multicultural, with equality to all the citizens and religious freedom and freedom from religion if they wish so.

Stopping the law of "return", and the return of all the Palestinian refugees that want to, living among the people already living in Israel.

To these words I will add the words of the poet, Issa Chaccour, who, while speaking of his village, Bir'im, engages the hearts and minds of many Palestinians, who remain steadfast and resolute despite Israeli intransigence on the one hand and the cynical and self-serving compromise of their leaders on the other:

Your people, Bir'im have not died
And will not forsake a grain of sand from you
As long as you have men like these
As long as you have men like these
Who continually strive for justice
they do not care what others may say
And they always say to the oppressor
Our Bir'im is more precious than money.
And the return will never disappear
We will return contented
We will forget the bitter days.

Khalidi, Walid. From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem Until 1948. Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1987.

Nakba-deniers; Eyes Wide Shut

By Tariq Shadid


In the West, when advocating the Palestinian cause, we are often told that public perception of the conflict has ‘come a long way’ in the direction of the Palestinians. This usually refers to the shift people made from believing in the Zionist myth of ‘a land without people for a people without land’, to accepting the Oslo-doctrine of the two-state solution.

It is difficult to disagree with this, but what has really been achieved? Basically it only means that Westerners seem to have discovered that Palestine was, after all, not a land without a people. What now seems like a painfully overdue observation, must have been a real eye-opener for them somewhere in the recent past.

I can imagine that recovering any bit of eyesight after having been completely blind, must feel like an absolute revelation. But does it also mean the person who has partially recovered his eyesight is now fit to engage in the busy traffic of rush hour? Even if this person is convinced he can?

As a Palestinian living in the West, I can assure you that there are many here who believe their eyes are already open, while in reality they have deviated much less away from the ‘land without people’ formula than they think. They believe they are sufficiently informed in order to have an opinion. And there we have it: the invisible deadlock that permeates the societies of the West, when it comes to Palestine.

This deadlock is caused for the most part by the fact that people in the West have been conditioned on a large scale to feel deeply guilty about any criticism of Israel. And therein lies the main reason for the attractiveness to Westerners to take the position of blaming both sides equally. The fact that the Zionists are the actual invaders, land confiscators, oppressors and occupiers, is brushed aside, basically because it causes these conflicting loyalties. The media aids this by the skilful dosing of information, and by the use of language, branding all Palestinian violence as terrorism, and all Israeli violence as retaliation.

It is not so difficult anymore these days to convince people that Palestinians are suffering heavily, and unjustly. What seems to be the biggest problem, however, is for these same people to see Israel as the cause of this suffering, despite the overwhelming historical facts that prove this. This, of course, includes those facts provided by the Israeli New Historians in the nineties. They deny none of the 1948 crimes against the Palestinians, but simply assert that they should have been carried out more thoroughly (Benny Morris).

A mistake often made by those who advocate the Palestinian cause in the West, is to fail to exert pressure on these highly essential issues. Nakba-denial is one of the biggest problems that cause the failure of people to perceive the Zionist crime for what it really was, namely a vicious and well-planned act of ethnic cleansing, that displaced around 800,000 Palestinians from their homes and their country in 1948. Also, the over 400 villages they were expelled from, were destroyed, and wiped off the map. The majority of people in the West still don’t know these hard and brutal facts.

What’s the use of having a discussion, for instance about the Israeli Apartheid wall, with a Nakba-denier? The axiom of cause and effect is reversed in his brain. A Nakba-denier sees Israel as the beginning, and the Palestinians as the attackers, and no matter how historically ludicrous this formula is, in the mind of the Nakba-denier it is a reality. The only useful thing to talk to him about, is the Nakba - Arabic for ‘catastrophe’- in order to try and open his eyes, that obviously are ‘wide shut’.

Since the Oslo-period, we also have a new, but quite strong presence of so-called Palestinian rights defenders in the West, who nevertheless hit the brakes when one mentions Zionism. They often have similar ideas to those of many who were active in the Israeli ‘Peace Now’ movement, that rapidly diminished in adherence over the last years – which also says something in itself. As European or American self-proclaimed promoters of the Palestinian cause, these people are of no use to the Palestinians, in fact they even constitute a significant problem, if not one of the main problems faced in creating awareness in the West, since they act as barriers and gatekeepers against progress.

How can a supporter of the Palestinian cause regard anyone who defends Zionist ideology, which is national-socialist in origin (this should ring a bell), and infested with concepts of racial superiority, without suspicion? The presently very active Christian form of Zionism is at least as destructive - and I mean this in the most literal sense - and uncompromising to the Palestinian people as its Jewish counterpart.

It is of great importance, to keep Zionism at the center of the political discourse about Israel, and to mention it in any discussion about the subject. Oslo-style thinking has indeed weakened this practice on a large scale, but there is a simple way to reverse this very rapidly: talk about it. Always talk about the Nakba, and always talk about Zionism, when talking about Palestine in the West. Without these two issues on the table, what are we really talking about? And whose purposes are we serving, by being caught in those fruitless dialogues about the issues that are only symptoms of these other two?

One thing is certain: awareness of the Nakba is at a very low level in the West. Yet I firmly believe that as long as this does not change, the apathy of Westerners will remain exactly as it is, and they will look on while Israel continues to encroach upon Palestine acre by acre, and continues to turn life into a living hell for each and every Palestinian inhabitant, person by person. And all they will do, is shake their heads, and repeat the eternal ‘why on earth can’t these people stop fighting each other?’ A statement of despair, as much as it is one of ignorance.

If only these people knew about the Nakba of 1948, and that it never stopped but is still going on today … Nakba is not a difficult word to educate people about, so let us be wise and make people talk about it, before Israel gets a chance to complete it.


Tariq Shadid is a Dutch-Palestinian activist.

Academic slams Israel for land grab

Web posted at: 3/29/2007 8:20:5
Source ::: The Peninsula

by Mohammed Iqbal

Doha • Dr Ilan Pappe is the only Jewish academic in Israel who is vehemently critical of Zionism and the formation of the Israeli state in the land of Palestine.

A senior lecturer of political science at Haifa University, Pappe says that he is now planning to migrate to the UK with his family, as he has found it increasingly difficult to live in Israel with his “unwelcome” views and convictions.

“I was boycotted in my university and there had been attempts to expel me from my job. I am getting threatening calls from people every day. I am not being viewed as a threat to the Israeli society but my people think that I am either insane or my views are irrelevant. Many Israelis also believe that I am working as a mercenary for the Arabs,” said Pappe in an interview with The Peninsula yesterday.

On his first-ever visit to a Gulf state, Pappe was in Doha yesterday at the invitation of the Qatar Foundation to speak at the Doha Debates. He believes that two independent states cannot co-exist in the land of Palestine and the only lasting solution to the issue is formation of one state, shared by Jews, Arabs and other communities living there. He also feels that there is no immediate solution to the crisis and only international pressure can force Israel to end the occupation and the continuing atrocities against the Palestinians.

"Over the past six years, the Israeli government has become more oppressive, thanks to the strong support from the Bush administration. They now feel that they can do anything they want," said Pappe.

He was born in Israel in 1954 of German parents who fled Nazi oppression during the1930s. They migrated to Palestine directly from Germany, years before the formation of the Israeli state in 1948.

Pappe's transformation from a "typical" Jew to a strong critic of Zionism started in the Eighties while he was studying history in England. "I re-examined the events of 1948, which changed my perceptions and I realised how the Israeli state was formed at the expense of the Palestinians. I don't subscribe to the view that a community which has a claim to a land that goes back thousands of years had the right to occupy it by dispossessing indigenous communities," Pappe said.

He noted that the Jews constituted a mere one per cent of the Palestinian population before the Israeli state was formed. The West, he felt, was supportive of Israel because of its "guilt complex" about the Holocaust and the oppression of the Jews.

"The Nazi movement and the Holocaust were not just German phenomena but a part of European history. The Western countries thought they can bury this chapter forever by creating a Jewish state in Palestine. But later they realised that the Palestinian issue is much more complex that what they had calculated," said Pappe.

There is a glimmer of hope with international public opinion growing against Israel, even among the powerful Jewish community in the West. There is a movement formed by a group of Jews in the US which called `Not in My Name'" As the name itself implies, members of this group do not want atrocities being committed by Israel to be attributed to Jews across the world. They are clearly trying to distance themselves from crimes being committed by Israel in the occupied territories.

The historian felt the George W Bush administration is mainly responsible for the current situation and the US policy towards Israel would change with a change in the government. "The policy of supporting Israel and seeking friendship with the Arabs cannot go hand-in-hand," said Pappe.

A bit surprisingly, he said: "I support Hamas in its resistance against the Israeli occupation though I disagree with their political ideology. I am for separating state from religion," said Pappe.

He feels that Israeli democracy is meant only for Jews and there is no space for other communities. "Any state that perpetrates occupation cannot be called a democratic state," he commented.

The Moral Imperative

March 26, 2007

By Charles Sullivan

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. --Andre Lorde


It should surprise no one that the United States invasion and occupation of Iraq four years ago was based upon lies and fabricated evidence. Other wars instigated by the U.S. were begun in the same way, but we never seem to learn the lessons that history could teach us. The purpose of the U.S. invasion was not to free the Iraqi people or to spread democracy (when has the government ever done that?); it was to privatize the natural wealth of the region and to transfer ownership from the Iraqi pubic domain to the coffers of U.S. corporations. We have a long and shameful history of imperial invasions and occupations, and no experience building democracies.

The United States Middle East policy is also intended to suppress the enemies of radical Zionism and to extend Zionist control of the region, as well as to prop up the sagging U.S. dollar against the strengthening euro. It is the continuation of Manifest Destiny; the foolish but stubborn believe that Americans are superior to everyone else; what historian Howard Zinn refers to as American exceptionalism.

Manifest Destiny and the spread of capitalism go hand in hand. The growth of the military industrial complex requires imperial conquests and continuous expansion—an impossibility on a finite planet. We have yet to learn that wherever reality clashes with economic myth, reality prevails.

The Pentagon, which is the iron fist of American capitalism, requires enemies in order to justify its vast expenditures to an unquestioning public, even if it has to invent them. In the past those enemies were the spread of communism and socialism, which were a threat only to Plutocratic rule, not to the American people themselves. Now the danger is as cryptic and ubiquitous as state propaganda—the exaggerated threat of Islamic terrorism.

I do not contend that there is no real threat of terrorism against U.S. citizens. I do, however, assert that those threats remain small and are a direct response to unjust U.S. foreign policy, including the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

It is important to understand that the interest of the people and the government are always in conflict. The will of the people has never mattered to the ruling clique, as evidenced by the ongoing occupation of Iraq, despite overwhelming public opposition. What matters to America’s rulers is the acquisition of private wealth through war and expansionism. The ruling elite have never hesitated to sacrifice the lives of our soldiers and workers for imperial ambitions, or to sanction the deliberate killing of innocent civilians in unknowable numbers.

It is equally important to understand that imperial wars are a product of capitalism. A core element of capitalism is the unequal distribution of wealth and political power in which a small cadre of owners can literally purchase political power. The very wealthy are never satiated. They never have enough. They have ambition. They are driven. They want more. They want it all. Their dream is to rule the world and privatize its wealth. To aid them in their quest the language of patriotism and religion are evoked to stir the public emotions and to inspire hatred and contempt. The people will be told that we are under siege by the forces of evil, even as terror emanates from the nation’s capital like spokes radiating from the center of a wheel.

America’s imperial wars will continue until capitalism is abolished and replaced by a more just and equitable system—a for use, rather than for profit economy.

The architects of the invasion of Iraq would have us believe that U.S. Middle East policy is a complex matter that is best left to high minded experts. In fact, it is a fantastically simple matter that can easily be understood by anyone having a conscience, a sense of justice; a moral compass. What it boils down to is simple right and wrong. A five year old child can understand that but imperial presidents and their cohorts in congress and industry cannot.

A thing is wrong when its purpose is anything other than a desire for justice. We need not make things more complicated than that. A nation founded upon injustice will have a history of ethnic cleansing, genocide, chattel slavery, racism, inequality, class divisions, sexism, a suppressed work force, murder, and war—a history very much like our own. Indeed, our history.

Injustice breeds fierce resistance that can never lead to peace, as we are witnessing throughout the Middle East. The United States will fail in Iraq because the government’s policies are not driven by a desire for justice. Its purpose is not honorable or principled; therefore, it will ultimately fail. It is wrong to impose our will on other people. It is wrong to murder innocent civilians. It is wrong to steal their wealth. It is wrong to subjugate people and to exploit them as cheap labor.

Eventually Israel will be expelled from Palestine for the same reasons—its cause (ethnic cleansing) is not only unjust—it is immoral and criminal.

Will governments ever learn that it is not the physically strongest who prevail, but the just? Were these not the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Henry Thoreau, and Gandhi?

Justice and morality do not enter into the economic equation of capitalism. Neither does compassion, the rights of other people to exist unmolested in their own belief systems, or equality. There can be no peace without justice; no reckoning without a high regard for truth. Our past speaks volumes about the probable future.

We need not look very far into the past to realize what the future holds. A better future demands that we act justly in the present. Otherwise, the patterns of history will continue to repeat themselves in endless cycles of death and violence, disparity and suffering. We must stop putting our faith in politicians who serve the plutocracy by exploiting the people, and a system that from its inception was created to serve the wealthy and privileged.

Our policies are a continuous negative feedback loop that has always produced consistent results. We cannot continue doing the same thing over and over and expect to get different outcomes. The fatal flaw is not in the administration of policy, it is in the policy itself and the corrupt system that created them; a system that is at its core unequal and unjust; and therefore, immoral.

A sound moral imperative should inform all that we do, and it must have at its core a burning desire to see justice done and to help others fulfill their promise. A strong moral imperative should be the basis of cooperation between individuals and nations. Without ethical moorings there can be no trust, no justice, and no peace. It is as simple as cause and effect. We truly do reap what we sow.


Charles Sullivan is an architectural millwright, photographer, and free-lance writer living in the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at: csullivan@phreego.com.

Israel As a Strategic Liability

1945-1956

By Harry F. Clark

March 2007

Abstract

The present catastrophic partnership of the United States and Israel in the Middle East is the opposite of conditions that existed during Israel’s founding, sixty years ago. The US foreign policy establishment opposed sponsorship of a Jewish state during the military and diplomatic struggle over Palestine after World War II. The State Department expected the US to inherit a position of leadership in the region, based on decades of good will, antipathy toward the British and French empires and qualified sympathy for the nationalism of their subaltern peoples. The region was valued for its oil reserves and communications links, including the Suez Canal, and was to be secured behind the "northern tier" of Greece, Turkey and Iran, where the Cold War began in 1945-6.

Zionism was opposed because it antagonized the Arabs, and US support for a Jewish state after the war was due to the nascent Israel lobby, which overwhelmed the government’s diplomatic and military expertise. This complemented the Zionist struggle against British rule in Palestine, which ended in the conquest of most of Palestine and exile of 750,000 Arab Palestinians, and introduced a force more inimical to Arab interests than British imperialism. Once Israel was established, US diplomats and strategists accepted it and acknowledged its military prowess, but kept it at a distance, limiting arms sales and excluding it from military alliances. The US feared political instability and radicalism from the desperate plight of the Palestinian refugees, the precarious Arab-Israeli armistice, and the rising force of Arab nationalism.

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The History of Israel Reconsidered

A Talk by Ilan Pappe

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Professor Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian and senior lecturer of Political Science at Haifa University. He is the author of numerous books, including A History of Modern Palestine, The Modern Middle East, The Israel/Palestine Question and, most recently, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, published in 2006. On March 8, he spoke at a small colloquium in Tokyo organized by the NIHU Program Islamic Area Studies, University of Tokyo Unit, on the path of personal experiences that brought him to write his new book. The following is a transcript of his lecture, tentatively titled "The History of Israel Reconsidered" by organizers of the event.

Ilan Pappe: Thank you for inviting me, it's a pleasure to be here. I hope that you will ask me, afterwards, questions of a more general nature because I'm not sure how much I can cover in 40, 45, 50 minutes. I will be a bit personal, to begin with, and then move to the more general issues. I think it will help to understand what I am doing.

I was born in Israel and I had a very conventional, typical Israeli education, and life, until I finished my B.A. studies at Hebrew University, which was many years ago in the mid-1970s. Like all Israeli Jews, I knew very little on the Palestinian side, and met very few Palestinians. And although I was a very keen student of history, already in high-school ― I knew I would be a historian ― I was very loyal to the narrative that I was taught in school. I had very little doubt that what my teachers taught me in school was the only truth about the past.

My life was changed, in a way ― definitely my professional life, but after that also my private and public life ― when I decided to leave Israel and do my doctoral dissertation outside the country. Because when you go out, you see things that you would find very difficult to see from within. And I chose as a subject for my doctoral thesis the year of 1948, because even without knowing much the past, I understood that this is a formative year. I knew enough to understand that this is a departure point for history, because for one side, the Israelis, 1948 is a miracle, the best year in Jewish history. After two thousand years of exile the Jews finally establish a state, and get independence. And for the Palestinians it was exactly the opposite, the worst year in their history, as they call it the Catastrophe, the Nakba, almost the Holocaust, the worst kind of year that a nation can wish to have. And that intrigued me, the fact that the same year, the same events, are seen so differently, on both sides.

Being outside the country enabled me to have more respect and understanding, I think, to the fact that maybe there is another way of looking at history than what I lived ― not only my own world, my own people's way, my own nation's way. But this was not enough, of course. This was not enough to revisit history, this attitude, this fact that one day you wake up and you say: wait a minute, there's someone else here, maybe they see history differently ― and if you are a genuine intellectual, you should strive to have respect for someone else's point-of-view, not only yours.

I was lucky that the year I decided to study the other side was the year when, according to the Israeli law of classification of documents ― every 30 years the Israeli archives declassify secret material, 30 years for political matters, and 50 years for military matters. When I started in Oxford, in England, in the early 1980s, quite a lot of new material about 1948 was opened. And I started looking at the archives in Israel, in the United Kingdom, in France, in the United States, and also the United Nations opened its archives when I started working on this. They had interesting archives in Geneva, and in New York.

And suddenly I began to see a picture of 1948 that I was not familiar with. It takes historians quite a while to take material and turn it into an article or a book, or a doctoral thesis, in this case. And after two years, I, at least, found that I had a clear picture of what happened in 1948, and that picture challenged, very dramatically, the picture I grew up with. And I was not the only one who went through this experience. Two or three, maybe four, historians ― partly historians, partly journalists, in Israel ― saw the same material and also arrived at similar conclusions: that the way we understood Israel of 1948 was not right, and that the documents showed us a different reality than what we knew. We were called ― the group of people who saw things differently ― we were called the New Historians. And whether it's a good term or not we can discuss later, but it's a fact that they called us the New Historians, this is not to be denied.

Now what did we challenge about 1948? I think that's very important to understand, the old picture, and the new picture, and then we can move on. The old picture was that, in 1948, after 30 years of British rule in Palestine, the Jewish Nation of the Zionist Movement was ready to accept an international offer of peace with the local people of Palestine. And therefore when the United Nations offered to divide Palestine into two states, the Zionist movement said yes, the Arab world and the Palestinians said no; as a result the Arab world went to war in order to destroy the state of Israel, called upon the Palestinian people to leave, to make way for the invading Arab armies; the Jewish leaders asked the Palestinians not to leave, but they left; and as a result the Palestinian refugee problem was created. Israel miraculously won the war, and became a fact. And ever since then the Arab world, and the Palestinians, have not ceased to want to destroy the Jewish state.

This is more or less the version we grew up with. Another mythology was that a major invasion took place in '48, a very strong Arab contingent went into Palestine and a very small Jewish army fought against it. It was a kind of David and Goliath mythology, the Jews being the David, the Arab armies being the Goliath, and again it must be a miracle if David wins against the Goliath.

So this is the picture. What we found challenged most of this mythology. First of all, we found out that the Zionist leadership, the Israeli leadership, regardless of the peace plans of the United Nations, contemplated long before 1948 the dispossession of the Palestinians, the expulsion of the Palestinians. So it was not that as a result of the war that the Palestinians lost their homes. It was as a result of a Jewish, Zionist, Israeli ― call it what you want ― plan that Palestine was ethnically cleansed in 1948 of its original indigenous population.

I must say that not all those who are included in the group of new historians agree with this description. Some would say only half of the Palestinians were expelled, and half ran away. Some would say that it was a result of the war. I have a clear picture in my mind. Of course I don't oblige anyone to accept it, but I am quite confident, as I wrote in my latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, that actually already in the 1930s the Israeli ― then it was not Israeli, it was a pre-state leadership ― had contemplated and systematically planned the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.

To summarize this point, the old historical Israeli position was: Israel has no responsibility for the Palestinians becoming refugees, the Palestinians are responsible for this because they did not accept the peace plan, and they accepted the Arab call to leave the country. That was the old position. My position, and with this a lot of the New Historians agree, was that Israel is exclusively responsible for the refugee problem, because it planned the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homeland. Therefore it definitely bears the responsibility.

Another point that we discovered is that we checked the military balance on the ground, and we found that this description of an Arab Goliath and a Jewish David also does not stand with the facts. The Arab world talked a lot, still does today, but doesn't do much when it comes to the Palestine question. And therefore they sent a very limited number of soldiers into Israel, and basically for most of the time, the Jewish army had the upper hand in terms of the numbers of soldiers, the level of equipment, and the training experience.

Finally, one of the common Israeli mythologies about 1948 ― and not only about 1948 ― is, that Israel all the time stretches its hand for peace, always offers peace to the Arab world in general, and the Palestinians in particular, and it is the Arab world and the Palestinians who are inflexible and refuse any peace proposal. I think we showed in our work that, at least in 1948, that there was a genuine offer for peace from the world ― or an idea of peace ― after the war ended, and actually the Palestinians and the Arab neighbouring states were willing at least to give a chance for peace, and it was the Israeli government that rejected it. Later, one of the New Historians, Avi Shlaim from Oxford, would write a book that is called the Iron Wall. In this book, he shows that not only in 1948, but since 1948 until today, there were quite a lot of junctures in history where there was a chance for peace, and it failed not because the Arab world refused to exploit the chance, but rather because the Israelis rejected the peace offer.

So revisiting history, for me, starts with 1948. And I will come back again in the end of my talk to 1948 to talk more about my latest book. But I want to explain that in the path from looking back at 1948 and questioning the common historical version and narrative, a group of Israeli scholars, academics, journalists, and so on, were not only content with looking at 1948 but also looked at other periods. We had a very strange time in Israeli academia, which is over now, in the 1990s. In the 1990s, Israeli academics went back to Israeli history, as I said not only to 1948, and looked at very important chapters in Israel's history, critically, and wrote an alternative history to the one that they were taught in schools, or even in universities. I say that it is a very interesting time because it ended in 2000 with the second Palestinian uprising. You won't find many traces of this critical energy today in Israel. Today in Israel these academics either neglect Israel, or left the views and came back to the national narrative. Israel is a very consensual society nowadays. But in the 1990s it was a very interesting time, I'm very happy that I was part of it. I don't regret it, I'm only sorry that it does not continue, and time will tell whether it is the beginning of something new or whether it was an extraordinary chapter and is not going to be repeated.

Now what did these scholars do? They went from the beginning of the Zionist experience to the present time and looked at all kinds of stations. They began with the early Zionist years. The Zionist movement appeared in Europe in the late 19th century. The first Jewish settler in Palestine arrived in 1882. Now the common view in Israel is that these people came to more or less an empty land, and were only part of a national project, that they created a national homeland for the Jews, and for some unexplained reasons, the Arabs didn't like it, and kept attacking the small Jewish community, and this seems to be the fate of Israel, to live in an area of people who cannot accept them. They don't accept them because the attackers of Israel are either Muslims, or Arabs, which should explain a certain political culture that cannot live at peace with neighbours, or whatever the explanations Israelis give for why Arabs and Palestinians keep attacking the Jewish state.

Now the new scholarship decided to look at the movement of Jews from Europe to the Arab world as a colonialist movement. It was not the only place in the world where Europeans, for whatever reasons ― even for good reasons ― moved out from Europe and settled in a non-European world. And they said that Zionism in this respect was not different. The fact that the Jews of course were persecuted in Europe explains why they were looking for a safe haven, this is known and accepted. But the fact that they decided that the only safe haven is a place where already someone else lived turned them into a colonialist project as well. So they introduced the colonialist perspective to the study of early Zionism.

They also looked differently at a very touchy subject, and this is the relationship between the Holocaust and the state of Israel. Very brave scholars showed what we know now is a fact how the Jewish leadership in Palestine was not doing all it could to save Jews in the Holocaust because it was more interested in the fate of the Jews in Palestine itself. And how the Holocaust memory was manipulated in Israel to justify certain attitudes and policies toward the Palestinians. They also note the treatment of Jews who came from Arab countries in the 1950s, they found this Israeli urge to be a part of Europe very damaging in the way they treated Jewish communities who came from Arab countries. And of course it would have helped Israel to integrate in the Middle-East, because they were Arabs as well, but they de-Arabized them, they told them: "You are not Arabs, you are something else." And they accepted it because it was the only ticket to be integrated into Israeli society.

All this revisiting, if you want, of Israeli history goes from 1882 to at least the 1950s. Around 100 to 120 scholars were involved in this in the 1990s. The Israeli public, at first, of course, did not accept these new findings, and was very angry with these scholars, but I think it was the beginning of a good chance of starting to influence Israeli public opinion to the point of even changing some of the textbooks in the educational system.

Then came the second Intifada, and a lot of people felt that Israel is again at war, and when you are at war, you cannot criticize your own side. This is where we are now, and so many of these critical scholars lowered down their criticism, and in fact people like myself ― I can only testify from my own experience ― in one night, changed from heroes to enemies. It is not an easy experience. In the 1990s, my university was very proud that I was a part of it. So the Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a lot of people to show how pluralistic is this university, they have this guy who is a New Historian, and he can show you how critical he is and that Israel is an open society, the only democracy in the Middle East.

After 2000, I became the enemy of the university. Not only did the foreign office stop sending people to see me, the university was looking for ways of sending me abroad, not bringing people to visit me, and almost succeeded in 2002. There was about to be a big trial ― the trial didn't take place, thank God ― where I was to be accused of all kinds of things that you would think that a democracy doesn't have, accusing lecturers of treason and being not loyal to their country, and so on. I was saying the same things in the 1990s as I was in 2002 ― I didn't change my views, what changed was the political atmosphere in Israel.

I want to go, now, in the last part of my talk, to my new book. After working on this new scholarship I wrote quite a lot of articles and edited a lot of books that summarized this new scholarship that I was talking about, trying to assess its impact. I was also very impressed ― in one of my books I wrote extensively about this ― how it influenced Palestinian scholarship to be more open and critical. It really created something which I call the "Bridging Narrative," a concept that I developed, and I am still developing. It is a historical concept that in fact to create peace you need a bridging narrative. You need both national sides, each has their own historical narrative, but if they want to contribute to peace they have to build a bridge narrative. I founded, together with a Palestinian friend, a group in Ramala, called the Bridging Narrative Historians. We started to work in 1997, still work now, and it's a very good project of building a joint narrative. We looked jointly at history because we believe the future is there if you agree on the past.

After doing that, I felt still very haunted by '48, I felt that the story was not complete. I wrote two books on 1948, and I felt it was not enough. And then came the new archives. In 1998, the Israelis opened the military archives. As I said, they opened political archives after 30 years, but military archives after 1990. And then I felt I had even a more complete picture, not only of '48, but unfortunately, of how '48 lives inside Israel today. And the new documents, I think, show very clearly ― although I knew it before, but the new documents show even more clearly, if you needed more evidence ― that the Zionist movement, from the very beginning, it realized that in the land of Palestine someone else lives. That the only solution would be to get rid of these people.

I'm not saying that they knew exactly how to do it, I'm not sure that they always knew how to do it, but they definitely were convinced that the main objective of the Zionist project ― which was to find a safe place for the Jews on the one hand, and to redefine Judaism as a national movement, not just as a religion ― can not be implemented as long as the land of Palestine was not Jewish. Now some of them thought that a small number of Palestinians can stay, but definitely they cannot be a majority, they cannot even be a very considerable minority. I think this is why '48 provides such a good opportunity for the Zionist leadership to try to change the demographic reality on the ground. And as I tried to show in my book, ever since 1937, under the leadership of the founding father of Zionism, David Ben-Gurion, the plan for ethnic cleansing of Palestine was carefully prepared.

This has a lot of moral implications, not just political ones. Because if I am right ― and I may be wrong, but if I am right ― in applying the term ethnic cleansing to what Israel did in 1948, I am accusing the state of Israel of a crime. In fact in the international legal parlance, ethnic cleansing is a crime against humanity. And if you look at the website of the American State Department, you will see that the American State Department Legal Section says that any group in history, or in the future, that lives in a mixed ethnic group, and plans to get rid of one of the ethnic groups, is committing a crime against humanity. And it doesn't matter ― very interesting ― it doesn't matter whether it does it by peaceful means, or military means. The very idea that you can get rid of people just because they are ethnically different from you, today, definitely, in international law, is considered to be a crime.

It's also interesting that the State Department says that the only solution for victims of an ethnic cleansing crime, who are usually refugees because you expel them, is the return of everyone their homes. Of course, in the State Department list of cases of ethnic crime, Israel does not appear. Everyone else appears, from Biblical times until today, but the one case that does not appear as an ethnic cleansing case is the case of Palestine because this would have committed the State Department to believe in the Palestinian right of return, which they don't want.

There is another implication. I am not a judge, and I don't want to bring people to justice, although in this book, for the first time in my life, I decided not to write a book that says "Israel ethnically cleansed Palestine." I name names, I give names of people. I give the names of the people that decided that 1.3 million Palestinians do not have the right to continue to live where they lived for more than one thousand years. I decided to give the names. I also found the place where the decision was taken.

I think far more important for me is not what happened in 1948. Far more important for me is the fact that the world knew what happened and decided not to do anything, and sent a very wrong message to the state of Israel, that it's okay to get rid of the Palestinians. And I think this is why the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues today as we speak. Because the message from the international community was that if you want to create a Jewish state by expelling so many Palestinians and destroying so many Palestinian villages and towns, that's okay. This is aright. It's a different lecture, why ― and I'm not going to give it ― why did the world allow Israel in 1948 to do something it would not have allowed anyone else to do. But, as I say, it's a different lecture, I don't want to go into it.

The fact is that the world knew, and absolved Israel. As a result, the Israeli state, the new state of Israel that was founded in 1948, accepted as an ideological infrastructure the idea that to think about an ethnic purity of a state is a just objective. I will explain this. The educational system in Israel, the media in Israel, the political system in Israel, sends us Jews in Israel a very clear message from our very early days until we die. The message is very clear, and you can see that message in the platforms of all the political parties in Israel. Everybody agrees with it, whether they are on the left, or on the right. The message is the following. And to my mind ― I will say the message in a minute ― but I will say that, to my mind, this is a very dangerous message, a very racist message, against which I fight (unsuccessfully).

The message is that personal life ― not collective life, not even political life ― personal life of the Jew in Israel would have been much better had there not been Arabs around. Now that doesn't mean that everybody believes that because of that you go out and start shooting Arabs or even expelling them. You will see the paradox.

Today I gave an interview to a journalist here in Japan, and he told me of someone ― I won't mention the name ― but a very well-known Israeli politician of the left, who said to him: "My dream is to wake up one morning and to see that there are no Arabs in Israel." And he is one of the leading liberal Zionists, he is on the left, very much in the peace camp. This is the result of 1948, the idea that this is legitimate, to educate people that the solution for their problems is the disappearing of someone just because he is an Arab, or a Muslim, and of course the disappearing of someone who is an indigenous population, who is the native of that land, not an immigrant. I mean, you can understand ― maybe not accept but you can understand ― how a society treats immigrants. Sometimes they find that these immigrants come to take my job, you know these politics of racism that are the result of immigration. But we are not even talking about immigrants, we are talking about a country that someone else immigrated into, and turned the local people into immigrants, and said that they have no rights there.

If someone who is from the Israeli peace camp, and very much on the left, has a dream that all the Arabs would disappear from the land of Israel, you can understand what happens if you are not from the left. You don't dream, you start working on this. And you don't have to be on the extreme right for that, you can be in the mainstream. We have to remember that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 was committed by the Labor Party, not by the Likud, by the mainstream ideology.

In other words, what we have here is a society that was convinced that its need to have ethnic exclusivity, or at least total majority, in whatever part of Palestine it would consider to be the future Jewish state, that this value, this objective is above everything else in Israel. It's more important than democracy. It's more important than human rights. It's more important than civil rights. Because, for most Jews in Israel, if you don't have a demographic majority, you are going to lose, it's a suicide. And if this is the position, then no wonder people would say that if the Palestinians in Israel would be more than 20%, we will have suicide. You will hear people that will tell you that they are intellectuals, liberals, democrats, humanists, say this.

And if Israel wants to annex ― and it wants to annex ― half of the West Bank, as you know, and half of the West Bank has a lot of Palestinians in it, there is not one person in Israel that thinks that it's wrong to move by force the people that live in one half of the West Bank to the second half of the West Bank. Because otherwise the demographic balance in Israel will change. And it's no wonder that Israelis feel no problem with what they did to the Gaza Strip. Take one million and a half people and lock them in an impossible prison with two gates and one key, that the Israelis have, and think that people can live like this without reaction. In order to delegitimize the right of someone to be in their own homeland, you have to dehumanize them. If they're human beings you won't think about them like this.

I think that as long as this is the ideology of the state of Israel, and it is the ideology of the state of Israel, a lot of the good things in Israel ― and there are many many good things in Israel, it's an impressive project that the Zionist movement did, the way it saved Jews, the way it created a modern society almost out of nothing ― all these amazing achievements will be lost. First of all the Palestinians would lose, that's true. This is true. First of all the Palestinians are going to lose because the Israelis are not going to change ― it doesn't look like they're going to change their policy, and it doesn't look like anyone in the world is going to force them to change their policy. But in the long run, Israel is not alone, and it is a small country in the Arab world and in the Muslim world, and America will not always be there to save it.

In the end of the day if the Israelis ― like South Africa, you cannot be in a neighbourhood and be alien to the neighbours, and say "I don't like you," or "I don't want to be here" ― eventually they would react. It could take one hundred years, two hundred years, I don't know. But the Israelis are miscalculating, I think, history. Only historians understand that sixty years is nothing in history. Look at the Soviet Union. The fact that you are successful for sixty years with the wrong policy does not mean that the next sixty years are going to be the same. They're making a terrible mistake, as the Jewish communities around the world are making a terrible mistake in supporting this policy.

The new book is trying to convince that the most important story about the ethnic cleansing is not only what happened in 1948 but the way that the world reacted to what happened in 1948, sending the wrong message to Israel, that this is fine, you can be part, not only of the world, but you can be part of the Western world. You can be a part of what is called "the group of civilized nations." So don't be surprised, if you go to the occupied territories and you see first-hand how people are being treated there, that the vast majority of the Israelis, firstly don't know what goes on there, secondly when they know what goes on there, don't seem to bother much. Because the same message they got from the world in 1948 is the message they get from the world in 2007. You can take a whole city ― imagine Tokyo ― surround it by an electric gate, and one person would have the key for the only gate to the city. Any other place in the world, if you would hear of a city that is at the mercy of a warden, like a prison, you would be shocked. You would not allow it to continue for one day without protests. In Israel the world accepts it. And this is despite the fact that there are more international journalists per square mile in Israel and Palestine than there are anywhere else in the world. That's a fact. And despite this international media presence, the Israelis have not changed one aspect of their policy of occupation in Palestine.

As I say, unfortunately I don't have time for this, but I think it's a very interesting question: why does the world allow Israel to do what it does? But it's really a different question ― so I think I will stop here, and open up for questions and remarks. Thank you.

by gyaku