Following is a comment I posted on the BLOG: www.desertpeace.wordpress.com
in response to an article concerning Israel's torture of Palestinians.


There is nothing new about Israel using this form of torture on Palestinians. My late husband was a Palestinian. His brother was tortured in Israeli prisons in the sixties and seventies. He was almost killed until a very brave and compassionate Israeli lawyer. Ms. Felicia Langer, came to his rescue and managed to get him freed via an Israeli court. She later moved back to Europe because as she said she could no longer endure watching her fellow Jews treat another people the way Europeans had treated hers.

My brother-in-law’s “crime” was that he had led a strike against an Israeli employer. His punishment included electric shock applied to his genitals and beatings of such brutality that later x-rays revealed every bone in his body had been broken. He died five years ago from bone cancer.

Bronwin Peel

Special Guest Columnist
Palestine before and after


May 4, 2008

http://www.washingt ontimes.com/ apps/pbcs. dll/article? AID=/20080504/ COMMENTARY/ 569743177&template=printart

By Sherri Muzher - People are tired of hearing about it," a friend once told me matter-of-factly about the Middle East conflict. Tell me about it.

As a first-generation American of Palestinian descent, I can vouch that nobody is more tired of this conflict than Palestinians. But many of us don't have the luxury of flipping the channel or ignoring what is happening to our relatives and friends.

Palestinians with serious illnesses in Gaza are denied access to medical care. More than 150 have died and children are being stoned on their way to school by Jewish settlers.

We do what we can but it never feels sufficient. And though we're 100 percent Semitic, the usual tiring label of "anti-Semite" is thrown at us for speaking out against the injustices.

This month marks the 60th anniversary of Israel's creation and the dispossession of the Palestinians from their land. I'll save the history lessons because the realities have even been acknowledged by Israeli historians, most recently by Professor Ilan Pappe in 2006 with his book, "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine."

Instead, I'd like to focus on the Palestinian people.

Denying their humanity has taken on many forms in the Israeli PR arsenal — from employing pop culture to paint Palestinians as terrorists at conception to the media's glorification of Israel's birth.

In recent years, pro-Israeli commentaries claim our parents don't love us. Apparently, my parents' years of love and sacrifice illustrate they never read the Palestinian manual for parents.

Sarcasm aside, it all makes strategic sense: Dehumanize Palestinians or deny their heritage long enough that any action against them doesn't seem so outrageous, even if they are expulsions at gunpoint.

Consider that Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said in 1969 in an oft-repeated statement, "There is no such thing as a Palestinian. " Too bad she didn't read up on history because there has been a collective consciousness of their unique identity for millennia. The ancient Canaanites weren't called Palestinians, but neither were the Mesopotamians called Iraqis or the Celts called Irish or British. Still, the roots are unquestionable and run eternally deep, from archeological finds to folktales.

Another example of whiting out the Palestinian heritage is using the term "Israeli Arab." I've never heard of a generic Arab race — every Arab has a specific heritage, be it Palestinian, Lebanese, Algerian, etc. Think of Latin America, where they all speak the same language (Spanish, except in Portuguese-speaking Brazil) and most share the same religion (Roman Catholic). In the Arab world, they all speak Arabic and most are Muslim. Nonetheless, each country has its own dialect, foods and customs. Mexicans and Argentines differ, as do Palestinians and Egyptians.

And within each Arab nation, there is even more diversity — from distinguishable dialects and expressions, to being able to identify the region a Palestinian woman came from by the intricate embroidery on her traditional dress. Palestinians have always had a rich and vibrant culture that is all their own, before and after Israel's creation.

There is no question that Palestinians have taken a bruising with poorly made leadership decisions and factional fighting in recent years. But what has remained steadfast is their fierce embrace of identity and their resilience. This is true not only of Palestinians in Palestine but those of Palestinian descent in the diaspora.

Whether it was the election of Tony Saca to the presidency in El Salvador or respected fiscal conservative U.S. Sen. John Sununu being singled out for praise by Time magazine or Dr. Motia Khaled Al-Asir being awarded the British Empire Medal by Queen Elizabeth II, those of Palestinian descent continue to make their mark around the world.

It is worth repeating that the Jewish Torah teaches us that man was created in God's image. The Palestinians have never been absent from this equation.

Sherri Muzher is director of the Michigan Media Watch in Woodhaven, Mich.

Subject: American Jews have no understanding of the Arab World, this proves it.
Date: Fri, 1 Feb 2008 19:02:01 +0000
Rejecting the ‘Arab Jew’
On Language

By Philologos
Wed. Jan 30, 2008

‘A senior Saudi royal has offered Israel a vision of broad cooperation with the Arab world if it signs a peace treaty and withdraws from all occupied Arab territories,” a Reuters dispatch reported last week, citing an interview with former Saudi ambassador to the United States Prince Turki al-Faisal. In the course of this interview, the prince was quoted as saying, “We will start thinking of Israelis as Arab Jews rather than simply as Israelis.”
Some vision of cooperation!
Needless to say, Prince Turki’s use of the term “Arab Jews” reflects either a comically naive misunderstanding on his part of who Israelis are, or the more sinister hope that they will one day cease to be who they are. In the best case, the prince’s remarks are ignorant and patronizing, and they reveal how even many supposedly sophisticated Arabs haven’t a clue that Israelis, although they live in the middle of an Arab expanse, are a people with a unique language, culture, history and identity of their own. If Prince Turki thinks that once peace is declared, Israelis will cheerfully agree to become another ethnic minority in the Arab Middle East, he is living in a cloud of nargileh smoke.
On the whole, however, one doesn’t come across the term “Arab Jews” in this context. Rather, it is used — mostly by Arabs but also by some anti-Israel and anti-Zionist intellectuals in the West — for the close to 1 million Jews who lived in Arab lands prior to the establishment of Israel, after which they left or were expelled from their native countries and immigrated to Israel or elsewhere. Thus, for instance, Ella Habiba Shohat, a professor of cultural and women’s studies at New York ’s City University , writes of herself in an essay titled “Reflections by an Arab Jew”:
“I am an Arab Jew. Or, more specifically, an Iraqi Israeli woman living, writing and teaching in the U.S…. To be a European or American Jew has hardly been perceived as a contradiction, but to be an Arab Jew has been seen as a kind of logical paradox, even an ontological subversion [leading to] a profound and visceral schizophrenia, since for the first time in our history Arabness and Jewishness have been imposed as antonyms…. The same historical process [that is, the establishment of Israel] that dispossessed Palestinians of their property, lands and national-political rights was linked to the dispossession of Middle Eastern and North African Jews of their property, lands, and rootedness in Muslim countries….”
There is, of course, a cynical absurdity in blaming Israel for the wholesale plunder of Jewish property by Arab regimes in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and other countries that forbade Jews to take money or possessions with them when they emigrated from or were thrown out of these places. But apart from this, what is it that makes one wince at the term “Arab Jews”? After all, don’t Ms. Shohat and others like her have a point? If a Jew living in America is an American Jew, and a Jew living in Europe is a European Jew, why isn’t a Jew living in an Arab country an Arab Jew? Is not the objection to calling him that a form of Arabaphobia?
I think not. Anti-Arab prejudice has nothing to do with it. Historically speaking, Ms. Shohat is simply dead wrong.
It’s true that Jews lived for hundreds and even thousands of years throughout the Middle East, and that after the Arabization of the region that started with the spread of Islam in the seventh century, they became linguistically and culturally Arabized, just as Jews in America have become linguistically and culturally Americanized. But it’s also true that, in the course of these centuries, no Middle Eastern Jew, if asked whether he was an Arab, would have said yes, no matter how at home he felt in his environment. And for that matter, no Arab would have called his Jewish neighbor an Arab either. Jewishness and Arabness were perceived as antonyms in the sense of denoting two mutually exclusive ethnic identities, just as “Jew” and “goy” were antonyms in Eastern Europe . It was only in the 20th century that small numbers of Jews — most of them communists or on the Anti-Zionist political left — in cosmopolitan Arab cities like Cairo and Baghdad began to argue on behalf of an “Arab Jewish” identity as a way of repudiating Jewish nationalism and justifying their participation in Arab revolutionary politics.
One speaks of “American Jews” and “European Jews” rather than of “Jews living in America ” or “Jews living in Europe ,” because Jews in these places think of themselves as Americans and Europeans. But traditionally, Jews living in Arab lands never thought of themselves as anything but Jews living in Arab lands, and I challenge Ms. Shohat to produce a single pre-20th-century text that suggests otherwise. To refer to these communities as “Arab Jews” is not only to imply that Zionism tore them away from their true homelands for the false lure of a Jewish state; it is to demean them by denying them their own sense of themselves. It’s a term that justly deserves to be rejected.
Questions for Philologos can be sent to philologos@forward.com.

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To: partnersforpeace@yahoogroups.com
From: "partnersforpeace"
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2007 18:53:20 -0000
Subject: [partnersforpeace] Op-ed from Jerusalem Women Speak 14 participant, Wejdan Jaber
Metal Detectors: My Biggest Fear
It's not the dentist or public speaking that I am afraid of. It is
the metal detector that is my biggest fear.

Every time I approach a metal detector gate, I get this strange fear
knowing that my ability to proceed to where I am going will be decided
by the person operating detector. Most times, I succeed in explaining
the reason the bells and whistles go off when I walk through the metal
detector, but sometimes I am not even allowed the opportunity to
explain and get denied entry.

In 1968, I was born with bi-lateral hip dislocation. I went through
several painful surgical operations to fix it, but none of them
worked. I grew up with my disability and the immense physical and
psychological pain it caused, including several years of being bullied
and picked on in school. Thirty years later, I had garnered the
courage and the money to replace my dislocated hips with a brand new
pair of artificial hips. Little did I know that my new hips would add
a new level of complexity to my life.

In the West Bank where I currently live, there are 85 manned checkpoints, 460 physical
obstacles, and many other "flying" checkpoints that cut the roads between Palestinian
cities and villages in the West Bank (UN OCHA report, Aug. 30, 2007 - www.ochaopt. org).
Only a few of these checkpoints are on the 1967 "green line" between the West Bank and
Israel, restricting Palestinians from entering Israel. Several of these manned checkpoints
contain metal detectors.

In metal detector line, I often see women taking off their jewelry or
hair pins; men taking out coins from their pockets; and older people
leaving their metal canes to the side or putting them through an
X-ray machine before they go through. It is like a test, I feel,
where everybody is eager to be let through and to collect their
belongings after the gate. It is a standard procedure that everyone
has to go through. If you are a Palestinian with dark hair and
"Middle-Eastern" features, this procedure may be more than just
standard protocol for you. You are a walking suspect because "you
fit the profile", and then, when the metal detector sounds its bells
also, it is as if it is shouting, 'Here she is, catch the terrorist!'

On a cold morning in January 2004, a 22-year-old mother of two
children, Reem Riashi, was sent by Hamas with an explosive belt to
Erez checkpoint between Israel and the Gaza Strip. She managed to
go through the Israeli security checks by claiming that she was
disabled and that she had metal parts in her body. Once she made it
through, Reem set off the explosive device taking her own life and
killing four Israelis. Reem must have realized that her suicidal
mission would leave her two children motherless, but I do not think
she recognized how her action would effect the thousands of disabled
Palestinians with metal parts in their bodies, including those who
have been wounded during confrontations with the Israeli army and have
bullet remnants or shrapnel in their bodies. She left all of us
prisoners because we set the metal detector off wherever we go.

In June 2004 while I was working for the United Nations office of the
High Commissioner for Human Rights. I was assigned to travel from
Gaza to Cairo to help with the work of the UN Special Committee that
investigates Israeli practices against Palestinian people under
occupation. The only way I could travel was through the
Israeli-controlled Rafah Crossing, south of Gaza. After waiting for
eight hours under the hot sun of a summer day in Rafah, I was ordered
to return to Gaza at once because the metal detector at the borders
went off. I tried to explain to the Israeli soldiers –whom I could
only see at a distance- my situation, but they would not come down
from their monitoring towers to check me personally. They kept on
saying through their loudspeakers "go back, go back or we will shoot".

And that's what I did. I went back through the metal detector gate
and I called the UN liaison office to see if they could help in
coordinating my passage as a UN employee, but they could do nothing.
Dismayed by knowing that I could face this every time I want to leave
the country, I headed home in tears. On my way back, I could not stop
thinking about the amount of anger, humiliation, and deprivation that
any human being can tolerate before he turns into a suicide bomber.
Of course, I didn't forget to stop by my office at the UN to hand in
the UN Passport that was issued to me especially for that mission.

Wejdan_jaber@ yahoo.com
www.filastiniyat. org

Subject: Gulfnews: The undeclared war on Arab cuisine
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:44:59 +0000



The undeclared war on Arab cuisine
By George S. Hishmeh, Special to Gulf News
Last updated: August 29, 2007

http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/07/08/30/10150036.html



My niece, Irene, called me a few days ago indignant that some of her American friends, including some Jews, keep describing typical Arab foods such as falafel, hummus and shawarma, among others, as Israeli.



She wanted to know how she can convince them this is not the case.



I am quite familiar with this problem since many Arab Americans have been aware of this undeclared war at many unsuspecting restaurants specialising in Mediterranean cuisine, or coverage in the media. My first confrontation with this issue came in 1969 when the late Leah Rabin, wife of the assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin who was then his country's ambassador in Washington, discussed in a New York Times interview Israeli cuisine, and praised labneh (strained yogurt) as healthful food.



My first impulse was to tell my niece that Israel was almost 60 year old and these food items have obviously existed long before then. My curiosity prompted me to "google" Israeli foods. The internet yielded tens of references, including the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website which carried a feature on Israeli foods.



I couldn't believe my eyes and wished the Arab governments would do the same, but knowing their ineptitude at explaining more life-and-death issues I doubted they will tackle this quiet Israeli attempt at usurping Arab foods. So I did not bother to check but I would like to be proven wrong.



As a matter of fact, Arab-Americans are used to reading sometimes the wildest of statements made against Arabs or Muslims. Two such items appeared in the press this week.



In an Op-Ed column published in The Washington Post, Nina Shea complains about the alleged "cleansing campaign" now underway against non-Muslim minorities in Iraq. Shea, director of the Hudson Institute's Centre for Religious Freedom and a commissioner on the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, saw this action as similar to what happened "sixty years ago (to) Iraq's flourishing Jewish population, a third of Baghdad, (that) fled in the wake of coordinated bombing and violence against them". Of the 125,000 only 6,000 remained in Iraq and the remainder presumably settled in Israel.



You would think that Shea would have checked her facts before making these outrageous and disputed allegations.



Naeim Giladi, an Iraqi Jew who fled to Israel and later settled in the US, maintains in an article that appeared in The Link (April - May 1998) and in his book, Ben Gurion's Scandals: How the Haganah & the Mossad Eliminated Jews that "the terrible truth is that the grenades that killed and maimed Iraqi Jews and damaged their property were thrown by Zionist Jews". He also pointed out that Wilbur Crane Eveland, a former senior officer in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), wrote in his book, Ropes of Sand, published in 1980, that "in attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorise the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the US Information Service library and in synagogues (and) soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel."



The second incident this week involved New York's newest public school in memory of a world-famous Lebanese-American philosopher and poet, Gibran Kahlil Gibran, a Christian, and the city's first to offer instruction in Arabic and on Arab culture. Consequently, it has been has been targeted by critics who alleged that the school will serve as "a potential radical-Islam training ground".



The school's original principal, Debbie Al Montaser, an Arab-American, had to quit for her refusal to condemn the use of the word "intifada", a term used by Palestinian Arabs to describe their uprising against Israeli occupation. Danielle Salzberg, a Jewish woman who does not speak Arabic, has been named her interim successor.



Distortions



To cite but one of many distortions and claims about the authenticity of Israeli cuisine, Joan Nathan, author of The Foods of Israel and whose writings and recipes appear on MyJewishLearning.com, maintains that falafel is "the ultimate Israeli food".



On the other hand, Daniel Rogov, the restaurant and wine critics of Haaretz, the leading Israeli newspaper, acknowledges that "despite these longstanding myths, there is nothing Israeli about falafel, shawarma, borekas or hummus ...." and added that "in order to set the culinary record straight, let it be known that falafel .... outdates the existence of the State of Israel by several thousand years, archeologists having discovered the remains of ground chickpeas in the tombs of several of the Pharaohs. Shawarma ... (is) Turkish in origin, as are borekas ... As for hummus, most food historians agree the dish originated some 4,000 years ago, probably in North Africa." Interestingly, his lengthy review titled The International Israeli Table which appears on the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was written three years ago.



Now that the record is hopefully set straight, I am just leaving to have a falafel sandwich at the best falafel and shawarma sandwich in the Washington, D.C. area, prepared by two Palestinian Arab cooks from Israel and working at a neighbourhood Jewish (kosher) restaurant.



George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He can be contacted at ghishmeh@gulfnews.com.



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Subject: VOANEWS on My Name is Rachel Corrie Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 13:39:54 +0000

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Controversial Play in Spotlight at Contemporary American Theater Festival
By Susan Logue
Shepherdstown, WVa.
23 July 2007


Ann Marie Nest portrays Corrie in the CATF production of 'My Name is Rachel Corrie'
The Contemporary American Theater Festival, held each July in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, has never shied away from controversial subject matter. This year's festival is drawing attention for one play in particular.

My Name is Rachel Corrie is a one-woman play pieced together from journals and e-mails written by 23-year-old Rachel Corrie. The young American was working in Gaza with the International Solidarity Movement in 2003 as a human shield.

Corrie's parents had recognized her talent as a writer from an early age. After her death, they wanted to share her work with the public, but Cindy Corrie says the idea of producing a play just evolved.


Rachel's parents, Craig and Cindy Corrie, have seen the play many times
"Some people in London happened to read Rachel's e-mails in the newspaper, in 'The Guardian,' where they were printed during the first week after she was killed. Some of those people were connected with the Royal Court Theater. They approached us with the idea and we kind of flowed with it."

Those people were actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner, who edited and assembled Corrie's writings for dramatic effect.

In one particularly prescient scene, Anne Marie Nest, who portrays Corrie, speaks words written in an e-mail to her mother just days before she tried to block an Israeli bulldozer and was killed. "I have bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside," Corrie wrote. "Sometimes the adrenaline acts as an anesthetic for weeks, and then at night it just hits me again, a little bit of the reality of the situation here. I'm really scared for these people."

My Name is Rachel Corrie premiered in London two years ago without controversy, but its arrival in New York was postponed for many months. Other theaters in Florida and Boston decided not to mount productions after complaints that the play gave an unbalanced view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza.


Ed Herendeen, founder and producing director of the Contemporary American Theater Festival, says theater should pose questions
"I've been doing this for over 30 years, and I can't remember a work of art having to be required to be balanced," says Ed Herendeen, founder and producing director of the Contemporary American Theater Festival.

Herendeen, who also directed the production, says when he read the play, he realized that "it could be inflammatory to some people." But, he says, he did not see it that way.

"All the pre-controversy and drama surrounding this production really had very little to do with this young woman's story." Herendeen says he didn't see Corrie as pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. "She was writing her view of the world at the age of 23. And her view of the world was: Why are we doing this to one another? This has to stop. This violence has to stop."

But Corrie clearly identifies with the Palestinians, at one point describing the conflict as "a largely unarmed people against the fourth most powerful military in the world."

After a lengthy discussion, the board of the CATF decided to support Herendeen's decision to mount the play. But following that decision one trustee resigned and withdrew a pledge of $100,000.

In addition, some regular festival-goers said they would not attend this year. Those who did attend were invited to participate in a dialogue on the issue.


Actor Ann Marie Nest (r) joined the post-performance discussion of the play 'My Name is Rachel Corrie
After a Sunday matinee, the audience adjourned to a large tent, where they sat in small groups and discussed the play and the issues it raises. Afterwards, some of them shared their opinions with the entire group.

Several people applauded the Contemporary American Theater Festival for producing the play, despite pressure not to, and one woman noted, "Whatever your point of view, she was a tremendous communicator."

While some Jews who joined the discussion said the play made them feel "a little defensive." One Jewish man, when asked if he had a similar reaction, said "not at all."

One man was not pleased with the play's description of the International Solidarity Movement as a peace movement. "I don't think it is a peace movement. I think it is a terrorist front for radical Islamic militants." He added that the group "tantalizes idealistic kids like Rachel Corrie to go in and become part of this movement thinking they are only doing good."

That last opinion was also expressed in a two-page ad in the playbill under the banner "My Name is Rachel Corrie Does Not Tell the Whole Story: Don't Be Misled." One page has photos of six other women named Rachel who were killed by Palestinian suicide bombers. The ad was paid for by www.RachelCorrieFacts.org.

Ed Herendeen says he expects, and welcomes, people to question what they see at the Contemporary American Theater Festival. "It's in the questioning of a work of art like My Name is Rachel Corrie that maybe you and I could have a conservation, even if we disagree," Herendeen says. "Theater is an opportunity to create a forum for a real dialogue, for a living conservation to take place."

Fears that theatergoers would stay away from the festival, were unfounded.. In fact, both ticket sales and donations are up this year.

The Contemporary American Theater Festival runs through July 29 in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Subject: Al Ahram: Lost opportunity of relevance Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2007 15:11:57 +0000
Lost opportunity of relevance
The left wing in Palestine has proven historically impotent amid the Fatah-Hamas crisis, which could have been avoided, Ramzy Baroud* opines

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The entire Arab world has become a scholar of law and an expert in constitutions. It has grown concerned with legality, observed regulations, and historical traditions, both those written and those not. I had thought that this trend applied only to the Arab-Israeli conflict, in whose context Arabs always throw out that valid phrase about the necessity of applying the resolutions stemming from the "legitimacy" of the international community. The world has always marvelled at how the Arabs possess this ability in the international arena but lack it in the establishment of states based on the rule of law.

Yet that age of lacking legitimacy and law has ended. Now you can look to Lebanon and find fierce competition between the 14 March group known as being "the majority" and for its loyalty, and the 8 March group, stigmatised as being a minority and in opposition. There you will find unique abilities in quarrelling and the holding of legal debates over the Lebanese constitution and the powers of the president of the republic, the prime minister, and the speaker of the House of Representatives. All of this takes place while the Lebanese state is paralysed at the level of the presidency, the cabinet, the parliament, and all other institutions, to the point that they function only enough to keep things from collapsing. The Lebanese people, meanwhile, pray night and day that civil war will not break out under their feet and the days will not roll back to their evil past when murder was committed on the basis of identity, religion and name, when any reason could send people to their death, becoming martyrs within their communities.

If you don't much care for Lebanese legal debates, you can always move on to the Palestinian arena, where the number of legal experts exceeds all global averages. As for constitutional scholars and those working in political science (focussing on politics both legitimate and otherwise), their numbers block out the sun. If talk had worth, Palestine would immediately be liberated under an effusive flood of legal rulings that would explain and clarify that missing or vague in constitutional articles and legal texts. Wherever you turned next, east or west, you would find a journalism of interpretation with an outstanding ability and acrobatic talent in transforming military coups into first class constitutional, legal, and legitimate situations. This would be true even if they had broken an agreement, fragmented a country, or turned a nation that had not yet gained independence upside down.

Wherever you go in the Arab world, you'll find the same cry. Even when the logic appears pieced together, lies seem believable thanks to their reinforcement through repetition. Look at the case of the Hamas overthrow of Palestinian legitimacy when the judge, with a boldness to be envied, looked into the extent that the measures taken by the Palestinian Authority were legal and constitutional, but not into the crime of those who imposed change with armed force. Writing placed all the actions of the Palestinian Authority under the guillotine of the law and its texts, while not a word was said about the extent to which Hamas's behaviour, Ismail Haniyeh's statements, or the actions of Khaled Meshaal, who was directing the crisis from Damascus, were in keeping with the law. It was as though all Palestinian factions were beyond judgement, and only one group was out of line.

During all of this, the Arabs forgot the crux of the issue, that the concept of "legitimacy" is essentially a political one that means public acceptance of a political authority and its ability to enforce the laws and constitutions that regulate the people's lives. It is a concept that is only applied to a political unit of some kind that is distinguished by serving as the sole authority and having the right to a legal "monopoly" over the use of armed force. In Arab contexts, this used to be the basis for the existence of the state, whether a monarchy or republic, democratic or despotic, socialist or capitalist, wealthy or impoverished. Yet recent years have seen an overstepping of this golden rule. The existence of parallel armed authorities is no longer seen as counter to legitimacy. Rather, being armed is seen by some as a source of legitimacy in itself. Under the name of the "arms of resistance", it has become the right of armed groups to impose upon society their will and vision for the struggle and for politics. This took place in Lebanon in the name of resisting Israel, and the same thing has happened in Palestine, Iraq, Somalia and wherever chaos and the rule of the jungle reign.

Yet "legitimacy" is not the only political concept left hanging. There is no legitimacy as long as a state is incapable of "penetration", meaning that it can reach, through influence or control, all of its regions. If a state cannot reach all of its regions, or if an armed group retains a region, as Hizbullah did in South Lebanon or southern Beirut, then legitimacy is lacking. What Hamas did in Gaza was to sequester a region and remove it from the reach of the political entity through armed force. After the sovereign authority was incapable of accessing it, the entire entity collapsed. This situation did not occur only after Hamas attacked Palestinian security leaders (which were legitimate to it before the attack), but rather when Hamas's armed units took control of the Palestinian street via an executive power parallel to the original authority. This, of course, is in addition to the Al-Qassam Brigades, which are another force outside the parameters of legitimacy.

There is a close tie between the concepts of "penetration" and "mobilisation", for the authority is not "legitimate" as long as it is unable to mobilise all of its region's resources through the levying of taxes or other means. In many Arab contexts, and particularly in Lebanon where there is Hizbullah and in Palestine where there is Hamas and its representative organisations, other entities remain outside the circle of mobilisation. They have their own private resources that remain beyond the reach of the political entity, and which may not even know about them. These resources do not have any kind of public circulation or transparency, even if their organisations never stop talking about corruption.

Furthermore, legitimacy is not obtained unless there is a shared identity among a group of people that motivates them to form a state or political entity. The concept of identity is the basis of the entire issue, as it provides for the right of self-determination and is thus the natural forerunner to a state that is legitimate and has a political authority. In the Palestinian case, in particular, the Palestine Liberation Organisation was founded on the basis of an identity specific to the Palestinians that distinguished them from the Israelis who plundered their land and also from other Arabs and Muslims. If it were not for this identity-based distinction, Palestine would have become an extension of other states in the region. When the Hamas movement and its peer Islamic Jihad groups came to the Palestinian arena, they halted at considering the Palestinian tie as essential to the political entity, stressing rather the connection of the Islamic nation as an alternative. Palestinian identity was no longer a basis for legitimacy, having been replaced by the extent to which the Palestinian political movements expressed an Islamic identity.

And thus talk of "legitimacy" in the Arab world is corrupt from the start. There is no legitimacy without penetration, mobilisation, and identity. In the Lebanese and Palestinian cases, where the political entity has been destroyed in the name of the resistance, such talk is approaching various forms of black comedy and terrifying nightmares.

* The writer is director of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.


© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved

Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/852/op5.htm


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See what you’re getting into…before you go there

My computer crashed last week, so it will be awhile before I find a new one and can make further entries In the meantime below is an excellent article.

Bronwin


Subject: Forward: Avraham Burg’s New Zionism
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2007 20:29:58 +0000
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.

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.”

Subject: What the persecution of Azmi Bishara means for Palestine
Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 15:21:34 +0000
Opinion/Editorial
What the persecution of Azmi Bishara means for Palestine
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 16 April 2007

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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 Palestinian 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)

Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2007 21:02:16 -0500
From: A Friend
Subject: Join Us In DC on June 10-11 to Support a Just Peace for Israel/Palestine
To: Bronwin Peel


Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace
WIAMEP * 2708 Ontario Road * Washington, DC 20009-2154
www.wiamep.org

April 16, 2007

Dear Friend,

On June 10-11, the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and United for Peace and Justice are sponsoring a two-day mobilization in Washington, DC to protest US support for 40 years of Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip. A rally on the Mall on June 10 will be followed by a lobbying day on June 11.

The Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace has endorsed this mobilization and its political demands, along with nearly 200 other organizations so far. We hope that you will plan now to attend this landmark event – we look to a turnout of thousands to send a clear message: The World Says NO to Israeli Occupation. Please save the dates and spread the word.

We are hoping that your organization will consider endorsement as well. The political demands of the protest are:

* An end to US military, economic, diplomatic, and corporate support for Israel’s illegal military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.

* A change in US policy to one that supports a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis based on equality, human rights and international law, and the full implementation of all relevant UN resolutions.

To sign on as an endorsing organization, go to www.endtheoccupation.org.

Leading up to the mobilization, supporters are conducting an organizing drive, the goal of which is to collect 100,000 signatures from around the country supporting the political demands of the protest. The signatures will be presented to Members of Congress during the grassroots lobbying day on June 11.

Endorsing organizations will receive a packet of postcards and petition pages that you and your group can use to organize in your community. The postcards and petitions can be sent back one at a time or all at once to: The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, P.O. Box 21539, Washington, DC, 20009. Individuals can also sign the petition at www.endtheoccupation.org.

If you or members of your organization would also like to include a donation to the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation that would be most appreciated although not a requirement for endorsement.

Thank you for spreading the word and helping us organize for this mobilization.

In solidarity,
Dr. John Salzberg and Rev. Susan P. Wilder
Co-Chairs, Washington Interfaith Alliance for Middle East Peace
On behalf of the Outreach Committee, US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation

From: MJ Rosenberg

Washington DC, April 13, 2007
Issue # 318

Try A Little Empathy

Last week New York Times columnist David Brooks published an intriguing piece called "Dueling Narratives" about a conference he attended in Jordan with people he described as "moderate Arab reformers."

The "Dueling Narratives" to which he referred were not those of Israelis and Palestinians, or Jews and Arabs, but Americans (specifically pro-Israel Americans) and Arabs. According to Brooks, the Arabs mainly wanted to focus on Israel which they view as "at the root" of Middle Eastern problems while the Americans wanted to discuss "the Sunni-Shiite split, the Iraqi civil war and the rise of Iran."

Brooks was seemingly taken aback by the fact that the Arabs wanted to talk about Israel while he saw no need to (he did not include Israel as one of the issues he was interested in discussing).

For me, the startling thing about Brooks' column is that he was surprised that Arabs want to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian issue with Americans. Of course, they do. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the only issue about which all Arabs (and, in fact, Muslims) are in general agreement. Sunnis and Shiites may not agree about much but they all want the post-’67 occupation to end. Arabs want to talk to Americans about it because the United States is Israel's number one backer in the world. Arabs understand that without US involvement in ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it will simply not end.

I imagine that the reason Brooks was surprised is that, like so many Americans, he does not take Arab and Muslim concern for the Palestinians seriously. People like Brooks believe that Palestine is a pretext. For Brooks, it is not, it cannot be, the main reason so many Arabs and Muslims have such strong antipathy to the US government.

And the fact is that the Palestinians have often been used as a pretext for incitement against Israel and Jews by the same forces that have done virtually nothing to ease the Palestinians’ plight. And also, of course, as a pretext for war. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah professed love for the Palestinians while he was attacking Israel last summer and killing Palestinians along with their Israeli neighbors.

But, for the most part, Arab anger about (and sympathy for) Palestinians is utterly genuine. Why wouldn’t it be?

The other day I had a conversation with a young woman from the Washington suburbs. She was born in the United States, as were her parents and grandparents. She told me that if "another war breaks out in Israel this summer, I'll just die. Last year, I just sat in front of my television and cried when I saw Israelis fleeing their homes in Haifa."

There was nothing remarkable about that statement. Many, if not most, Jewish Americans felt that way.

A few decades ago, the Jewish community here actually got a million people to come to Washington to protest the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union. I was there. There were angry speeches and there were tears. All this about Jews in a country thousands of miles away who were from being prevented from immigrating to Israel.

So why would anyone assume that Arabs are faking their anguish over the suffering of Palestinians. Palestinians have, if anything, a greater connection to their fellow Arabs than Jewish Americans have to Israeli or Russian Jews. They live in the same region. They speak the same language. Only a third of Jewish Americans have even visited Israel and I doubt 2% can speak Hebrew. For Jordanians, Egyptians, Syrians, Lebanese, Saudis and Iraqis, Palestinians are either the people next door or a few hundred miles away.

They are also a people who suffered a terrible tragedy. If the establishment of Israel was, as I believe it was, one of the best things that ever happened to Jews, it was the worst thing that ever happened to Palestinians. No matter that they could have accepted the Partition Plan or any of the other plans that would have shared the land with the Jews. They were the overwhelming majority of the country for 1900 years and had no interest in sharing it with anybody which, of course, turned out to be a colossal blunder.

As a result, a culture and way of life disappeared. As General Moshe Dayan put it in 1969, "Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I don't blame you because geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahalal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushu'a in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."

That is a tragedy, by any definition, just as the disappearance of the once flourishing Jewish communities of the Arab world is a tragedy.

The good news, and it is very good, is that we can put an end to the historical epoch that included so much Palestinian and Jewish suffering. Unlike the legendary baby in the King Solomon story, this "baby" called Palestine or Israel can be divided and still survive. Not only survive, both parts will do better if separated into two secure states. Negotiations based on the Saudi Plan (still on the table and generally being ignored by both Americans and Israelis) could accomplish that goal.

Until that happens, David Brooks can expect to hear "moderate Arabs," not to mention those not so moderate, fixating on Israel. If he really cared about Israel, he might also start fixating on a way to end a status quo that is so deadly to both Israelis and Palestinians. I understand that a tenet of the neoconservative philosophy holds that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not central to the region's problems or to America's declining fortunes in that region. But that is hogwash and everyone not blinded by ideology knows it. It is not the only problem we have in that region, but it is a huge one and, 40 years after the occupation began, it looms larger and larger.

For Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims worldwide, the situation in the West Bank and Gaza is a hole in the heart. And whether some people like it or not, America's standing in the world – and Israel's security – will continue to decline until we help end the conflict that spawned it.

MJ Rosenberg is the Director of Israel Policy Forum's Washington Policy Center. If you would appreciate receiving this weekly letter via e-mail, send an e-mail, with the subject "subcribe" to: ipfdc@ipforumdc.org

Subject: The History of Israel Reconsidered:Ilan Pappe Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2007 18:55:27 +0000
March 21, 2007



Subject: A talk by Israeli Historian Ilyan Pappe in Japan

From: PLO Mission Washington, DC


NEWS YOU WON'T FIND ON CNN

The History of Israel Reconsidered:



A Talk by Ilan Pappe



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.



03/20/07 "Dissidentvoice" -- - -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.

Re: The Baltimore Sun Article
From: Mona Drooby
March 24, 2007

ZIONIST AIMS ARE TO TAKE ALL OF PALESTINE AND CONDI RICE IS MERELY THE
MEANS TO SECURE THIS OBJECTIVE. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS ZIONISTS
FOR PEACE WITH THE PALESTINIANS===YOU ARE FABRICATING AN UNTRUTH THAT
ULTIMATELY WILL BRING ABOUT MORE DEATH AND DESTRUCTION TO THE REGION.

SO PLEASE, AS GANDHI SAID: "TRUTH HAS A LIFE OF ITS OWN".

THE JEWISH PEOPLE DESERVE BETTER THAN TO BE LED BY ZIONISTS.
ZIONISM IS DOING TO THE JEWS WHAT HITLER'S NAZIS DID TO GERMANY.

THESE TWO PEOPLES, DESCENDANTS OF ABRAHAM, ARE EITHER GOING TO LEARN
TO LIVE TOGETHER TO SHARE PALESTINE/ISRAEL, OR CONTINUE ON THE ROAD TO
MUTUAL SELF-DESTRUCTION.

SHOULD YOU CHOSE THE PATH OF COEXISTENCE, IT COULD MOBILIZE OTHER
NEIGHBORING STATES TO CREATE A MIDDLE EAST ECONOMIC UNION THAT WILL BE
AN EXAMPLE TO ALL THE WORLD OF HOW TRULY THE CHILDREN OF ABRAHAM HAVE
BROUGHT GLORY NOT ONLY TO HIM, BUT TO ALL THE WORLD---FOR PEACE IN AND OF
ITSELF IS A MIGHTY AND GLORIOUS QUEST THAT ALL GOOD PEOPLES SEEK TO
SECURE FOR THEMSELVES AND THOSE WHO COME AFTER THEM.

Subject: Yediot Ahronot: Yes, There Is Apartheid in Israel
From: My Son

Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2007 18:21:05 +0000
Yes, There Is Apartheid in Israel
by: Shulamit Aloni
April - May 2007
The Link - Volume 40, Issue 2


Shulamit Aloni, Israel Prize laureate for 2000, served as Israel’s Minister of Education under Yitzhak Rabin. This article was published in Hebrew in Yediot Ahronot (Latest News), Israel’s largest circulating newspaper, and was translated by Sol Salbe, an Australian editor, whose comments are in square brackets.

Jewish self-righteousness is taken for granted among ourselves to such an extent that we fail to see what’s right in front of our eyes. It’s simply inconceivable that the ultimate victims, the Jews, can carry out evil deeds. Nevertheless, the state of Israel practices its own, quite violent, form of Apartheid with the native Palestinian population.

The US Jewish Establishment’s onslaught on former President Jimmy Carter is based on him daring to tell the truth which is known to all: through its army, the government of Israel practices a brutal form of Apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp. All this is done in order to keep an eye on the population’s movements and to make its life difficult. Israel even imposes a total curfew whenever the settlers, who have illegally usurped the Palestinians’ land, celebrate their holidays or conduct their parades.

If that were not enough, the generals commanding the region frequently issue further orders, regulations, instructions and rules (let us not forget: they are the lords of the land). By now they have requisitioned further lands for the purpose of constructing “Jewish only” roads. Wonderful roads, wide roads, well-paved roads, brightly lit at night—all that on stolen land. When a Palestinian drives on such a road, his vehicle is confiscated and he is sent on his way.

On one occasion I witnessed such an encounter between a driver and a soldier who was taking down the details before confiscating the vehicle and sending its owner away. “Why?” I asked the soldier. “It’s an order—this is a Jews-only road,” he replied. I inquired as to where was the sign indicating this fact and instructing [other] drivers not to use it. His answer was nothing short of amazing. “It is his responsibility to know it, and besides, what do you want us to do, put up a sign here and let some anti-semitic reporter or journalist take a photo so that he can show the world that Apartheid exists here?”

Indeed Apartheid does exist here. And our army is not “the most moral army in the world” as we are told by its commanders. Sufficient to mention that every town and every village has turned into a detention center and that every entry and every exit has been closed, cutting it off from arterial traffic. If it were not enough that Palestinians are not allowed to travel on the roads paved “for Jews only,” on their land, the current GOC found it necessary to land an additional blow on the natives in their own land with an “ingenious proposal.”

Major-General Naveh, renowned for his superior patriotism, has issued a new order. Coming into effect on 19 January, it prohibits the conveyance of Palestinians without a permit. The order determines that Israelis are not allowed to transport Palestinians in an Israeli vehicle (one registered in Israel regardless of what kind of number plate it carries) unless they have received explicit permission to do so. The permit relates to both the driver and the Palestinian passenger. Of course none of this applies to those whose labor serves the settlers. They and their employers will naturally receive the required permits so they can continue to serve the lords of the land, the settlers.

Did man of peace President Carter truly err in concluding that Israel is creating Apartheid? Did he exaggerate? Don’t the US Jewish community leaders recognize the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination of 7 March 1966, to which Israel is a signatory? Are the U.S. Jews who launched the loud and abusive campaign against Carter for supposedly maligning Israel’s character and its democratic and humanist nature unfamiliar with the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid of 30 November 1973? Apartheid is defined therein as an international crime that among other things includes using different legal instruments to rule over different racial groups, thus depriving people of their human rights. Isn’t freedom of travel one of these rights?

In the past, the U.S. Jewish community leaders were quite familiar with the meaning of those conventions. For some reason, however, they are convinced that Israel is allowed to contravene them. It’s OK to kill civilians, women and children, old people and parents with their children, deliberately or otherwise without accepting any responsibility. It’s permissible to rob people of their lands, destroy their crops, and cage them up like animals in the zoo.

From now on, Israelis and International humanitarian organizations’ volunteers are prohibited from assisting a woman in labor by taking her to the hospital. [Israeli human rights group] Yesh Din volunteers cannot take a robbed and beaten-up Palestinian to the police station to lodge a complaint. (Police stations are located at the heart of the settlements.) Is there anyone who believes that this is not Apartheid?

Jimmy Carter does not need me to defend his reputation that has been sullied by Israelophile community officials. The trouble is that their love of Israel distorts their judgment and blinds them from seeing what’s in front of them. Israel is an occupying power that for 40 years has been oppressing an indigenous people, which is entitled to a sovereign and independent existence while living in peace with us. We should remember that we too used very violent terror against foreign rule because we wanted our own state. And the list of victims of terror is quite long and extensive.

We do not limit ourselves to denying the [Palestinian] people human rights. We not only rob them of their freedom, land and water. We apply collective punishment to millions of people and even, in revenge-driven frenzy, destroy the electricity supply for one and half million civilians. Let them “sit in the darkness” and “starve.”

Employees cannot be paid their wages because Israel is holding 500 million shekels that belong to the Palestinians. And after all that we remain “pure as the driven snow.” There are no moral blemishes on our actions. There is no racial separation. There is no Apartheid. It’s an invention of the enemies of Israel. Hooray for our brothers and sisters in the U.S.! Your devotion is very much appreciated. You have truly removed a nasty stain from us. Now there can be an extra spring in our step as we confidently abuse the Palestinian population, using the “most moral army in the world.”