A MUST READ ARTICLE

The exceedingly narrow range of "correct opinion" on Israel for American Jews isn't holding together like it used to. Is a Jewish glasnost coming to America?

For American Jews, Dissent Against Israel Has Become Mainstream
By Tony Karon
[Via: AlterNet]

First, a confession: It may tell me that I hate myself, but I can't help loving Masada2000, the website maintained by militant right-wing Zionist followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane. The reason I love it is its D.I.R.T. list -- that's "Dense anti-Israel Repugnant Traitors" (also published as the S.H.I.T. list of "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening" Jews). And that's not because I get a bigger entry than -- staying in the Ks -- Henry Kissinger, Michael Kinsley, Naomi Klein, or Ted Koppel. The Kahanists are a pretty flaky lot, counting everyone from Woody Allen to present Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on their list of Jewish traitors. But the habit of branding Jewish dissidents -- those of us who reject the nationalist notion that as Jews, our fate is tied to that of Israel, or the idea that our people's historic suffering somehow exempts Israel from moral reproach for its abuses against others -- as "self-haters" is not unfamiliar to me.

In 1981, my father went, as a delegate of the B'nai B'rith Jewish service organization, to a meeting of the Cape Town chapter of the Jewish Board of Deputies, the governing body of South Africa's Jewish communal institutions. The topic of the meeting was "Anti-Semitism on Campus." My father was pretty shocked and deeply embarrassed when Exhibit A of this phenomenon turned out to be something I'd published in a student newspaper condemning an Israeli raid on Lebanon.

By then, I was an activist in the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, which was consuming most of my energies. Having been an active left-Zionist in my teenage years, I had, however, retained an interest in the Middle East -- and, of course, we all knew that Israel was the South African white apartheid regime's most important ally, arming its security forces in defiance of a UN arms embargo. Even back then, the connection between the circumstances of black people under apartheid, and those of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, seemed obvious enough to me and to many other Jews in the South African liberation movement: Both were peoples harshly ruled over by a state that denied them the rights of citizenship.

Still, this was a first. I could recite the kiddush from memory, sing old kibbutznik anthems and curse in Yiddish. I had been called a "bloody Jew" many times, but never an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. What quickly became clear to me, though, was the purpose of that "self-hating" smear -- to marginalize Jews who dissent from Zionism, the nationalist ideology of Jewish statehood, in order to warn others off expressing similar views.

What I like about the S.H.I.T. list's approach to the job -- other than the "Dangerous Minds" theme music that plays as you read it -- is the way it embraces literally thousands of names, including many of my favorite Jews. Memo to the sages at Masada2000: If you're trying to paint dissenters as demented traitors, you really have to keep the numbers down. Instead, Masada2000's inadvertent message is: "Think critically about Israel and you'll join Woody Allen and a cast of thousands..."

A New Landscape of Jewish Dissent

The Kahanists are a fringe movement, but their self-defeating list may nonetheless be a metaphor for the coming crisis in more mainstream nationalist efforts to police Jewish identity. The Zionist establishment has had remarkable success over the past half-century in convincing others that Israel and its supporters speak for, and represent, "the Jews." The value to their cause of making Israel indistinguishable from Jews at large is that it becomes a lot easier to shield Israel from reproach. It suggests, in the most emphatic terms, that serious criticism of Israel amounts to criticism of Jews. More than a millennium of violent Christian persecution of Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, has made many in the West rightly sensitive towards any claims of anti-Semitism, a sensitivity many Zionists like to exploit to gain a carte blanche exemption from criticism for a state they claim to be the very personification of Jewishness.

So, despite Israel's ongoing dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians in the occupied territories, then-Harvard president Larry Summers evidently had no trouble saying, in 2002, that harsh criticisms of Israel are "anti-Semitic in their effect if not in their intent."

Robin Shepherd of the usually sensible British think-tank Chatham House has gone even further, arguing that comparing Israel with apartheid South Africa is "objective anti-Semitism."

Says Shepherd: "Of course one can criticize Israel, but there is a litmus test, and that is when the critics begin using constant key references to South Africa and the Nazis, using terms such as ‘bantustans.' None of these people, of course, will admit to being racist, but this kind of anti-Semitism is a much more sophisticated form of racism, and the kind of hate-filled rhetoric and imagery are on the same moral level as racism, so gross and distorted that they are defaming an entire people, since Israel is an essentially Jewish project."

I'd agree that the Nazi analogy is specious -- not only wrong but offensive in its intent, although not "racist". But the logic of suggesting it is "racist" to compare Israel to apartheid South Africa is simply bizarre. What if Israel objectively behaves like apartheid South Africa? What then?

Actually, Mr. Shepherd, I'd be more inclined to pin the racist label on anyone who conflates the world's 13 million Jews with a country in which 8.2 million of them -- almost two thirds -- have chosen not to live.

Although you wouldn't know it -- not if you followed Jewish life simply through the activities of such major Jewish communal bodies as the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations and the Anti-Defamation League -- the extent to which the eight million Jews of the Diaspora identify with Israel is increasingly open to question (much to the horror of the Zionist-oriented Jewish establishment). In a recent study funded by the Andrea and Charles Bronfman Philanthropies (an important donor to Jewish communal organizations), Professors Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman revealed that their survey data had yielded some extraordinary findings: In order to measure the depth of attachment of American Jews to Israel, the researchers asked whether respondents would consider the destruction of the State of Israel a "personal tragedy." Less than half of those aged under 35 answered "yes" and only 54% percent of those aged 35-50 agreed (compared with 78% of those over 65). The study found that only 54% of those under 35 felt comfortable with the very idea of a Jewish state.

As groups such as the Jewish Agency in Israel (which aims to promote Jewish immigration) and the American Jewish committee expressed dismay over the findings, Cohen and Kelman had more bad news: They believed they were seeing a long-term trend that was unlikely to be reversed, as each generation of American Jews becomes even more integrated into the American mainstream than its parents and grandparents had been. The study, said Cohen, reflected "very significant shifts that have been occurring in what it means to be a Jew."

Cohen's and Kelman's startling figures alone underscore the absurdity of Shepherd's suggestion that to challenge Israel is to "defame an entire people." They also help frame the context for what I would call an emerging Jewish glasnost in which Jewish critics of Israel are increasingly willing to make themselves known. When I arrived in the United States 13 years ago, I was often surprised to find that people with whom I seemed to share a progressive, cosmopolitan worldview would suddenly morph into raging ultranationalists when the conversation turned to Israel. Back then, it would have seemed unthinkable for historian Tony Judt to advocate a binational state for Israelis and Palestinians or for Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen to write that "Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now." Unthinkable, too, was the angry renunciation of Zionism by Avrum Burg, former speaker of Israel's Knesset.

And, in those days, with the internet still in its infancy, the online Jewish dissident landscape that today ranges from groups in the Zionist peace camp like Tikkun, Americans for Peace Now, and the Israel Policy Forum, among others, to anti-Zionist Jews of the left such as Not in My Name and Jewish Voices for Peace, had not yet taken shape. Indeed, there was no Ha'aretz online English edition in which the reality of Israel was being candidly reported and debated in terms that would still be deemed heretical in much of the U.S. media.

Thirteen years ago, there certainly was no organization around like "Birthright Unplugged," which aims to subvert the "Taglit-Birthright Program," funded by Zionist groups and the government of Israel, that provides free trips to Israel for young Jewish Americans in order to encourage them to identify with the State. (The "Unplugged" version encourages young Jews from the U.S. to take the Birthright tour and its free air travel, and then stay on for a two-week program of visits to the West Bank, to Israeli human rights organizations, and to peace groups. The goal is to see another side of Israel, the side experienced by its victims -- and by Israelis who oppose the occupation of the West Bank.)

Clearly, much has changed, and the ability of the Zionist establishment -- the America Israel Political Action Committee, the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and others -- to impose nationalist boundaries on Jewish identity is being eroded. It's worth remembering in this context that anti-Zionism was originally a Jewish movement -- the majority of European Jews before World War II rejected the Zionist movement and its calls for a mass migration from Europe to build a Jewish nation-state in Palestine. The most popular Jewish political organization in Europe had been the Yiddishe Arbeiter Bund, a Jewish socialist party that was militantly anti-Zionist. Even among the rabbis of Europe, there was considerable opposition to the idea of Jews taking control of Zion before the arrival of the Messiah (and there still is, of course, from a sizable minority of the ultra-Orthodox).

Of course, the Holocaust changed all that. For hundreds of thousands of survivors, a safe haven in Palestine became a historic necessity.

But the world has changed since then, and as the research cited above suggests, the trends clearly don't favor the Zionists. I was reared on the idea that a Jewish nation-state in the Middle East was the "manifest destiny" of the Jews. I learned in the Zionist movement that Jewish life in the Diaspora was inevitably stunted and ultimately doomed. But history may have decided otherwise. The majority of us have chosen to live elsewhere, thereby voting with our feet. Indeed, according to Israeli government figures, some 750,000 Israeli Jews (15% of Israel's Jewish population) are now living abroad, further undermining the Zionist premise that the Diaspora is an innately hostile and anti-Semitic place.

The Ferocity of Nationalism, The Universality of Justice

Increasingly anxious that most of us have no intention of going to Israel to boost Jewish numbers, the Israel-based Jewish Agency -- apparently oblivious to the irony of its own actions -- has complained to Germany over official policies that make life there so attractive to Jewish immigrants from former Soviet territories, thus discouraging them from going to Israel. More immediately threatening to the Zionist establishment, however, is another reality: Many Jews are beginning to make once unthinkable criticisms of Israel's behavior. If you want to bludgeon Jewish critics with the charge of "anti-Semitism" when they challenge Israel's actions, then it's hardly helpful to have other Jews standing up and expressing the same thoughts. It undermines the sense, treasured by Israel's most fervent advocates, that they represent a cast-iron consensus among American Jews in particular.

That much has been clear in the response to the publication of John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt's controversial new book The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which challenges the wisdom and morality of the unashamed and absolute bias in U.S. foreign policy towards Israel. In an exchange on the NPR show Fresh Air, Walt was at pains to stress, as in his book, that the Israel Lobby, as he sees it, is not a Jewish lobby, but rather an association of groupings with a right-wing political agenda often at odds with majority American-Jewish opinion.

Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, argued exactly the opposite: Walt and Mearsheimer, he claimed, were effectively promoting anti-Semitism, because the Israel lobby is nothing more (or less) than the collective will of the American Jewish community. Which, of course, it isn't. In fact, in the American Jewish community you can increasingly hear open echoes of Mearsheimer and Walt's skepticism over whether the lobby's efforts are good for Israel.

But Foxman's case is undercut by something far broader -- an emerging Jewish glasnost. Of course, like any break with a long-established nationalist consensus, the burgeoning of dissent has provoked a backlash. Norman Finkelstein -- the noted Holocaust scholar and fierce critic of Zionism recently hounded out of De Paul University in a campaign of vilification based precisely on the idea that fierce criticism of Israel is the equivalent of "hate speech" -- could be forgiven for being skeptical of the idea that the grip of the ultranationalists is weakening.

So, too, could Joel Kovel. After all, he found his important book Overcoming Zionism pulled by his American distributor, the University of Michigan Press, also on the "hate speech" charge. (This decision was later reversed, but it may have long-term consequences for the distributor's relationship with Kovel's publisher, the British imprint Pluto.)

Jimmy Carter -- who was called a "Holocaust denier" (yes, a Holocaust denier!) for using the apartheid analogy in his book on Israel -- and Mearsheimer and Walt might have reason for skepticism as well. But I'd argue that the renewed ferocity of recent attacks on those who have strayed from the nationalist straight and narrow has been a product of panic in the Jewish establishment -- a panic born of the fact that its losing its grip. As in the former Soviet Union with the actual glasnost moment, this is a process, once started, that's only likely to be accelerated by such witch-hunting.

Last year, a very cranky academic by the name of Alvin Rosenfeld, on behalf of the oldest Jewish advocacy group in the U.S., the American Jewish Committee, got a flurry of attention by warning that liberal Jews such as playwright Tony Kushner, Tony Judt and Richard Cohen, all of whom had recently offered fundamental criticisms of Israel, were giving comfort to a "new anti-Semitism."

"They're helping to make [anti-Semitic] views about the Jewish state respectable -- for example, that it's a Nazi-like state, comparable to South African apartheid; that it engages in ethnic cleansing and genocide. These charges are not true and can have the effect of delegitimizing Israel."

In reality, though, whether or not you agree with the views of those critics, they simply can't legitimately be called anti-Semitic. Actually, I doubt any of those he cited have accused Israel of genocide or compared it in any way to the Nazi state. (Former Israeli Knesset Speaker Avram Burg, however, recently did write, in reference to Israeli militarism and hostility to Arabs, "It is sometimes difficult for me to distinguish between the primeval National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the here-and-now."). But the ethnic-cleansing in which the Israelis expelled 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 and the apartheid character of Israel's present occupation of the West Bank are objective realities. Rosenfeld is suggesting that, to take an honest look at either the occupation or the events of 1948, as so many Israeli writers, journalists, and politicians have done, is to "delegitimize" Israel and promote anti-Semitism.

Just last week, Danny Rubinstein, senior correspondent covering Palestinian affairs for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was slated to speak to the British Zionist Federation - and then, at the last minute, his speech was canceled. The reason? Rubinstein had pointed out that "today Israel is an apartheid state with different status for different communities." (While many liberal Jewish Americans can't bring themselves to accept the apartheid comparison, that's not true of their Israeli counterparts who actually know what's going on in the West Bank. Former education minister Shulamit Aloni, for example, or journalist Amira Hass use the comparison. (The comparison first occurred to me on a visit to Kibbutz Yizreel in 1978, when the elders of my Zionist youth movement, Habonim, who had emigrated from South Africa to Israel, warned that the settlement policy of the then-new Likud government was designed to prevent Israel letting go of the West Bank. The population there, they told us, would never be given the right to vote in Israel, and so the result would be, as they presciently put it, "an apartheid situation.")

Use of the term "apartheid" in reference to the occupation does draw the attention of those who prefer to look away from the fact that Israel is routinely engaged in behavior democratic society has deemed morally odious and unacceptable when it has occurred in other contexts. It is precisely because that fact makes them uncomfortable, I suspect, that they react so emotionally to the A-word. Take black South Africans who suffered under apartheid on a visit to the West Bank -- a mild-mannered moderate Nobel Peace Prize winner such as Bishop Desmond Tutu, for example -- ask them about the validity of the comparison, and you know the answer you're going to get.

Moreover, it's an answer with which a growing number of Jews, who place the universal, ethical and social justice traditions of their faith above those of narrow tribalism, are willing to deal.

In an earlier commentary, perhaps presaging his break with Zionism, Burg noted in 2002:

"Yes, we Israelis have revived the Hebrew language, created a marvelous theater and a strong national currency. Our Jewish minds are as sharp as ever. We are traded on the Nasdaq. But is this why we created a state? The Jewish people did not survive for two millennia in order to pioneer new weaponry, computer security programs or antimissile missiles. We were supposed to be a light unto the nations. In this we have failed. It turns out that the 2,000-year struggle for Jewish survival comes down to a state of settlements, run by an amoral clique of corrupt lawbreakers who are deaf both to their citizens and to their enemies. A state lacking justice cannot survive. More and more Israelis are coming to understand this as they ask their children where they expect to live in 25 years. Children who are honest admit, to their parents' shock, that they do not know."

Although I am not religious, I share Burg's view that universal justice is at the heart of the Jewish tradition.

Growing up in apartheid South Africa was an object lesson in Jewish ethics. Yes, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the colonial white society of my childhood, but the mantle of victimhood belonged to others. And if you responded to the in-no-way-exclusively-so, but very Jewish impulse to seek justice, you found yourself working side by side not only with the remarkable number of Jews who filled leadership roles in the liberation movement, but also with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and others.

Judaism's universal ethical calling can't really be answered if we live only among ourselves -- and Israel's own experience suggests it's essentially impossible to do so without doing injustice to others. Israel is only 59 years old, a brief moment in the sweep of Jewish history, and I'd argue that Judaism's survival depends instead on its ability to offer a sustaining moral and ethical anchor in a world where the concepts of nation and nationality are in decline (but the ferocity of nationalism may not be). Israel's relevance to Judaism's survival depends first and foremost on its ability, as Burg points out, to deliver justice, not only to its citizens, but to those it has hurt.

Tony Karon is a senior editor at TIME.com where he analyzes the Middle East and other international conflicts. South African-born and raised, yet a lifelong fan of Liverpool, he offers comment and analysis -- as well as a World Cup blog -- on his own web site Rootless Cosmopolitan. He also edits Global Beat, an annotated weekly digest of international conflict coverage.

Richard Gage, member of the AIA and founder of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, gave the following presentation to a packed house at the University of Manitoba on May 29, 2007.

Watch one of the best technical analysis of the World Trade Center "controlled demolition theory" on September 11, 2001.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Arnon Milchan - Mossad's Man in the Middle
by Christopher Bollyn
1 September 2007

Photo: Arnon Milchan Mossad's man in the middle, between two of the architects of 9-11 and the War on Terror: Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu.

Who controls the "hidden hand" in the U.S. mass media that censors and suppresses the crucial 9-11 evidence? What is the nexus connecting the architects of 9-11 with the mass media moguls who are covering up the truth?

The on-going cover-up of the evidence of Israeli involvement in 9-11 and explosions in the World Trade Center by the U.S. mass media is indicative of a high-level connection between the architects of the "false flag" terror attacks and the media moguls who control the major news networks in the United States.

As a longtime observer of Israel and the Middle East, I have watched how the U.S. mass media has increasingly become an instrument of Israeli propaganda. As Zionists have extended their grip on American media networks the major television, radio, film and print media outlets have effectively become propaganda tools of a foreign state - Israel - and are used to manipulate U.S. public opinion to support the Zionist agenda. The painfully obvious anti-Arab and anti-Islamic bias of Hollywood films and news-related programs has become ever more extreme as pro-Israel Zionists have achieved near total control of the U.S. mass media.

It needs to be understood that the Zionist conquest of the U.S. mass media did not simply happen by chance or as a result of natural market forces. It is the planned result of a long-term covert strategy put into effect decades ago by the government of Israel to control the news and entertainment networks that inform how Americans view Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East.

The Israelis realized that if they could control what Americans read, see, and hear about Zionism, Israel, and the Middle East then they would be able to control how they think. Controlling U.S. public opinion is crucial to realizing the Zionist agenda.

Zionist control of the the major media networks has resulted in Americans getting an extremely distorted and biased view of the world, particularly of the Middle East and of such significant events as 9-11 and the "War on Terror."

Understanding the strategy and the people behind Israel's conquest of the American mass media is an essential step to recovering our national sovereignty.

As an independent journalist and 9-11 researcher, I have seen how Zionist-controlled media outlets are actively engaged in covering up the evidence of Israeli involvement in the "false flag" attacks of 9-11 and the Zionist-planned "War on Terror." I have personally been subjected to 6 years of slander and defamation from a host of Zionist-controlled news outlets, including CNN and FOX News, simply because I have investigated and written about the evidence of Israeli involvement.

Today, the United States of America is by all appearances an Israeli-occupied state. The U.S. Congress dutifully authorizes the annual payment of an immense tribute to Israel, some three thousand million dollars a year.

Like a subservient colony, the United States provides hundreds of thousands of its young men and women to fight and die as mercenaries in Zionist-planned wars in the Middle East. The tens of thousands of American and European Christian soldiers and mercenaries fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are very similar to the former Mamluks of Baghdad - captured "male white slaves" serving their Zionist rulers.

This dismal situation is, of course, not new. It has only become more obvious and extreme. The United States has provided more than $108 billion in direct aid to the state of Israel since 1949 (Washington Report, July 2006) and the U.S. State Dept. recently promised the Israeli military another $30 billion over the next ten years - a 25 percent increase from the present level.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of U.S. soldiers have died as a result of serving on or near the front lines in Israel's wars. The 241 American marines killed in the Beirut bombing of 1983 and the 34 servicemen killed during the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty are the first that come to mind.

Nearly 4,000 American men and women have died during the current phase, the occupation stage, of the 16-year war against Iraq. The U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq, an illegal war of aggression, is clearly a Zionist-planned war in which Americans and other mercenaries actually do the fighting -- and dying.

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE?

The obvious question is where is the outrage? Where is the spiritual, intellectual, and political resistance to this blatant exploitation of Americans and their national resources by a tiny foreign state with a militant and racist ideology? Why do patriotic Americans tolerate this abuse of the "land of the free and the home of the brave?"

While the power of the Israeli lobby (and an occasional murder) may explain the lack of any significant political resistance in the U.S. Congress to Zionist demands, it can not explain how the American population has come to accept this extremely bizarre and abusive relationship with a foreign state.

How has Zionist control of the United States been foisted onto the American people?

ZIONIST DECEPTIONS

Many Americans willingly accept the extremely one-sided and abusive relationship with Israel because they have internalized three fundamental Zionist deceptions, which have been forced into their brains by the controlled mass media.

The first is the religious hoax that equates the modern state of Israel with the Israel of the Bible. This religious fraud elevates modern-day Israelis, regardless of their actual ethnicity, to being the rightful heirs of the Promised Land. Although this hoax is quickly revealed to anyone who actually reads Zionist history, it has been successfully foisted onto millions of extremely naive and gullible Christians. These misled and abused people are often referred to as Christian Zionists.

The second fundamental Zionist deception is that Israel is a "sister democracy" of the United States and that Israelis and Americans share the same "democratic" values. This lie is also quickly exposed by reading Israeli history or visiting Israeli-occupied Palestine. The only Americans who could possibly share Israeli values are those who believe in Jewish racism and supremacism -- the central pillar of the Zionist worldview that is completely un-American.

The third Zionist deception is that 19 Arab Muslims under the leadership of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Osama bin Laden were behind the 9-11 attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This deception has been used to usher in the Zionist-planned "War on Terror," which has brought U.S. and European troops into an extensive long-term Middle Eastern war.

Why hasn't the media interviewed the families of the 19 suspected hijackers? Why does the media not demand an open trial for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged "mastermind" of 9-11, currently held by the U.S. in Guantanamo? Why is the media treatment of these people only as deep as their photos?

While the first two deceptions are primarily philosophical in nature and rather pointless to argue, the 9-11 deception is painfully real and something we allow to continue at our own peril.

"AUSCHWITZ OF THE MIND"

These Zionist deceptions, which are all demonstrably false, have been carefully planted and cultivated in the minds of millions of people through the devices of the Zionist-controlled media.

Zionist domination of the mass media and academia in the United States is so pervasive that Americans are subjected, like Truman Burbank in the film The Truman Show, to a constant barrage of multi-level deception, as if the entire population were living in a false construction -- an "Auschwitz of the mind."

Like the false world of Truman Burbank, the Zionist-created worldview is so overwhelming that it prevents many people from ever realizing that they are being held mentally captive. Even when we peel away the layers of deception and expose the fraud, somehow the show goes on. For the criminals in high places, the show must go on.

The first deception, the religious hoax of the Zionist state's connection to the biblical Israel, is doctrine to television evangelists like Pat Robertson and his Christian Coalition, while the second and third have become "conventional wisdom" for the U.S. news and entertainment media.

Because millions of Americans have accepted and internalized these Zionist-created falsehoods they are unable to understand the actual realities of the Middle East or the massive fraud of the "War on Terror." The controlled media is careful to censor any information that might disturb the perverse worldview of America's 40 million Christian Zionists who are kept in the darkness like children locked in a closet.

ZIONISM - "THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS"

When, for example, the highly-regarded Israeli historian Avi Shlaim wrote his 2005 editorial entitled "Is Zionism today the real enemy of the Jews?" his comments were published in the International Herald Tribune (IHT), which is read in 180 nations, but kept out of the pages of The New York Times, the domestic newspaper of its parent company.

Now, why would the New York Times, whose motto is "All The News That's Fit to Print," censor the viewpoint of a reknowned Israeli historian writing on the causes of modern anti-Semitism?

What did Shlaim say that the editors at the Times thought was unfit for Americans to read?

"Israel's image today is negative not because it is a Jewish state but because it habitually transgresses the norms of acceptable international behavior. Indeed, Israel is increasingly perceived as a rogue state, as an international pariah, and as a threat to world peace," Shlaim, an Iraqi Jew who was born in Baghdad, wrote.

"This perception of Israel is a major factor in the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and in the rest of the world. In this sense, Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews."

When one understands that the primary function of the Zionist-controlled media is to keep Americans in the dark about the Middle East and Zionism, it becomes clear why Shlaim's article was published in the international publication owned by the New York Times but kept from their U.S. readership. Shlaim's comments would have greatly disturbed the carefully cultivated Zionist worldview of millions of Americans - both Jews and Gentiles - an audience that is both protected and held captive.

THE MEDIA COVER-UP OF 9-11

As an independent journalist I have seen how many important stories have been covered-up or ignored by the controlled media. I have written about many of these suppressed stories, such as the sinking of Estonia, the downing of Flight TWA 800, and the dangers of depleted uranium. At the top of my list, however, is the most egregious and criminal cover-up of the evidence of 9-11.

"Ninety-five percent of the work of the intelligence agencies around the world is deception and disinformation," German intelligence expert Andreas von Bulow told me in December 2001. This deception is widely propagated in the mainstream media creating an accepted version of events. "Journalists don't even raise the simplest questions," he said. "Those who differ are labeled as crazy."

After the London press conference during Jimmy Walter's 2005 European 9-11 Truth tour, two reporters from the BBC were eager to interview me.

"Why are you the only journalist who does not believe the official explanation of what happened on 9-11?" was their first question.

http://www.bollyn.com/public/BBC_interviewing_Bollyn.jpg

If that were the case, I told them, it is probably due to the fact that others who had questioned the official version had lost their jobs as a result. The van was leaving for the hotel so I decided to cut the interview short. I could see where the interview was heading.

When FOX News and CNN interviewed me on the pretense that they were interested in my 9-11 research and evidence, all they really wanted to do was to smear me as an anti-Semite. In both cases the interviewers were clearly not at all interested in the 9-11 evidence or my research.

"WOE BETIDE HIM..."

"The dissident cannot be taken seriously," the veteran British journalist Roland Huntford wrote about the mass media in his book The New Totalitarians. "There is a range of tolerated opinions, and a narrow one it is: woe betide him who departs from it."

While Huntford was writing about the controlled media of Sweden in the 1970s, his comments hold true for the Zionist-controlled mass media in the United States today, particularly when the subject is 9-11 or Israel.

I, for example, have paid a very high price for investigating and writing about the evidence that contradicts the government's version of what happened on 9-11. The first attack came from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL) in November 2001.

The ADL, a private organization dedicated to supporting Zionist and Israeli interests, first smeared the American Free Press, the newspaper I wrote for, as a "conspiratorial and anti-Semitic weekly newspaper," which it said had "repeatedly turned to the subject of the 9-11 attacks as grist for its mill."

The ADL then singled me out for my article "Some Survivors Say Bombs Exploded Inside WTC" in which, the ADL said, "Bollyn suggests that the 'mainstream media' is ignoring eyewitness accounts of bombs that exploded inside the World Trade Center before the collapse of the Twin Towers."

See: http://www.adl.org/terrorism_america/saying_121101.asp

I did, indeed. The first line of my article said exactly that:

"Despite reports from numerous eyewitnesses and experts, including news reporters on the scene, who heard or saw explosions immediately before the collapse of the World Trade Center, there has been virtual silence in the mainstream media."

But, I asked, why would an organization dedicated to Israeli and Jewish interests attack me, as a journalist, for writing about eyewitness reports of explosions in the World Trade Center? What did my writing about this extremely newsworthy subject have to do with Israel or Jews?

Had my BBC interview gone on, I might have asked why the BBC editors had ignored and censored the comments of their own reporter, Steve Evans, who had been in the South Tower (WTC 2) when it was hit and who reported having observed a "series of explosions."

Shortly after the destruction of the WTC, the BBC interviewed Evans on their television news program based in London. Because Evans' observations were ignored by the BBC and not followed up, I wrote about his report of the explosions he felt in the South Tower:

"Evans was asked what he had seen: "Its more what I felt really," Evans said. "I was at the base of the 2nd tower, the second tower that was hit. There was an explosion - I didn't think it was an explosion - but the base of the building shook. I felt it shake...then when we were outside, the second explosion happened and then there was a series of explosions."

[At this point the London news anchor cut Evans off in mid-sentence rather than listen to Evans continue to describe the "series of explosions" that he saw and felt. Evans' microphone was turned down.]

But in a minute Evans returns to the "series of explosions" that he witnessed: "We can only wonder at the kind of damage - the kind of human damage - which was caused by those explosions - those series of explosions," Evans said.

Evans is a professional journalist and his observations of explosions in the second tower need to be taken into account by anybody looking into the cause of the catastrophe of September 11. Many eyewitnesses have reported similar explosions, but these reports, and what they suggest, are intentionally being censored and avoided by the very people who are supposed to be investigating the cause of the collapses."

The same kind of censorship occurred with FOX News, CNN, and the leading U.S. news networks that had reporters at the World Trade Center. Firsthand reports of explosions at the WTC from professional reporters were broadcast only once -- and never picked up again, except by the much-despised "conspiracy theorists."

The news reports that five Middle Eastern men were being sought or had been captured in New Jersey after they had videotaped themselves celebrating in front of the burning towers were treated in the same way. The arrest of the five men, all Israelis, two of whom were known Mossad agents, was only reported in the Bergen Record (New Jersey) on September 12, 2001 -- but never discussed or investigated by the national news networks.

ISRAELIS FOREWARNED

Likewise, the story of the Odigo text message warning of the attacks - before they occurred - was dropped into the media's memory hole. The instant text messages, which were precise to the minute, had been sent via the Israeli-owned Odigo instant messaging service and had even been received by Odigo employees in Israel, but the story of Israelis having prior knowledge of the attacks was never discussed in the U.S. mass media.

How did the news editors at the BBC, FOX News, CNN, and the leading networks decide to censor their own reporters and avoid discussing certain aspects of 9-11?

Let's look at this logically. 9-11 was the biggest story these news editors had ever handled. Suffice it to say that the editorial decisions about how to cover 9-11 must have been made by the boss at the top. Any decision to omit or censor reports about explosions at the World Trade Center or indications of Israeli involvement would have been made by the senior executive of each network.

In the case of CNN it would have been Gerald M. Levin, the CEO of Time Warner, who acquired Turner Broadcasting in 1997. (Levin unexpectedly announced his resignation in December 2001, less than three months after 9-11.)

At FOX News the top decision maker would have been Rupert Murdoch, CEO of News Corp.

At ABC News it would have been Michael D. Eisner, CEO of Disney, the network's parent company.

Were the media moguls Murdoch, Levin, and Eisner involved in 9-11? How else could they know that certain aspects of the event needed to be suppressed by their news networks? Their networks have been suppressing important information about 9-11 for 6 years now. They have been actively involved in a conspiracy to cover-up the truth. How can that be? Who is behind this cover-up?

What occult power, what hidden hand, would be able to communicate with these men and influence them to suppress important reports and evidence from the terror attacks of 9-11?

ARNON MILCHAN - MOSSAD'S MAN IN THE MIDDLE

If one considers the known evidence of Israeli prior knowledge of 9-11, the Odigo text messages and the 5 arrested Mossad agents, for example, as indicative of Israeli state involvement in the crime, the identity of the occult power behind the cover-up is rather obvious.

The "hidden hand" suppressing the information about 9-11 would have to be a high-level person in the Israeli political-military intelligence establishment who also has very close relations with media kingpins like Murdoch, Levin, and Eisner.

Arnon Milchan (a.k.a. Milchen) is such a person.

While millions of Americans have watched his films, such as Pretty Woman and JFK, very few know that Arnon Milchan is a "best friend" of Shimon Peres (born Szymon Perski in Wiśiewo, Poland) the current Israeli president and godfather of Israel's nuclear arsenal.

Shimon Peres is "widely regarded as the architect of Israel's assumed nuclear weapons programme," the BBC reported when he was elected president of Israel in June 2007. Peres was elected to replace the incumbent Israeli president Moshe Katsav who was forced to take a leave of absence after being accused of rape and other sexual offences. (Milchan is also good friends of Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu.)

Milchan's 40-year friendship with Peres, the man who oversaw the construction of Israel's nuclear weapon program is key to understanding Milchan's career as an undercover operative, weapons procurer, and film producer.

The fact that Milchan, the Hollywood producer, has been Israel's "foremost weapons procurer" for decades, brokering deals for "everything from nuclear triggers to rocket fuel to guidance systems," is seldom mentioned in the U.S. news media.

This is probably due to the fact that Milchan is also a "best friend" and business partner of Rupert Murdoch. He is also a close friend and business partner of Levin (Warner Brothers) and Eisner.

"I consider him one of my best friends," Milchan said about Murdoch, "and I think vice versa. We're having a ball. He's a very cool guy."

"Kingpins like Warner Bros.' Gerald Levin and Disney's Michael Eisner are quick to return his calls," the American Jewish journalist Ann Louise Bardach wrote about Milchan in her article "The Last Tycoon" in April 2000.

In 1997, after a six-year relationship with Warner Bros., Milchan became a partner with Murdoch, selling him 20 percent of his film company, New Regency Productions, for $200 million. Murdoch also invested another $30 million in Regency Television. Today, Murdoch's equity partnership with Milchan is close to 50 percent.

"Milchan's deal with Fox also assures him a level of financial security," Bardach wrote. "With Murdoch's $200 million investment and a subsequent $600 million line of credit from a team of banks led by Chase Manhattan, Milchan is well into mogul territory.

"Milchan's tony offices occupy most of Building 12, right next door to the Executive Building on the Fox lot," Bardach wrote. "And it is from this seat of power that Milchan is building an entertainment empire that could one day rival Murdoch's."

THE MILCHAN INFLUENCE

The Israeli influence in films and news media has profoundly affected the quality of news reporting and entertainment. Israeli attitudes and ideas are now disseminated through national media outlets which reach the entire U.S. population on a daily basis. Israeli-made films often reveal hints or clues about actual crimes or criminal plans the Israeli producers are aware of.

One such project, The Lone Gunman, produced by Milchan's "best friend" Rupert Murdoch, had a uncanny resemblance to the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Was this Milchan's influence?

The Milchan-Murdoch partnership in television production may be key to understanding the genesis of the plot of the pilot episode of this short-lived television series. In the first episode a passenger airliner is hijacked by remote control and flown toward the World Trade Center. Disaster is averted at the last minute by over-riding the computer program that has hijacked the plane.

The Lone Gunman, produced by Rupert Murdoch in 2000, revealed an extremely uncanny prescience of 9-11. During the same year it was made, Milchan was producing two television series in collaboration with Fox Television: Roswell, which aired on Warner Brothers network, and Malcolm in the Middle, which aired on Fox. The Lone Gunman pilot episode aired on FOX Television in March 2001.

Given the long, close, and extensive collaboration between Murdoch and Milchan it seems fair to ask: Was Arnon Milchan the original source of the plotline for the Lone Gunman?

Why were the people involved in the production of this episode not investigated in the media? Why did the media ignore its own uncanny prescience, the Lone Gunman episode, which mirrored reality 6 months later?

Was the similarity between the Murdoch-produced show and reality too close for comfort? Was it too uncomfortable to discuss the origin of the idea for the show? Apparently so.

In Milchan's highly-controversial film JFK (1991), directed by Oliver Stone, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is ascribed to conspirators within the U.S. military-industrial complex. Whose idea was this? Why is Arnon Milchan's own criminal connection with Itzhak Rabin, who was in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, not an issue here?

In his futuristic film Brazil (1985), directed by Terry Gilliam, terrorist explosions go off randomly in cafes for no apparent reason, very much like the seemingly senseless terrorism that plagues occupied Iraq. Is this Milchan's influence?

"Anyone closely associated with Peres pretty well must be satanic," Barry Chamish, a Canadian-Israeli wrote, "but Milchan produced a film that shows he has insider information. Chamish advises his readers to watch The Devil's Advocate with Al Pacino to "understand the implication."

"Milchan runs his company like a family business. Heading up New Regency Productions for him is his childhood friend David Matalon, whose parents were best friends with Milchan's," Bardach wrote. "Daughter Alexandra [Milchan-Lambert] is vice president of production in Los Angeles."

Matalon has served as president and CEO of New Regency Productions since 1995.

In 1986, Matalon, an Israeli co-founder of Tri-Star pictures, released a film entitled Iron Eagle, in which the aerial combat scenes were filmed entirely with the Israeli Air Force. The plot of this film is about how a few teenagers are able to steal U.S. military aircraft, codes, and information from under the noses of the military brass and run an entire military operation in which they bomb Libya without the knowledge of the military command. This film gives some indication of the kind of projects, and ideas, the Israeli military has collaborated on with their fellow Israelis in Hollywood.

THE SECRETIVE MOGUL

"Averse to publicity and little known outside Hollywood" is how Arnon Milchan's biography begins.

"My idea of a good profile is no profile," Milchan told Bardach. Murdoch, Levin, and Eisner have obviously respected the Israeli's wish, but why would a Hollywood mogul not want to be known to the public?

"Arnon Milchan has kept his secrets to himself," Bardach wrote.

Indeed, very little is known about Milchan, Israel's super weapons agent, except that he spends more time in Tel Aviv and France than he does in his office on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles, according to Bardach. Now, why would a Hollywood movie producer spend more time in Tel Aviv, where no movies are being made, than in Hollywood?

POLISH ZIONIST ROOTS

Milchan was born on December 6, 1944 on the Zionist settlement of Rehovot, in what was then Palestine, according to Current Biography (2000). Rehovot, one of the earliest Zionist settlements, was founded in 1890 by Polish and Russian Jews, one of whom was Milchan's paternal grandfather. Rehovot has a street and a neighborhood named "Milchen", no doubt in memory of his grandfather.

"My family's been there for 500 years," Milchan told Bardach. "My grandfather was a very close friend of President [Chaim]Weizmann." Oddly, Bardach does not provide the name of his grandfather who was "a very close friend" of Israel's first president. Likewise, she does not give the name of the ancestors Milchan proudly claims have lived in Palestine for 500 years.

"Milchan's father was an enviable success story himself, having laid the sprinklers that irrigated Israel," Bardach wrote. "Later, he would handle some of Israel's lucrative military contracts, according to his son."

Bardach continues:

"However, it was young Milchan who put the company on the map internationally, after his father's sudden death. Following a spot of schooling in London and Geneva, where he excelled in soccer and tennis, Milchan dropped out and returned to Israel. Soon, he struck gold. By marketing a newly discovered nutrient that quadrupled citrus production, he brought his company stratospheric sales throughout the world.

"This is a man who made his fortune by screwing with nature," says screenwriter Shawn Slovo, who began her career as Milchan's secretary in 1977. "He's the Israeli who made the desert bloom. Amazing when you think about it. He could have retired at the age of 22."

Instead, like a kid racing around the Monopoly board, Milchan gobbled up another half dozen businesses--including electronics, chemicals, aerospace and plastics. Still in his early twenties, he met the Shah of Iran and reportedly talked the wily Persian into dozens of contracts, one to build much of Tehran's airport."

When one considers that Arnon Milchan, in his early twenties, was among the founders of Israel's Labor Party in the 1960s with Shimon Peres, Moshe Dayan, and Teddy Kolleck, then one can appreciate that his contracts in Iran and his career in arms dealing and Hollywood have been done with the active collaboration of the Mossad.

"I'M AN AGENT"

Milchan is a "go-between for American weapons manufacturers and the Israeli government, thus playing a major role in the strengthening of the Israeli military," according to Current Biography (2000).

"Throughout the 1970s, '80s and even up until the Gulf War in 1991, Milchan was Israel's foremost weapons procurer, brokering deals for such prized superweapons as the Hawk missile and the famous Scud-foil of the Gulf War, the Patriot," Bardach wrote.

"At different times in his career, his Israeli company, Milchan Brothers, has represented arms manufacturers such as Raytheon, North American Rockwell, Beechcraft, Bell Helicopter and Magnavox. Or, as Milchan downplays it, "there were a bunch of them." Nevertheless, he bristles at being called an arms dealer. "I'm their rep in Israel," he says emphatically. "I get a fee, a commission. I'm not even the buyer. I'm an agent."

"What we do is send my people to the United States," Milchan told Bardach, "so we know what these guys are talking about, and you go back and say to the buyer, 'I think this guy has some interesting stuff. Would you meet with him?' And then you arrange a meeting with the head of the [Israeli] air force and the head of this and the head of that."

In 1992, Milchan was described by the Jerusalem Post as being "among the handful of Hollywood moguls with the muscle and money to single-handedly give the go-ahead for a new movie project. The Mossad is undoubtedly the source of much of Milchan's "muscle and money."

Who pays Milchan's commissions? Whether the commission is paid by the weapon's vendor or by the state of Israel, the money going to Milchan is American money. He is paid either by the company or from the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars provided to Israel for weapons every year. In this way, Milchan, Mossad's man in the middle, has been enriched by U.S. weapons sales to Israel.

"BIG STAR TO RAYTHEON"

In 1975, for example, Milchan reportedly received an improper $300,000 commission paid by a Raytheon subsidiary for the sale of Hawk missiles.

Raytheon makes the Patriot and Hawk missile systems and key components of the Global Hawk. Of particular interest is Raytheon's Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) which allow remote operators to pilot the Global Hawk from "thousands of miles away." This is the kind of technology that is thought to have been used in the terror attacks of 9-11, at the Pentagon in particular.

Terry Gilliam told Bardach that he'll never forget a visit to the Paris Air Show with Milchan during the filming of Baron Munchausen. "It was wonderful to see how the whole arms business worked," Gilliam said. "Arnon was very psyched about the video games. He brought his son with him, who was then a teenager, to play the games, which can replicate the destruction of the planet. He took me to the Raytheon booth, and it was all showmanship. He was obviously a big star to Raytheon."

"Growing up, I would read that he was an arms dealer; he was in the Mossad, and he was a movie producer," his daughter Alexandra told Bardach. She is married to a Scott Lambert, an agent with William Morris in Beverley Hills and graduate of American University in Washington, D.C. (Lambert happens to share the same name of a former Director of Manufacturing Systems at Raytheon.)

MODUS OPERANDI

When one looks at Milchan's career as an Israeli agent who bought media outlets with dirty money one should consider that this may be the modus operandi he has employed to gain influence and outlets in the U.S. media market. Money laundering could explain his ability to make huge deals and control media networks - and his desire for secrecy.

"He's extremely powerful because he brings money to the table," journalist Anita Busch wrote. "He's unique in that way. He's got a credit line that's astronomical, like, you know, almost a billion dollars."

Terry Gilliam, the director of Brazil, wondered where the money came from. "Arnon can be great, but when it comes to money there's something - I don't know - bits just don't seem to connect."

Charles McKeown, a film writer, had a hard time getting paid by the billion dollar Israeli. "You just never know whether he was telling the truth or not," McKeown said. "The kind of deals he was in, the level of finance and the way he operated, seemed to me like a world upside down. I felt we were dealing with a sort of dangerous, shady quality."

MONEY LAUNDERER

In 1975, the Israeli government headed by Yitzhak Rabin and Defense Minister Shimon Peres recruited Milchan to launder money from South Africa. Milchan "has admitted laundering some of the more than $100 million spent by the South Africans during the 1970s in an attempt to improve the white government's image abroad," according to the authors of The Iran-Contra Connection.

Because both Israel and South Africa were ostracized in the 1970s, "The money laundering was part of the two countries' plan to buy newspapers and other media in various parts of the world," his biography reads.

"The Rabin government recruited ... Milchan to launder cash ... to purchase influential publications," Andrew and Leslie Cockburn wrote in their book Dangerous Liaison.

THE MIDDLEMAN

Milchan told Bardach he was asked by "prominent Israelis if 'we can use your companies to make deals to buy newspapers.' I said, 'Sure. It sounds like fun.' Basically, I was used as a middleman."

A citizen of both Israel and Monaco, he is said to control 30 companies in 17 countries, profiting in everything from film production to the weapons trade. But how does one man control 30 companies in 17 countries? Clearly there must be an entire team behind these businesses. Milchan's team could be called Team Mossad.

"I'll say it in my own words," Milchan told Bardach. "I love Israel, and any way I can help Israel, I will. I'll do it again and again. If you say I'm an arms dealer, that's your problem. In Israel, there is practically no business that does not have something to do with defense."

Milchan also funds Christian Zionist movements. Milchan has reportedly contributed significantly to the Christian Coalition, an organization started by the Reverend Pat Robertson, a staunch supporter of Israel.

He also underwrites the Israeli Network which transmits Israeli television programs to the United States and Canada via cable and satellite.

Milchan is also an owner of the Israeli television station known as Channel 10. The other owners are Ronald Lauder, who like Milchan owned about 25 percent, and Josef (Yossi) Maiman, who owns 51 percent and who has been with Channel 10 since it was founded in 2003. Rupert Murdoch bought 9 percent of Channel 10 stock from Milchan and Lauder in 2006.

(Maiman and Lauder are both linked to the Mossad and 9-11. For more on Maiman read "The Great Game: The War For Caspian Oil And Gas." Information about Lauder and 9-11 is in "Mossad - The Israeli Connection To 9-11")

SMUGGLING NUCLEAR TRIGGERS

Milchan should have been busted in 1985 for smuggling trigger devices for nuclear bombs when a business associate, Richard Kelly Smyth, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles on charges of smuggling 810 krytrons to Israel. Because krytrons are used in the detonators of nuclear weapons, they are called triggers and their export is tightly regulated.

In 1973, Smyth started a company called Milco International, Inc., financed, according to the Washington Post, by Milchan, hence its name. Up to 80 percent of Milco's business was reportedly with Milchan and Israel.

In 1980, the federal indictment asserted, Smyth and Milco sent 610 krytrons to Israel without the necessary licenses, plus another 200 in 1982.

The 1985 indictment identified the Israeli buyers of the nuclear triggers as Heli Trading Ltd. and Milchan Brothers, two of Milchan's Israel-based companies. Federal authorities told NBC News in 1993 that Milchan also shared in the profits derived from the sales.

Announcement of the indictments came four days after the Israeli Defense Ministry, reacting to news of the grand jury probe, admitted that it had the devices, known as krytrons.

The krytrons were shipped between 1979 and 1983 to an Israeli firm under contract to the government for defense work. The Israeli Ministry of Defense returned only 469 of the krytrons, and Smyth vanished a week before he was to appear for trial.

PROTECTING ISRAEL

Robert C. Bonner, the U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, refused to comment on questions about whether the Israeli government had been involved in the illegal actions.

State Department spokesman Edward Djerejian said, "I can only note that the indictment does not mention any Israeli citizen."

Djerejian added that the United States "has expressed its serious concern to the Israeli government about this alleged violation of U.S. law" and had been assured that Israel will cooperate with the continuing U.S. investigation "to the full extent permitted under Israeli law."

"Smyth's disappearance, and the unwillingness of Israeli officials to cooperate with U.S. investigators on the case, left federal authorities unable to proceed," Robert Windrem of NBC News reported in July 2001.

Although Milchan is not mentioned in the indictment, a Milco employee, Gretel Siler, who identified herself as corporate treasurer of Milco, told The Washington Post that Milchan had been associated with Milco in various export transactions and had been involved in purchasing the krytrons from the manufacturer, EG&G of Wellesley, Mass.

Milchan denied being involved in the $60,000 krytron deal, but told "60 Minutes" (CBS) that he had allowed the Israeli government to use his companies as conduits for trading with the United States.

"I'm not saying I'm an innocent person - but in this specific case, I knew nothing about it," Milchan told Frank Rose of Premiere magazine. In any case, Milchan was never charged in the case.

Robert Mainhardt, a nuclear scientist and former director of Milco, told "60 Minutes" that he had resigned after Milchan had asked him to obtain advanced nuclear reactor designs and a supply of uranium hexachloride, which is used in the enrichment of bomb-grade uranium.

Mainhardt's fellow directors at Milco, Arthur Biehl and Ivan Getting began to feel uneasy sometime in 1982, the Washington Post reported. The Washington Post did a series of articles about this smuggling. The most important excerpts from the series are the following:

When they joined the board of directors of Milco International in 1980, Biehl and Getting recalled, they thought the company's primary business was developing aerospace software for U.S. military and space programs. They had been recruited by the company's owner, Richard K. Smyth, while serving with him on an influential panel that advises the U.S. Air Force on advanced technologies, work that required them to have top-secret clearances.

But they soon realized that Smyth, a California-based computer expert, spent most of his time trying to buy equipment with military applications, including a uranium byproduct known as "green salt" that can be processed into weapons-grade uranium, for the government of Israel. Often, they said, the sales were made through an Israeli middleman, Arnon Milchan, a flamboyant businessman who sold arms before becoming a producer of such popular movies as the recent Brazil.

"I didn't have any evidence there was anything improper," Biehl said. "I just thought it was a strange way to do business . . . . I wondered why the Israelis were paying fees to {Milco and Milchan} when they could get the same equipment directly" using U.S. foreign aid.

In late 1982, Biehl and Getting resigned from Milco's board of directors, in part because of their misgivings about Smyth's dealings with Milchan and Israel.

Asked why Israel didn't buy the krytrons through its 200-member procurement staff in New York, which buys military equipment with $1.8 billion in annual U.S. aid, Yossi Gal, spokesman with the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. told the Post that Israel occasionally used "independent agents" to make purchases.

Under U.S. laws, Smyth needed a munitions license from the State Department to ship the krytrons overseas. If he had tried to obtain one, according to a knowledgeable State Department source, he would have been turned down because Israel has not signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Smyth's relations with Israel began in the early 1970s when he was working for North American Rockwell as a chief engineer in its avionics division and traveled to Israel to help set up a subsidiary. There, he met Milchan, who was Rockwell's representative and "point man" with the Israeli government, according to an associate of Smyth from that period.

In January 1973, Smyth founded Milco while still working at Rockwell. His associate recalled Smyth once saying that Milchan provided money to start Milco; this associate said he believes that the name Milco was derived from Milchan.

At the time that Milco was founded, former U.S. intelligence officials said, the Central Intelligence Agency knew that Israel was working to perfect a solid-fuel tactical missile, known as the Jericho, that could carry nuclear warheads. In late 1973, Smyth's associate recalled, he saw Milco order forms for several barrels of a butyl compound used to bind explosive powders into solid rocket fuel. Smyth said he was shipping the butyl to Milchan through another company he owned in Houston, the associate recalled.

Smyth's next known contact with Israel occurred in 1975, about a year after he left Rockwell to run Milco full time. On Oct. 30 of that year, Smyth applied for a munitions license to ship 400 krytrons to Heli Trading Inc., Milchan's company in Israel.

The application, which is filed in court records in Los Angeles, said that the "end user" would be Rehovot Instruments Ltd. and that the krytrons would be used as "remotely located intrusion detectors."

Smyth filed the application after being told by an official from an unnamed U.S. intelligence agency that a license was required, according to court records. Smyth met with the official and told him that "Arnon Milchan {had} requested that a certain number of krytrons be shipped to Israel," according to a letter filed by William Fahey, the prosecutor in the current case.

Internal Milco records, provided by former Smyth associates, show that the company struggled financially from 1975 to 1980. It landed several small contracts for less than $25,000 with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Air Force for studies on computer software for avionics systems in advanced aircraft, the MX missile and a small ship defense missile called the Patriot.

It was also in 1980, the federal indictment alleged, that Milco sent 610 krytrons to Israel in 11 shipments without obtaining the needed licenses. Smyth bought them from EG&G in Salem, Mass., the sole producer of the switches in the United States.

In mid-1981, Smyth listed several contracts with Heli Trading to acquire training simulators for Hawk air defense missiles, a voice scrambler and lasers. He also cited "probable" contracts for a computerized flight control system for Israel's Lavi fighter plane, and thermal batteries and gyroscopes.

James Russell, vice president of Incosym Inc., a maker of gyroscopes in Thousand Oaks, Calif., said he sold Milco several $10,000 gyroscopes in that period. Smyth told him the navigation aids would be used on Israeli navy patrol boats. Milco also won a flight control contract for the Lavi in 1983, according to a listing in Aviation Week magazine.

Smyth's world started to crumble in early 1983 after someone broke into Milco's offices and took several thousand dollars worth of computer and software equipment. Because he was doing some classified U.S. government work and feared some records of it might have been stolen, Smyth wrote a lengthy report about the theft for the Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, then-company attorney Brian R. Carter said.

SMYTH DISAPPEARS TO ISRAEL

Milco company records revealed that Milchan's companies had ordered large quantities of missile-related equipment and materials between 1977 and 1982. Among the nuclear items listed were the 810 krytrons, plus neutron generators, high-speed oscilloscopes and high-voltage condensers, according to a 1996 paper on Israel's Nuclear Weapon Capability by the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

In August 1985, U.S. Customs subpoenaed the financial records linking Smyth and Milchan. The records were neither turned over nor found. Smyth and his wife disappeared just days before his scheduled trial, which almost certainly would have involved Milchan.

"There were so many...indictments that they probably decided just to get out," Mainhardt, who operates a security business in Dublin, Calif., said. "If I had to make a guess, I'd say they're in Israel."

"Let's assume that there's nothing that Israel and the United States do separately," Milchan told Bardach. "Smyth, a U.S. fugitive for more than a decade, was last seen in Herzliya Pituach, an affluent suburb of Tel Aviv, where Milchan owns a home," Bardach wrote in 2000.

In July 2001, Smyth was arrested in Malaga, Spain.

Smyth pleaded guilty in December to one count of violating the Arms Export Control Act and one count of making a false statement to Customs agents. Proscutors dropped 28 other counts.

On April 29, 2002 Smyth was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison and fined $20,000 for illegally exporting to Israel the devices that are used as triggers for nuclear weapons.

Smyth, 72, was immediately made eligible for parole at his sentencing.

MILCHAN AND PERES

"In Israel, Milchan spends much of his time with best friend Shimon Peres," Bardach wrote.

"Milchan's political connections would prove to be the foundation of his future empire," she wrote. "In addition to agriculture, there would be biotechnology, advertising, aerospace and the biggest jackpot of them all - arms."

In 1953, at age 30, Shimon Peres was appointed by Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to become Director-General of the Ministry of Defense. Within three years, Peres had laid the foundation for Israel's nuclear weapon program, according to the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control.

Peres started Israel's program to develop nuclear power and nuclear weapons by convincing the French to help Israel build a secret nuclear reactor beginning about 1957. He chose France as the major supplier, arranged the sale of a nuclear reactor, and spent the next decade overseeing the construction of the Dimona nuclear weapon production complex.

Peres is the one who came up with Israel's most often repeated nuclear declaration. At a April 1963 meeting in the White House, Peres responded to President John F. Kennedy's questions about Israel's nuclear program by saying: "Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East." Two years later, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol elevated Peres's words to Israel's official nuclear line.

Finis

Sources:

Bardach, Ann Louise, "The Last Tycoon" Los Angeles Magazine, April 2000

http://www.bardachreports.com/articles/oa_20000400.html

BBC News, "Peres elected Israel's president" June 13, 2007

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6747517.stm

Bollyn, Christopher, "Intel Expert Says 9-11 Looks Like A Hollywood Show" December 2001

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BOL403A.html

Bollyn, "9/11: What Did Rupert Murdoch Know?" October 3, 2003

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=37543

Bollyn, "Mossad - The Israeli Connection To 9-11" April 14, 2005

http://www.rense.com/general64/moss.htm

Bollyn, "Some Survivors Say Bombs Exploded in WTC" September 2001

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=245

Bollyn, "'Series of Explosions' in WTC - BBC" June 28, 2002

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?noframes;read=20617

Bollyn, "9-11 Mossad Agents Admit Mission: 'Our Purpose Was To Document The Event'" June 28, 2002

Bollyn, "Why was Kobi Alexander Allowed to Flee? The Israeli Fugitive, Odigo, and the Forewarning of 9/11" August 24, 2006

Bollyn, "The Great Game: The War For Caspian Oil And Gas" October 14, 2001

All three articles at: http://www.bollyn.com/index/?id=10372

Current Biography, "Arnon Milchan" 2000, H.W. Wilson Company

Lima, Paolo, "Five men detained as suspected conspirators", The Bergen Record, September 12, 2001

McArthur, Shirl, "A Conservative Estimate of Total Direct U.S. Aid to Israel: $108 Billion" Washington Report, July 2006

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/July_2006/0607016.html

Washington Post, "Computer Expert Used Firm to Feed Israel Technology" October 31, 1986

Washington Post, "L.A. Man Indicted in Export of Potential Nuclear Bomb Component to Israel" John M. Goshko, May 17, 1985

Washington Post, "U.S. Asks to Inspect Israeli Atom Sites To Verify Use of Restricted Device" John M. Goshko, May 15, 1985

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Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, "Israeli Nuclear Program Pioneered by Shimon Peres," The Risk Report, Volume 2 Number 4, July-August 1996

http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/Israel-nuclear-peres.html

One is tempted to make a political reflections on 9/11. One is tempted to review videos that question the official narrative (e.g. see this video already viewed by over 6 million people) and/or reflect on new evidence of a major coverup: e.g. http://911truth.org/

A part of our heart is also tempted to get angry at the needless loss of lives. This is especially true when the next war (on Iran) is being planned as evidenced by the Israeli airforce probing the newly installed air defense systems made in Russia and just recently in Iran and Syria. [Hat tip: Mazin Qumsiyeh]

By Régis Debray, Le Monde Diplomatique

Foreword from the journal: Last year President Jacques Chirac asked Régis Debray to study the situation in the Middle East. On 15 January 2007 Debray sent the French authorities the following document on Palestine. It is an important key to understanding a long policy drift whose results are now obvious.

How the world backed itself into a corner

Dennis Ross, formerly the United States envoy to the Middle East, admitted back in 2000 that mistakes had been made in the 1978 Camp David accords: the diplomatic process had not taken enough account of developments on the ground, especially the settlements. The number of Jewish settlers in the Palestinian territories doubled from 1994 to 2000. As many Israelis have settled in the West Bank since the Oslo accords of 1993 as in the previous 25 years. With an international conference again being discussed, it would be a mistake to continue to ignore the real state of affairs. There is no need for a committee of inquiry. The report has already been drawn up, many times over. No conflict in the world is as well documented, mapped and recorded.

The OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), a United Nations agency, keeps up-to-date, detailed maps of the disputed territories, with photographs, population counts and graphs. It takes an hour to look at them, but doing so might forestall some of the never-ending statements of good intentions.

The maps show that the physical, economic and human basis for a viable Palestinian state is disappearing. The two-state solution and Israeli writer Amos Oz's "fair divorce" (a territory shared between two national homes, one smaller than the other and demilitarised but sovereign, viable and continuous) are now empty phrases belonging to the realm of might-have-been. Some might argue that we have not yet reached the point of no return and that the Israelis may have won the territorial battle (with only 22% of British mandate Palestine now outside their control) but the Palestinians are sure to win the demographic battle. They invoke the resilience of the local population in the face of the steam roller that is slowly but surely implementing the 1968 Allon Plan and the 1984 "Road Plan 50".

It is clear from developments on the ground that:

• the purpose of the security wall is not, as is believed, to trace a border that, however illegal (since it encloses over 10% of the West Bank), will at least serve as the dotted line for a future international frontier;

• it is true (as Ehud Omert said on Israeli army radio on 20 March 2006) that Israel's strategic border lies on the Jordan: the whole valley has been declared a forbidden area and the intervening area has been nibbled away (cross-river transit is only possible at certain points);

• the new east-west bypass roads built at the expense of the old north-south axis clearly chart a territory in the process of annexation, with space for three or four Arab bantustans (Jenin, Ramallah and Jericho). The exhaustion of natural resources in these overcrowded enclaves will eventually lead to massive emigration (much of the elite, especially Christian, has already left); and

• with the construction of the separation wall, the ongoing judaisation of East Jerusalem and reconfiguration of the Jerusalem municipality, the UN's repeated but purely formal condemnations have no effect on Israel's grip on the whole city (1).

Away from the cameras

There is a huge gap between what is said because we want to hear it (local withdrawals, easing of travel restrictions, removal of one checkpoint out of 20, a change of tone) and what is being done on the ground, which we don't want to see (interlinking of settlements, construction of bridges and tunnels, encirclement of Palestinian towns, expropriation of land, destruction of houses). Some would describe that gap as duplicity, others as ambiguity. The gradual encroachment happens out of sight of the cameras, without causing a stir and without an explicit colonial diktat. Nobody makes a formal complaint, even supposing they can find out what's going on – difficult if you haven't grown up locally. Israeli maps and school textbooks refer to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria and, following the Knesset's recent rejection of a proposal from a Labour education minister, obliteration of the 1967 green line is now a legal fait accompli.

This is not just a gap between the de facto and de jure situations. It reflects a method and tradition going back to the earliest days of the Yishuv (2): the strategy of fait accompli. That strategy has always paid off: the Jewish state was there before it was declared and recognised in 1948, as was the army. What we have is a theatre with two stages: on the international stage we hear repeated vague and encouraging speeches concerning withdrawal, coexistence and a Palestinian state, but the things that count (settlements, roads, tunnels, water tables) happen on the operational stage next door, where the outcome is decided out of public view.

Understanding how public opinion works in a democracy, successive Israeli governments of the left and right take care to administer regular painkillers, plans for unilateral withdrawal or the partial dismantlement of settlements and encouraging announcements that are always conditional and come to nothing. The media live from day to day, with no attempt to remember. Who now recalls that the road map (3) was supposed to be "a final and comprehensive settlement of the Israel-Palestinian conflict by 2005"?

The Oslo process did not just remain a dead letter: with the military reoccupation of Zones A and B (4) in April 2002, it went into reverse.

Territorial fragmentation cuts off local authorities from any possible central Palestinian administration and from each other, while the systematic physical destruction of national institutions, Palestinian infrastructure and political leaders by the Israeli army ensures internal anarchy and the spread of clans and gang violence: bottomless chaos. Clearly the path that has been taken is not that of nation building but the deconstruction of all possible governance beyond the separation wall. It is the logical counterpart of a 30-year annexation process that will be endorsed, when the time comes, "in view of the new reality on the ground".

Autosuggestion

In these circumstances, constant invocation of the road map by all parties has more to do with autosuggestion than a sober look at the consistent transformation of reality. That reality may not be visible from Geneva, Paris or New York, but it is immediately apparent to anyone travelling throughout the country after a few years' absence. It is a land carved up by military force, where the Israeli settlements are no longer shapes on a Palestinian background – instead the Palestinian areas appear as shapes on a solidly-infrastructured Israeli background: a land where water reserves are confiscated and a temporary travel restriction is very close to a permanent ban.

Some may take comfort in these ideas:

• since it was possible to withdraw settlements from Gaza, it should be possible in the near future in the West Bank. That is to ignore the fact that the withdrawal of 8,000 settlers from one place in Gaza was soon followed by the unpublicised installation of 20,000 settlers in another (the West Bank/Jerusalem). Gaza is not part of the promised land, whereas Judea and Samaria are its backbone. Sharon did not make any secret of the fact that withdrawal on the margins would be compensated by strengthening the Israeli presence elsewhere (438,000 settlers to date, including 192,910 in East Jerusalem);

• the dismantling of four small settlements in the north (1,000 settlers) and the proposed concentration of 60,000 settlers in the most populous blocs, Maale Adumim, Ariel and Gush Etzion, will create a free space. But with the settlements linked in a continuous string under cover of the security wall, the West Bank has been effectively cut in two. The wall separates Palestinians from each other even more than it separates them from the Israelis.

What is taking shape is not the Palestinian state announced and desired by all: it is an as yet unperceived Israeli territory enclosing three self-governing Palestinian enclaves.

All parties have a vested interest in preserving the international pretence (5). For the Israelis, history is being created under the cover of the pretence. The Palestinians cannot be told the truth – they are under occupation yet hoping for a better life and not self-destruction; wishful thinking provides notables, elected representatives and officials with a living, status, dignity and a raison d'?tre. The Europeans chose to salve their consciences by providing financial and humanitarian aid to apologise for their political passivity and voluntary blindness. The thinking of the Americans owes more to the Old Testament than the New; their link with Israel is a parent-child relationship beyond criticism. This shared illusion of self-protection results from the coincidence of opposing interests.

Is this situation tenable to the end of the century? It seems doubtful, given Israel's obsession with security, which makes it less secure, and its disregard for the demographic and religious trends in the region (6). Could not at least one European government convey to our Israeli friends that we are not all taken in by the deception, and that those who deceive may not be be its first victims – but will certainly be its last?

Eyal Weizman interview: Israel's oppressive architecture of occupation
[Source: Socialist Worker]

Dissident architect Eyal Weizman explains the mechanics of Israel's occupation of Palestine to Anindya Bhattacharyya

The occupied West Bank, 1999. A group of Israeli settlers complain that their mobile phone reception cuts out on a bend in a road from Jerusalem to their settlements.

The mobile phone company Orange agrees to put up an antenna on a hill overlooking the bend.

The hill happens to be owned by Palestinian farmers, but since mobile phone reception is a "security issue", the mast construction can go ahead without the farmers' permission.

Other companies agree to supply electricity and water to the construction site on the hill.

In May 2001 an Israeli security guard moves on to the site and connects his cabin to the water and electricity mains. Then his wife and children move in with him.

In March 2002 five more families join him to create the settler outpost of Migron. The Israeli ministry for construction and housing builds a nursery, while donations from abroad build a synagogue.

By mid-2006 Migron is a fully fledged illegal settlement comprising 60 trailers on a hilltop around the antenna, overlooking the Palestinian lands below.

This blow-by-blow account of just one example of the ongoing Israeli colonisation of Palestine appears in the opening pages of a fascinating new book by Eyal Weizman, the dissident Israeli architect.

Called Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, it is an extraordinarily detailed account of exactly how the occupation works in practice, focusing on the physical organisation of space and the political dynamics that shape it.

The 300 page book is packed with fascinating diagrams and photographs that shed a revealing light on almost every aspect of the occupation.

Housing

It explains the way that housing projects in Jerusalem are clad with a specific kind of stone to give the houses a "Biblical" look, and the use of one-way mirrors at border posts in the West Bank.

Eyal Weizman started work on the book in 2001 when he was commissioned by B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, to help document how Palestinian rights were being violated through the planning of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

This work was later turned into an exhibition and book called A Civilian Occupation. The Israeli Association of Architects commissioned the project - only to prevent the exhibition from being shown and then destroy 5,000 copies of the book.

Today Eyal Weizman lives and works in London as director of the Centre for Architectural Research at Goldsmiths College.

His students work on a variety of similar projects that combine architectural and political analysis, including studies of Dubai, Beirut and United Nations protectorates in the former Yugoslavia.

I asked Eyal what had prompted him to write the book - and what the significance was of its subtitle referring to the "architecture of occupation".

"As I was working, it seemed to me more and more that the entire occupation, the entire formation of the terrain itself, could be thought of in the same way as you think of the structure of a building," he says.

"This first occurred to me while reading the Oslo Accords of 1993. The partition of the territory put forward there is not two dimensional but three dimensional - it partitions a volume, rather than a land, giving Palestinians some bits of land while maintaining the subterranean water reservoirs and airspace for Israel.

"As soon as you imagine geopolitics operating in a volume like that, architecture comes into play."

This analogy led him to consider how architectural analysis could be applied to a military and political situation: "For instance, what's the most basic analytic tool you use if you're an architecture student and you want to understand a building? You draw a cross-section through it.

"In fact, the book Hollow Land is structured as a cross-section through the entire Occupied Territories. The first chapter is about the underground water reservoirs.

"Then it looks at the archaeology, then the valleys, the hills and finally the airspace. It's a series of episodes that make up a volume, layer by layer, chapter by chapter.

"So you can think of the entire occupation as if it was some kind of complex building, such as an airport or a shopping mall, with security corridors inbound and outbound, and movement through it."

This focus on the material organisation of Israel's encroachment into the West Bank might sound rather dry - but in fact Hollow Land's relentless and patient accumulation of details throws the human catastrophe of the occupation into even starker light.

One particularly chilling section of the book discusses Israeli military techniques for sending assassination squads into the dense urban sprawl of Palestinian settlements.

Rather than use the alleyways and paths of the settlement - and risk ambush - the Israeli soldiers simply blast their way in a straight line through to their target. They cut holes in the walls of residential buildings and literally march straight through people's living rooms.

To train the occupation troops the Israelis have built a fake Palestinian settlement in the Negev desert - whose buildings are ready equipped with holes cuts into their walls. The US has now started building similar fake villages to train its troops for the occupation of Iraq.

Hollow Land does not just document the shape of the Israeli occupation - it also looks into the dynamics that created that shape in the first place. "It's about the way in which politics, culture and other formative forces register themselves in the organisational form of the landscape," says Eyal.

"The idea is that you look at a piece of architecture, or any piece of design, and study it as a consequence of conflicts, forces, practices and so on. So form becomes a kind of diagram of the forces that create it - process is frozen into form."

One example of this is the Migron settlement described at the beginning of the book, which arises out of the interplay of a whole host of actors - Israeli settlers, mobile phone companies, utility firms, state institutions, the army and so on.

Eyal is keen to stress how "settlements emerge out of organisational chaos". The very nature of the occupation is one of "uncoordinated coordination", where the government allows degrees of freedom to rough elements and then denies its involvement. He says this is characterised by "micro-processes that become wheels in larger processes".

The wall

A key example of this is the construction of the "separation wall" in the Occupied Territories - a huge barrier designed to wall off the Palestinians into tiny enclaves while annexing vast portions of the West Bank for Israel.

The wall is fiercely controversial even within Israel, and its precise route is constantly being contested. As a result the wall snakes through the West Bank in a curiously fluid manner, sometimes swinging out east to take in an illegal Israeli settlement, at other times being pushed back west again.

"The trick is to understand how the wall is flexible without justifying it as benign - it's a dangerous flexibility!" says Eyal.

"But what the course of the wall registers the most is opposition to it - the constant petitions of Israeli NGOs to the Israeli high court of justice and the weekly demonstrations by Israeli human rights groups, for instance."

In a striking analogy, Eyal suggests that the space of possible routes of the wall maps the spectrum of official Israeli politics - the doves seeking a wall to as close to Israel's pre-1967 borders as possible, the hawks wanting to push the wall out towards Jordan.

The wall's route reflects the dynamic between these two forces.

But for Eyal the problem is that fierce battles over the precise route of the wall can fail to challenge the wall's very existence.

"These micro-political acts of resistance are paradoxical because by pursuing the lesser evil they allow the greater evil of the wall to exist and function," he says. "The opposition to the wall becomes part of what designs it - it becomes complicit in the wall."

Eyal argues that this paradox is part of a larger pattern whereby the occupation has absorbed and incorporated the views of the human rights organisations and NGOs at work in the Occupied Territories.

Human rights

"In some cases human rights organisations end up influencing the design plans for checkpoints," he notes.

"They end up sustaining the occupation. They go to the military and plead for certain things. Governance always needs carrots and sticks - it operates not just on the basis of threats, but by absorbing the opposition into a governing system."

One example of this is the fact that Palestinians in Gaza are dependent on food aid from international donors.

"If humanitarian organisations did not feed Palestinians in Gaza there would be a crisis - some 1.8 million Palestinians live off international aid," he says.

"Consequently a significant part of Israeli intelligence is to monitor the levels of hunger in Gaza and keep it just at the level that the world will tolerate. This level changes - a level of hunger that would not have been tolerated in the 1990s is tolerated now."

Eyal is aware that this might sound "anti-humanitarian" but he insists he is not suggesting that NGOs should simply down tools and leave the Palestinians to their fate.

Rather it's a matter of a clear sighted acknowledgement that even the best intentioned and most benign of humanitarian organisations operating in the Occupied Territories is to a certain extent complicit, and, to a certain extent, part of the problem.

Ultimately Eyal says he is pessimistic over the current prospects for Palestinians. He believes the madness and terror of the occupation stem out of the paradoxes of trying to partition the land in the first place into separate "Israeli" and "Palestinian" territories.

"You have to understand the idea that guides the Israeli occupation, which is how to resolve the paradox of maintaining overall control while ensuring separation," he says.

"It's very different from other kinds of colonial geography - for instance, the ‘bantustans' in apartheid South Africa were special designated zones, but with Israel and Palestine you get overlapping claims over the same sites woven together into mutually exclusive separate networks that try to never cross."

This pattern of settlements and camps arranged in space, connected by bridges and tunnels, has a long history. "This is something you get from the very first attempt to divide Israel and Palestine," Eyal notes.

"If you look at plans from the 1920s and 1930s prepared for the League of Nations during the mandate period by diplomats and mapmakers, you'll see that nobody could find a line that separates Israel from Palestine - it was always a matter of building bridges or tunnels over or under the other's territory to maintain continuity.

"So my critique throughout the book is against the politics of partition. I want to show how paradoxical partition is - and that it just cannot operate physically."

A very interesting article about the strange 30 year jump from one major event to the next in the Zionist narrative. It is a rather lengthy piece, but I believe it is a must read.

2007: THE YEAR OF THE LION

By Diego Traversa
Translated from Italian by Mary Rizzo

The events that mark the historical journey of the Israeli State have an odd thirty-year cadence.

• 1917, Balfour Declaration and consequent willingness of English imperialism to concede a "national homeland" for the Jewish people.
• 1947, UN Resolution for the partition of historical Palestine into two entities, one destined to the future Jewish State and the other for the native inhabitants, in other words, the Palestinians.
• 1977, year of the historical shift in Israel: after thirty years of Labor-socialist-progressive dominance, a coalition government led by Menachem Begin's Likud is installed. Further, there are the signs of the first breakthrough in the resolute Arab refusal to recognise Israel: the historic visit of Sadat to Jerusalem.

Now, if mathematics is not an opinion, this year is the next step in that tradition, thirty years from the latest stage in the development of Zionism in Palestine and, excepting major upheavals, there doesn't seem to be any earth-shattering political change on the horizon.

Are we really so sure of that?

Allowing for a rapid consideration, it seems to me that the above-mentioned dates brought about one of the most serious miscarriages of justices ever perpetrated in history, and that their succession is nothing more than a catastrophic climax: rather than a "national homeland", 1917 gave way, through diplomatic means, to a regional homeland that today seems like one of the most tormented on the planet; in 1947 there was the ratification of an absurd imperialist decision to divide a territory exactly with the same gluttony, insensitivity and arrogance that was used every time that Europe was redesigned after very bellicose or political upheaval (Metternich and the Vienna Congress, the Paris Conference, etc.) in which the resident population had absolutely no say in the matter; lastly, in 1977, while in Italy trade union leader Luciano Lama was being kicked out of the Universities by radical students, in Israel the political program of massive settlement building was kicking the Palestinian people out of their homeland, taking from them even what little remained for them in the West Bank, stuffing them into remote reservations, as the Americans did with the natives of that continent, thanks to the criminal policies of Begin who, driven by a Labor idea, set off extensive colonisation campaigns (both secular and religious).

Considering this progression, an initial thought comes to me: if in 2007 some great change should happen, this would certainly be detrimental to the Palestinian people, absolutely not to the Israelis. And, to tell the truth, it seems that it actually has been that way.

One has to be blind to not notice that there has indeed been a radical change.

In 2007, in my humble opinion, there has been perhaps the most extensive and aggressive Zionist propaganda campaign ever made, especially caused by the Israeli fear of seeing Hamas come to power. Not that this in itself says much, seeing as how in Israel there is little difference made between Hamas and Fatah: when there was Arafat, they pitted him against the religious extremists; now that the latter are in (relative) power, they are doing everything they can to support the "moderate" rivals who are more apt to settle with Israel on Israeli terms.

The fact of the matter is that in Israel they have noticed that after forty years of illegal occupation, privation and provocation, of injustice of every imaginable sort, the Palestinian people are still there, ready to express their dignity to exist yet again. In Israel they have noticed that there is a necessity for a strong political instability that will allow the continuation of the Zionist project (that, we must remember, foresees as a minimum requirement a single and homogenous – viable – territorial entity that is destined for Jews that extends from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, leaving aside the even more ambitious dreams of Jabotinsky and his followers that aspired to the conquest of the ENTIRETY of Palestine, that is, even those parts of land that the English destined to the Hashemites, the philosophy behind the birth of the Revisionist Zionist movement of which Begin, Shamir and Sharon have been the most famous exponents). And to do this, they have used the most terrible means possible, such as withholding funds that are owed to the Palestinians, bringing about commercial blockades, throwing dirt and infamy against a government elected by its people (whether or not it was democratic almost is of little importance: by chance are we as interested in knowing if the Colombians, North Koreans, Saudis, Iranians or Chinese democratically elect their representatives?) Are these the typical means that a democracy employs towards other governments?

It is clear that 2007 might be the next step ahead in favour of Zionism, taking into consideration the extremely great change that has taken place: the fracture of the Palestinian people into two branches, with the consequent exultance of all the philo-Zionists in the world. It is a fact that has actually brought to mind the hypothesis of the so-called "two people, three states" paradigm. A "Three for the price of two" offer that simply seems too good to pass up...

So there it is, 2007 is indeed the year of great news for the tireless Zionists. In that gigantic Middle Eastern melting pot, a new ingredient has been added: virulent Palestinian discord, a factor that can only benefit the treacherous Zionist plans (yes, doubt not, even the Zionists plan away...).

Even so, trying to be optimistic and willing to demonstrate comprehension and solidarity to the long-suffering Palestinian people, we can try to turn the data of the problem in its head.

Yes, because while our politicians yammer on about everything and everybody without in reality understanding anything at all, the more careful observers should not let the slight changes that are taking place escape our attention, verifying that, in reality won't bring about the success of Zionism, but rather, its unweaving.

Everything, in nature, has a beginning and an end.

If we take into account the three dates previously given, we can even in a poetic way imagine the development of Zionist events in terms of biological development: 1917, conception, 1947, birth, 1977, maturity.

Therefore, could 2007 be the year of aging? (For that of death, it's a little bit early, but, never say never...)

Who knows, maybe all of these major upheavals are not what they seem to be. Maybe the situation is not all that rosy for the grandchildren of Herzl and his brutal, irrational dream.

There are all the elements there in order to come to such a conclusion.

Let's start from a simple idea: just as the Zionists, in order to justify (pathetically and arrogantly, for sure) their undertaking, claimed that there was no such thing called Palestine. If we are willing to call a spade a spade, we have even more reason to claim that no such thing as a Jewish State exists, given that constitutional rights acknowledge, as a necessary condition for such a definition, the specification of precise confines. Seeing as how Israel simply does not have definitive confines, it can't be called a State. Therefore, the Palestinians are totally entitled to carry through their goal, as much as and even more than the Zionists who have sacked their land. Because it's sacking we're talking about, despite the improbable justifications and essential propaganda that has been presented as a benevolent Zionist project, dedicated only to guaranteeing a land for a people dispersed throughout the world and desirous only of "normalisation".

If it is true that before 1948 the Zionists didn't engage in outright theft, since they bought property from Arab absentee landlords and there they built their various Kibbutz, it is also undeniable that the portion of land inhabited by the Jewish community was little to nothing in comparison to the overwhelming Arab majority, certainly not enough to allow them to claim any kind of national sovereignty. Then, as a matter of coincidence, the "war of liberation" broke out, as the Zionists call it, and they are right about that: because, actually they did "liberate" large areas inhabited by Arabs, "cleansing" them of their Palestinian population. All of this is the contrary of a irredentist war, one that usually breaks out to reclaim a land that is inhabited by a majority of a given ethnic community in order to liberate it from those who they consider to be invaders who have no cultural and historical relationships with it. Curiously, the Zionists had planned it all out rather well; beforehand they "evacuate" a hostile population and after, with the wave of a magic wand, they affirm, "See? Now we are the majority. Give us a State, please..." If that's not sacking, I don't know what is...

Further, that supposed Jewish "people", seeing that it had been so kindly donated a State, does not present all of the characteristics that constitute the primary condition for the demand of self-determination: language, customs, local traditions, culture connected to a specific territory (unless one insists upon stubbornly closing his eyes and claiming that a Yemenite Jew has much in common with a German or Lithuanian one). We've heard a lot about Jewish rights to a land based on presumed past connections dating as far back as 2 or even 3 thousand years. This is something that should make anyone having good sense see how illogical it is. It would be like, for instance, tomorrow we Italians wanting to newly conquer Istanbul because it was an antique Roman territory and we decided to even take the name Constantinople out of its dusty chest. How silly and irrational that demand sounds as long as it takes precedence over the objective and evident historical situation. In the case of Israel, going against what the Palestinians (Jews, Christians or Muslims that they might have been... ah, yes, many even can't think that a Palestinian could have been Jewish!!) have been living for centuries. What seems ridiculous is that while the Jews are working hard to dig deeply in the search for archaeological artefacts that will attest to their millenary connection with the Palestinian territory, the roots of the Palestinians to their land is so very evident that, absurdly, they ignore it or try to diminish it, as if it had no importance at all.

This is just a basis for discussion, just to clarify that the Palestinian cause has to be morally supported against the historical Zionist injustice.

A second point, one might object that the Palestinians have chosen to live side-by-side with Israel in a State of their own.

Here we are faced with a great distortion. The Palestinians have accepted the hypothesis of Two States exactly when the Jews accepted the Partition plan. Practical and tactical decisions, that don't however substitute the true goals.

Just as how the Jews in 1947 were certain that no matter how things went, they never would have abandoned their dream of creating a single territorial entity for themselves from the Jordan to the Mediterranean (proof of this is the incredible perseverance to not let up on the West Bank, or as they call it, their beloved Judea-Samaria, upon which the State of Palestine is supposed to rise, and is instead dotted by hundreds of colonies full of fanatical religious nuts or by Jewish immigrants attracted to the place by the trick of fiscal facilitation), the same can be said of the Palestinians who, driven by simple necessity, will be forced into accepting the hypothesis of Two States in order to not risk losing that small portion that remains. If the Israelis and the Palestinians really wanted to live in two adjacent States, by now there already would have been these States, one next to the other. But Israel's aggressive, racist policies based on colonisation, is there for everyone to see and demonstrates the impossibility of such a hypothesis: only egotistical, incompetent politicians, ones who are profiteers, aren't aware of Israel's behaviour, in fact, they accuse the Palestinians of being the ones who resort to violence.

Rather, Israel is described always as an absolute good, the only democracy in the Middle East, the light that comes from the European civilisation and illuminates the backward Arab world.

Israel makes concessions that the Arabs refuse; Israel is pacific, the Arabs are blood-thirsty vampires (and God only knows how the most militarised nation on the face of the earth can be the one that tends so strongly towards tranquillity and peace.... It brings to mind the cartoon of a child who asks his father, an army general: 'Dad, tonight I dreamt of a world without war,' and the father reprimands him saying, 'Don't worry son, it was only a bad dream'...). Israel has free elections, free press, freedom of speech while the Arab States are authoritarian regimes, its press is subservient to power and women can only be out in the streets if they are dressed like black cockroaches.

Yes, these are the stereotypes and the modern vision that everyday we are force-fed, with its scope of merely denigrating, diminishing and humiliating that marvellous (especially regarding its cuisine and legendary hospitality) Arab-Muslim culture for mere geo-political and financial interests.

Being able to tolerate the lies, the distortion and the misrepresentation that politicians, journalists and pseudo-experts propagate day after day is truly a hard task.

This is the point, though.

Politicians think that we are idiots and that we are malleable. Unfortunately for them, they aren't able to notice (if they ever were in the past) the changes that are just below the surface and are able to be summarised in one simple question: setting aside the moral issue of wanting to give a State to a "people" by taking another people's territory away from them; are we sure that the solution of Two States in really and truly feasible?

Unfortunately, in their approaching senility (it seems to me that the average age of Italian politicians is over 60 years of age), they haven't noticed that in the last ten years people don't refer that often to newspapers (at least here in Italy) or at any rate, in order to satisfy their own thirst for knowledge, they don't only read the newspapers, but they make continual use of what may be the greatest invention of the century: Internet.

A place that, given the enormous quantity of data, helps to train, understand, illuminate, learn and find explanations. All it takes is a dose of goodwill, without bias or preconceived ideas, and anyone can make a generic and true opinion on any argument.

When I see Italian politicians praise Zionism and Israel to the seventh heavens, saying what they will of the Palestinian question, my blood pressure rises, because I understand just how ignorant and hypocritical they are.

I may not be a refined expert on matters of the Middle East, but I can easily affirm that sometimes I know more about it than all of those arrogant figures who, only for the fact of being in Parliament, think they are telling us what the truth is.

Their complete incapacity and lack of courage in affirming their ideas comes essentially from their ignorance, specifically of Middle Eastern issues (then there are the interests of the Lobbies, but that is another matter).

Do you really think that a Fini, a D'Alema, a Calderoli, and yes, even a Bertinotti or a Napolitano have ever really had the time to investigate just what the Middle East is (not to mention those politicians who probably don't even know where it is located)? Do they know what Zionism is, with all of its shades and currents? Which politicians can say what the origins of the various Shamirs, Sharons, Begins and Jabotinskys are? What does the original English text (that they don't even speak) of UN Resolution 242 say, with that slight of hand that specifies an Israeli withdrawal "from territories", rather than "from the territories"? Can they say what a Fellah is? Do they know when the Arab League was founded? Can they say what happened at Deir Yassin in April 1948?

In other words, what is this "Israeli-Palestinian Question" they talk about as if they are experts?

This issue risks being too involved, but I would merely like to stress that these poor, mad politicians shouldn't drive us nuts with their absurdities.

In the first place, this issue requires people who are serious and well-informed. In the second place, it's not necessary to have a bias, to root for one side or the other. Politicians, in dealing with foreign politics and therefore with realities that are meant for others to make the decisions (that is, the populations whose lives are directly affected by a particular reality), have the task and the duty to set themselves apart as objective parties, as intermediaries, and not as supporters of this or that political faction. They should base their politics on an awareness of an objective reality.

Furthermore, as carriers of values and inalienable rights that are inspired by the advanced Western civilisation (especially we Italians, who have to export even wider that power system that the whole world envies, the Mafia), these politicians are called to work for their dissemination in the world, possibly without wars, through cultural and economic exchange. Otherwise, they should stop talking about liberalism and democracy, and they should proudly affirm that war is an honest instrument (rather than speaking hypocritically about humanitarian wars...) and they should be more honest in saying: 'Ok, we want to settle in that specific area because it's geo-politically strategic for us.' They'd even be more respected for it.

It's a waste of time to try to fool people, intervening in Iraq and in Afghanistan to "export" democracy and freedom and at the same time to forget all the rest. It's just not believable and this trickery is simply no longer tolerable.

All the more reason that they should start to take into account the fact that thanks to Internet, people are far less apt to have the wool pulled over their eyes to such extreme levels. They can't keep on defending and covering up their geo-political interests under absurd lies such as the Clash of Civilisations and other such idiocies.

If they really are concerned about politics, the serious kind, they had better start acting so that people are able to find interest in them again, rather than hypocritically wondering about the reasons that the public has lost interest, rightly convinced that current politics is little more than a mere bartering of interests and a tangle of stratagems.

Politicians should come back to seriously dealing with politics and all it implies, in the first place, an awareness that politics is based on compromises made between parties, taking off from a condition of objective reality.

In the case under examination, reality tells us that Zionism, meant as an instrument to give a country to the Jews, has failed, because substantially the Zionist idea was defective to begin with. The Jews already did have a country, just as a Catholic or a Muslim had one. Instead, turning this idea upside down, wanting to avoid the assimilation and disappearance of the Jews, it was decided to give them a State, with all that it has brought about.

It is this starting point that the politicians, in their stubbornness, don't care to recognise, to admit or that they simply don't want to understand. But, they repeat ad nauseam, with an emphasis that should make us begin to suspect their motivations, that "Israel has the right to exist."

In what way and where?

Israel does NOT have a right to exist because it is not the fruit of the history of a people who invoke their self-determination as much as it is the product of the madness of political thinkers. It has no such right because it was born on the stream of antiquated doctrine. The reactionary and nationalistic doctrines that were typical of the late 1800s were its sources, and they certainly did not foresee, as today they would like us to think, of the use of democratic means for their realisation. A realisation that is impossible to bring about with democratic and pacific means. The mediocrity of such thinkers lies precisely in their incapacity to be able to predict what developments could have come about from undertaking such an enterprise. And given their considerations, the difference between what they predicted and what has actually happened is so enormous that one can only draw the logical conclusion and say that Zionism is already dead and buried. The final ending to it was its guaranteeing a safe harbour to Jews, following the tragic events of the Shoah. Well, what has Israel become for the Jews? An enormous armed Jewish ghetto that is supposed to guarantee the future of Judaism. But, ironically, this last Jewish ghetto is the last place on earth in which the Zionist axiom of wanting to give a secure "nation" to the Jews is in total contradiction to reality, seeing as it is the only place in the world where a Jew is not safe, given the surrounding hostility.

This alone is more than sufficient to declare the failure of Zionism, the absolute worthlessness of those thinkers who had conceived it (Hess, Gordon, Herzl, just to cite the most important ones) and the anachronistic nature of Israel, especially if one takes into account that the majority of Jews live outside their "nation", demonstrating that modern society has overcome all its limits and is able to guarantee coexistence between various religions.

Setting aside for the moment whether or not Israel has the right to exist (considering that for many we are talking about a God-given right!), European politicians and not only them, simply don't see that many of the interested parties, Jews and Palestinians, are reflecting on the prospective that excludes the creation of what is known as "Two States for two People". This is the objective reality of the future: the two rights are irreconcilable. The only true, democratic and just solution is one that the United Nations and the international community should support, putting aside strategic interests that induce them to root for one side or the other. A single democratic State, in which the rights of both communities are guaranteed but not allowing that one should predominate over the other. Allowing the right of Jews and Arabs to immigrate within the land, if they so desire, and (considering the Jewish need of safeguarding Judaism) to make the Middle East an example of civilisation, guaranteeing a spiritual centre for Judaism in Eastern land, as was already what the great thinker Ahad Ha-Am had promoted.

It is a sensible and rational project, that could immediately be implemented and one that would put an end to the hostilities once and for all.

One, if I may, I'd like to speak to an important politician and put him face to face with the evidence of reality. If I am allowed to, I'd choose to ask my questions to Blair, because Bush makes me sick just looking at him, and the politicians of my country make me nauseous just by hearing them. I'd like to be able to write him two (thousand) lines like this:

Dear Mr Blair,

You have been recently nominated by the Quartet with the title of "Middle East Peace Envoy". I wish to give you my most heartfelt compliments, seeing as how now you will be able to present yourself once again like a good guy, after the enormous mud slung against you by the absurd and villainous accusations against you that were painting you as someone responsible for a rather sizeable crime such as the death of hundreds of thousands of people.

The Quartet has given birth to its Fifth Element, the saviour who will prevent the total destruction of the Middle East. If I were you, I wouldn't let myself be discouraged by doubt and by the poisonous suspicions of those who ask how it is even possible that a warmonger like yourself, responsible, as they say, for the death of so many people can become a pacifist and flower child. To leave these doubts behind, I would advise you to first of all let your hair grow and then open your heart and, especially, to listen to the voice that comes from the Middle East, I am convinced that you, certainly equipped with natural auricular devices that are beyond the ordinary, will be able to fully absolve especially this task.

Listen, Mr Blair, to what the Israelis and Palestinians are invoking. The former are tired, they can't go on like this any more, despite their doubtless military superiority, they are starting to notice that this situation can't go on much longer for them. The latter, despite all the privations they are subject to, are ever more determined and steadfast. The more they are forced to endure starvation, the angrier they get (rightly so, I might add). In your view, is it really worth it all to shed more blood? How much longer can people be fooled into believing that Israel has a right to exist? For how much longer do you think that we can tolerate the lie of a democratic Israel, a State that maintains its Jewish ethnic majority must by way of force (and, I repeat, by way of force, inevitably) carry out a precise, structured and clear-cut discrimination against the other main ethnic component? For how much more time will you still think that we can accept the unjust preliminary condition that the Palestinians, if they want peace, have to first recognise the right of the State of Israel to "exist"? Have you ever asked Israel to do as much? To accept a right of existence of the Palestinians in their State? Perhaps you have, and maybe you are even convinced that Israel, righteous Israel, is truly intent on making peace and living a pacific coexistence. In words, maybe, but not in actions.

Actions speak louder than words, dear Mr Blair. And the actions of Israel are of a State that for 40 years has been occupying, after having started a war, the piece of land that was destined to the elusive Palestinian State. And on top of it, they have built hundreds of settlements, demonstrating in action, just how much they are truly inclined towards peace.

Mr Blair, do you really believe that people are so stupid or ignorant to believe that Israel is a democratic and independent State? Aside from the fact that it has no established borders, aside from the fact that it discriminates against a chunk of its own population, aside from the ethnic cleansing enacted since 1948, aside from its formidable military apparatus (the only true institution that is able to form, forge and unite the Israeli people, who otherwise would remain divided by profound cultural differences), aside from the doubt as to how such a warlike nation proposes itself as a guarantor for peace and democracy, I ask you:

Can one define as an independent State an entity that depends exclusively on financial contributions from the Diaspora community, as well as the State money from the American ally, and without which its entire economy would collapse? Can one define as a State a place where only a fourth of its citizens live? I mean to ask: we Italians number 60 million, but I am quite certain that there are not 180 million other Italian citizens living elsewhere... In Israel there are 5 million Jewish citizens, but the majority (a further 13 million), live abroad. Isn't that a contradiction of sorts? If, as they say, this is a "people" that needs and has the right to a nation, why then aren't you interceding through your friend Bush, inviting him to grant to the "chosen people" Montana or Nebraska or Florida (there's enough sun, so that they can get tanned: following that Zionist myth of the "sabra" who is scorched by the hot sun...), seeing as how in America there is a greater number of "co-nationals"? Try to make a similar request towards him and let's see how Bush responds.... I would bet that he would take you for a madman. Pity that this clearly evident mad idea didn't seem that way when, on the contrary, having to pay the price were those backward people with brown skin who abstain from pork and usually bow down to the ground in the direction of Mecca while they pray.

Let's be honest, Mr Blair. Palestine is not America. It hasn't got its wealth nor its wide open spaces. If we think that, in spite of these things, the Americans had no scruples and they didn't hesitate for a moment when it came to denying the sharing of the land with the Indians. How can one think that Jews and Arabs will be able to co-exist in two States alongside one another in a small and impoverished region such as Palestine? I'm not saying that a Jew could not, if he so chose, to go live in Palestine, but to then take this as an invitation to take the land from another people to give it to someone coming from abroad is completely unjust. It has been said that the Jews hadn't robbed anything from the Palestinians. That they bought their country bit by bit and, given the millenary links to the land in question, they would then have put forth the demand of independence. As if buying land in a State is sufficient enough to demand the independence from someone. Without then taking into account that those who requested this, the Jews, were not even all that interested in such a project. Only a few Mitteleuropean Jews supported this idea, while the Jewish communities were not at all interested in founding a State, finding the very idea dangerous and absurd. Then there was Nazism, the cause of which, ignobly, the Zionists have coined the motto "never again" to push the Jewish masses into Palestine, despite the fact that Western societies, after the horror of the Second World War, learned to guarantee the rights of everyone, Jews included. To approve of Zionism means the outright denial that Western societies are able to assure the rights of the various religious communities and that would be a real offence, because this would implicate putting on the same plane democratic societies and authoritarian, illiberal and racist ones. It is nothing less than a moral victory of Nazism, sixty years after the end of the Second World War.

Unless you consider Jews as a people that has a right to a nation like any other people: that is, a "race" having specific physical and cultural characteristics, which is precisely what the Nazis claimed about (against) the Jews. In both cases, we see how the acceptance of Zionism isn't possible without an inevitable re-evaluation of the Nazi regime (and we don't aim at that in any way, shape or form). After all, Nazism and Zionism have very much in common, even the close relationship between officials, as was the case of Adolph Eichmann and Rudolph Kastner, the details of which are unknown to the masses (and for some people, they want it to stay that way, because otherwise it would make it quite clear just what Zionism really is).

Mr Blair, in trying to avoid the destruction of what the moral foundations of Zionism might be (a time-consuming question, better left to intellectuals), why don't we speak a bit more concretely, let's get "down to earth", as you might say.

In that you are nominated as the new peace envoy in the Middle East, do you think you could illuminate me on what generic basis we can conceive of a Palestinian State? I'll give you some advice first: don't do like all the negotiators have done so far, demonstrating their complete incapacity or bad faith. Take the question head on and tell us how you intend upon resolving the vital issues of the question.

I'll propose a mathematical model:

"The candidate must resolve the following problem: data X = decades-long existence of the problem of the Palestinian refugees and Y = the stubborn Zionist refusal to share the city of Jerusalem (Capital indivisible by two!), not being able to avoid Z = inevitable exponential expansion of the Jewish colonies and taking into account K = neurotic Zionist psychological state that will not accept living as neighbours next to enemies who are armed to the teeth, please demonstrate how it is possible to come up with an area that is sufficiently large to allow for those that are meant to be (P) = Palestinian institutions, build them a viable State that is not fragmented in Bantustans and then to explain how an Israeli will be able to accept that this will become a normal State like any other, that is, armed, furnished with a regular army, when Israel itself is worried about the existence of the simplest Swiss Army Knife or by homemade Qassam rockets". In other words: what is the correspondence of P = 700X + Y/2 + Z^n + K?

Mr Blair, I know I'm fooling around a bit, but in reality, there is very little to laugh about. Those who principally have little to be cheerful about are the desperate Palestinian masses, who don't know where to turn for help.

They are constantly blackmailed, they have to additionally bear the constant burden of being accused of terrorism. That is the usual trick that the politicians and the powerful use when they aren't able to seriously face these questions. The cowardice and perverse practice of labelling rivals in order to discredit them before anyone can do anything to combat that is shameful. I am sure you know what I'm referring to, seeing as how even you Englishmen have used this tactic in the past, especially against the Irish.

Mr Blair, besides the fact that terrorism derives from Jacobian matrix of the French Revolution, that is, State terrorism, I believe that with this stupid and cowardly method to get rid of one's adversaries is no longer credible. Especially looking at the disastrous State terrorism campaigns that have been made since 2001 onwards.

To label Hamas as terrorism means supporting the idea that the Palestinian people, as a whole, is a terrorist people, judging by the popular support that the Islamic movement has. How long do you think you can fool people with these word games?

You might remember, Mr Blair that even the IRA had ample popular support: yet, look at what Ireland has become today. Yet, to stay on topic, think of the adoption of "terrorism" by the Jews themselves when they fought your co-nationals in 1948 and expelled them from Palestine. Why do you need to continually belittle the demands of a political entity by tagging them as "terrorists"? Do you seriously think that this lie of yours is believable?

Of course, the methods used by certain groups might be cause of some doubt, but, on the other hand, when two nationalist claims are clashing, it is extremely difficult to imagine that the factions in opposition are able to talk peacefully around a campfire and decide the fate of the territory. If you believe that the use of violence and attacks against civilians are terrorist acts, this is fine. Yet, this does not have a prerogative in any people in particular: in this sense, we are all terrorists, from Hamas to the Irgun, from you Englishmen to the Irishmen, from the Vietnamese to the Americans and their napalm raids.

In this sense, the tale of the Lion and the Hunter by John Henry Newman is very fitting. In case you are unfamiliar with is, let me briefly tell it. Because, honestly, I believe that in the Middle East, history needs to be rewritten, completely and once and for all.

"One day, a man invited a lion to his house and he welcomed him with all the hospitality one reserved for a king. The lion was allowed to move freely anywhere in the magnificent palace full of an infinity of wonderful things to admire. There were large salons, long corridors, all of which were decorated with great luxury. There was a collection of paintings and sculptures, works of great artists. The subjects that were depicted were varied, but the most magnificent one of all was the one that interested the lion the most: it was in fact a painting of the lion himself. While he went from one room to another, the owner of the palace always drew the lion's attention to the indirect homage that the various groups of statues and paintings made to the importance of the tribe of the lions. Yet, there was an aspect in all of these works to which the guest, though remaining courteously in silence, was not left indifferent. No matter how varied the works were in style from one another, all of them showed a common element: the man always was depicted as victorious and the lion was always defeated.

When the lion finished visiting the palace, his host asked him what he thought of the marvellous things inside. The lion answered by complimenting the wealth of the owner and the artistry of his decorators, but he added: "If the lions were the artists, they would have had a better fate."

With this tale, Mr Blair, I hope you have been able to see the evident meaning, and considering the times we live in, a meaning that is still valid. Given that you Englishmen are among the main parties responsible for the Middle Eastern disaster, thanks to your centuries-old imperialism, I will close this letter by inviting you to take advantage of the coincidence of the year, 90 years after the Balfour Declaration, history has put the destiny of the tormented Palestinian land into the hands of another Englishman. I fully hope, even if I am not that convinced of it, that you won't make the same mistakes that your incapable forefather did and finally, once and for all, someone remembers the lions in question: the Palestinians. Their history does not deserve to be so ignobly vilified as it has been for far too long.

If you read only one thing today, it should be this one.

It is very long, however, it is worth every minute you spend reading it. I promise you, it's going to be a good read. But first, a quick background.

Avraham Burg, former Knesset speaker, former Shimon Peres protégé and former Israel Agency Director. Finally, he has finished his book - Defeating Hitler - which came as a thunderbolt to the Zionists and Israel because of his savage critiques to the Israel regime and the Zionism system.

Avraham's book confirms that the Jewish democracy is nothing but a "ticking bomb" and that the so called 'State of Israel' is rotting from within and is doomed with self-destruction.

Avraham Burg himself, has left Israel and taken French citizenship. His family is originally a German Jew, which emigrated to Palestine. His father, Yosef Burg, served for decades as Party Chair of the National Religious Party.

His friend, Ari Shavit, has written the following:

Leaving the Zionist ghetto
By Ari Shavit - Source: Haaretz

We met 25 years ago. Exactly 25 years ago. Avraham - Avrum - Burg and I were then part of a small group of reserve soldiers and officers who came out against the First Lebanon War. "Soldiers Against Silence," we were called. Very quickly Avrum was taken from us. In the great demonstration of the 400,000 [the peace rally in Tel Aviv following the September 1982 massacre in the Sabra and Chatilla camps in Beirut], he became a star and immediately turned to politics. At first he was one of Shimon Peres' smart young men. Then he was the great hope of the Labor Party's Young Guard. After that the chairman of the Jewish Agency, Speaker of the Knesset, a candidate for the Labor leadership.

And then, suddenly, three years ago, Burg got up and left. Went to feather his nest. Got entangled in a problematic and failed privatization deal. Was slandered in the papers, scrutinized by the state comptroller, investigated by the police. And all this time he was writing a book.

All this time he was formulating the bold insights of "Defeating Hitler."

Burg will not admit it, but from his point of view the book he is launching now, to coincide with Hebrew Book Week, is a book of prophecy. A book that is intended to vest the kingdom with prophecy. For others, the book will not be easily definable. It contains deep thoughts about Israel and Zionism, a prolonged comparison between Israel and Germany, trenchant criticism of Eichmann's hanging, reflections on Judaism in the age of globalization and memories from his father's house.

Yosef Burg, the refugee from Dresden, accords the book a certain softness that is not to be found in the angry words of his son. True, toward the end the optimist Avrum tries to transform his eulogy into a paean, but the attempt is not entirely convincing. The Israel of "Defeating Hitler" is a very harsh place. Brutal and imperialist, confrontational and insular. A shallow place, thuggish, lacking spiritual inspiration.

I was outraged by the book. I saw it as a turning away of an Israeli colleague from our shared Israeliness. I saw it as a one-dimensional and unempathetic attack on the Israeli experience. Still, the dialogue with Avrum was riveting. We got angry at each other and raised our voices at each other and circled each other warily like two wounded gladiators in the arena. You can't take away from Avrum what he has. You can't take away the education or the articulateness or the ability to touch truly painful places. Maybe that's why he is so infuriating. Friend and predator; brother and deserter.

Avrum Burg, I read your new book, "Defeating Hitler," as a parting from Zionism. Am I wrong? Are you still a Zionist?

"I am a human being, I am a Jew and I am an Israeli. Zionism was an instrument to move me from the Jewish state of being to the Israeli state of being. I think it was Ben-Gurion who said that the Zionist movement was the scaffolding to build the home, and that after the state's establishment it should be dismantled."

So you confirm that you are no longer a Zionist?

"Already at the First Zionist Congress, Herzl's Zionism was victorious over the Zionism of Ahad Ha'am. I think that the 21st century should be the century of Ahad Ha'am. We have to leave Herzl behind and move to Ahad Ha'am."

Does this mean that you no longer find the notion of a Jewish state acceptable?

"It can't work anymore. To define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end. A Jewish state is explosive. It's dynamite."

And a Jewish-democratic state?

"People find this very comfortable. It's lovely. It's schmaltzy. It's nostalgic. It's retro. It gives a sense of fullness. But 'Jewish-democratic' is nitroglycerine."

We have to change the national anthem?

"The anthem is a symbol. I would be ready to buy into a reality in which everything is fine and only the anthem is screwed-up."

Do we have to amend the Law of Return?

"We have to open the discussion. The Law of Return is an apologetic law. It is the mirror image of Hitler. I don't want Hitler to define my identity."

Should the Jewish Agency be dismantled?

"Back when I was chairman of the Jewish Agency, I suggested changing its name from the Jewish Agency for the Land of Israel to the Jewish Agency for Israeli Society. There is room for philanthropic tools. But at the center of its experience it have to deal with all of Israel's citizens, including the Arabs."

You write in your book that if Zionism is catastrophic Zionism, then you are not only post-Zionist but anti-Zionist. And I say that since the 1940s, the catastrophic element has been integral to Zionism. It follows that you are anti-Zionist.

"Ahad Ha'am made the charge against Herzl that his whole Zionism had its source in anti-Semitism. He thought of something else, of Israel as a spiritual center - the Ahad Ha'am line has not died, and now its time has come. Our confrontational Zionism vis-a-vis the world is disastrous."

But it's not just the Zionist issue. Your book is anti-Israeli, in the deepest sense. It is a book from which loathing of Israeliness emanates.

"When I was a boy I was a Jew. In the language prevalent here: a Jew-boy. I attended a heder [religious school]. I was taught by former yeshiva students. After that, for most of my life I was an Israeli. Language, signs, smells, tastes, places. Everything. Today that is not enough for me. In my situation today, I am beyond Israeli. Of the three identities that form me - human, Jewish and Israeli - I feel that the Israeli element deprives the other two."

On the face of it, your position is conciliatory and humanistic. But out of that approach you develop a very harsh attitude toward Israeliness and Israelis. You say terrible things about us.

"I think that I have written a book of love. Love hurts. If I were writing about Nicaragua, I wouldn't care. But I am coming from a place of tremendous pain. I see my love withering before my eyes. I see my society and the place I was raised in and my home being destroyed."

Love? You write that Israelis understand only force. If someone were to write that Arabs understand only force or that the Turkmen understand only force, he would immediately be condemned as a racist. And rightly.

"You can't take one sentence and say that this is the whole book."

It's not just one sentence. It is repeated. You say that we have force, a great deal of force and only force. You say that Israel is a Zionist ghetto, an imperialistic, brutish place that believes only in itself.

"Look at the Lebanon War. The people returned from the field of battle. There were certain achievements, there were certain failures, things were revealed. You would expect people in the mainstream and even on the right to understand that when the IDF is allowed to win, it doesn't win. That force is not a solution. But then comes Gaza, and what is the Gaza discourse? We will smash them, we will erase them. Nothing has sunk in. Nothing. And it's not just between nation and nation. Look at the relations between people. Listen to the personal conversation. The graph of violence on the roads, the discourse of the battered women. Look at the mirror of Israel's face."

What you are saying is that the problem is not just the occupation. In your eyes, Israel as a whole is some sort of horrible mutation.

"The occupation is a very small part of it. Israel is a frightened society. To look for the source of the obsession with force and to uproot it, you have to deal with the fears. And the meta-fear, the primal fear is the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust."

That is the book's thesis. You are not the first to propose it, but you formulate it very acutely. We are psychic cripples, you claim. We are gripped by dread and fear and make use of force because Hitler caused us deep psychic damage.

"Yes."

Well, I will counter by saying that your description is distorted. It's not as though we are living in Iceland and imagining that we are surrounded by Nazis who actually disappeared 60 years ago. We are surrounded by genuine threats. We are one of the most threatened countries in the world.

"The true Israeli rift today is between those who believe and those who are afraid. The great victory of the Israeli right in the struggle for the Israeli political soul lies in the way it has imbued it almost totally with absolute paranoia. I accept that there are difficulties. But are they absolute? Is every enemy Auschwitz? Is Hamas a scourge?"

You are patronizing and supercilious, Avrum. You have no empathy for Israelis. You treat the Israeli Jew as a paranoid. But as the cliche goes, some paranoids really are persecuted. On the day we are speaking, Ahmadinejad is saying that our days are numbered. He promises to eradicate us. No, he is not Hitler. But he is also not a mirage. He is a true threat. He is the real world - a world you ignore.

"I say that as of this moment, Israel is a state of trauma in nearly every one of its dimensions. And it's not just a theoretical question. Would our ability to cope with Iran not be much better if we renewed in Israel the ability to trust the world? Would it not be more right if we didn't deal with the problem on our own, but rather as part of a world alignment beginning with the Christian churches, going on to the governments and finally the armies?

"Instead, we say we do not trust the world, they will abandon us, and here's Chamberlain returning from Munich with the black umbrella and we will bomb them alone."

In your book we are not only victims of the Nazis. In your book we are almost Judeo-Nazis. You are careful. You do not actually say that Israel is Nazi Germany. But you come very close. You say that Israel is pre-Nazi Germany. Israel is Germany up to the Nazis.

"Yes. I started the book from the saddest place. As mourning, but for the loss of Israel. During most of the writing the book's title was 'Hitler Won.' I was sure it was finished. But slowly I discovered the layer of not everything being lost. And I discovered my father as a representative of German Jewry that was ahead of its time. These two themes nourished the book from beginning to end. In the end I am an optimistic person, and the end of the book is also optimistic."

The end may be optimistic, but throughout its entire course the book repeatedly equates Israel with Germany. Is that really justified? Is there sufficient basis for the Israel-Germany analogy?

"It is not an exact science, but I will describe to you some of the elements that go into the stew: a great sense of national insult; a feeling that the world has rejected us; unexplained losses in wars. And, as a result, the centrality of militarism in our identity. The place of reserve officers in society. The number of armed Israelis in the streets. Where is this swarm of armed people going? The expressions hurled publicly: 'Arabs out.'"

What you are actually claiming is that we have viruses of Nazism within us.

"The term 'Nazism' is extremely charged."

Avrum Burg writes in his new book: "It is sometimes difficult for me to distinguish between the primeval National-Socialism and some national cultural doctrines of the here-and-now."

"There is a difference between saying 'Nazi' and saying 'National-Socialist.' Nazi is an ultimate icon; in us it goes to final and terminal places."

OK, we will leave Nazism. Are you concerned about a fascist debacle in Israel?

"I think it is already here."

Do you really believe that the racist slogans which, appallingly, do indeed appear on the stone walks in Jerusalem are akin to the slogans of the 1930s in Germany?

"I see that we are not weeding out those utterances with all our might. And I hear voices coming out of Sderot .... We will destroy and kill and expel. And there is a transferist discourse in the government .... We have crossed so many red lines in the past few years. And then you ask yourself what the next red lines that we cross will be."

In the book you both ask and answer. "I feel very strongly," you write, "that there is a very good chance that a future Knesset in Israel ... will prohibit sexual relations with Arabs, use administrative means to prevent Arabs from employing Jewish cleaning ladies and workers ... like the Nuremberg Laws ... All this will happen, and is already happening." Didn't you get carried away, Avrum?

"When I was Speaker of the Knesset, I heard people talking. I conducted in-depth conversations with members from all parts of the House. I heard people of peace say -I want peace because I hate Arabs and can't stand to look at them and can't tolerate them, - and I heard people on the right use Kahanist language. Kahanism [referring to the ultranational doctrine of Rabbi Meir Kahane] is in the Knesset. It was disqualified as a party, but it constitutes 10 and maybe 15 and maybe even 20 percent of the Jewish discourse in the Knesset. These matters are far from simple. These are roiling waters."

I will tell you frankly. I think we have serious moral and psychological problems. But I think that the comparison with Germany on the eve of the rise of Nazism to power is baseless. One example: There is a problem with the place of the army in our lives and with the place of the generals in our politics and in the relations between the political echelon and the army. But you are likening Israeli militarism to German militarism, and that is a false comparison. You describe Israel as a Prussian Sparta living by the sword, and that is not the Israel I see outside. Certainly not in 2007.

"I envy your ability to read the situation as you read it. I very much envy you. But I think we are a society that in its feelings lives by the sword .... It is not by chance that I make the comparison with Germany, because our feeling that we are obliged to live by the sword stems from Germany. What they deprived us of in the 12 years of Nazism necessitates a very large sword. Look at the fence. The separation fence is a fence against paranoia. And it was born in my milieu. In my school of thought. With my own Haim Ramon. What is the thinking here? That I will erect a big wall and the problem will be solved because I will not see them. You know, the Labor movement always saw the historical context and represented a culture of dialogue, but here we have terrible pettiness of soul. The fence physically demarcates the end of Europe. It says that this is where Europe ends. It says that you are the forward post of Europe and the fence separates you from the barbarians. Like the Roman Wall. Like the Wall of China. But that is so pathetic. And it is a bill of divorce from the vision of integration. There is something so xenophobic about it. So insane. And it comes just at a time when Europe itself, and the world with it, has made such an impressive advance in internalizing the lessons of the Holocaust and has fomented a great advance in the normative behavior of nations."

The truth is that you are a salient Europist. You live in Nataf but you are all Brussels. The prophet of Brussels.

"Completely. Completely. I see the European Union as a biblical utopia. I don't know how long it will hold together, but it is amazing. It is completely Jewish."

And this admiration you show for Europe is not accidental. Because one of the riveting things in your book is that the sabra Avrum Burg turns his back on being sabra and connects very deeply with some sort of yekke [a reference to Jews of German origin] romanticism. Zionist Israel comes across as a vulgar baron in the book, whereas German Jewry is the ideal and the paragon.

"You are dichotomous, Ari, and I am inclusive. You slice off and I try to contain. Therefore I do not say that I am turning my back on being sabra but that I am turning in a different direction. And that is true. Completely true."

Leaving the Zionist ghetto (cont.)

I have a bone to pick with this romanticism. You describe a thousand wonderful years of German Jewry. In large measure you view German Jewry as a model. But it ends in Auschwitz, Avrum. It leads to Auschwitz. Your yekke romanticism is understandable and attractive, but it lies.

"Is there a well-grounded romanticism? Is your Israeli romanticism grounded?"

My Israeliness is not romantic. On the contrary: It is cruel. It stems from understanding necessity. And you blur the necessity. Emotionally, you prefer the move from Dresden to Manhattan over coping with the Jewish-Israeli fate.

"We do not want to accept this, but the existence of the Diaspora dates from the beginnings of our history. Abraham discovers God outside the borders of the Land. Jacob leads tribes to outside the borders. The tribes become a people outside the borders. The Torah is given outside the borders. As Israelis and Zionists, we ignored this completely. We rejected the Diaspora. But I maintain that just as there was something astonishing about German Jewry, in America, too, they also created the potential for something astonishing. They created a situation in which the goy can be my father and my mother and my son and my partner. The goy there is not hostile but embracing. And as a result, what emerges is a Jewish experience of integration, not separation. Not segregation. I find those things lacking here. Here the goy is what he was in the ghetto: confrontational and hostile."

There really is a deep anti-Zionist pattern in you. Emotionally, you are with German Jewry and American Jewry. They excite you, thrill you, and by comparison you find the Zionist option crude and spiritually meager. It broadens neither the heart nor the soul.

"Yes, yes. The Israeli reality is not exciting. People are not willing to admit it, but Israel has reached the wall. Ask your friends if they are certain their children will live here. How many will say yes? At most 50 percent. In other words, the Israeli elite has already parted with this place. And without an elite there is no nation."

You are saying that we are suffocating here for lack of spirit.

"Totally. We are already dead. We haven't received the news yet, but we are dead. It doesn't work anymore. It doesn't work."

And you see in American Jewry the spiritual dimension and the cultural ferment that you don't find here.

"Certainly. There is no important Jewish writing in Israel. There is important Jewish writing in the United States. There is no one to talk to here. The religious community of which I was a part - I feel no sense of belonging to it. The secular community - I am not part of it, either. I have no one to talk to. I am sitting with you and you don't understand me, either. You are stuck at a chauvinist national extremity."

That is not completely accurate. I am aware of the Jewish richness you are talking about. But I am also aware that the basic Zionist analysis was correct. Without Israel there is no future for a non-Orthodox Jewish civilization.

"Take the purest Israeliness there is. Moshe Dayan, for example. And we will shed all the Avrums from him. Totally immaculate Israeliness. No nudniks. No effete types. Nothing. Are you sure that this living-in-order-to-live will endure? Take on the other hand the 'kites.' Martin Buber, George Steiner. You say that these [ethereal] kites will not get anywhere. But my historical experience tells me that these kites get farther than the troopers."

You are actually preparing tools for exile.

"I have been living with them from the day I was born. What is it when I say in prayer that because of our sins we were exiled from our land? In Jewish history the spiritual existence is eternal and the political existence is temporary."

In this sense, you are essentially non-Zionist. Because the energy needed to establish and maintain this place is tremendous, and you are saying that we must not give our all to this place.

"There is no Israeli whole. There is a Jewish whole. The Israeli is a half-Jew. Judaism always prepared alternatives. The strategic mistake of Zionism was to annul the alternatives. It built an enterprise here whose most important sections are an illusion. Do you really think that some sort of floating secular Tel Aviv-type post-kibbutz entity will [continue to] exist here? Never. Israeliness has only body; it doesn't have soul. At most, remnants of soul. You are already dead spiritually, Ari. You have only an Israeli body. If you go on like this, you will no longer be."

Israeliness is far richer, Avrum. It has energy and vibrancy and diversity and productivity. But you fled from Israeliness. You defected from Israeliness. You were an Israeli. You were more Israeli than I was. But no more.

"No more. I think that the 'non-Israeli' is not an alternative to the whole Jewish existence of two thousand years that I am talking about. That is why I wrote this book. Because I cannot leave this world while lying to myself. I told you: There is no Jewish existence without a narrative. There is no such thing. And here there is certainly no narrative. But what is even graver is that there are no forces that will draw out a narrative from within.

"Accordingly, I am going to the world and to Judaism. Because the Jew is the first postmodernist, the Jew is the first globalist."

You really are a globalist now. You really are going out to the world. You have taken a French passport, and as a French citizen you voted in the French presidential elections.

"I have already declared: I am a citizen of the world. This is my hierarchy of identities: citizen of the world, afterward Jew and only after that Israeli. I feel a weighty responsibility for the peace of the world. And Sarkozy is in my eyes a threat to world peace. That is why I went to vote against him."

Are you French?

"In many senses I am European. And from my point of view, Israel is part of Europe."

But it isn't. Not yet. And you are an Israeli public figure who is taking part in the French presidential elections as a Frenchman. That is a far-reaching act. A pre-Zionist Jewish act. Something that neither an Englishman or a Dutchman would do.

"True. It is completely Jewish. I am moving forward to the Jewish condition."

Do you recommend that every Israeli take out a foreign passport?

"Whoever can."

But in this, in this too, you are dismantling the Israeli mutual surety. You are playing with your multiple passports and your multiple identities, which is a course not available to many others. You are dismantling something very basic.

"Those are your fears, Ari. I suggest that you not be afraid. That is what I say in the book. I propose that we stop being afraid."

But you are not only the book, Avrum. You are also the person outside the book. And there is a contradiction between the purism of the man who wrote the book and the political life you lived here.

"A terrible question. Terrible. And it's true. For some of those years I lived a lie. For many years I was not myself. At the outset of my political path I had the energy of the struggle for religion and state and the struggle for peace. I had the precise wind of [the late Prof. Yeshayahu] Leibowitz in my sails. Those were my years of honesty. That was me. But afterward, for long years I was a Mapainik [Mapai, forerunner of the Labor Party]. I was there just to be. And I was no longer me. I was false to the tenets."

And now that you are free of the limitations of politics, you are going all the way with the Leibowitz in you. You describe the targeted assassinations as acts of murder. You are happy that your mother's grandson is not a fighter pilot who kills innocent people. You describe the occupation as an Israeli Anschluss. An Israeli Anschluss?

"That is what we are doing there. What do you want me to say about what we are doing there? That it's humanism? The Red Cross?"

And the targeted assassinations are murder?

"Some of them, certainly."

We are being dragged into carrying out war crimes?

"I have no other way to see it. Especially if there is no horizon of dialogue. The Israelis are very calm. One more Arab, one less Arab. Ya'allah, it's alright. But in the end, the pile grows high. The number of innocent people is so large that it can no longer be contained. And then our explosion and their explosion and the world's will be infinite. I see it happening before my eyes. I see the pile of Palestinian bodies crossing the wall we erected so as not to see it."

And you are not only Leibowitz. You are also Gandhi. You say that the right reaction to the Holocaust was not Anielewicz [Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising] but Gandhi.

"I believe in the doctrine of nonviolence. I do not think that to believe in nonviolence is to be a patsy. In my eyes, Gandhi is as Jewish as there is. He embodies a very ancient Jewish approach. Like Yochanan ben Zakkai, who asked for Yavneh and its sages. Not Jerusalem, not the Temple, not sovereignty: Yavneh and its sages."

And your Gandhiist approach has a political expression: You believe Israel should be relieved of nuclear weapons.

"Of course, of course. The day the Bomb is dismantled will be the most important day in Israel's history. It will be the day on which we get such a good deal with the other side that we will no longer need the Bomb. That has to be our ambition."

Avrum, your book is that of a man of peace. Almost a pacifist. How did it happen that when a man of peace like you left politics you tried to buy from the government a factory that manufactures tank parts?

"I am a businessman. I deal with companies. With bringing them back to health. Privatizations. I like this job and I am also good at it. One of my main projects was Ashot Industries in Ashkelon, 40 percent of which manufactures arms. My intention was to close down that production line and expand Ashot's involvement in the world of civil aviation. I will not be responsible for manufacturing arms for one day. The challenge I saw was to take a place that makes spears and beat them into plowshares."

That deal raised serious questions. It led to an investigation by the state comptroller and by the police. But I don't want to ask about its criminal aspect, because the case was closed and you were exonerated. I want to ask how it can be that the first thing a politician who presented himself as an anti-Thatcherite and as a sworn enemy of privatization did after leaving politics was to try to earn a huge personal profit from privatization.

"I set out to do the most anti-Thatcherite thing. The state sold badly but I wanted to buy well. The state wronged the workers and I wanted to ensure their rights. I wanted to show a different model of partnership between employees and owners. So I think it is unjust that the State of Israel took this deal away from me. When I left politics, the temptations were great. I could have sat on this board or that board. People wanted me to open doors and close doors. But I said no. I went to the old [type of] industry. To the periphery. I am now producing corn in Hatzor Haglilit. Show me another person like me who emerged from politics and is doing work like this. I am not sitting in Kiryat Atidim [a high-tech industrial zone]. I am not sitting in the slick places. I am sweating my guts out every month to pay my 600 employees. Their salary."

It's not exactly right that you decided not to open doors or close doors. In your joint venture with businessman David Appel you were supposed to open doors so he could reincarnate the 'Greek Island' tourist project in southern Italy.

"Nothing came of that project. Not even a business opportunity. But if something had come of it - so what? Because 20 people don't like David he is unacceptable? Because terrible things are said about him in the judicial system but nothing is proved? That is violence I cannot tolerate. It is simply an executioner's approach. Israeliness as executioner, and we really love it - it sells papers."

Are the allegations against you concerning Ashot Industries and David Appel part of an Israeli executioner's approach?

"There is a gallows society here. First we'll hang you and when you breathe your last breath we will clarify why it was your last. How it left your body. We are now living in the equivalent of the 1950s in America. In a McCarthyite era. The assault on corruption is McCarthyism. It is important that we set boundaries. In the past we swiped things from the chicken coop, and today that is impossible. Once we asked girls, When you say no, what do you mean? - and today sexual harassment is forbidden. But the way it is being done - the style, the vulgarity, the populism, the superficiality. The inability of those who are under attack to fight back properly."

You do know how to fight back. For example, Salai Meridor [former Jewish Agency chairman] decides that there is no justification for him and you to enjoy the baseless privilege of a service car with a chauffeur for life, and you go to court to fight for that privilege with all your might.

"As a former chairman of the Jewish Agency, I have pension rights just as you have pension rights. One day they are suddenly gone. Out of the blue. Think that part of your pension is to receive Haaretz free and one day Amos Schocken [the publisher] suddenly takes it away. Wouldn't you fight? Wouldn't you go to the workers' committee?

"But every person is allowed to fight when something is taken from him - only Avrum is not allowed. Why? Because. This whole thing is such a pittance in money terms that it doesn't even exist. But the level of principle sent me up the wall."

We're talking about NIS 200,000. And about your behavior, which the judge found disgraceful. And about the fact that even though you talk high and mighty about morals, you don't see the moral flaw in the fact that 10 years after leaving the Jewish Agency you are driving on your business trips throughout the country with a Jewish Agency chauffeur driving you everywhere. On top of which, today you are so alienated from everything the Jewish Agency stands for.

"I have something to say about what the judge said. But I will not counterattack. I will not correct violence with violence. We are talking about a person's basic right. About a pension right."

Was it worth it? What will remain engraved in people's memory is that Salai Meridor was fair and modest, and Avrum Burg was a hedonist who coveted benefits.

"What remains of all this is that I am at peace with myself. Everyone who feels good with secret violence or hidden knifing or with being an open or covert Sicarius [name given to Second Temple Jews who used a dagger, sicarius, to dispose of collaborators with Rome] - good luck to him! Well and good. I am not going to educate the world. What's important for me is that I am at harmony with myself."

But there is a question mark here which has accompanied you all along. You speak so impressively. Not only articulately but morally. And now you have written a book that is all morality. But your activity in the world is different. In political life you were sophisticated, cagy and snakelike, and in the business world, too, you are far from being a saint. The disparity between your language and your deeds is disturbing.

"The disparity is in the eye of the beholder. I do not ask myself how Ari Shavit sees me. I am finished with the world in which I care what you think of me. I live in a world in which I care what I think about me. For many years I lived with the Moloch of what people would say. That Moloch led me to wrong places. To places of a very large gap between the inner me and the outer me. Today I live with my truth."

Maybe the things connect. You really are a man of peace who rejects the militarist, nationalist, brute-force Israeli. But when you reconnect to the Jew, you are connecting not only to the spiritual Jew but also to the Jew of money.

"True. Life is not just to be a pioneer with a hoe and a bold fighter at Lion's Gate. Life is also to be a merchant in Warsaw. Unequivocally, that is a richer totality in life."

Still, you haven't given up the political. You are a close friend of Prime Minister Olmert. Do you continue to support him even after the Second Lebanon War?

"The story of Ehud Olmert is a terribly great tragedy. Of everyone in the generation that is slightly older than me, he is the most talented. The most experienced. There is a great fondness between us. I like him very much. He is one of the most humane people and most moral people in regard to relations between people, and in terms of his relations with his family. But his ability to translate into practical terms what he has is impossible because of the declaration of the war. The Bush-like notion that war is the first option is a mistake that colors all of Olmert's other essential qualities. I still pray that he will correct this by means of a great political drama. Hamas or Syria or the Saudi initiative. I tell him not to entrench himself in the mistake. It is still possible for a great healing to come out of the blunder."

Who do you support in the Labor Party primaries?

"Barak."

Why?

"He has already proved once that he is ready to go beyond the Israeli Rubicon. And there will be Rubicons to cross here. His ability to do that is very important to me."

Do you see yourself returning to politics?

"An open question. Only in 2010 will a new political era begin in Israel. After the Olmert-Barak-Bibi [Netanyahu] generation comes to its end, the turn will come of a new generation who will come from the economy, the academy, the arts. Maybe then there will be a place for me."

A place in the Prime Minister's Bureau?

"Once I wanted very much to be prime minister. It burned like fire in my bones. I didn't know what I wanted to do there, but I wanted terribly to be there. Today I say that I have lot of marathons to run before that can happen."

But you are in the marathon?

"All my life."

Bless you, Avrum. Now I know which book I'm buying, but unfortunately it is still not available in English!

The United States is among the least peaceful nations in the world, ranking 96th between Yemen and Iran, according to an index of 121 countries.

According to the Global Peace Index, created by the Economist Intelligence Unit, Norway is the most peaceful nation and Iraq is the least, just after Israel and Sudan. The survey places Israel at the bottom end of the scale - 119^th.

Here is a list of all Arab countries and few others (most at peace ranked first):

1) Norway,
22) Oman,
25) Australia,
30) Qatar,
33) Italy,
34) France,
38) United Arab Emirates,
39) Tunisia,
46) Kuwait,
48) Morocco,
49) United Kingdom,
58) Libya,
60) China,
62) Bahrain,
63) Jordan,
73) Egypt,
77) Syria,
90) Saudi Arabia,
92) Turkey,
95) Yemen,
96) United States of America,
97) Iran,
107) Algeria,
114) Lebanon,
119) Israel,
120) Sudan,
121) Iraq,

Click here for the complete list of rankings.

Notice that ALL Arab counties (but Iraq and Sudan) ranked better than Israel. Also only Algeria and Lebanon beside Sudan and Iraq, ranks worse than the United States... And they are still SEARCHING for a partner for peace!

Despite gains made to make 'occupation' the frame of reference in understanding what is going on in the Occupied Palestine, to a large extent the occupation continues to remain "invisible".

The occupation's invisibility is mainly credited to propaganda-influenced media reports. Repeated studies of the media's coverage of Palestine/Israel have highlighted the prevalent pro-Israeli bias. A bias that flows from the refusal to frame individual events in the context of the occupation or a colonisation-resistance dynamic. Thus to average Western readers and listeners, terms like "Palestine" and "occupation" become almost completely alien.

It is time to show, explain and uncover the reality of occupation to those in the West who really can make a difference. It is time to make the occupation the primary lens through which people see the sad events in Occupied Palestine from sea to river.

May 15 may be the most important - and the most overlooked - date in Palestinian history. Here are few noteworthy words from a Palestinian American to commemorate the 59th Anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe).

For Palestinians, memory matters
It provides a blueprint for their future

by George Bisharat

Sunday, May 13, 2007 - San Francisco Chronicle

Why do some people have the power to remember, while others are asked to forget? That question is especially poignant at this time of year, as we move from Holocaust Remembrance day in early spring to Monday's anniversary of Israel's declaration of independence on May 14, 1948.

In the months surrounding that date, Jewish forces expelled, or intimidated into flight, an estimated 750,000 Palestinians. A living, breathing, society that had existed in Palestine for centuries was smashed and fragmented, and a new society built on its ruins.

Few Palestinian families lack a personal narrative of loss from that period -- an uncle killed, or a branch of the family that fled north while the others fled east, never to be reunited, or homes, offices, orchards and other property seized. Ever since, Palestinians worldwide have commemorated May 15 as Nakba (Catastrophe) Day.

No ethical person would admonish Jews to "forget the Holocaust." Indeed, recent decades have witnessed victims of that terrible era not only remembering, but also regaining paintings and financial assets seized by the Nazis -- and justifiably so.

Other victims of mass wrongs -- interned Japanese Americans, enslaved African Americans, and Armenians subjected to a genocide that may have later convinced Hitler of the feasibility of mass killings -- receive at least respectful consideration of their cases, even while responses to their claims have differed.

Yet in dialogues with Israelis, and some Americans, Palestinians are repeatedly admonished to "forget the past," that looking back is "not constructive" and "doesn't get us closer to a solution." Ironically, Palestinians live the consequences of the past every day -- whether as exiles from their homeland, or as members of an oppressed minority within Israel, or as subjects of a brutal and violent military occupation.

In the West we are amply reminded of the suffering of Jewish people in World War II. Our newspaper featured several stories on local survivors of the Nazi holocaust around Holocaust Remembrance Day (an Israeli national holiday that is widely observed in the United States). My daughter has read at least one book on the Nazi holocaust every year since middle school. Last year, in ninth grade English literature alone, she read three. But we seldom confront the impact of Israel's policies on Palestinians.

It is the "security of the Jewish people" that has rationalized Israel's takeover of Palestinian lands, both in the past in Israel, and more recently in the occupied West Bank. There, most Palestinian children negotiate one of the 500 Israeli checkpoints and other barriers to movement just to reach school each day. Meanwhile, Israel's program of colonization of the West Bank grinds ahead relentlessly, implanting ever more Israeli settlers who must be "protected" from those Palestinians not reconciled to the theft of their homes and fields.

The primacy of Jewish security over rights of Palestinians -- to property, education, health care, a chance to make a living, and, also to security -- is seldom challenged.

Unfortunately, remembering the Nazi Holocaust -- something morally incumbent on all of us -- has seemingly become entangled with, and even an instrument of, the amnesia some would force on Palestinians. Israel is enveloped in an aura of ethical propriety that makes it unseemly, even "anti-Semitic" to question its denial of Palestinian rights.

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

What this demonstrates is that memory is not just an idle capacity. Rather, who can remember, and who can be made to forget, is, fundamentally, an expression of power.

Equally importantly, however, memory can provide a blueprint for the future -- a vision of a solution to seek, or an outcome to avoid. My Palestinian father grew up in Jerusalem before Israel was founded and the Palestinians expelled, when Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in peace and mutual respect. Recalling that past provides a vision for an alternative future -- one involving equal rights and tolerance, rather than the domination of one ethno-religious group over others.

Thus, what Palestinians are really being commanded is not just to forget their past, but instead to forget their future, too. That they will never do.

George Bisharat is professor of law at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. He writes frequently about the Middle East. Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page E - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle and reprinted with permission from the author.

We shall not forget, and occupation will not conquer our souls.

By Azmi Bishara - latimes.com

During my years in the Knesset, the attorney general indicted me for voicing my political opinions (the charges were dropped), lobbied to have my parliamentary immunity revoked and sought unsuccessfully to disqualify my political party from participating in elections — all because I believe Israel should be a state for all its citizens and because I have spoken out against Israeli military occupation. Last year, Cabinet member Avigdor Lieberman — an immigrant from Moldova — declared that Palestinian citizens of Israel "have no place here," that we should "take our bundles and get lost." After I met with a leader of the Palestinian Authority from Hamas, Lieberman called for my execution.

The Israeli authorities are trying to intimidate not just me but all Palestinian citizens of Israel. But we will not be intimidated. We will not bow to permanent servitude in the land of our ancestors or to being severed from our natural connections to the Arab world. Our community leaders joined together recently to issue a blueprint for a state free of ethnic and religious discrimination in all spheres. If we turn back from our path to freedom now, we will consign future generations to the discrimination we have faced for six decades.

Read full article here.

There are plenty of noteworthy articles that are missed every week. To give them credit and rescue them from going unnoticed by my blog readers, I will try to compile some of these articles every weekend in a 'Weekend Read' post. Here is the first one:

1. The Holocaust as political asset
By Amira Hass (Source: Ha'aretz)

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

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

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

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

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

2. Why is the Peace Movement Silent About AIPAC?
By John Walsh (Source: CounterPunch)

"AIPAC!" was the forceful one-word answer of Congressman Michael Capuano when we asked him, "Why was the Iran clause forbidding war on Iran without Congressional approval taken out of the recent supplemental for the Iraq war funding?" I nearly fell out of my chair at his reply - not because this was news but because of who had just said it. Capuano is a close ally of Nancy Pelosi, her fixer and enforcer. That was last Friday morning when a small delegation from Cambridge and Somerville, MA, were visiting the Congressman, known for his bluntness, as part of the nationwide UFPJ (United For Peace and Justice) home lobbying effort during the Congressional recess.

Later that day, Dennis Kucinich made an appearance at Harvard, where he was asked the same question, the reason for removing the Iran provision. "AIPAC," I volunteered out loud. Kucinich looked my way and said, "Exactly." Again my chair almost failed to contain me...

AIPAC is not just an issue for Jewish Americans or the Jewish wing of the peace movement like Jewish Voice for Peace; it is a major force, although not the only one, driving the U.S. to wars in the Middle East. AIPAC is no less a force for war than is the Republican National Committee. In fact it is worse, because it sinks its teeth into the foreign policy establishment of both parties, perhaps the Dems more so than the Republicans. If the peace movement is to be worth its salt, then it must take action against AIPAC.

3. What the persecution of Azmi Bishara means for Palestine
By Ali Abunimah (Source: Electronic Intifada)

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...

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.

4. Occupation defies social justice
By Amanda Gelender (Source: The Stanford Daily Online)

However, our actions - as represented by the Israeli government - distort the essence of our core values of peace and social justice. Israel’s despotism has turned Jews into the very oppressors we have struggled against for thousands of years. We are killing. We are demolishing homes. We are denying basic human rights. I refuse to tolerate the unequivocal endorsement of these brutalities to compose the predominant voice of the Jewish community at Stanford. A Jewish upbringing informs my system of values, and I will not betray my notions of social justice merely because those committing the atrocities are fellow Jews.

Jewish culture embodies the struggle for peace and equality, selflessness in serving others and liberation from oppression. The treatment of Palestinian people by the Israeli government is ethically depraved. It is in direct violation of both internationally recognized human rights standards and our stated ideals. No, I do not support acts of Palestinian terror, and I condemn all forms of violence against civilians. However, these fringe acts of terrorism in no way justify the horrific actions of collective punishment and severe repression perpetrated by the powerful Israeli military and government. We as Jews are not "repairing the world" in Israel and the Occupied Territories - we are destroying it along with the integrity of our faith and culture.

I refuse to stand idly by while the supreme injustices committed by Israel occur in my name. I refuse to allow fellow Jews to hijack our peaceful, resilient religion by supporting the occupation of Palestine under the guise of anti-Semitism and national security. For those of you who feel stifled and angry at this usurpation of Jewish values, I encourage you to join Jews for Justice in Palestine and become advocates for justice, human rights and peace in Israel and the Occupied Territories. For those of you who are afraid to stand in solidarity with Palestinians out of fear of offending the Jewish community, know that there are many Jews who are repulsed by the stifling of legitimate critique of Israel based upon unfounded claims of anti-Semitism. There is real anti-Semitism in the world, but employing the term in this manner is a disgrace to the legacy and current manifestations of prejudice and discrimination against Jews. Unlike others outspoken on this issue, I do not claim to represent the Jewish community. I do, however, represent myself, and I refuse to be spoken for.

[Cartoon Image by Benjamin Heine on Israel torturing Palestinian child prisoners]

A multinational poll finds that publics around the world reject the idea that the United States should play the role of preeminent world leader. Most publics say the United States plays the role of world policeman more than it should, fails to take their country’s interests into account and cannot be trusted to act responsibly.

The United States' Role in the World

Majorities in all 15 of the publics polled about the United States' role in the world reject the idea that "as the sole remaining superpower, the US should continue to be the preeminent world leader in solving international problems." However majorities in only two publics (Argentina and the Palestinian territories) say that the United States "should withdraw from most efforts to solve international problems." The preferred view in all of the other cases is that the United States "should do its share in efforts to solve international problems together with other countries."

In Asia, large majorities embrace the idea that the United States should play a cooperative role in South Korea (79%) and China (68%). A majority of Filipinos (55%) and a plurality of Indians (42%) also take this view, but they are among the few publics with substantial numbers saying the United States should play the role of the preeminent world leader: 20 percent in the Philippines and 34 percent in India. Thais are also relatively reluctant to support a cooperative role (47%), but very few endorse a preeminent role (8%) or disengagement (18%), while 27 percent declined to answer.

In Europe, the French are those most emphatic in their support for a cooperative role (75%), followed by Armenia (58%). A majority of Ukrainians (52%) also support this position, but an unusually high number (34%) supports US disengagement. In Russia, a plurality (42%) favors a cooperative role, but this is barely more than the percentage (38%) that favors disengagement.

In Latin America, about six in ten Peruvians (61%) and Mexicans (59%) believe the United States should cooperate with other countries to solve international problems. However, as mentioned above, Argentines are one of only two publics favoring US withdrawal from international efforts with 55 percent taking this position and 34 percent in favor of cooperation.

In the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians differ sharply. A majority of Palestinians favor US disengagement (55%) while more than a third (36%) prefers cooperation. Israelis are more in line with most other publics in that 62 percent favor US cooperation, but they also show the second highest level of support (after India) for the US taking the role of preeminent leader (24%).

Americans match the French in their support for the United States doing its share together with other nations (75%), with small numbers favoring a preeminent role (10%) or isolationism (12%).

United States as World Policeman

Majorities in 13 out of 15 publics polled say the United States is "playing the role of world policeman more than it should be." This is the sentiment of about three-quarters or more of those polled in: France (89%), Australia (80%), China (77%), Russia (76%), Peru (76%), the Palestinian territories (74%) and South Korea (73%).

The US public is also among those most convinced that United States too often plays the role of world policeman. Seventy-six percent of Americans agree that their country is overdoing such activities.

In only one country does a majority disagree with the idea that the United States tends to take on the role of international enforcer more than it should: the Philippines. Fifty-seven percent of Filipinos reject the idea that the United States plays a police role too often, while only a third (31%) agrees that it does.

Israelis, who are the United States' closest allies in the Middle East, are divided over whether the United States plays the global policeman role too often. Forty-eight percent of Israelis agree and forty-eight percent disagree.

The five other countries where majorities believe the United States is too often acting as world policeman are: Indonesia (68%), Ukraine (67%), Armenia (63%), Argentina (62%) and India (53%). In India, a country which has been among the most positive about the United States in recent years, a third (33%) disagrees.

The survey also asks respondents in nine countries whether the United States has the "responsibility to play the role of 'world policeman,' that is to fight violations of international law and aggression wherever they occur." Majorities in eight of the nine countries say the United States does not have the responsibility to fight aggression and enforce international law. The exception is India, where a slight majority (53%) says the US does have this responsibility while a third (35%) says it does not.

Palestinians (76%) are the most likely of the publics surveyed to answer that the United States does not have such a responsibility. The next most likely are Americans themselves. Three-quarters of Americans (75%) reject the idea that their country has a duty to enforce international law.

Strong majorities of Armenians (70%), Australians (70%), Indonesians (69%), and Ukrainians (69%) also agree that the United States does not have this responsibility.

The United States' greatest economic and military rival in Asia-China-and one of its closest allies-South Korea-are equally likely to reject the idea that the US government has a duty to enforce international law. Sixty-one percent of Chinese and60 percent of South Koreans answer no. South Koreans are only somewhat more likely to say yes (39%) than the Chinese (30%).

Read more to find out what the world public think about trusting the United States to Act Responsibly and US Overseas Military Bases.

Source: World Public Opinion

[Image by Carlos Latuff]

By Uri Avnery's - Gush Shalom
14/04/07

AT THIS moment, negotiations on a prisoner exchange are in full swing.

The term "negotiations" is really inappropriate. "Haggling" seems more fitting. One could also use an uglier expression: "trafficking in human beings".

The planned deal concerns living people. They are being treated like goods, for which the officials of the two sides are bargaining, as if they were a piece of land or a load of fruit.

In their own eyes, and in the eyes of their spouses, parents and children, they are not goods. They are life itself.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the signing of the Oslo agreement in 1993, "Gush Shalom" publicly called on the Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, to free all the Palestinian prisoners.

The logic was simple: they are in reality prisoners-of-war. They did what they did in the service of their people, exactly like our own soldiers. The people who sent them were the chiefs of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) with whom we have just signed a far-reaching agreement. Is there any sense in signing an agreement with the commanders, while their subordinates continue to languish in our jails?

When one makes peace, prisoners-of-war are expected to be released. In our case, this would not only be a sign of humanity, but also of wisdom. These prisoners come from all the towns and villages. Sending them home would release an outburst of joy all over the occupied Palestinian territories. There is hardly a Palestinian family that does not have a relative in prison.

If the agreement is not to remain just a piece of paper, we said, but be imbued with content and spirit - there is no wiser act than this.

Unfortunately, Rabin did not listen to us. He had many positive traits, but he was a rather closed person, devoid of imagination. He was himself a prisoner of narrow "security" concepts. For him, the prisoners were goods to be traded for something. True, before the founding of Israel he himself had been held in detention by the British for some time, but, like many others, he was incapable of applying the lessons of his own experience to the Palestinians.

We considered this a fateful matter as far as the peace efforts were concerned. Together with the unforgettable Faisal Husseini, the adored leader of the Palestinian population of East Jerusalem, we organized a demonstration opposite the Jneid prison in Nablus. It was the largest joint Israeli-Palestinian demonstration ever. More than ten thousand people took part.

In vain. The prisoners were not released.

FOURTEEN YEARS later, nothing has changed. Prisoners have been released after completing their sentence, others have taken their place. Every night, Israeli soldiers capture a dozen or so new "wanted" Palestinians.

At any one time, there are some 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, male and female, from minors to old people.

All our governments have treated them as goods. And goods are not given away for nothing. Goods have a price. Many times it was proposed to release some prisoners as a "gesture" to Mahmoud Abbas, in order to strengthen him vis-à-vis Hamas. All these suggestions were rejected by Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert.

Now, the security services oppose the prisoner exchange deal for the release of the soldier Gilad Shalit. And not because the price - 1400 in exchange for 1 - is exorbitant. On the contrary, for many Israelis it seems quite natural that one Israeli soldier is worth 1400 "terrorists". But the security services raise much weightier arguments: if prisoners are released for a "kidnapped" soldier, it will encourage the "terrorists" to capture more soldiers.

At least some of the released prisoners will return to their organizations and activities, and that will result in more bloodshed. Israeli soldiers will be obliged to risk their lives in order to arrest them again.

And there is something else lurking in the background: some of the families of Israelis killed in attacks, who are organized in a very vociferous lobby connected with the extreme right, will raise hell. How could this pitiful government, devoid of any public standing, withstand such pressure?

FOR EACH of these arguments, there is a counter-argument.

Not releasing the prisoners leaves the "terrorists" with a permanent motivation to "kidnap" soldiers. After all, nothing else seems to convince us to release prisoners. In these circumstances, such actions will always enjoy huge popularity with the Palestinian public, which includes many thousands of families that are waiting for the return of their loved ones.

From a military point of view, there is another strong argument: "Soldiers are not left in the field". This is held as a sacred maxim, a mainstay of army morale. Every soldier must know that if he or she is captured, the Israeli army will do everything, but everything, to get him free. If this belief is undermined, will soldiers be as ready to take risks in battle?

Furthermore, experience shows that a high proportion of released Palestinian prisoners do not return to the cycle of violence. After years in detention, all they want is to live in peace and devote their time to their children. They exercise a moderating influence on their surroundings.

And as for the thirst for revenge of the families of "terror victims" - woe to a government that gives in to such emotions, which, of course, exist on both sides.

THE POLITICAL argument goes both ways. There is pressure from the "terror victims" - but there is even stronger pressure from the family of the captured soldier.

In Judaism, there is a commandment called "ransom of prisoners". It arose from the reality of a persecuted community dispersed across the world. Every Jew is obliged to make any sacrifice and pay any price for the release of another Jew from prison. If Turkish pirates captured a Jew from England, the Jews of Istanbul paid the ransom for his release. In today's Israel, this obligation still holds.

Public meetings and demonstrations are now being held for the release of Gilad Shalit. The organizers do not say openly that the aim is to push the government to accept the exchange deal. But, since there is no other way to get him back alive, that is the message in practice.

One cannot envy the members of the government who find themselves in this situation. Caught between two bad options, the natural tendency of a politician like Olmert is not to decide at all and postpone everything. But this is a third bad option, and one which carries a heavy political price.

THE STRONGEST emotional argument voiced by the opponents of the deal is that the Palestinians are demanding the release of prisoners with "blood on their hands". In our society, the words "Jewish blood" - two words beloved by the Right - are enough to silence even many on the Left.

But that is a stupid argument. It is also mendacious.

In the terminology of the Security Service, this definition applies not only to a person who himself has taken part in an attack in which Israelis were killed, but also to anyone who thought about the action, gave the order, organized it and helped to carry it out - prepared the weapons, conveyed the attacker to the scene, etc.

According to this definition, every soldier and officer of the Israeli army has "blood on his hands", along with many politicians.

Somebody who has killed or wounded Israelis - is he different from us, the Israeli soldiers past and present? When I was a soldier in the 1948 war, in which tens of thousands of civilians, fighters and soldiers on both sided perished, I was a machine-gunner in the Samson's Foxes commando unit. I fired thousands of bullets, if not tens of thousands. It was mostly at night, and I could not see whether I hit anybody, and if so - who. Do I have blood on my hands?

The official argument is that the prisoners are not soldiers, and therefore they are not prisoners-of-war, but common criminals, murderers and their accomplices.

That is not an original argument. All colonial regimes in history have said the same. No foreign ruler, fighting an uprising of the oppressed people, has ever recognized his enemy as legitimate fighters. The French did not recognize the Algerian freedom fighters, the Americans do not recognize the Iraqi and Afghan freedom fighters (they are all terrorists, who can be tortured and held in abominable detention centers), the South African apartheid regime treated Nelson Mandela and his comrades as criminals, as the British did to Mahatma Gandhi and the fighters of the Hebrew underground in Palestine. In Ireland, they hanged the members of the Irish underground, who left behind moving songs ("Shoot me like an Irish soldier / Do not hang me like a dog; / For I fought for Ireland's freedom / On that dark September morn…")

The fiction that freedom-fighters are common criminals is necessary for the legitimation of a colonial regime, and makes it easier for a soldier to shoot people. It is, of course, twisted. A common criminal acts in his own interest. A freedom fighter or "terrorist", like most soldiers, believes that he is serving his people or cause.

ONE PARADOX of the situation is that the Israeli government is negotiating with people who themselves have served time in Israeli prisons. When our leaders speak about the need to strengthen the "moderate" Palestinian elements - they mainly mean these.

That is a feature of the Palestinian situation, which I doubt the existence of in other occupied countries. People who have spent five, ten and even twenty years in Israeli prisons, and who have every reason in the world to hate our guts, are quite open to contact with Israelis.

Since I know some of them, and some of them have become close friends, I have wondered many times about this.

At international conferences I have met Irish activists. After several pints of Guinness they have told me that they know no greater joy in life than killing Englishmen. I was reminded of the song of our poet Nathan Alterman, who prayed to God "Give me hatred grey like a sack" (for the Nazis). After hundreds of years of oppression, that's how they felt.

Of course, my Palestinian friends hate the Israeli occupation. But they do not hate all Israelis, just for being Israelis. In prison, most of them have learned good Hebrew and listened to Israeli radio, read Israeli newspapers and watched Israeli TV. They know that there are all kinds of Israelis, just as there are all kinds of Palestinians. Israeli democracy, which allows members of the Knesset to vilify their prime minister, has made a deep impression on them. When the Israeli government showed a readiness to negotiate with Palestinians, the best partners were to be found among these ex-prisoners.

That is also true for the prisoners that are to be released now. If Marwan Barghouti is released, he will be a natural partner in any peace effort.

I shall be very happy when both he and Gilad Shalit are free.

If you read only one thing today, it must be this piece...

By Sara Roy

We have nothing to lose except everything. Albert Camus

[Image by bendib]
During the summer my husband and I had a conversion ceremony for our adopted daughter, Jess. We took her to the mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath where she was totally submerged in a pool of living water -- living because it is fed in part by heavenly rain -- and momentarily suspended as we are in the womb, emerging the same yet transformed. This ritual of purification, transformation and rebirth is central to Judaism and it signifies renewal and possibility.

The day of Jess's conversion was also the day that Israel began its pitiless bombing of Lebanon and nearly three weeks into Israel's violent assault on Gaza, a place that has been my second home for the last two decades. This painful juxtaposition of rebirth and destruction remains with me, weighing heavily, without respite. Yet, the link deeply forged in our construction of self as Jews, between my daughter's acceptance into Judaism and Israel's actions-between Judaism and Zionism -- a link that I never accepted uncritically but understood as historically inevitable and understandable, is one that for me, at least, has now been broken.

For unlike past conflicts involving Israel and the Palestinian and Arab peoples this one feels qualitatively different -- a turning point -- not only with regard to the nature of Israel's horrific response -- its willingness to destroy and to do so utterly -- but also with regard to the virtually unqualified support of organized American Jewry for Israel's brutal actions, something that is not new but now no longer tolerable to me.

I grew up in a home where Judaism was defined and practiced not so much as a religion but as a system of ethics and culture. God was present but not central. Israel and the notion of a Jewish homeland were very important to my parents, who survived Auschwitz, Chelmno and Buchenwald. But unlike many of their friends, my parents were not uncritical of Israel. Obedience to a state was not a primary Jewish value, especially after the Holocaust. Judaism provided the context for Jewish life, for values and beliefs that were not dependent upon national or territorial boundaries, but transcended them to include the other, always the other. For my mother and father Judaism meant bearing witness, raging against injustice and refusing silence. It meant compassion, tolerance, and rescue. In the absence of these imperatives, they taught me, we cease to be Jews.

Many of the people, both Jewish and others, who write about Palestinians and Arabs fail to accept the fundamental humanity of the people they are writing about, a failing born of ignorance, fear and racism. Within the organized Jewish community especially, it has always been unacceptable to claim that Arabs, Palestinians especially, are like us, that they, too, possess an essential humanity and must be included within our moral boundaries, ceasing to be "a kind of solution," a useful, hostile "other" to borrow from Edward Said. That any attempt at separation is artificial, an abstraction.

By refusing to seek proximity over distance, we calmly, even gratefully refuse to see what is right before our eyes. We are no longer compelled, if we ever were, to understand our behavior from positions outside our own, to enter, as Jacqueline Rose has written, into each other's predicaments and make what is one of the hardest journeys of the mind. Hence, there is no need to maintain a living connection with the people we are oppressing, to humanize them, taking into account the experience of subordination itself, as Said would say. We are not preoccupied by our cruelty nor are we haunted by it. The task, ultimately, is to tribalize pain, narrowing the scope of human suffering to ourselves alone. Such willful blindness leads to the destruction of principle and the destruction of people, eliminating all possibility of embrace, but it gives us solace.

Why is it so difficult, even impossible to incorporate Palestinians and other Arab peoples into the Jewish understanding of history? Why is there so little perceived need to question our own narrative (for want of a better word) and the one we have given others, preferring instead to cherish beliefs and sentiments that remain impenetrable? Why is it virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism, repression and injustice almost anywhere in the world and unacceptable -- indeed, for some, an act of heresy -- to oppose it when Israel is the oppressor, choosing concealment over exposure? For many among us history and memory adhere to preclude reflection and tolerance, where, in the words of Northrop Frye, "the enemy become, not people to be defeated, but embodiments of an idea to be exterminated."

What happens to the other as we, a broken and weary people, continually abuse him, turning him into the enemy we now want and need, secure in a prophecy that is thankfully self-fulfilling?

What happens to a people when renewal and injustice are rapturously joined?

A new discourse of the unconscious

We speak without mercy, numb to the pain of others, incapable of being reached-unconscious. Our words are these:

* " . . . [W]e must not forget,' wrote Ze'ev Schiff, the senior political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, "the most important aspect of this war: Hezbollah and what this terrorist organization symbolizes must be destroyed at any price. . . .What matters is not the future of the Shiite town of Bint Jbail or the Hezbollah positions in Maroun Ras, but the future and safety of the State of Israel." "If Israel doesn't improve its military cards in the fighting, we will feel the results in the political solution."

* "We must reduce to dust the villages of the south . . ." stated Haim Ramon, long known as a political dove and Israel's Minister of Justice. "I don't understand why there is still electricity there." "Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hizbollah. . . What we should do in southern Lebanon is employ huge firepower before a ground force goes in." Israel's largest selling newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth put it this way: "A village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire. This decision should have been made and executed after the first Katyusha. But better late than never."

* "[F]or every katyusha barrage on Haifa, 10 Dahiya buildings will be bombed," said the IDF Chief of Staff, Dan Halutz. Eli Yishai, Israel's Deputy Prime Minister, proposed turning south Lebanon into a "sandbox", while Knesset member Moshe Sharoni called for the obliteration of Gaza, and Yoav Limor, a Channel 1 military correspondent, suggested an exhibition of Hezbollah corpses followed by a parade of prisoners in their underwear in order "to strengthen the home front's morale."

* "Remember: distorted philosophical sensitivity [sic] to human lives will make us pay the real price of the lives of many, and the blood of our sons," read an advertisement in Ha'aretz.

* "[A]ccording to Jewish law," announced the Yesha Rabbinical Council, "during a time of battle and war, there is no such term as 'innocents of the enemy'."

* "But speaking from our own Judaic faith and legal legacy," argued the Rabbinical Council of America, "we believe that Judaism would neither require nor permit a Jewish soldier to sacrifice himself in order to save deliberately endangered enemy civilians. This is especially true when confronting a barbaric enemy who would by such illicit, consistent, and systematic means seek to destroy not only the Jewish soldier, but defeat and destroy the Jewish homeland. New realities do indeed require new responses."

* The Israeli author, Naomi Ragan, after learning that many of the war dead in Lebanon were children, wrote "Save your sympathy for the mothers and sisters and girlfriends of our young soldiers who would rather be sitting in study halls learning Torah, but have no choice but to risk their precious lives full of hope, goodness and endless potential, to wipe out the cancerous terrorist cells that threaten their people and all mankind. Make your choice, and save your tears."

Many of us, perhaps most, have declared that all Palestinians and Lebanese are the enemy, threatening our -- Israel and the Jewish people's -- existence. Everyone we kill and every house we demolish is therefore a military target, legitimate and deserving. Terrorism is part of their culture and we must strengthen our ability to deter. Negotiation, to paraphrase the Israeli scholar, Yehoshua Porat, writing during the 1982 Lebanon war, is a "veritable catastrophe for Israel." The battlefield will preserve us.

The French critic and historian, Hippolyte Taine, observed:

"Imagine a man who sets out on a voyage equipped with a pair of spectacles that magnify things to an extraordinary degree. A hair on his hand, a spot on the tablecloth, the shifting fold of a coat, all will attract his attention; at this rate, he will not go far, he will spend his day taking six steps and will never get out of his room."

We are content in our room and seek no exit.

In our room, compassion and conscience are dismissed as weakness, where pinpoint surgical strikes constitute restraint and civility and momentary ceasefires, acts of humanity and kindness. "Leave your home, we are going to destroy it." Several minutes later another home in Gaza, another history, is taken, crushed. The warning, though, is not for them but for us-it makes us good and clean. What better illustration of our morality: when a call to leave one's home minutes before it is bombed is considered a humane gesture.

Our warnings have another purpose: they make our actions legitimate and our desire for legitimacy is unbounded, voracious. This is perhaps the only thing Palestinians (and now the Lebanese) have withheld from us, this object of our desire. If legitimacy will not be bestowed then it must be created. This explains Israel's obsession with laws and legalities to insure in our own eyes that we do not transgress, making evil allowable by widening the parameters of license and transgression. In this way we insure our goodness and morality, through a piece of paper, which is enough for us.

What are Jews now capable of resisting: tyranny? Oppression? Occupation? Injustice? We resist none of these things, no more. For too many among us they are no longer evil but necessary and good-we cannot live, survive without them. What does that make us? We look at ourselves and what do we see: a non-Jew, a child, whose pain we inflict effortlessly, whose death is demanded and unquestioned, bearing validity and purpose.

What do we see: a people who now take pleasure in hating others. Hatred is familiar to us if nothing else. We understand it and it is safe. It is what we know. We do not fear our own distortion -- do we even see it? -- but the loss of our power to deter, and we shake with a violent palsy at a solution that shuns the suffering of others. Our pathology is this: it lies in our struggle to embrace a morality we no longer possess and in our need for persecution of a kind we can no longer claim but can only inflict.

We are remote from the conscious world -- brilliantly ignorant, blindly visionary, unable to resist from within. We live in an unchanging place, absent of season and reflection, devoid of normality and growth, and most important of all, emptied-or so we aim -- of the other. A ghetto still but now, unlike before, a ghetto of our own making.

What is our narrative of victory and defeat? What does it mean to win? Bombed cars with white civilian flags still attached to their windows? More dead and dismembered bodies of old people and children littered throughout villages that have been ravaged? An entire country disabled and broken? Non-ending war? This is our victory, our achievement, something we seek and applaud. And how do we measure defeat? Losing the will to continue the devastation? Admitting to our persecution of others, something we have never done?

We can easily ignore their suffering, cut them from their food, water, electricity, and medicine, confiscate their land, demolish their crops and deny them egress -- suffocate them, our voices stilled. Racism does not allow us to see Arabs as we see ourselves; that is why we rage when they do not fail from weakness but instead we find ourselves failing from strength. Yet, in our view it is we who are the only victims, vulnerable and scarred. All we have is the unnaturalness of our condition.

As an unconscious people, we have perhaps reached our nadir with many among us now calling for a redefinition of our ethics-the core of who we are -- to incorporate the need to kill women and children if Jewish security required it. "New realities do indeed require new responses," says the Rabbinical Council of America. Now, for us, violence is creation and peace is destruction.

Ending the process of creation and rebirth after the Holocaust

Can we be ordinary, an essential part of our rebirth after the Holocaust? Is it possible to be normal when we seek refuge in the margin, and remedy in the dispossession and destruction of another people? How can we create when we acquiesce so willingly to the demolition of homes, construction of barriers, denial of sustenance, and ruin of innocents? How can we be merciful when, to use Rose's words, we seek "omnipotence as the answer to historical pain?" We refuse to hear their pleading, to see those chased from their homes, children incinerated in their mother's arms. Instead we tell our children to inscribe the bombs that will burn Arab babies.

We argue that we must eliminate terrorism. What do we really know of their terrorism, and of ours? What do we care? Rather, with language that is denuded and infested-give them more time to bomb so that Israel's borders can be natural-we engage repeatedly in a war of desire, a war not thrust upon us but of our own choosing, ingratiating ourselves with the power to destroy others and insensate to the death of our own children. What happens to a nation, asks the Israeli writer David Grossman, that cannot save its own child, words written before his own son was killed in Lebanon?

There are among Israelis real feelings of vulnerability and fear, never resolved but used, intensified. Seeing one's child injured or killed is the most horrible vision -- Israelis are vulnerable, far more than other Jews. Yet, we as a people have become a force of extremism, of chaos and disorder, trying to plow an unruly sea-addicted to death and cruelty, intoxicated, with one ambition: to mock the pauper.

Judaism has always prided itself on reflection, critical examination, and philosophical inquiry. The Talmudic mind examines a sentence, a word, in a multitude of ways, seeking all possible interpretations and searching constantly for the one left unsaid. Through such scrutiny it is believed comes the awareness needed to protect the innocent, prevent injury or harm, and be closer to God.

Now, these are abhorred, eviscerated from our ethical system. Rather the imperative is to see through eyes that are closed, unfettered by investigation. We conceal our guilt by remaining the abused, despite our power, creating situations where our victimization is assured and our innocence affirmed. We prefer this abyss to peace, which would hurl us unacceptably inward toward awareness and acknowledgement.

Jews do not feel shame over what they have created: an inventory of inhumanity. Rather we remain oddly appeased, even calmed by the desolation. Our detachment allows us to bear such excess (and commit it), to sit in Jewish cafes while Palestinian mothers are murdered in front of their children in Gaza. I can now better understand how horror occurs-how people, not evil themselves, can allow evil to happen. We salve our wounds with our incapacity for remorse, which will be our undoing.

Instead the Jewish community demands unity and conformity: "Stand with Israel" read the banners on synagogues throughout Boston last summer. Unity around what? There is enormous pressure -- indeed coercion -- within organized American Jewry to present an image of "wall to wall unity" as a local Jewish leader put it. But this unity is an illusion -- at its edges a smoldering flame rapidly engulfing its core -- for mainstream Jewry does not speak for me or for many other Jews. And where such unity exists, it is hollow built around fear not humanity, on the need to understand reality as it has long been constructed for us -- with the Jew as the righteous victim, the innocent incapable of harm. It is as if our unbending support for Israel's militarism "requires putting our minds as it were into Auschwitz where being a Jew puts your existence on the line. To be Jewish means to be threatened, nothing more. Hence, the only morality we can acknowledge is saving Israel and by extension, ourselves." Within this paradigm, it is dissent not conformity that will diminish and destroy us. We hoard our victimization as we hoard our identity -- they are one -- incapable of change, a failing that will one day result in our own eviction. Is this what Zionism has done to Judaism?

Israel's actions not only demonstrate the limits of Israeli power but our own limitations as a people: our inability to live a life without barriers, to free ourselves from an ethnic loyalty that binds and contorts, to emerge, finally, from our spectral chamber.

Ending the (filial) link between Israel and the Holocaust

How can the children of the Holocaust do such things, they ask? But are we really their rightful offspring?

As the Holocaust survivor dies, the horror of that period and its attendant lessons withdraw further into abstraction and for some Jews, many of them in Israel, alienation. The Holocaust stands not as a lesson but as an internal act of purification where tribal attachment rather than ethical responsibility is demanded and used to define collective action. Perhaps this was an inevitable outcome of Jewish nationalism, of applying holiness to politics, but whatever its source, it has weakened us terribly and cost us greatly.

Silvia Tennenbaum, a survivor and activist writes: "No matter what great accomplishments were ours in the diaspora, no matter that we produced Maimonides and Spinoza, Moses Mendelssohn and hundreds of others of mankind's benefactors -- not a warrior among them! -- we look at the world of our long exile always in the dark light of the Shoah. But this, in itself, is an obscene distortion: would the author . . . Primo Levi, or the poet Paul Celan demand that we slaughter the innocents in a land far from the snow-clad forests of Poland? Is it a heroic act to murder a child, even the child of an enemy? Are my brethren glad and proud? . . . And, it goes without saying, loyal Jews must talk about the Holocaust. Ignore the images of today's dead and dying and focus on the grainy black and white pictures showing the death of Jews in the villages of Poland, at Auschwitz and Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen. We are the first, the only true victims, the champions of helplessness for all eternity."

What did my family perish for in the ghettos and concentration camps of Poland? Is their role to be exploited and in the momentary absence of violence, to be forgotten and abandoned?

Holocaust survivors stood between the past and the present, bearing witness, sometimes silently, and even in word, often unheard. Yet, they stood as a moral challenge among us and also as living embodiments of a history, way of life and culture that long predated the Holocaust and Zionism (and that Zionism has long denigrated), refusing, in their own way, to let us look past them. Yet, this generation is nearing its end and as they leave us, I wonder what is truly left to take their place, to fill the moral void created by their absence?

Is it, in the words of a friend, himself a Jew, a "memory manufactory, with statues, museums and platoons of 'scholars' designed to preserve, indeed ratchet up Jewish feelings of persecution and victimhood, a Hitler behind every Katyusha or border skirmish, which must be met with some of the same crude slaughterhouse tools the Nazis employed against the Jews six decades ago: ghettos, mass arrests and the denigration of their enemy's humanity?" Do we now measure success in human bodies and in carnage, arguing that our dead bodies are worth more than theirs, our children more vulnerable and holy, more in need of protection and love, their corpses more deserving of shrouds and burial? Is meaning for us to be derived from martyrdom or from children born with a knife in their hearts? Is this how my grandmother and grandfather are to be remembered?

Our tortured past and its images trespass upon our present not only in Israel but in Gaza and Lebanon as well. "They were temporarily buried in an empty lot with dozens of others," writes a New York Times reporter in Lebanon. "They were assigned numbers, his wife and daughter. Alia is No. 35 and Sally is No. 67. 'They are numbers now,' said the father. There are no names anymore."

"They were shrunken figures, dehydrated and hungry," observes the Washington Post. "Some had lived on candy bars, others on pieces of dry bread. Some were shell-shocked, their faces blank . . . One never made it. He was carried out on a stretcher, flies landing on lifeless eyes that were still open."

As the rightful claimants to our past we should ask, How much damage can be done to a soul? But we do not ask. We do not question the destruction but only our inability to complete it, to create more slaughter sites.

Can we ever emerge from our torpor, able to mourn the devastation?

Our ultimate eviction?

Where do Jews belong? Where is our place? Is it in the ghetto of a Jewish state whose shrinking boundaries threaten, one day, to evict us? We are powerful but not strong. Our power is our weakness, not our strength, because it is used to instill fear rather than trust, and because of that, it will one day destroy us if we do not change. More and more we find ourselves detached from our past, suspended and abandoned, alone, without anchor, aching-if not now, eventually-for connection and succor. Grossman has written that as a dream fades it does not become a weaker force but a more potent one, desperately clung to, even as it ravages and devours.

We consume the land and the water behind walls and steel gates forcing out all others. What kind of place are we creating? Are we fated to be an intruder in the dust to borrow from Faulkner, whose presence shall evaporate with the shifting sands? Are these the boundaries of our rebirth after the Holocaust?

I have come to accept that Jewish power and sovereignty and Jewish ethics and spiritual integrity are, in the absence of reform, incompatible, unable to coexist or be reconciled. For if speaking out against the wanton murder of children is considered an act of disloyalty and betrayal rather than a legitimate act of dissent, and where dissent is so ineffective and reviled, a choice is ultimately forced upon us between Zionism and Judaism.

Rabbi Hillel the Elder long ago emphasized ethics as the center of Jewish life. Ethical principles or their absence will contribute to the survival or destruction of our people. Yet, today what we face is something different and possibly more perverse: it is not the disappearance of our ethical system but its rewriting into something disfigured and execrable.

As Jews in a post-Holocaust world empowered by a Jewish state, how do we as a people emerge from atrocity and abjection, empowered and also humane, something that still eludes us? How do we move beyond fear and omnipotence, beyond innocence and militarism, to envision something different, even if uncertain? "How," asks Ahad Haam, the founding father of cultural Zionism, "do you make a nation pause for thought?"

For many Jews (and Christians), the answer lies in a strong and militarized Jewish state. For others, it is found in the very act of survival. For my parents-defeating Hitler meant living a moral life. They sought a world where "affirmation is possible and . . . dissent is mandatory," where our capacity to witness is restored and sanctioned, where we as a people refuse to be overcome by the darkness.

Can we ever turn away from our power to destroy?

It is here that I want to share a story from my family, to describe a moment that has inspired all of my work and writing.

My mother and her sister had just been liberated from concentration camp by the Russian army. After having captured all the Nazi officials and guards who ran the camp, the Russian soldiers told the Jewish survivors that they could do whatever they wanted to their German persecutors. Many survivors, themselves emaciated and barely alive, immediately fell on the Germans, ravaging them. My mother and my aunt, standing just yards from the terrible scene unfolding in front of them, fell into each other's arms weeping. My mother, who was the physically stronger of the two, embraced my aunt, holding her close and my aunt, who had difficulty standing, grabbed my mother as if she would never let go. She said to my mother, "We cannot do this. Our father and mother would say this is wrong. Even now, even after everything we have endured, we must seek justice, not revenge. There is no other way." My mother, still crying, kissed her sister and the two of them, still one, turned and walked away.

What then is the source of our redemption, our salvation? It lies ultimately in our willingness to acknowledge the other-the victims we have created-Palestinian, Lebanese and also Jewish-and the injustice we have perpetrated as a grieving people. Perhaps then we can pursue a more just solution in which we seek to be ordinary rather then absolute, where we finally come to understand that our only hope is not to die peacefully in our homes as one Zionist official put it long ago but to live peacefully in those homes.

When my daughter Jess was submerged under the waters of the mikvah for the third and final time, she told me she saw rainbows under the water. I shall take this beautiful image as a sign of her rebirth and plead desperately for ours.

Sara Roy is Senior Research Scholar, Center for Middle Eastern Studie, Harvard University. "A Jewish Plea" will be published in The War on Lebanon: A Reader . Nubar Hovsepian (ed), Interlink Publishing, Spring 2007. Sara Roy can be reached at sroy@fas.harvard.edu
[Source: CounterPunch]