Christians in Palestine

Former IDF now Oxford Professor Avi Shlaim says; Israel is a "Rogue" State

Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli army and has never questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him to devastating conclusions


The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through understanding the historical context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on behalf of the infant state. On 2 June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that the Americans were responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". I used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on the people of Gaza, and the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and who has never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders. What I utterly reject is the Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security and everything to do with territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through permanent political, economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result has been one of the most prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the Gaza Strip. With a large population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no infrastructure or natural resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development of local industry was actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their subordination to Israel and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish settlements in occupied territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They are at once the instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the Jewish settlers numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the settlers controlled 25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce water resources. Cheek by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived in abject poverty and unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a day. The living conditions in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to resistance and a fertile breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout from Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they had left behind. Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the Israelis out of Gaza. The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world, Sharon presented the withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But in the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible. Israel had a choice and it chose land over peace.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a prelude to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what was seen, mistakenly in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection of the Palestinian national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence on their land.

Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip by land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From this point on, the Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this prison.

Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the Palestinian Authority brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.

America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the Hamas government and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing economic sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but against the oppressed.

As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for their own misfortunes. Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antisemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible with democracy. But the simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal aspirations. They are no better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to, above all, is a piece of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.

Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme following its rise to power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move towards pragmatic accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a national unity government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel. Israel, however, refused to negotiate with a government that included Hamas.

It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian factions. In the late 1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the secular nationalist movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and pliant Fatah leaders to overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive American neoconservatives participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their meddling was a major factor in the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize power in Gaza in June 2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a series of clashes and confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a war between Israel and the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The declared aim of the war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to a new ceasefire on Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza are seen by the world simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for independence and statehood.

The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election is scheduled for 10 February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are looking for an opportunity to prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to deliver a crushing blow to Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of the war against Hezbollah in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and impotence of the pro-western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of his term in the White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on Hamas, vetoing proposals at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a free pass to mount a ground invasion of Gaza.

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but the sheer asymmetry of power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real victim. This is indeed a conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a small and defenceless Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli Goliath. The resort to brute military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood and a farrago of self-pity overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of bokhim ve-yorim, "crying and shooting".

To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the fruit of its electoral victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the weapon of the weak - terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket attacks against Israeli settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire last June. The damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact is immense, prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the circumstances, Israel had the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket attacks was totally disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the withdrawal from Gaza, 11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the IDF killed 1,290 Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.

Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as much as it does to Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force which, in the view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbidden by international humanitarian law.

The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its spokesmen. Eight months before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National Information Directorate. The core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the ceasefire agreements; that Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces are taking the utmost care not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably successful in getting this message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.

A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its spokesmen. It was not Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4 November that killed six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but the eventual overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And far from taking care to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a three-year-old blockade that has brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.

The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensive against Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing, with a death toll of more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land invasion of Gaza the consequences of which are incalculable.

No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks from the military wing of Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them, they kept up their resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies victimhood and martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two communities. The problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most elementary security to the other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through shooting but through talks with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with the Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel has rejected this offer for the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on the table: it involves concessions and compromises.

This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it difficult to resist the conclusion that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders". A rogue state habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these three criteria; the cap fits and it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its Palestinian neighbours but military domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more disastrous ones. Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and mistakes of the past. But it is not mandatory to do so.

Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History Deterrence and Arms Control

Dr. Avner Cohen, the author of Israel and the Bomb, is Senior Research Fellow at the National Security Archive. Formerly, Dr. Cohen was co-director of the Project on Nuclear Arms Control in the Middle East at the Security Studies program at MIT (1990-95). In 1997-98 he was a Senior Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), where he was working on issues related to arms control and the peace process in the Middle East.

After undergraduate study at Tel Aviv University in Philosophy (1975), Cohen earned his M.A. in Philosophy at York University (1977) and Ph.D. from the Committee on History of Culture of the University of Chicago (1981). He was a member of the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University from 1983 to 1991 and has been a visiting professor at various American universities and colleges.

For more than a decade, Dr. Cohen has written on issues related to nuclear weapons, primarily on the questions of nuclear deterrence and morality as well as issues related to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. In 1987-88 he was a research fellow at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, where he developed the notion of "opaque" nuclear proliferation. He is the co-editor of Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity (Rowman & Allanheld, 1986), The Institution of Philosophy (Open Court, 1989), and the author of The Nuclear Age as Moral History (in Hebrew, 1989). In 1989 Dr. Cohen was awarded a MacArthur Research and Writing Fellowship to work on the question of nuclear weapons and democracy, focusing on the Israeli case.

Dr. Cohen has published numerous articles in Ethics, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Survival, Israel Studies, Security Studies, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, The Nonproliferation Review, The Washington Quarterly, The Journal of Israeli History, the Middle East Journal, as well as op-eds in the New York Times, Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. He is also an occasional contributor to the Israeli daily Ha'aretz.


In this pdf document, Dr. Avner Cohen illustrates Israel's used of chemical/biological warfare against indegenious populations of Palestinian Arabs...in order to displace them from their ancestral lands, here are a few excerpts:

It is believed that one of the largest operations in this campaign was in the Arab coastal town of Acre, north of Haifa, shortly before it was conquered by the IDF on May 17, 1948. According to Milstein, the typhoid epidemic that spread in Acre in the days before the town fell to the Israeli forces was not the result of wartime chaos but rather a deliberate covert action by the IDF - the contamination of Acre's water supply.

In 1999, a palestinian physician, Dr. Salaman Abu Sitta, speaking before the British house of commons, claimed that in 1948, "even bacteriological warfare was used by poisoning wells and infecting drinking water with malaria and typhus. That was the case in Gaza in the summer of 1948, as Ben-Gurion admitted in his diary." Interestingly, however no known Palestinian sources allege that the epidemics in Acre resulted from Israeli sabotage.

Israel - Death of The 'Jewish' State

Article written by; Nathaneal Kapner Orthodox Christian 'Street Evangelist' of Jewish descent

THE ‘JEWISH’ STATE OF ISRAEL was founded on the premise that Jews and Gentiles cannot get along. Zionist Jews have laid the blame for this upon the Gentiles, although history has proven otherwise. In truth, the Zionists have both fueled and perpetrated this enmity between Jews and Gentiles in their vindication of a ‘Jewish’ homeland in Palestine.

Zionist Jews, with their decades of propaganda via the Jewish-occupied press and media, would have the world believe that the founding and continuation of the Jewish state of Israel is a positive and progressive endeavor. However, in reality, quite the opposite is true. The idea of a Jewish state, is, at its roots, a negative conception that militates against the brotherhood of man.

In 1925, the most vehement protagonist of a Jewish homeland, Jacob Klatzkin, the co-editor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, laid down the full implications of the Zionist approach to a Jewish homeland.

Klatzkin argued that the only meaningful goal for Zionism was regaining the land of Israel. Along with this goal, Klatzkin called all *'Jewish assimilationists', “traitors to their Judaism.” Klatzkin maintained, in opposition to the assimilationists, that the spiritual definition of Judaism should lead to national chauvinism:

*'Jewish assimilationist' is referenced to Jews with gentile cultural mannerisms


“In the face of Anti-Semitism, we Jews must insist on the rightfulness of our own nationalism. To possess our own national life, we must see ourselves as an alien body within the nations we reside, and thus insist on our own distinct identity.” View Entire Story Here.

However, the problem of this “alien body” residing as a hated people in the Gentile nations that host them, has not been solved by the “rightfulness of Jewish nationalism.” Instead, the problem has expanded into a global pandemic.

The entire world has been in a state of chaos ever since the founding of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. Indeed, the Zionist argument for a ‘Jewish’ state has been exposed for the hoax and anti-human conception that it is. The world continually witnesses atrocities upon atrocities against the Palestinian people committed by the Israelis and supported by Zionist Jewry worldwide, even up to the present hour.

JEWRY’S GREAT DIVIDE

TWO THREATS TO PRESENT-DAY ZIONISM and the beastial ‘Jewish’ state it has produced, has now come to the fore. Zionist Jews are currently working around the clock to deal with these threats.

The first threat to Zionism is the geopolitical realignment which is now occurring with regard to the nation of Iran and its economic and socio/religious influence globally and in the Middle East.

The second threat to Zionism is an internal threat within Jewry itself, especially within American Jewry. A division is now taking place amongst American Jews which threatens to spread beyond American shores. This division within American Jewry draws a line between Zionist-Jews and Anti-Zionist Jews.

This Great Divide within Jewry began to manifest itself with the recent atrocities committed by the Israelis against innocent Palestinians in Gaza. Outraged by the actions of the Israelis and the support from global Zionist Jewry, many American Jews began calling for the end of US military aid to Israel. And this especially, (which will mean the death of the ‘Jewish’ state), will surely become a matter of contention within Jewry in the months to come. View Entire Story Here.

Palestine Before 1948

The end of World War II, the curtains of the world stage were raised to mark the beginning of a new dialectical paradigm, the start of the cold-war ( Communism vs Capitalism ) and Israel, birthed out of Jewish Supremacy. The political birth of Israel in 1948 was brought about through Jewish Terror proved to be the continuance of Hitler's accursed legacy of racial genocide and forced relocation and apartheid, only the tables had turned - the victims became the oppressor against the indigenous Palestinian population. As we can see in this youtube videos, The native people of Palestine were beautiful, rich in culture,and freedom. That is until the accursed political Zionism arrived to cleanse and terrorize the land from it's indigenous people and it's culture. what has resulted is over 60 years of war and oppression against a defenseless minority.

Gaza: A Simple Explanation for Christians

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

Review by: William Podmore U.K.

Pappe, an Israeli historian and a senior lecturer at Haifa University, has written a superb account of the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians from their land in 1948. He quotes David Ben Gurion, leader of the Zionist movement from the mid-1920 until the 1960s, who wrote in his diary in 1938, "I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it." This contradicts the Zionists' public claim that they were seizing a land without a people.

Pappe writes of the Israelis' March 1948 plan for evicting the Palestinians, "The orders came with a detailed description of the methods to be employed to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; laying siege to and bombarding villages and population centres; setting fire to homes, properties and goods; expulsion; demolition; and, finally, planting mines among the rubble to prevent any of the expelled inhabitants from returning."

Between 30 March and 15 May 1948, i.e. before any Arab government intervened, Israeli forces seized 200 villages and expelled 250,000 Palestinians. The Israeli leadership stated, "The principal objective of the operation is the destruction of Arab villages ... the eviction of the villagers." On 9 April, Israeli forces massacred 93 people, including 30 babies, at Deir Yassin. In Haifa, the Israeli commander ordered, "Kill any Arab you encounter."

This all happened under British rule in Palestine, where Britain had 75,000 troops: Britain's Mandate did not end until 14 May. The Labour government connived at the Israeli onslaught, although the British state was legally obliged as the occupier (and also by UN resolution 181) to uphold law and order. Yet the Labour government announced that it would no longer be responsible for law and order and it withdrew all the British policemen. It also forbade the presence of any UN bodies, again breaching the terms of the UN resolution. The government ordered British forces to disarm the few Palestinians who had weapons, promising to protect them from Israeli attacks, then immediately reneged on this promise.

On 24 May 1948, Ben Gurion wrote, "We will establish a Christian state in Lebanon, the southern border of which will be the Litani River. We will break Transjordan, bomb Amman and destroy its army, and then Syria falls, and if Egypt will still continue to fight - we will bombard Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo. This will be in revenge for what they (the Egyptians, the Aramis and Assyrians) did to our forefathers during Biblical times." These ravings of an insane warmonger hardly betrayed any genuine fear of a `second holocaust'. The Palestinians were suffering massive expulsion, not trying to destroy the Jewish community.

Pappe summarises, "When it created its nation-state, the Zionist movement did not wage a war that `tragically but inevitably' led to the expulsion of `parts of' the indigenous population, but the other way round: the main goal was the ethnic cleansing of all of Palestine, which the movement coveted for its new state. A few weeks after the ethnic cleansing operations began, the neighbouring Arab states sent a small army - small in comparison to their overall military might - to try, in vain, to prevent the ethnic cleansing. The war with the regular Arab armies did not bring the ethnic cleansing operations to a halt until their successful completion in the autumn of 1948."

Overall, the Zionist forces uprooted more than half Palestine's population, 800,000 people, destroyed 531 villages and emptied eleven urban neighbourhoods of their inhabitants. Pappe concludes that this was "a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity."

America's Shame

By Paul Craig Roberts
5-6-9


Why does Israel have a right to exist, but Palestine doesn't?

This is the question of our time.

For sixty years Israelis have been stealing Palestine from Palestinians. There are maps available on the Internet and in Israeli publications showing the shrinkage over time of what was once Palestine into what Palestine is today--a small number of unconnected ghettos or bantustans.

Palestine became "the occupied territory" from which Palestinians were ejected and Israeli settlements built for "settlers." Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are full of refugee camps in which Palestinians driven off their lands by Israeli force have been living for decades.

Driving people off their land is strictly illegal under international law, but Israel has been getting away with it for decades.

Gaza is a concentration camp of 1.5 million Palestinians who were driven from their homes and villages and collected in the Gaza Ghetto.

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency was created 60 years ago in
1949 to administer refugee camps for Palestinians driven from their lands by Israel. As of 2002, the registered Palestinian refugee population was 3.9 million.

Caterpillar Tractor makes a special bulldozer for Israel that is designed to knock down Palestinian homes and to uproot their orchards. In 2003 an American protester, Rachel Corrie, stood in front of one of these Caterpillars and was run over and crushed.

Nothing happened. The Israelis can kill whomever they want whenever they want.

They have been doing so for 60 years, and they show no sign of stopping.

Currently they are murdering women and children in the ghetto that they have created for Palestinians in Gaza. The entire world knows this. The Red Cross protests it. But the Israelis brazenly claim that they are killing "Hamas terrorists who are a threat to Israel's existence."

The American media knows that this is a lie, but does not say so.

Israel has been able to slowly exterminate a people for sixty years without provoking sufficient outrage to stop it.

The United States, "Christian America," has been Israel's greatest enabler in its long-term murder of the Palestinian people. Millions of "evangelical Christians" endorse Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

The rest of the world condemns the Israeli military attack on the Gaza Ghetto. Last week the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution requiring a ceasefire and the withdrawal of the Israeli SS from Gaz a.

The United States abstained.

While the rest of the world condemns Israel's inhumanity, the US Congress--I should say the US Knesset--rushed to endorse the Israeli slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza.

The US Senate endorsed Israel's massacre of Palestinians with a vote of 100-0.

The US House of Representatives voted 430-5 to endorse Israel's massacre of Palestinians.

The resolutions endorsed by 100% of the US Senate and 99% of the House were written by AIPAC, as were the speeches praising Israel for its inhumanity.

The US Congress was proud to show that it is Israel's puppet even when it comes to murdering women and children.

The President of the United States was proud to block effective action by the UN Security Council by ordering the Secretary of State to abstain.

Be a Proud American. Swagger and strut. Pretend that you are not besmirched by the shame that your government has heaped upon you. Take refuge in your ignorance, fostered by 60 years of Israeli lies, that the murder of Palestinians and the theft of their lands is "Israel's right of self-defense."

A Conversation with Prof. Norman Finkelstein; How to Lose friends and Alienate People

Norman G. Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is currently an independent scholar. Finkelstein is the author of five books which have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions: Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press, 2005; expanded paperback edition, 2008) The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering (Verso, 2000; expanded paperback edition, 2003) Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995; expanded paperback edition, 2003) A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen thesis and historical truth (with Ruth Bettina Birn) (Henry Holt, 1998) The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A personal account of the intifada years (University of Minnesota, 1996) He has just completed a new book entitled A Farewell to Israel: The coming break-up of American Zionism, to be published in 2009.


By Don Atapattu

Professor Norman Finkelstein is one of a dying breed of American mavericks that relentlessly defies any attempt at easy categorization. He is the son of Holocaust survivors but an unremitting critic of Holocaust reparation claims; a Jew but is a life-long anti Zionist; and though very much a Leftist, he is often praised by far Right revisionists of the Third Reich, such as Hitler-admiring historian David Irving. He initially made his name by revealing Joan Peter's massively successful From Time Immemorial (a book heavily promoted by the Israeli lobby, that claimed there were no native Arabs before Zionist immigration into Palestine), as a colossal fraud, and for 10 years he was a Professor of Political Science at New York University.

However, he is best known as the author of four books, the most recent being The Holocaust Industry, which has catapulted him into the spotlight, due to its contention that American Jewry have ruthlessly exploited the Nazi holocaust for political and financial gain. Often lambasted for his intemperate approach, Finkelstein is unlikely to win popularity contests in America for the language he employs, as much as his arguments. Like his close friend and mentor Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein is not one to mince his words. In his eyes the mainstream Jewish organisations are 'hucksters', 'gangsters' and 'crooks'; Elie Wiesel (celebrity Holocaust survivor) is the 'resident clown' for the Holocaust 'circus'; reparations claims against Germany for Nazi era slave laborers are 'blackmail'; and he infamously dismissed Professor Goldhagen's critically acclaimed Holocaust bestseller 'Hitler's Willing Executioners' as the 'pornography of violence'. Small wonder then that he has few friends amongst the American Jewish establishment, with Elian Steinberg (World Jewish Congress Executive Secretary) stating on TV that 'Finkelstein is full of shit', and the literary editor of the pro Israeli New Republic describing him as 'poisonsomething you would find under a rock'.

In its initial hardback edition, The Holocaust Industry was a tremendous success in many nations (selling 130 000 copies in a few weeks on its publication in Germany), but in America its sales were limited to a paltry 12000. This relative failure stateside is attributed at least in part by Finkelstein to a fatwah by the Jewish establishment--he notes indignantly that the New York Times book review was much more hostile toward The Holocaust Industry than it was even to Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'. Now the revised paperback edition has just been released many of these same periodicals are uncharacteristically silent, perhaps thinking they can kill it more effectively through lack of exposure rather than outright aggression. The following is an interview conducted with Norman Finkelstein on 15 October 2001, on the eve of the paperback's publication.

It is generally considered that growing up Jewish and growing up Zionist are mutually inextricable. What made you break this link?

First of all, I don't agree that Zionism and growing up in a Jewish household are inextricably linked. It is fair to say that growing up Jewish and having a consciousness about Israel are inextricably linked. As a Jew I felt that I bore a certain amount of responsibility for the policies of Israel because Israel claimed to speak in the name of the Jewish people, and therefore they were using the history and suffering of the Jewish people as a means to justify its policies. However, my family were not Zionists, and therefore I see no special connection between the two.

You stated in a BBC interview that your radical politics have exacted 'a substantial personal cost' to yourself. Have you found yourself alienated from mainstream Jewish life?

I wouldn't say that alienation has been the price because I have managed to find a crowd of people who share my values in my life, which has been quite satisfying to me. I'd say that without wanting to pose a martyr, that I've paid a professional price for my views. Most recently I taught at Hunter College, City University of New York, and every semester I was the highest rated professor in my department on student evaluations, I had also published in the last five years, four books and I would say that in every reckoning I had proven myself to be worthy as a professor. Nonetheless, I was always the lowest paid by far, I had the heaviest teaching load, and this past May after 10 years faithful service at slave wages, I was let go and forced--at the ripe old age of 49--to relocate to Chicago to find temporary work.

How have Jewish academics and Middle East specialists reacted to the arguments that you have expanded upon in your books?

The reviews of my first book (Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict), were given the content of the book remarkably favorable. I was quite surprised by the positive reception of the first book. Generally speaking, I don't have much contact with the mainstream. I don't publish in mainstream journals, and have never been asked to publish in them. It is also true that my name comes up quite a lot in articles in mainstream publications; my writings on a variety of subjects are quite frequently cited.

While researching your second book (The Rise and Fall of Palestine: The Intifadah Years), you lived with Palestinian families in the Occupied Territories. How do you regard this time in retrospect?

First of all, it's not looking back, I still go fairly frequently, I was there in June and I stay in close touch with the families of whom I write in the book. When I first went it was a moral test of the values that are meaningful to me, and I wanted to see if I could bridge the chasm between a Jew and a Palestinian based upon our common humanity and our shared commitment to justice and decency. To that extent I would say that it was a satisfying experience, because I think that we developed close and meaningful relationships.

Were conditions in the territories as bad as you had anticipated?

I would say that the situation there is horrible. Whenever I go I almost literally count the minutes before I leave. I can't stand it there because you feel that you are watching people endure a living death for no justifiable reason people are suffering and they're wasting away a life. It's very hard to bear, because it is impossible to rationalise to oneself why you should have a meaningful and satisfying life, and these people have to endure a meaningless and horrifying life. It is impossible to rationalise, unless you consider yourself a superior human being and deserve better, than maybe it would be a tolerable situation. When you recognise your common humanity and realise that for reasons for nothing to do with anything these people have ever done that they should have to suffer this way.. it's really hard.

Did you ever experience any hostility because of your background (as an American Jew)?

Quite the contrary. The first couple of years, I was treated like royalty and people were gracious and wonderful, by the third year no one could care less that I was Jewish. It was not even a topic of discussion. Even this summer I spent time in Gaza, where the people knew I was Jewish, and they didn't care. It's not an issue; the issue is whether you are for or against the occupation.

'Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict' is a radical reinterpretation of Israeli-Arab history, turning on its head the standard Western notion of Israel being the constant victim of Arab aggression. How have historians reacted to the arguments contained within it?

As I said earlier it does get frequently cited. The chapter on Joan Peters--the hoax about Palestine being empty on the eve of Jewish colonization--is considered a standard text, everybody cites it. The chapter on Benny Morris and the Palestinian refugee question (in which Finkelstein dismisses Morris' claims that there was no overall plan by the Zionists to expel the Arabs from Palestine), is considered the definitive critique on the Morris book, and nowadays most scholarship agrees that I'm closer to the truth than Morris. The last chapters on the `67 and `73 wars...they're pretty much ignored.

Regarding your most recent work, The Holocaust Industry, can you explain who the Holocaust Industry (according to your interpretation) are and what their goals might be?

The Holocaust Industry, is as I conceive in the book, is institutions, organisations and individuals who have put to use Jewish suffering for political and financial gain. Throughout the little book, I am not at all shy of naming names, so large numbers of organisations and individuals are cited for their activities in the exploitation of the Nazi holocaust. It is hard to say the main ones, but the mainstream Jewish organisations and individuals such as Elie Wiesel, they feature prominently in the book.

Do you believe the 'Holocaust Industry' were responsible for the poor sales of the book in the US in comparison with its spectacular success elsewhere?

First of all, I do name names and a lot of these individuals and organisations have a huge vested interest in the Nazi holocaust. It's a political weapon, but it's also plainly a financial weapon, and it's unsurprising that the book would die an early death in the United States. Given those facts, it would be shocking were it otherwise.

Do you believe these people were involved in your dismissal from New York University?

I think it works much more subtly in our system. Sometimes phone calls are made, no doubt about it, but I think things work through a crystallising of a consensus--in the sense of 'this guy is more trouble than he is worth, and so it is time to let him go'. I think this is what happened at Hunter College, that yes I had an excellent teaching record, yes I had an excellent publication record, but it's also true that 'a lot of people are complaining about him and we do get all these phone calls and there are faculty members who are very uncomfortable with him because he is just not professional' and so on and so forth. Finally, a consensus crystallises that it is time to let him go.

A spokesman for the World Jewish Congress suggested that you should be grateful to organisations such as themselves, for the compensation that your parents received. Is there not some truth in that were it not for the awareness raising campaigns of these bodies, Holocaust survivors would not have been compensated at all?

These organisations frankly, bring to mind an insight of my late mother, that it is no accident that Jews invented the word "chutzpah". They steal, and I do use the word with intent, 95% of the monies earmarked for victims of Nazi persecution, and then throw you a few crumbs while telling you to be grateful. It is very hard to sink much lower than to turn the colossal suffering of the Jewish people during World War Two into an extortion racket. I really think that not even Julius Streicher (leading anti Semitic publisher in 1930's Germany) were he editing Der Stuermer today, could have conjured up the image of Jews huckstering their dead, but that's exactly what this gang of wretched crooks have done. They have disgraced the memory of the Jewish people's suffering on the one hand by turning it into an extortion racket. If there were any doubt left, I would point to the recent London Times article headlined 'Swiss Holocaust cash revealed to be a myth', that is all the claims against the Swiss banks were a fantastic concoction of the Holocaust hustlers. But then after turning Jewish suffering into an extortion racket.to then deny the actual victims these monies extorted..it is very difficult to imagine sinking any lower on a moral level than that. If they were all put behind bars, it wouldn't be yet, in my opinion, be a just punishment.

Many of the same adjectives crop up in the hostile reviews of The Holocaust Industry, such as 'bitter', 'angry', 'shrill', and 'polemical'. Do you think this is because you are breaking a hereto untouchable taboo?

Only one of the many reviews I have read, made the comment that the book was very funny, and I think that there is a certain amount of humour in the book. I didn't note personally any intimation of a rant or shrillness. You find humour there and irony there, but I should point out that the book went through several editors who were quite exacting and wherever it did go over the top, they pulled me back. I think a lot of reviews stem from the fact that most people (including myself), tend to defer to authority, and the first reviews the word that was constantly used was 'rant' and before you knew it everyone began to pick up on that, and so that became the drum beat theme of the negative reviews. Therefore, I don't think it is so much that I broke a taboo; I think the initial negative reviews set a tone for what followed.

One extraordinary fact that I learned in your book was that former President Reagan, and his UN ambassador Jean KirkPatrick, received the Simon Wiesenthal Center humanitarian of the year award (for their staunch support of Israel) despite providing political, financial and military support to extreme Right terrorist groups in Central America. Do you agree that it is an incredible perversion of history that the racism and violence of the Nazi holocaust, is now used to justify turning a blind eye to racism and violence?

Well that is what you would expect from the Simon Wiesenthal Center. This is really a gang of heartless and immoral crooks, whose hallmark is that they will do anything for a dollar. As I point out in the book, the guy who runs their headquarters in Los Angeles, runs it as a family business, and in the mid 1990's they were collectively raking in $525 000 a year.

Do you think The Holocaust Industry would have been published were you not the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors?

(Laughs) No, I have no doubt about that. First of all, it just got barely published as the son of Holocaust survivorsIf I weren't, there would be no chance at all.I would have been buried alive. Just the other day I was speaking to someone who I cannot name for this interview, who met with a high government official in Germany who we both know. My friend asked him about the questions raised in my book concerning the number of surviving slave labourers, and whether the German government knew that the numbers had been grossly inflated to justify the extortion of huge amounts of money. His response was that 'of course we knew what he was saying was true', but a decision was made early on to go on with the blackmail because 'we were afraid of a huge anti Semitic reaction being unleashed in Germany', and the attitude was Germany was rich enough to pay the ransom. But, if you go to Germany and try to say the things that I did, the so called 'Left' become absolutely hysterical as they have this huge vested interest in being professional anti anti-Semites and semophiles. It's this huge identity that they have carved out for themselves, and when I go out there and say that of course be anti Nazis but a lot of what is being done in the name of anti anti-Semitism, is in fact a gross falsification of history .and unless exposed will do huge damage to the Jewish people, these people go berserk. It is one of the peculiarities of this whole industry, in that it has created an alignment between the Left in Germany and the Right-wing Jewish establishment in the US. They sing the praises of people like Israel Singer (disgraced executive V.P. of the World Jewish Congress), a complete and total hoodlum - something that crawled out of the sewer.and they sing the praises of him! You would think he was Demetrios the way they talk about him.

Another matter that puts you at odds with the Jewish establishment, is your rejection of the uniqueness of Jewish persecution compared to the suffering of other peoples. What is the position of groups like the World Jewish Congress on financial reparations for the Indo-Chinese, Black slavery, the slaughter of the American Indians etc?

They don't say anything, well I shouldn't say they don't say anythingDuring the US Congressional hearings on the Holocaust compensation, Maxine Waters (US Congresswoman) raised the issue with the special US envoy on Holocaust compensation, and of course he responded in exactly the way you would expect--he said you can't compare and it is not the same thing, and that is the standard view of these organisations. Nothing compares to the Jews. Everything that the Jews endure, everything that the Jews achieve, is special, because we're the 'chosen people', so don't compare us with garbage like the Tasmanian savages (the entire indigenous population of Tasmania were exterminated under British colonial rule), or don't compare us with the Gypsies. I mean God forbid those uncivilised savages be compared with us. You have to understand that the great tragedy of the Second World War, was not that Jews per se were killed, but such a cultured people were killed--if you kill uncultured people, who cares?

What is your position on the comparison between Israel and the Occupied Territories and South Africa under apartheid (as raised during the recent UN convention on racism in Durban)?

I don't think the comparison with South Africa is exactly precise for a number of reasons. Israel proper--pre June `67 Israel, is a fairly lively democracy, Palestinian Arabs do enjoy rights of citizenship (as) second class citizens, it is probably similar to the situation to Blacks in the American South before the civil rights movement. The difference is that in the US South, Blacks did not have the right to vote, but that question is due to numbers, where American Blacks were the majority in several states in the South and that is why they were disenfranchised, whereas Israel's unstated official policy is that they will tolerate a minority of approximately 15%, so long as the Arabs remain around this percentage its OK to give them the right to vote because it won't affect the Jewish majority. In addition to the second-class citizenship of the Israeli Arabs, there is also the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, and that too is not really comparable to South Africa because I think it is much worse.

Dr David Rabeeya (Iraqi born American rabbi), talks of a caste system in Israeli society, where the Arabs are clearly at the bottom, but also the non European Jews are considered to be of lesser value. He claims that the wholesale importation of Russian Jews was to ensure the demographic majority of secular European Jews over their Sephardic countrymen for generations to come.

There is some truth to that, because a large percentage of the so-called 'Russian Jews' are not Jewish. In recent years, it has been more than 50%, and the reason why is because the Israeli establishment likes the blue eyed, blonde haired Aryan types as a racial group. The Russians look right even if they are not Jewish, and they preserve the Ashkenazi elite's dominance.

You argue in The Holocaust Industry that if it were no longer in America's interest to support Israel, the Jewish elites would quickly forget about the Jewish state. Is this really tenably considering the huge emotional attachment American Jewry has to Israel?

Generations of Americans Jews have not been brought up on Zionism. Before 1967, Israel barely figured at all in American Jewish life, as anyone who goes back and reads the publications of the US Jews before then will tell you. Even nowadays people are not Zionist by conviction, they are Zionist because it is useful for their political and more recently financial self-interest. The guiding light is what serves their self-interest, not ideological commitment.

Raul Hillberg (leading Holocaust academic) says that he hopes you will expand on your work in The Holocaust Industry. Are you currently working on anything?

No. I suffered the blow of losing my job so I have to make ends meet to survive.

Did you not receive a substantial sum from the spectacular success of The Holocaust Industry in Germany and elsewhere?

No, that is science fiction. You don't receive substantial sums. I received a $5000 advance for the book, and in total I have received about $50 000. You are not going to get rich out of this...I mean $50 000 is the average annual salary in the United States, I have never made more than $22,000 in a year, so it is about two years salary. OK, I am not a kid anymore, but I expect to be living more than two more years.

I noticed that the publication of the paperback of The Holocaust Industry has been delayed in the UK

(Interrupts) No, no it's been published but I don't expect it to get any kind of publicity. It's not a bad paperbackthere is a lot of new material in it.

You dismiss entirely Professor Daniel Goldhagen's argument that the German public were collectively responsibility for the crimes of the Nazis, yet you seem to hold the Jewish people collectively responsible for the policies of Israel. Is this not a case of double standards?

Collective responsibility is not a term that is devoid of any meaning, whether or not it's true depends on the circumstances. In the case of Germany you were dealing with a fascist, terrorist state in which the population had relatively speaking no say in the making of policy and no say in the crimes committed. In other circumstances depending on which a collectivity influences policy and shapes criminal actions, it does bear a responsibility, so you have to examine each individual case for how much collective responsibility is applicable.

Following the tragedy on September 11, Left-wing writer Christopher Hitchens, criticised people like yourself and Noam Chomsky for their 'masochistic' response to the 'Islamic fascism' practised by Bin Laden and his followers. What do you think an appropriate response would be to the destruction of the World Trade Center?

(Incredulously) Well, my views are so conventional it is hard to understand why Christopher Hitchens would point to me at all, and frankly what Noam Chomsky had to say on the topic was interesting in its insights, but his general view was utterly banal. You have to look to the social and political roots of what happened, because if we were just dealing with a bunch of lunatics on the loose, then the whole question would be just a psychiatric and security question. We would bring to psychiatrists to explain what is the source of this lunacy, and we would rely on our security services to correct the problem. But plainly, no one really believes this is strictly a psychiatric or a policing problem, because there has been massive social and political commentary trying to explain it. The moment you have massive social and political commentary trying to explain a phenomenon, then you know we are no longer dealing with a strictly psychiatric question. When there were the Jim Jones mass suicides there was no such commentary, as everyone knew they are a socially and politically marginal cult, but nobody in their right mind would say the Bin Laden phenomenon is something marginal. Everyone understands that this is rooted in a deeper problem.

The next question is what are the sources of the problem? If you are a mainstream conservative the usual answer is that the fundamental source of the problem can be located in the Arab--Islamic world loathing of modernity, freedom and all the virtues of enlightenment and capitalist industry that the US stands for. If you are off the mainstream, or on the Left end of the political system, you say the main source of the problem is US foreign policy in the Middle East which has evoked hatred among Arab-Islamic society because of US crimes in Iraq, the US backed Israel crimes against the Palestinians, and so forth. (Angrily) My point is that everyone, from whatever end of the political spectrum, tries to locate the Bin Laden phenomenon in some deeper social and political current, so for Mr. Hitchens to come along and say that to explain (the attacks) is a form of rationalisation--this is sheer idiocy! There is literally not a single person, apart from Mr. Hitchens who tries to explain it in a deeper social and political current, we may disagree on what this current is, but we all realise that this is not Jim Jones, or the Branch Dravidians.

What do you think of America's moral authority to spearhead a crusade against terrorism?

If you understand terrorism to mean the targeting of civilian populations in order to achieve political goals, then plainly the US qualifies as the main terrorist government in the world today, if only because of the sheer force it has at its disposal. I am not claiming that another government were it to be in the position of the US would act better, but given the predominant material and political weight of the US today, means that they are going to be the main terrorist state in the World today, and I think that's true.

I think I can safely assume that you are not a supporter of George Bush, so did you vote for Ralph Nader or Al Gore in the last election?

I voted for Nader, and I have no doubts at all that it was the right thing to do because the Nader candidacy was extremely energising and a terrific phenomenon in American life, and I hope he continues.

What do you think of the prospects for the Green Party to become a genuine Third Force in US Politics?

I think we are now heading for very dismal time. It seems like Bush is launching a perpetual war. We endured the nightmare of the destruction of Iraq, but at least that had a beginning and an end. This current 'war' does not seem to have an end, and I think it is even conceivable that it going to endure the remainder of my lifetime and in this political climate it is very speculative to make any meaningful predictions for the future.

How democratic is America given the enormous financial and media powers with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo?

There are contradictory tendencies in American society. There's a huge range of activities that one can engage in that mark it as a quite free society. It's also true to say that the powers that be have so much control over how people think that there are fewer and fewer people make use of the rights and information available to them. So I think that both are true. The amount of control exercised by the ruling elites over the decisions, choices, lifestyles, and so forth of American society mean that many of the rights and information that is available are not accessed. I can say what I wantthe worst that is going to happen to me is that I lose my job. I am not going to get shot or put in a psychiatric hospital..though it is also true to say that if a movement developed which actually tried to use on a mass level the rights available, I suspect there would be substantial repression.

If you attended Nader's rallies and speeches as I did, he was delivering a very hard-hitting critique of US capitalism, I mean it is as tough as you can really get and he was able to pull it off. No one prevented him from holding his mass rallies. They prevented him from appearing on TV, they excluded him from appearing on the (presidential candidates) debate, but he was able to organise in constituencies around the country. If it ever became a bigger phenomenon, what would have happened . I don't know.

The Pro Israeli lobby has had spectacular success in getting its version of events picked up by the media, with even the openly anti Arab / pro Israel polemic 'Exodus' on the US school curriculum. Noam Chomsky has even criticised liberal publications such as the New Republic for being openly racist toward Arabs, and Rana Kabbani has said that hating Arabs (and Muslims in particular) is the last acceptable form of racism, would you agree?

I think that they are openly racist in that they say things about Arabs that would not be permitted about other ethnic groups. These people are not pro-Israel, but Israel serves an interest to the US ruling elites and by that fact it serves a useful interest to American Jewish organisations. The moment that Israel ceases to be an interest, Israel will no longer be a concern of these organisations.

You said in your second book that one small Palestinian boy asked you if it was true that Americans believed all Palestinians to be animals, and you didn't answer not having the heart to tell him it was. Yet you also said that Arabs should reach out to America to try and build a counter consensus to Hollywood demonisations. Is this really plausible given the perceptions in American of Arabs and Muslims?

Nowadays nothing is possible with the events of September 11, a lot of hard work over many years to try to build a counter consensus disappeared in the rubble of the World Trade Center. I am utterly pessimistic about the prospects now, but I did not think it was impossible (before). Israel was suffering quite a number of major public relations disasters, beginning with the Lebanon War, the first Intifadah, and then the second Intifadah. As much as the mainstream media tries to depict the reality in a manner that suits US-Israeli interests, enough of the truth was coming through that Israel was suffering a public relations disaster. There were some prospects, how significant the prospects were we don't know, because not enough effort was made in trying to exploit those prospects, but after September 11 I don't think there is much hope.

I get the impression that you think that the West was in some way responsible for the tragedy of September 11.

Lets put it this way. The so-called West, and really we're talking about the United States, and to a lesser extent its pathetic puppy dog in England, have a real problem on their hands. Regrettably, it's payback time for the Americans and they have a problem because all the other enemies since the end of World War Two that they pretended to contend with .. were basically fabricated enemies. The Soviet Union was a conservative bureaucracy by the end of World War Two, which apart from the sphere of influence it carved out--mostly for defensive reasons--was plainly in retrospect a stabilising force in international affairs. Then the enemies that the US conjured up as the Soviet Union fell into decline beginning in the early 1980`senemies like Libya, Iraq, narco-terrorists and so forththese were basically enemies created by the United States to--among other things--justify repressive policies around the world, and to inflate its military budget. Now they do have a problem on their hands, and its going to exact a cost from Americans. The American elites can talk about honour and creativity until the cows come home, but it's not going to be like the Iraq shooting fish in a barrel situation, like they did when they destroyed Iraq in 1991. Frankly, part of me says - even though everything since September 11 has been a nightmare--'you know what, we deserve the problem on our hands because some things Bin Laden says are true'. One of the things he said on that last tape was that 'until we live in security, you're not going to live in security', and there is a certain amount of rightness in that. Why should Americans go on with their lives as normal, worrying about calories and hair loss, while other people are worrying about where they are going to get their next piece of bread? Why should we go on merrily with our lives while so much of the world is suffering, and suffering incidentally not with us merely as bystanders, but with us as the indirect and direct perpetrators. So that I think that you can summon up all the heroic and self-aggrandizing rhetoric you want, but there is a problem facing all of us now, and maybe it's about time that the United States starts having to confront the same sort of problems that much of humanity has had to confront on a daily basis for God knows how long.

Gaza: The Killing Zone; Putting a Human Face on Israeli Terror

May 2003
The Documentary producers set out to do a HAMAS militants documentary, but instead, circumstances of the Israeli siege of Gaza turned into a different direction about the daily life struggles of ordinary Palestinians living in squalid conditions in Gaza.
Life in Gaza is a constant gauntlet of Israeli sniper fire, military rockets and army bulldozers. No one is safe. In light of the escalating tensions, we're bringing back one our most moving documentaries, a hard-hitting expose of life in the Occupied territories. We speak to the children caught in the crossfire and find out the true cost of Israel's targeted assassinations policy.

Sadly, Israel Is No Longer Democratic

By Shulamit Aloni
Haaretz
5-2-9


Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin and philosopher Asa Kasher, two respected men around here, published an article entitled: "A just war of a democratic state," (Haaretz, April 24, Hebrew).

A remark about the first part: There are wars that are necessary for self-defense or to fight injustice and evil. But the expression "just" is problematic when speaking of war itself - which involves killing and destruction and leaves women, children and old people homeless, and sometimes even kills them.

Our sages have said: "Don't be overly righteous." And there is absolutely no question that dropping cluster bombs in an area populated by civilians, as we did in the Second Lebanon War, does not testify to great righteousness. The same thing can be said of using phosphorus bombs against a civilian population.

Apparently, according to the Yadlin and Kasher definition of justice, in order to eliminate terrorists it is just to destroy, kill, expel and starve a civilian population that has no connection to the acts of terror and no responsibility for them. Perhaps had they adopted a more decent and less arrogant approach they would have tried to explain the reasons for the fury and intensity that brought about the shocking killing and destruction, and even apologized for the fact that these exceeded any reasonable necessity.

But after all, we are always right; moreover, these things were done by "the most moral army in the world," sent by the "democratic" Jewish state - and here is the meeting point of the two concepts in the title of Yadlin and Kasher's article.

As for the army's morality, it would have been better had they remained silent and thereby been considered wise. This is because the statistics on the destruction and harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip are familiar to everyone, and not divorced from the oh-so-moral behavior of our army in the occupied territories. In the context of this behavior, for example, the army operates with great efficiency against farmers who demonstrate against the theft of their lands, even when the demonstrations are not violent.

The long-term evidence of abuse by soldiers against civilians at the checkpoints - including repeated instances of expectant mothers who are forced to give birth in the middle of the road, surrounded by armed soldiers who laugh wickedly - is no secret either. Day after day, year after year, the most moral army in the world helps to steal lands, uproot trees, steal water, close roads - in the service of the righteous "Jewish and democratic" state and with its support. It's heartbreaking, but the State of Israel is no longer democratic. We are living in an ethnocracy under "Jewish and democratic" rule.

In 1970 it was decided that in Israel religion and nationality are one and the same (that is why we are not listed in the Population Registry as Israelis, but as Jews). In 1992 it was determined in the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Liberty that Israel is a "Jewish state." There is no mention in this law of the promise that appears in the state's formative document, the Declaration of Independence, to the effect that "The State of Israel will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex." The Knesset ratified the law nonetheless.

And so there is a "Jewish state" and no "equality of rights." Therefore some observers emphasize that the Jewish state is not "a state of all its citizens." Is there really a democracy that is not a state of all its citizens? After all, Jews living today in democratic countries enjoy the full rights of citizenship.

Democracy exists in the State of Israel today only in the formal sense: There are parties and elections and a good judicial system. But there is also an omnipotent army that ignores legal decisions that restrict the theft of land owned and held by people who have been living under occupation for the past 42 years. And since 1992, as we mentioned, we also have the definition "Jewish state," which means an ethnocracy - the rule of an ethnic religious community that strictly determines the ethnic origin of its citizens according to maternal lineage. And as far as other religions are concerned, disrespect for them is already a tradition, since we have learned: "Only you are considered human beings, whereas the gentiles are like donkeys."

>From here it is clear that we and our moral army are exempt from concerns for the Palestinians living in Israel, and this is even more true of those living under occupation. On the other hand, it is perfectly all right to steal their land because these are "state lands" that belong to the State of Israel and its Jews.

That is the case even though we have not annexed the West Bank and have not granted citizenship to its inhabitants, who under Jordanian rule were Jordanian citizens. The State of Israel has penned them in, which makes it easy to confiscate their land for the benefit of its settlers.

And important and respected rabbis, who are educating an entire generation, have ruled that the whole country is ours and the Palestinians should share the fate of Amalek, the ancient tribe the Israelites were commanded to eradicate. At a time when a "just war" is taking place, racism is rife and robbery is called "return of property."

We are currently celebrating the 61st anniversary of the State of Israel. We fought in the War of Independence out of a great hope that we would build a "model society" here, that we would make peace with our neighbors, work the land and develop the Jewish genius for the benefit of science, culture and the value of man - every man. But when a major general and a philosopher justify - out of a sense of moral superiority - our acts of injustice toward the other in such a way, they cast a very heavy shadow on all those hopes.

How The Israeli Lobby ( AIPAC ) Dictates American Foreign Policy

For many years now the American foreign policy has been characterized by the strong tie between the United States and Israel. Does the United States in fact keep Israel on its feet? And how long will it continue to do so?
Is one allowed to question that reality, or is the pro-Israel lobby so strong, financially and politically, that the relationship with Israel is taboo and therefore unmentionable? And what happens to those who dare expose the unmentionable?

In March 2006 the American political scientists John Mearsheimer (University of Chicago) and Steve Walt (Harvard) published the controversial article 'The Israel Lobby and US foreign policy'. In it they state that it is not, or no longer, expedient for the US to support and protect present-day Israel. Together with the power shifts in Congress and the increasing doubts about the current Middle-East policy, this could become the fuse in the powder keg. Backlight talks to the people concerned in this 'new realism' debate.

The documentary sheds light on both parties involved in the discussion: those who wish to maintain the strong tie between the US and Israel (Neocon Richard Perle, televangelist John Hagee, and lobby organization AIPAC), and those who were critical of it and not infrequently became 'victims' of the lobby. Member of Congress Earl Hilliard from Alabama advocated a rapprochement with the Arab world and was promptly ousted by a political adversary who had the support of Aipac money. Historian Tony Judt, who tried to maintain that Israel was becoming a belligerent and intolerant ethno-state, driven by religion, found a lecture cancelled at the last minute. And Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth was personally attacked after he had criticised the violence Israel had used in the mini-war against Lebanon last summer.

Finally the question arises to what extend the pro-Israel lobby ultimately determines the military and political importance of Israel itself. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (Colin Powell's ex chief-of-staff) explains how the lobby's influence affects the decision-making structure in the White House. The lobby, Congress, the White House and Israel itself seem to have ended up in a suffocating embrace: will it ever change and how could it?Tony Judt and Richard Perle conclude by raising the crucial matters: what is the alternative? And what other friends can Israel count on?

Director: Marije Meerman
Research: William de Bruijn