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November 5, 2003
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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November
8 / 9, 2003
Zionism as a Racist
Ideology
Reviving
an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide
By KATHLEEN and BILL
CHRISTISON
During a presentation on the Palestinian-Israeli
situation in 2001, an American-Israeli acquaintance of ours began
with a typical attack on the Palestinians. Taking the overused
line that "Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss
an opportunity," he asserted snidely that, if only the Palestinians
had had any decency and not been so all-fired interested in pushing
the Jews into the sea in 1948, they would have accepted the UN
partition of Palestine. Those Palestinians who became refugees
would instead have remained peacefully in their homes, and the
state of Palestine could in the year 2001 be celebrating the
53rd anniversary of its independence. Everything could have been
sweetness and light, he contended, but here the Palestinians
were, then a year into a deadly intifada, still stateless, still
hostile, and still trying, he claimed, to push the Jews into
the sea.
It was a common line but with a new and
intriguing twist: what if the Palestinians had accepted partition;
would they in fact have lived in a state at peace since 1948?
It was enough to make the audience stop and think. But later
in the talk, the speaker tripped himself up by claiming, in a
tone of deep alarm, that Palestinian insistence on the right
of return for Palestinian refugees displaced when Israel was
created would spell the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state.
He did not realize the  inherent contradiction in
his two assertions (until we later pointed it out to him, with
no little glee). You cannot have it both ways, we told him: you
cannot claim that, if Palestinians had not left the areas that
became Israel in 1948, they would now be living peaceably, some
inside and some alongside a Jewish-majority state, and then also
claim that, if they returned now, Israel would lose its Jewish
majority and its essential identity as a Jewish state.*
This exchange, and the massive propaganda
effort by and on behalf of Israel to demonstrate the threat to
Israel's Jewish character posed by the Palestinians' right of
return, actually reveal the dirty little secret of Zionism. In
its drive to establish and maintain a state in which Jews are
always the majority, Zionism absolutely required that Palestinians,
as non-Jews, be made to leave in 1948 and never be allowed to
return. The dirty little secret is that this is blatant racism.
But didn't we finish with that old Zionism-is-racism
issue over a decade ago, when in 1991 the UN repealed a 1975
General Assembly resolution that defined Zionism as "a form
of racism or racial discrimination"? Hadn't we Americans
always rejected this resolution as odious anti-Semitism, and
didn't we, under the aegis of the first Bush administration,
finally prevail on the rest of the world community to agree that
it was not only inaccurate but downright evil to label Zionism
as racist? Why bring it up again, now?
The UN General Assembly based its 1975
anti-Zionist resolution on the UN's own definition of racial
discrimination, adopted in 1965. According to the International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination,
racial discrimination is "any distinction, exclusion, restriction
or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or
ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or
impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal
footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political,
economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life."
As a definition of racism and racial discrimination, this statement
is unassailable and, if one is honest about what Zionism is and
what it signifies, the statement is an accurate definition of
Zionism. But in 1975, in the political atmosphere prevailing
at the time, putting forth such a definition was utterly self-defeating.
So would a formal resolution be in today's
political atmosphere. But enough has changed over the last decade
or more that talk about Zionism as a system that either is inherently
racist or at least fosters racism is increasingly possible and
increasingly necessary. Despite the vehement knee-jerk opposition
to any such discussion throughout the United States, serious
scholars elsewhere and serious Israelis have begun increasingly
to examine Zionism critically, and there is much greater receptivity
to the notion that no real peace will be forged in Palestine-Israel
unless the bases of Zionism are examined and in some way altered.
It is for this reason that honestly labeling Zionism as a racist
political philosophy is so necessary: unless the world's, and
particularly the United States', blind support for Israel as
an exclusivist Jewish state is undermined, unless the blind acceptance
of Zionism as a noble ideology is undermined, and unless it is
recognized that Israel's drive to maintain dominion over the
occupied Palestinian territories is motivated by an exclusivist,
racist ideology, no one will ever gain the political strength
or the political will necessary to force Israel to relinquish
territory and permit establishment of a truly sovereign and independent
Palestinian state in a part of Palestine.
Recognizing Zionism's
Racism
A racist ideology need not always manifest
itself as such, and, if the circumstances are right, it need
not always actually practice racism to maintain itself. For decades
after its creation, the circumstances were right for Israel.
If one forgot, as most people did, the fact that 750,000 Palestinians
(non-Jews) had left their homeland under duress, thus making
room for a Jewish-majority state, everyone could accept Israel
as a genuine democracy, even to a certain extent for that small
minority of Palestinians who had remained after 1948. That minority
was not large enough to threaten Israel's Jewish majority; it
faced considerable discrimination, but because Israeli Arabs
could vote, this discrimination was viewed not as institutional,
state-mandated racism but as the kind of discrimination, deplorable
but not institutionalized, faced by blacks in the United States.
The occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, with
their two million (soon to become more than three million) Palestinian
inhabitants, was seen to be temporary, its end awaiting only
the Arabs' readiness to accept Israel's existence.
In these "right" circumstances,
the issue of racism rarely arose, and the UN's labeling of Israel's
fundamental ideology as racist came across to Americans and most
westerners as nasty and vindictive. Outside the third world,
Israel had come to be regarded as the perpetual innocent, not
aggressive, certainly not racist, and desirous of nothing more
than a peace agreement that would allow it to mind its own business
inside its original borders in a democratic state. By the time
the Zionism-is-racism resolution was rescinded in 1991, even
the PLO had officially recognized Israel's right to exist in
peace inside its 1967 borders, with its Jewish majority uncontested.
In fact, this very acceptance of Israel by its principal adversary
played no small part in facilitating the U.S. effort to garner
support for overturning the resolution. (The fact of U.S. global
dominance in the wake of the first Gulf war and the collapse
of the Soviet Union earlier in 1991, and the atmosphere of optimism
about prospects for peace created by the Madrid peace conference
in October also played a significant part in winning over a majority
of the UN when the Zionism resolution was brought to a vote of
the General Assembly in December.)
Realities are very different today, and
a recognition of Zionism's racist bases, as well as an understanding
of the racist policies being played out in the occupied territories
are essential if there is to be any hope at all of achieving
a peaceful, just, and stable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict. The egg of Palestine has been permanently scrambled,
and it is now increasingly the case that, as Zionism is recognized
as the driving force in the occupied territories as well as inside
Israel proper, pre-1967 Israel can no longer be considered in
isolation. It can no longer be allowed simply to go its own way
as a Jewish-majority state, a state in which the circumstances
are "right" for ignoring Zionism's fundamental racism.
As Israel increasingly inserts itself
into the occupied territories, and as Israeli settlers, Israeli
settlements, and Israeli-only roads proliferate and a state infrastructure
benefiting only Jews takes over more and more territory, it becomes
no longer possible to ignore the racist underpinnings of the
Zionist ideology that directs this enterprise. It is no longer
possible today to wink at the permanence of Zionism's thrust
beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders. It is now clear that Israel's
control over the occupied territories is, and has all along been
intended to be, a drive to assert exclusive Jewish control, taming
the Palestinians into submission and squeezing them into ever
smaller, more disconnected segments of land or, failing that,
forcing them to leave Palestine altogether. It is totally obvious
to anyone who spends time on the ground in Palestine-Israel that
the animating force behind the policies of the present and all
past Israeli governments in Israel and in the occupied West Bank,
Gaza, and East Jerusalem has always been a determination to assure
the predominance of Jews over Palestinians. Such policies can
only be described as racist, and we should stop trying any longer
to avoid the word.
When you are on the ground in Palestine,
you can see Zionism physically imprinted on the landscape. Not
only can you see that there are settlements, built on land confiscated
from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not live. Not only
can you see roads in the occupied territories, again built on
land taken from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not drive.
Not only can you observe that water in the occupied territories
is allocated, by Israeli governmental authorities, so inequitably
that Israeli settlers are allocated five times the amount per
capita as are Palestinians and, in periods of drought, Palestinians
stand in line for drinking water while Israeli settlements enjoy
lush gardens and swimming pools. Not only can you stand and watch
as Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian olive groves and other
agricultural land, destroy Palestinian wells, and demolish Palestinian
homes to make way for the separation wall that Israel is constructing
across the length and breadth of the West Bank. The wall fences
off Palestinians from Israelis, supposedly to provide greater
security for Israelis but in fact in order to cage Palestinians,
to define a border for Israel that will exclude a maximum number
of Palestinians.
But, if this is not enough to demonstrate
the inherent racism of Israel's occupation, you can also drive
through Palestinian towns and Palestinian neighborhoods in and
near Jerusalem and see what is perhaps the most cruelly racist
policy in Zionism's arsenal: house demolitions, the preeminent
symbol of Zionism's drive to maintain Jewish predominance. Virtually
every street has a house or houses reduced to rubble, one floor
pancaked onto another or simply a pile of broken concrete bulldozed
into an incoherent heap. Jeff Halper, founder and head of the
non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
(ICAHD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, has
observed that Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years
have all conveyed what he calls "The Message" to Palestinians.
The Message, Halper says, is "Submit. Only when you abandon
your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept
that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent
[i.e., stop attacking Palestinians]." The deeper meaning
of The Message, as carried by the bulldozers so ubiquitous in
targeted Palestinian neighborhoods today, is that "You [Palestinians]
do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948and
now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."
In the end, Halper says, the advance
of Zionism has been a process of displacement, and house demolitions
have been "at the center of the Israeli struggle against
the Palestinians" since 1948. Halper enumerates a steady
history of destruction: in the first six years of Israel's existence,
it systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages inside Israel,
fully 85 percent of the villages existing before 1948; since
the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 11,000 Palestinian
homes. More homes are now being demolished in the path of Israel's
"separation wall." It is estimated that more than 4,000
homes have been destroyed in the last two years alone.
The vast majority of these house demolitions,
95 percent, have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism,
but are designed specifically to displace non-Jews and assure
the advance of Zionism. In Jerusalem, from the beginning of the
occupation of the eastern sector of the city in 1967, Israeli
authorities have designed zoning plans specifically to prevent
the growth of the Palestinian population. Maintaining the "Jewish
character" of the city at the level existing in 1967 (71
percent Jewish, 29 percent Palestinian) required that Israel
draw zoning boundaries to prevent Palestinian expansion beyond
existing neighborhoods, expropriate Palestinian-owned lands,
confiscate the Jerusalem residency permits of any Palestinian
who cannot prove that Jerusalem is his "center of life,"
limit city services to Palestinian areas, limit development in
Palestinian neighborhoods, refuse to issue residential building
permits to Palestinians, and demolish Palestinian homes that
are built without permits. None of these strictures is imposed
on Jews. According to ICAHD, the housing shortage in Palestinian
neighborhoods in Jerusalem is approximately 25,000 units, and
2,000 demolition orders are pending.
Halper has written that the human suffering
involved in the destruction of a family home is incalculable.
A home "is one's symbolic center, the site of one's most
intimate personal life and an expression of one's status. It
is a refuge, it is the physical representation of the family,maintainingcontinuity
on one's ancestral land." Land expropriation is "an
attack on one's very being and identity." Zionist governments,
past and present, have understood this well, although not with
the compassion or empathy that Halper conveys, and this attack
on the "very being and identity" of non-Jews has been
precisely the animating force behind Zionism.
Zionism's racism has, of course, been
fundamental to Israel itself since its establishment in 1948.
The Israeli government pursues policies against its own Bedouin
minority very similar to its actions in the occupied territories.
The Bedouin population has been forcibly relocated and squeezed
into small areas in the Negev, again with the intent of forcing
an exodus, and half of the 140,000 Bedouin in the Negev live
in villages that the Israeli government does not recognize and
does not provide services for. Every Bedouin home in an unrecognized
village is slated for demolition; all homes, and the very presence
of Bedouin in them, are officially illegal.
The problem of the Bedouins' unrecognized
villages is only the partial evidence of a racist policy that
has prevailed since Israel's foundation. After Zionist/Israeli
leaders assured that the non-Jews (i.e., the Palestinians) making
up the majority of Palestine's population (a two-thirds majority
at the time) departed the scene in 1948, Israeli governments
institutionalized favoritism toward Jews by law. As a Zionist
state, Israel has always identified itself as the state of the
Jews: as a state not of its Jewish and Palestinian citizens,
but of all Jews everywhere in the world. The institutions of
state guarantee the rights of and provide benefits for Jews.
The Law of Return gives automatic citizenship to Jews from anywhere
in the world, but to no other people. Some 92 percent of the
land of Israel is state land, held by the Jewish National Fund
"in trust" for the Jewish people; Palestinians may
not purchase this land, even though most of it was Palestinian
land before 1948, and in most instances they may not even lease
the land. Both the Jewish National Fund, which deals with land
acquisition and development, and the Jewish Agency, which deals
primarily with Jewish immigration and immigrant absorption, have
existed since before the state's establishment and now perform
their duties specifically for Jews under an official mandate
from the Israeli government.
Creating Enemies
Although few dare to give the reality
of house demolitions and state institutions favoring Jews the
label of racism, the phenomenon this reality describes is unmistakably
racist. There is no other term for a process by which one people
can achieve the essence of its political philosophy only by suppressing
another people, by which one people guarantees its perpetual
numerical superiority and its overwhelming predominance over
another people through a deliberate process of repression and
dispossession of those people. From the beginning, Zionism has
been based on the supremacy of the Jewish people, whether this
predominance was to be exercised in a full-fledged state or in
some other kind of political entity, and Zionism could never
have survived or certainly thrived in Palestine without ridding
that land of most of its native population. The early Zionists
themselves knew this (as did the Palestinians), even if naïve
Americans have never quite gotten it. Theodore Herzl, father
of Zionism, talked from the beginning of "spiriting"
the native Palestinians out and across the border; discussion
of "transfer" was common among the Zionist leadership
in Palestine in the 1930s; talk of transfer is common today.
There has been a logical progression
to the development of Zionism, leading inevitably to general
acceptance of the sense that, because Jewish needs are paramount,
Jews themselves are paramount. Zionism grew out of the sense
that Jews needed a refuge from persecution, which led in turn
to the belief that the refuge could be truly secure only if Jews
guaranteed their own safety, which meant that the refuge must
be exclusively or at least overwhelmingly Jewish, which meant
in turn that Jews and their demands were superior, taking precedence
over any other interests within that refuge. The mindset that
in U.S. public discourse tends to view the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict from a perspective almost exclusively focused on Israel
arises out of this progression of Zionist thinking. By the very
nature of a mindset, virtually no one examines the assumptions
on which the Zionist mindset is based, and few recognize the
racist base on which it rests.
Israeli governments through the decades
have never been so innocent. Many officials in the current right-wing
government are blatantly racist. Israel's outspoken education
minister, Limor Livnat, spelled out the extreme right-wing defense
of Zionism a year ago, when the government proposed to legalize
the right of Jewish communities in Israel to exclude non-Jews.
Livnat justified Israel's racism as a matter of Jewish self-preservation.
"We're involved here," she said in a radio interview,
"in a struggle for the existence of the State of Israel
as the state of the Jews, as opposed tothose who want to force
us to be a state of all its citizens." Israel is not "just
another state like all the other states," she protested.
"We are not just a state of all its citizens."
Livnat cautioned that Israel must be
very watchful lest it find in another few years that the Galilee
and the Negev, two areas inside Israel with large Arab populations,
are "filled with Arab communities." To emphasize the
point, she reiterated that Israel's "special purpose is
our character as a Jewish state, our desire to preserve a Jewish
community and Jewish majority hereso that it does not become
a state of all its citizens." Livnat was speaking of Jewish
self-preservation not in terms of saving the Jews or Israel from
a territorial threat of military invasion by a marauding neighbor
state, but in terms of preserving Jews from the mere existence
of another people within spitting distance.
Most Zionists of a more moderate stripe
might shudder at the explicitness of Livnat's message and deny
that Zionism is really like this. But in fact this properly defines
the racism that necessarily underlies Zionism. Most centrist
and leftist Zionists deny the reality of Zionism's racism by
trying to portray Zionism as a democratic system and manufacturing
enemies in order to be able to sustain the inherent contradiction
and hide or excuse the racism behind Zionism's drive for predominance.
Indeed, the most pernicious aspect of
a political philosophy like Zionism that masquerades as democratic
is that it requires an enemy in order to survive and, where an
enemy does not already exist, it requires that one be created.
In order to justify racist repression and dispossession, particularly
in a system purporting to be democratic, those being repressed
and displaced must be portrayed as murderous and predatory. And
in order to keep its own population in line, to prevent a humane
people from objecting to their own government's repressive policies,
it requires that fear be instilled in the population: fear of
"the other," fear of the terrorist, fear of the Jew-hater.
The Jews of Israel must always be made to believe that they are
the preyed-upon. This justifies having forced these enemies to
leave, it justifies discriminating against those who remained,
it justifies denying democratic rights to those who later came
under Israel's control in the occupied territories.
Needing an enemy has meant that Zionism
has from the beginning had to create myths about Palestinians,
painting Palestinians and all Arabs as immutably hostile and
intransigent. Thus the myth that in 1948 Palestinians left Palestine
so that Arab armies could throw the Jews into the sea; thus the
continuing myth that Palestinians remain determined to destroy
Israel. Needing an enemy means that Zionism, as one veteran Israeli
peace activist recently put it, has removed the Palestinians
from history. Thus the myths that there is no such thing as a
Palestinian, or that Palestinians all immigrated in modern times
from other Arab countries, or that Jordan is Palestine and Palestinians
should find their state there.
Needing an enemy means that Zionism has
had to make its negotiating partner into a terrorist. It means
that, for its own preservation, Zionism has had to devise a need
to ignore its partner/enemy or expel him or assassinate him.
It means that Zionism has had to reject any conciliatory effort
by the Palestinians and portray them as "never missing an
opportunity to miss an opportunity" to make peace. This
includes in particular rejecting that most conciliatory gesture,
the PLO's decision in 1988 to recognize Israel's existence, relinquish
Palestinian claims to the three-quarters of Palestine lying inside
Israel's pre-1967 borders, and even recognize Israel's "right"
to exist there.
Needing an enemy means, ultimately, that
Zionism had to create the myth of the "generous offer"
at the Camp David summit in July 2000. It was Zionist racism
that painted the Palestinians as hopelessly intransigent for
refusing Israel's supposedly generous offer, actually an impossible
offer that would have maintained Zionism's hold on the occupied
territories and left the Palestinians with a disconnected, indefensible, non-viable state. Then,
when the intifada erupted (after Palestinian demonstrators threw
stones at Israeli police and the police responded by shooting
several demonstrators to death), it was Zionist racism speaking
when Israel put out the line that it was under siege and in a
battle for its very survival with Palestinians intent on destroying
it. When a few months later the issue of Palestinian refugees
and their "right of return" arose publicly, it was
Zionist racism speaking when Israel and its defenders, ignoring
the several ways in which Palestinian negotiators signaled their
readiness to compromise this demand, propagated the view that
this too was intended as a way to destroy Israel, by flooding
it with non-Jews and destroying its Jewish character.
The Zionist Dilemma
The supposed threat from "the other"
is the eternal refuge of the majority of Israelis and Israeli
supporters in the United States. The common line is that "We
Israelis and friends of Israel long for peace, we support Israeli
withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, we have always supported
giving the Palestinians self-government. But 'they' hate us,
they want to destroy Israel. Wasn't this obvious when Arafat
turned his back on Israel's generous offer? Wasn't this obvious
when Arafat started the intifada? Wasn't this obvious when Arafat
demanded that the Palestinians be given the right of return,
which would destroy Israel as a Jewish state? We have already
made concession after concession. How can we give them any further
concessions when they would only fight for more and more until
Israel is gone?" This line relieves Israel of any responsibility
to make concessions or move toward serious negotiations; it relieves
Israelis of any need to treat Palestinians as equals; it relieves
Israelis and their defenders of any need to think; it justifies
racism, while calling it something else.
Increasing numbers of Israelis themselves
(some of whom have long been non-Zionists, some of whom are only
now beginning to see the problem with Zionism) are recognizing
the inherent racism of their nation's raison d'etre. During
the years of the peace process, and indeed for the last decade
and a half since the PLO formally recognized Israel's existence,
the Israeli left could ignore the problems of Zionism while pursuing
efforts to promote the establishment of an independent Palestinian
state in the West Bank and Gaza that would coexist with Israel.
Zionism continued to be more or less a non-issue: Israel could
organize itself in any way it chose inside its own borders, and
the Palestinian state could fulfill Palestinian national aspirations
inside its new borders.
Few of those nettlesome issues surrounding
Zionism, such as how much democracy Zionism can allow to non-Jews
without destroying its reason for being, would arise in a two-state
situation. The issue of Zionism's responsibility for the Palestinians'
dispossession could also be put aside. As Haim Hanegbi, a non-Zionist
Israeli who recently went back to the fold of single-state binationalism
(and who is a long-time cohort of Uri Avnery in the Gush Shalom
movement), said in a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz, the promise of mutual recognition offered by
the Oslo peace process mesmerized him and others in the peace
movement and so "in the mid-1990s I had second thoughts
about my traditional [binational] approach. I didn't think it
was my task to go to Ramallah and present the Palestinians with
the list of Zionist wrongs and tell them not to forget what our
fathers did to their fathers." Nor were the Palestinians
themselves reminding Zionists of these wrongs at the time.
As new wrongs in the occupied territories
increasingly recall old wrongs from half a century ago, however,
and as Zionism finds that it cannot cope with end-of-conflict
demands like the Palestinians' insistence that Israel accept
their right of return by acknowledging its role in their dispossession,
more and more Israelis are coming to accept the reality that
Zionism can never escape its past. It is becoming increasingly
clear to many Israelis that Israel has absorbed so much of the
West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem into itself that the Jewish
and the Palestinian peoples can never be separated fairly. The
separation wall, says Hanegbi, "is the great despairing
solution of the Jewish-Zionist society. It is the last desperate
act of those who cannot confront the Palestinian issue. Of those
who are compelled to push the Palestinian issue out of their
lives and out of their consciousness." For Hanegbi, born
in Palestine before 1948, Palestinians "were always part
of my landscape," and without them, "this is a barren
country, a disabled country."
Old-line Zionist Meron Benvenisti, who
has also moved to support for binationalism, used almost identical
metaphors in a Ha'aretz interview run alongside Hanegbi's.
Also Palestine-born and a contemporary of Hanegbi, Benvenisti
believes "this is a country in which there were always Arabs.
This is a country in which the Arabs are the landscape, the natives.I
don't see myself living here without them. In my eyes, without
Arabs this is a barren land."
Both men discuss the evolution of their
thinking over the decades, and both describe a period in which,
after the triumph of Zionism, they unthinkingly accepted its
dispossession of the Palestinians. Each man describes the Palestinians
simply disappearing when he was an adolescent ("They just
sort of evaporated," says Hanegbi), and Benvenisti recalls
a long period in which the Palestinian "tragedy simply did
not penetrate my consciousness." But both speak in very
un-Zionist terms of equality. Benvenisti touches on the crux
of the Zionist dilemma. "This is where I am different from
my friends in the left," he says, "because I am truly
a native son of immigrants, who is drawn to the Arab culture
and the Arabic language because it is here. It is the land.Whereas
the right, certainly, but the left too hates Arabs. The Arabs
bother them; they complicate things. The subject generates moral
questions and that generates cultural unease."
Hanegbi goes farther. "I am not
a psychologist," he says, "but I think that everyone
who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself
to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's
impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible
to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not
only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression,
but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to
hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very
deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land
that drives us out of our minds."
While some thoughtful Israelis like these
men struggle with philosophical questions of existence and identity
and the collective Jewish conscience, few American defenders
of Israel seem troubled by such deep issues. Racism is often
banal. Most of those who practice it, and most of those who support
Israel as a Zionist state, would be horrified to be accused of
racism, because their racist practices have become commonplace.
They do not even think about what they do. We recently encountered
a typical American supporter of Israel who would have argued
vigorously if we had accused her of racism. During a presentation
we were giving to a class, this (non-Jewish) woman rose to ask
a question that went roughly like this: "I want to ask about
the failure of the other Arabs to take care of the Palestinians.
I must say I sympathize with Israel because Israel simply wants
to have a secure state, but the other Arabs have refused to take
the Palestinians in, and so they sit in camps and their hostility
toward Israel just festers."
This is an extremely common American,
and Israeli, perception, the idea being that if the Arab states
would only absorb the Palestinians so that they became Lebanese
or Syrians or Jordanians, they would forget about being Palestinian,
forget that Israel had displaced and dispossessed them, and forget
about "wanting to destroy Israel." Israel would then
be able simply to go about its own business and live in peace,
as it so desperately wants to do. This woman's assumption was
that it is acceptable for Israel to have established itself as
a Jewish state at the expense of (i.e., after the ethnic cleansing
of) the land's non-Jewish inhabitants, that any Palestinian objection
to this reality is illegitimate, and that all subsequent animosity
toward Israel is ultimately the fault of neighboring Arab states
who failed to smother the Palestinians' resistance by anesthetizing
them to their plight and erasing their identity and their collective
memory of Palestine.
When later in the class the subject arose
of Israel ending the occupation, this same woman spoke up to
object that, if Israel did give up control over the West Bank
and Gaza, it would be economically disadvantaged, at least in
the agricultural sector. "Wouldn't this leave Israel as
just a desert?" she wondered. Apart from the fact that the
answer is a clear "no" (Israel's agricultural capability
inside its 1967 borders is quite high, and most of Israel is
not desert), the woman's question was again based on the automatic
assumption that Israel's interests take precedence over those
of anyone else and that, in order to enhance its own agricultural
economy (or, presumably, for any other perceived gain), Israel
has the right to conquer and take permanent possession of another
people's land.
The notion that the Jewish/Zionist state
of Israel has a greater right to possess the land, or a greater
right to security, or a greater right to a thriving economy,
than the people who are native to that land is extremely racist,
but this woman would probably object strenuously to having it
pointed out that this is a Jewish supremacist viewpoint identical
to past justifications for white South Africa's apartheid regime
and to the rationale for all European colonial (racist) systems
that exploited the human and natural resources of Africa, the
Middle East, and Asia over the centuries for the sole benefit
of the colonizers. Racism must necessarily be blind to its own
immorality; the burden of conscience is otherwise too great.
This is the banality of evil.
(Unconsciously, of course, many Americans
also seem to believe that the shameful policies of the U.S. government
toward Native Americans somehow make it acceptable for the government
of Israel to pursue equally shameful policies toward the Palestinians.
The U.S. needs to face its racist policies head on as much as
it needs to confront the racism of its foremost partner, Israel.)
This woman's view is so very typical,
something you hear constantly in casual conversation and casual
encounters at social occasions, that it hardly seems significant.
But this very banality is precisely the evil of it; what is evil
is the very fact that it is "hardly significant" that
Zionism by its nature is racist and that this reality goes unnoticed
by decent people who count themselves defenders of Israel. The
universal acceptability of a system that is at heart racist but
proclaims itself to be benign, even noble, and the license this
acceptability gives Israel to oppress another people, are striking
testimony to the selectivity of the human conscience and its
general disinterest in human questions of justice and human rights
except when these are politically useful.
Countering the Counter-Arguments
To put some perspective on this issue,
a few clarifying questions must be addressed. Many opponents
of the occupation would argue that, although Israel's policies
in the occupied territories are racist in practice, they are
an abuse of Zionism and that racism is not inherent in it. This
seems to be the position of several prominent commentators who
have recently denounced Israel severely for what it does in the
West Bank and Gaza but fail to recognize the racism in what Israel
did upon its establishment in 1948. In a recent bitter denunciation
of Zionist policies today, Avraham Burg, a former Knesset speaker,
lamented that Zionism had become corrupted by ruling as an occupier
over another people, and he longed for the days of Israel's youth
when "our national destiny" was "as a light unto
the nations and a society of peace, justice and equality."
These are nice words, and it is heartening to hear credible mainstream
Israelis so clearly denouncing the occupation, but Burg's assumption
that before the occupation Zionism followed "a just path"
and always had "an ethical leadership" ignores the
unjust and unethical policy of ethnic cleansing that allowed
Israel to become a so-called Jewish democracy in the first place.
Acknowledging the racist underpinnings
of an ideology so long held up as the embodiment of justice and
ethics appears to be impossible for many of the most intellectual
of Israelis and Israeli defenders. Many who strongly oppose Israel's
policies in the occupied territories still, despite their opposition,
go through considerable contortions to "prove" that
Israel itself is not racist. Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of
the Jewish magazine Tikkun and a long-time opponent of
the occupation, rejects the notion that Zionism is racist on
the narrow grounds that Jewishness is only a religious identity
and that Israel welcomes Jews of all races and ethnicities and
therefore cannot be called racist. But this confuses the point.
Preference toward a particular religion, which is the only aspect
of racism that Lerner has addressed and which he acknowledges
occurs in Israel, is no more acceptable than preference on ethnic
grounds.
But most important, racism has to do
primarily with those discriminated against, not with those who
do the discriminating. Using Lerner's reasoning, apartheid South
Africa might also not be considered racist because it welcomed
whites of all ethnicities. But its inherent evil lay in the fact
that its very openness to whites discriminated against blacks.
Discrimination against any people on the basis of "race,
colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin" is the major
characteristic of racism as the UN defines it. Discrimination
against Palestinians and other non-Jews, simply because they
are not Jews, is the basis on which Israel constitutes itself.
Lerner seems to believe that, because the Palestinian citizens
of Israel have the vote and are represented in the Knesset, there
is no racial or ethnic discrimination in Israel. But, apart from
skipping over the institutional racism that keeps Palestinian
Israelis in perpetual second-class citizenship, this argument
ignores the more essential reality that Israel reached its present
ethnic balance, the point at which it could comfortably allow
Palestinians to vote without endangering its Jewish character,
only because in 1948 three-quarters of a million Palestinians
were forced to leave what became the Jewish state of Israel.
More questions need to be addressed.
Is every Israeli or every Jew a racist? Most assuredly not, as
the examples of Jeff Halper, Haim Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti,
and many others like them strikingly illustrate. Is every Zionist
a racist? Probably not, if one accepts ignorance as an exonerating
factor. No doubt the vast majority of Israelis, most very good-hearted
people, are not consciously racist but "go along" unquestioningly,
having been born into or moved to an apparently democratic state
and never examined the issue closely, and having bought into
the line fed them by every Israeli government from the beginning,
that Palestinians and other Arabs are enemies and that whatever
actions Israel takes against Palestinians are necessary to guarantee
the personal security of Israelis.
Is it anti-Semitic to say that Zionism
is a racist system? Certainly not. Political criticism is not
ethnic or religious hatred. Stating a reality about a government's
political system or its political conduct says nothing about
the qualities of its citizens or its friends. Racism is not a
part of the genetic makeup of Jews, any more than it was a part
of the genetic makeup of Germans when Hitler ran a racist regime.
Nor do Zionism's claim to speak for all Jews everywhere and Israel's
claim to be the state of all Jews everywhere make all Jews Zionists.
Zionism did not ask for or receive the consent of universal Jewry
to speak in its name; therefore labeling Zionism as racist does
not label all Jews and cannot be called anti-Semitic.
Why It Matters
Are there other racist systems, and are
there governing systems and political philosophies, racist or
not, that are worse than Zionism? Of course, but this fact does
not relieve Zionism of culpability. (Racism obviously exists
in the United States and in times past was pervasive throughout
the country, but, unlike Israel, the U.S. is not a racist governing
system, based on racist foundations and depending for its raison
d'etre on a racist philosophy.) Many defenders of Israel
(Michael Lerner and columnist Thomas Friedman come to mind) contend
that when Israel is "singled out" for criticism not
also leveled at oppressive regimes elsewhere, the attackers are
exhibiting a special hatred for Jews. Anyone who does not also
criticize Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il or Bashar al-Assad for
atrocities far greater than Israel's, they charge, is showing
that he is less concerned to uphold absolute values than to tear
down Israel because it is Jewish. But this charge ignores several
factors that demand criticism of Zionist racism. First, because
the U.S. government supports Zionism and its racist policy on
a continuing basis and props up Zionism's military machine with
massive amounts of military aid, it is wholly appropriate for
Americans (indeed, it is incumbent on Americans) to call greater
attention to Zionism's racism than, for instance, to North Korea's
appalling cruelties. The United States does not assist in North
Korea's atrocities, but it does underwrite Zionism's brutality.
There is also a strong moral reason for
denouncing Zionism as racist. Zionism advertises itself, and
actually congratulates itself, as a uniquely moral system that
stands as a "light unto the nations," putting itself
forward as in a real sense the very embodiment of the values
Americans hold dear. Many Zionist friends of Israel would have
us believe that Zionism is us, and in many ways it is: most Americans,
seeing Israelis as "like us," have grown up with the
notion that Israel is a noble enterprise and that the ideology
that spawned it is of the highest moral order. Substantial numbers
of Americans, non-Jews as well as Jews, feel an emotional and
psychological bond with Israel and Zionism that goes far beyond
the ties to any other foreign ally. One scholar, describing the
U.S.-Israeli tie, refers to Israel as part of the "being"
of the United States. Precisely because of the intimacy of the
relationship, it is imperative that Zionism's hypocrisy be exposed,
that Americans not give aid and comfort to, or even remain associated
with, a morally repugnant system that uses racism to exalt one
people over all others while masquerading as something better
than it is. The United States can remain supportive of Israel
as a nation without any longer associating itself with Israel's
racism.
Finally, there are critical practical
reasons for acknowledging Zionism's racism and enunciating a
U.S. policy clearly opposed to racism everywhere and to the repressive
Israeli policies that arise from Zionist racism. Now more than
at any time since the United States positioned itself as an enthusiastic
supporter of Zionism, U.S. endorsement, and indeed facilitation,
of Israel's racist policies put this country at great risk for
terrorism on a massive scale. Terrorism arises, not as President
Bush would have us believe from "hatred of our liberties,"
but from hatred of our oppressive, killing policies throughout
the Arab and Muslim worlds, and in a major way from our support
for Israel's severe oppression of the Palestinians. Terrorism
is never acceptable, but it is explainable, and it is usually
avoidable. Supporting the oppression of Palestinians that arises
from Israel's racism only encourages terrorism.
It is time to begin openly expressing
revulsion at the racism against Palestinians that the United
States has been supporting for decades. It is time to sound an
alarm about the near irreversibility of Israel's absorption of
the occupied territories into Israel, about the fact that this
arises from a fundamentally racist ideology, about the fact that
this racism is leading to the ethnicide of an entire nation of
people, and about the fact that it is very likely to produce
horrific terrorist retaliation against the U.S. because of its
unquestioning support. Many who are intimately familiar with
the situation on the ground are already sounding an alarm, usually
without using the word racism but using other inflammatory terms.
Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen recently observed that "Israel's
atrocities have now intensified to an extent unimaginable in
previous decades." Land confiscation, curfew, the "gradual
pushing of Palestinians from areas designated for Jews"
have accompanied the occupation all along, he wrote, but the
level of oppression now "is quite another story.[This is]
an eliminationist policy on the verge of genocide."
The Foundation for Middle East Peace,
a Washington-based institution that has tracked Israeli settlement-building
for decades, came to much the same conclusion, although using
less attention-getting language, in its most recent bimonthly
newsletter. Israel, it wrote, is "undertaking massive, unprecedented
efforts beyond the construction of new settlement housing, which
proceeds apace, to put the question of its control of these areas
beyond the reach of diplomacy." Israel's actions, particularly
the "relentless" increase in territorial control, the
foundation concluded, have "compromised not only the prospect
for genuine Palestinian independence but also, in ways not seen
in Israel's 36-year occupation, the very sustainability of everyday
Palestinian life."
It signals a remarkable change when Israeli
commentators and normally staid foundations begin using terms
like "unprecedented," "unimaginable in previous
decades," "in ways not seen in Israel's 36-year occupation,"
even words like "eliminationist" and "genocide."
While the Bush administration, every Democratic presidential
candidate (including, to some degree, even the most progressive),
Congress, and the mainstream U.S. media blithely ignore the extent
of the destruction in Palestine, more and more voices outside
the United States and outside the mainstream in the U.S. are
finally coming to recognize that Israel is squeezing the life
out of the Palestinian nation. Those who see this reality should
begin to expose not only the reality but the racism that is at
its root.
Some very thoughtful Israelis, including
Haim Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti, and activists like Jeff Halper,
have come to the conclusion that Israel has absorbed so much
of the occupied territories that a separate, truly independent
Palestinian state can never be established in the West Bank and
Gaza. They now regard a binational solution as the only way.
In theory, this would mean an end to Zionism (and Zionist racism)
by allowing the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples to form a
single secular state in all of Palestine in which they live together
in equality and democracy, in which neither people is superior,
in which neither people identifies itself by its nationality
or its religion but rather simply by its citizenship. Impossible?
Idealized? Pie-in-the-sky? Probably so but maybe not.
Other Israeli and Jewish activists and
thinkers, such as Israel's Uri Avnery and CounterPunch contributor
Michael Neumann, have cogently challenged the wisdom and the
realism of trying to pursue binationalism at the present time.
But it is striking that their arguments center on what will best
assure a decent outcome for Palestinians. In fact, what is most
heartening about the newly emerging debate over the one- versus
the two-state solution is the fact that intelligent, compassionate
people have at long last been able to move beyond addressing
Jewish victimhood and how best to assure a future for Jews, to
begin debating how best to assure a future for both the Palestinian
and the Jewish people. Progressives in the U.S., both supporters
and opponents of present U.S. policies toward Israel, should
encourage similar debate in this country. If this requires loudly
attacking AIPAC and its intemperate charges of anti-Semitism,
so be it.
We recently had occasion to raise the
notion of Israeli racism, using the actual hated word, at a gathering
of about 25 or 30 (mostly) progressive (mostly) Jews, and came
away with two conclusions: 1) it is a hard concept to bring people
to face, but 2) we were not run out of the room and, after the
initial shock of hearing the word racist used in connection with
Zionism, most people in the room, with only a few exceptions,
took the idea aboard. Many specifically thanked us for what we
had said. One man, raised as a Jew and now a Muslim, came up
to us afterward to say that he thinks Zionism is nationalist
rather than racist (to which we argued that nationalism was the
motivation but racism is the resulting reality), but he acknowledged,
with apparent approbation, that referring to racism had a certain
shock effect. Shock effect is precisely what we wanted. The United
States' complacent support for everything Israel does will not
be altered without shock.
When a powerful state kills hundreds
of civilians from another ethnic group; confiscates their land;
builds vast housing complexes on that land for the exclusive
use of its own nationals; builds roads on that land for the exclusive
use of its own nationals; prevents expansion of the other people's
neighborhoods and towns; demolishes on a massive scale houses
belonging to the other people, in order either to prevent that
people's population growth, to induce them "voluntarily"
to leave their land altogether, or to provide "security"
for its own nationals; imprisons the other people in their own
land behind checkpoints, roadblocks, ditches, razor wire, electronic
fences, and concrete walls; squeezes the other people into ever
smaller, disconnected segments of land; cripples the productive
capability of the other people by destroying or separating them
from their agricultural land, destroying or confiscating their
wells, preventing their industrial expansion, and destroying
their businesses; imprisons the leadership of the other people
and threatens to expel or assassinate that leadership; destroys
the security forces and the governing infrastructure of the other
people; destroys an entire population's census records, land
registry records, and school records; vandalizes the cultural
headquarters and the houses of worship of the other people by
urinating, defecating, and drawing graffiti on cultural and religious
artifacts and symbols when one people does these things
to another, a logical person can draw only one conclusion: the
powerful state is attempting to destroy the other people, to
push them into the sea, to ethnically cleanse them.
These kinds of atrocities, and particularly
the scale of the repression, did not spring full-blown out of
some terrorist provocations by Palestinians. These atrocities
grew out of a political philosophy that says whatever advances
the interests of Jews is acceptable as policy. This is a racist
philosophy.
What Israel is doing to the Palestinians
is not genocide, it is not a holocaust, but it is, unmistakably,
ethnicide. It is, unmistakably, racism. Israel worries constantly,
and its American friends worry, about the destruction of Israel.
We are all made to think always about the existential threat
to Israel, to the Jewish people. But the nation in imminent danger
of elimination today is not Israel but the Palestinians. Such
a policy of national destruction must not be allowed to stand.
-----
* Assuming, according to the scenario
put forth by our Israeli-American friend, that Palestinians had
accepted the UN-mandated establishment of a Jewish state in 1948,
that no war had ensued, and that no Palestinians had left Palestine,
Israel would today encompass only the 55 percent of Palestine
allocated to it by the UN partition resolution, not the 78 percent
it possessed after successfully prosecuting the 1948 war. It
would have no sovereignty over Jerusalem, which was designated
by the UN as a separate international entity not under the sovereignty
of any nation. Its 5.4 million Jews (assuming the same magnitude
of Jewish immigration and natural increase) would be sharing
the state with approximately five million Palestinians (assuming
the same nine-fold rate of growth among the 560,000 Palestinians
who inhabited the area designated for the Jewish state as has
occurred in the Palestinian population that actually remained
in Israel in 1948). Needless to say, this small, severely overcrowded,
binational state would not be the comfortable little Jewish democracy
that our friend seems to have envisioned.
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the
Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central
Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast
Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was
Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis,
a 250-person unit.
Kathleen Christison also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since
then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine.
She is the author of Perceptions
of Palestine and The
Wound of Dispossession.
They are also contributors to CounterPunch's
hot new book: The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
The Christison's can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
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Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
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Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
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Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
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Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
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