AUSTIN, Texas—One of the consistent deformities in American policy debate has been challenged by a couple of professors, and the reaction proves their point so neatly it’s almost funny.

A working paper by John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, professor of international affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, called “The Israel Lobby” was printed in the London Review of Books earlier this month. And all hell broke loose in the more excitable reaches of journalism and academe.

For having the sheer effrontery to point out the painfully obvious—that there is an Israel lobby in the United States—Mearsheimer and Walt have been accused of being anti-Semitic, nutty and guilty of “kooky academic work.” Alan Dershowitz, who seems to be easily upset, went totally ballistic over the mild, academic, not to suggest pretty boring article by Mearsheimer and Walt, calling them “liars” and “bigots.”

Of course there is an Israeli lobby in America—its leading working group is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It calls itself “America’s Pro-Israel Lobby,” and it attempts to influence U.S. legislation and policy.

Several national Jewish organizations lobby from time to time. Big deal—why is anyone pretending this non-news requires falling on the floor and howling? Because of this weird deformity of debate.

In the United States, we do not have full-throated, full-throttle debate about Israel. In Israel, they have it as a matter of course, but the truth is that the accusation of anti-Semitism is far too often raised in this country against anyone who criticizes the government of Israel.

Being pro-Israel is no defense, as I long ago learned to my cost. Now I’ve gotten used to it. Jews who criticize Israel are charmingly labeled “self-hating Jews.” As I have often pointed out, that must mean there are a lot of self-hating Israelis, because those folks raise hell over their own government’s policies all the time.

I don’t know that I’ve ever felt intimidated by the knee-jerk “you’re anti-Semitic” charge leveled at anyone who criticizes Israel, but I do know I have certainly heard it often enough to become tired of it.

And I wonder if that doesn’t produce the same result: giving up on the discussion.

It’s the sheer disproportion and the vehemence of the denunciations of those perceived as criticizing Israel that make the attacks so odious. Mearsheimer and Walt are both widely respected political scientists—comparing their writing to “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” is just silly.

Several critics have pointed out some flaws in the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, including a too-broad use of the term “Israel lobby”—those of us who are pro-Israel differ widely—and having perhaps overemphasized the clout of the Israel lobby by ignoring the energy lobby.

It seems to me the root of the difficulty has been Israel’s inability first to admit the Palestinians have been treated unfairly and, second, to figure out what to do about it. Now here goes a big fat generalization, but I think many Jews are so accustomed (by reality) to thinking of themselves as victims, it is especially difficult for them to admit they have victimized others.

But the Mearsheimer-Walt paper is not about the basic conflict, but rather its effect on American foreign policy, and it appears to me the authors’ arguments are unexceptional. Israel is the No. 1 recipient of American foreign aid, and it seems an easy case can be made that the United States has subjugated its own interests to those of Israel in the past.

Whether you agree or not, it is a discussion well worth having and one that should not be shut down before it can start by unfair accusations of “anti-Semitism.” In a very equal sense, none of this is academic. The Israel lobby was overwhelmingly in favor of starting the war with Iraq and is now among the leading hawks on Iran.

To the extent that our interests do differ from those of Israel, the matter needs to be discussed calmly and fairly. This is not about conspiracies or plots or fantasies or anti-Semitism—it’s about rational discussion of American interests. And, in my case, being pro-Israel. I’m looking forward to hearing from all you nutjobs again.

www.commondreams.org/views06/0425-27.htm

the Zionists tried to smother discussion by flooding the thread with their usual spew. Since they already have a thread in which to do that, let's see if they are capable of showing some common human courtesy and allowing discussion of the Israel Lobby to occur in this thread. Since barging in by force where they have not been invited is what Zionism is all about, it's unlikely. I'm not holding my breath. But hey, maybe for once they'll prove me wrong. Time will tell.

Why is the Israeli lobby special except in scope?

This idea of hidden, non public funding is at the very heart of this kabuki theatre we fondly refer to as 'politics'.
Time to separate the money from the voting process. After we establish a transparent system which is at this time unbelievably corrupt and getting worse.
It's not just the lobby influence but the direct dual citizen Israeli / American loyalties among which are my two favorites Jack & Chertov.

A Response to Critics of 'The Israel Lobby'

By John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, London Review of Books. Posted May 10, 2006.

The following is a response by the authors of the controversial paper "The Israel Lobby" to their critics. AlterNet staff writer Joshua Holland covered the issues surrounding the paper, and AlterNet columnist Molly Ivins also weighed in. Originally appearing in British style, this letter has been adapted to fit American spelling and punctuation.

We wrote "The Israel Lobby" in order to begin a discussion of a subject that had become difficult to address openly in the United States. We knew it was likely to generate a strong reaction, and we are not surprised that some of our critics have chosen to attack our characters or misrepresent our arguments. We have also been gratified by the many positive responses we have received, and by the thoughtful commentary that has begun to emerge in the media and the blogosphere. It is clear that many people -- including Jews and Israelis -- believe that it is time to have a candid discussion of the U.S. relationship with Israel. It is in that spirit that we engage with the letters responding to our article. We confine ourselves here to the most salient points of dispute.

One of the most prominent charges against us is that we see the lobby as a well-organized Jewish conspiracy. Jeffrey Herf and Andrei Markovits, for example, begin by noting that "accusations of powerful Jews behind the scenes are part of the most dangerous traditions of modern anti-Semitism." It is a tradition we deplore and that we explicitly rejected in our article. Instead, we described the lobby as a loose coalition of individuals and organizations without a central headquarters. It includes gentiles as well as Jews, and many Jewish-Americans do not endorse its positions on some or all issues. Most important, the Israel lobby is not a secret, clandestine cabal; on the contrary, it is openly engaged in interest-group politics, and there is nothing conspiratorial or illicit about its behavior. Thus, we can easily believe that Daniel Pipes has never "taken orders" from the lobby, because the Leninist caricature of the lobby depicted in his letter is one that we clearly dismissed. Readers will also note that Pipes does not deny that his organization, Campus Watch, was created in order to monitor what academics say, write and teach, so as to discourage them from engaging in open discourse about the Middle East.

Several writers chide us for making mono-causal arguments, accusing us of saying that Israel alone is responsible for anti-Americanism in the Arab and Islamic world (as one letter puts it, anti-Americanism "would exist if Israel was not there") or suggesting that the lobby bears sole responsibility for the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq. But that is not what we said. We emphasized that U.S. support for Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories is a powerful source of anti-Americanism; the conclusion reached in several scholarly studies and U.S. government commissions (including the 9/11 Commission). But we also pointed out that support for Israel is hardly the only reason America's standing in the Middle East is so low. Similarly, we clearly stated that Osama bin Laden had other grievances against the United States besides the Palestinian issue, but as the 9/11 Commission documents, this matter was a major concern for him. We also explicitly stated that the lobby, by itself, could not convince either the Clinton or the Bush administration to invade Iraq. Nevertheless, there is abundant evidence that the neoconservatives and other groups within the lobby played a central role in making the case for war.

At least two of the letters complain that we "catalogue Israel's moral flaws," while paying little attention to the shortcomings of other states. We focused on Israeli behavior, not because we have any animus towards Israel, but because the United States gives it such high levels of material and diplomatic support. Our aim was to determine whether Israel merits this special treatment either because it is a unique strategic asset or because it behaves better than other countries do. We argued that neither argument is convincing: Israel's strategic value has declined since the end of the Cold War, and Israel does not behave significantly better than most other states.

Herf and Markovits interpret us to be saying that Israel's "continued survival" should be of little concern to the United States. We made no such argument. In fact, we emphasized that there is a powerful moral case for Israel's existence, and we firmly believe that the United States should take action to ensure its survival if it were in danger. Our criticism was directed at Israeli policy and America's special relationship with Israel, not Israel's existence.

Another recurring theme in the letters is that the lobby ultimately matters little because Israel's "values command genuine support among the American public." Thus, Herf and Markovits maintain that there is substantial support for Israel in military and diplomatic circles within the United States. We agree that there is strong public support for Israel in America, in part because it is seen as compatible with America's Judeo-Christian culture. But we believe this popularity is substantially due to the lobby's success at portraying Israel in a favorable light and effectively limiting public awareness and discussion of Israel's less savory actions. Diplomats and military officers are also affected by this distorted public discourse, but many of them can see through the rhetoric. They keep silent, however, because they fear that groups like AIPAC will damage their careers if they speak out. The fact is that if there were no AIPAC, Americans would have a more critical view of Israel and U.S. policy in the Middle East would look different.

On a related point, Michael Szanto contrasts the U.S.-Israeli relationship with the American military commitments to Western Europe, Japan and South Korea, to show that the United States has given substantial support to other states besides Israel. He does not mention, however, that these other relationships did not depend on strong domestic lobbies. The reason is simple: These countries did not need a lobby because close ties with each of them were in America's strategic interest. By contrast, as Israel has become a strategic burden for the United States, its American backers have had to work even harder to preserve the "special relationship."

Other critics contend that we overstate the lobby's power because we overlook countervailing forces, such as "paleo-conservatives, Arab and Islamic advocacy groups … and the diplomatic establishment." Such countervailing forces do exist, but they are no match -- either alone or in combination -- for the lobby. There are Arab-American political groups, for example, but they are weak and divided, and wield far less influence than AIPAC and other organizations that present a strong, consistent message from the lobby.

Probably the most popular argument made about a countervailing force is Herf and Markovits' claim that the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy is oil, not Israel. There is no question that access to that region's oil is a vital U.S. strategic interest. Washington is also deeply committed to supporting Israel. Thus, the relevant question is, how does each of those interests affect U.S. policy? We maintain that U.S. policy in the Middle East is driven primarily by the commitment to Israel, not oil interests. If the oil companies or the oil-producing countries were driving policy, Washington would be tempted to favor the Palestinians instead of Israel. Moreover, the United States would almost certainly not have gone to war against Iraq in March 2003, and the Bush administration would not be threatening to use military force against Iran. Although many claim that the Iraq war was all about oil, there is hardly any evidence to support that supposition and much evidence of the lobby's influence. Oil is clearly an important concern for U.S. policymakers, but with the exception of episodes like the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, the U.S. commitment to Israel has yet to threaten access to oil. It does, however, contribute to America's terrorism problem, complicates its efforts to halt nuclear proliferation, and helped get the United States involved in wars like Iraq.

Regrettably, some of our critics have tried to smear us by linking us with overt racists, thereby suggesting that we are racists or anti-Semites ourselves. Michael Taylor, for example, notes that our article has been "hailed" by Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Alan Dershowitz implies that some of our material was taken from neo-Nazi websites and other hate literature. We have no control over who likes or dislikes our article, but we regret that Duke used it to promote his racist agenda, which we utterly reject. Furthermore, nothing in our piece is drawn from racist sources of any kind, and Dershowitz offers no evidence to support this false claim. We provided a fully documented version of the paper so that readers could see for themselves that we used reputable sources.

Finally, a few critics claim that some of our facts, references or quotations are mistaken. For example, Dershowitz challenges our claim that Israel was "explicitly founded as a Jewish state, and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship." Israel was founded as a Jewish state (a fact Dershowitz does not challenge), and our reference to citizenship was obviously to Israel's Jewish citizens, whose identity is ordinarily based on ancestry. We stated that Israel has a sizeable number of non-Jewish citizens (primarily Arabs), and our main point was that many of them are relegated to a second-class status in a predominantly Jewish society.

We also referred to Golda Meir's famous statement that "there is no such thing as a Palestinian," and Jeremy Schreiber reads us as saying that Meir was denying the existence of those people rather than simply denying Palestinian nationhood. There is no disagreement here; we agree with Schreiber's interpretation, and we quoted Meir in a discussion of Israel's prolonged effort "to deny the Palestinians' national ambitions."

Dershowitz challenges our claim that the Israelis did not offer the Palestinians a contiguous state at Camp David in July 2000. As support, he cites a statement by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and the memoirs of former US negotiator Dennis Ross. There are a number of competing accounts of what happened at Camp David, however, and many of them agree with our claim. Moreover, Barak himself acknowledges that "the Palestinians were promised a continuous piece of sovereign territory, except for a razor-thin Israeli wedge running from Jerusalem … to the Jordan River." This wedge, which would bisect the West Bank, was essential to Israel's plan to retain control of the Jordan River Valley for another six to 20 years. Finally, and contrary to Dershowitz's claim, there was no "second map" or map of a "final proposal at Camp David." Indeed, it is explicitly stated in a note beside the map published in Ross's memoirs that "no map was presented during the final rounds at Camp David." Given all this, it is not surprising that Barak's foreign minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was a key participant at Camp David, later admitted: "If I were a Palestinian, I would have rejected Camp David as well."

Dershowitz also claims that we quote David Ben-Gurion "out of context" and thus misrepresented his views on the need to use force to build a Jewish state in all of Palestine. Dershowitz is wrong. As a number of Israeli historians have shown, Ben-Gurion made numerous statements about the need to use force (or the threat of overwhelming force) to create a Jewish state in all of Palestine. In October 1937, for example, he wrote to his son Amos that the future Jewish state would have an "outstanding army … so I am certain that we won't be constrained from settling in the rest of the country, either by mutual agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors, or by some other way" (emphasis added). Furthermore, common sense says that there was no other way to achieve that goal, because the Palestinians were hardly likely to give up their homeland voluntarily. Ben-Gurion was a consummate strategist, and he understood that it would be unwise for the Zionists to talk openly about the need for "brutal compulsion." We quote a memorandum Ben-Gurion wrote prior to the Extraordinary Zionist Conference at the Biltmore Hotel in New York in May 1942. He wrote that "it is impossible to imagine general evacuation" of the Arab population of Palestine "without compulsion, and brutal compulsion." Dershowitz claims that Ben-Gurion's subsequent statement -- "we should in no way make it part of our program" -- shows that he opposed the transfer of the Arab population and the "brutal compulsion" it would entail. But Ben-Gurion was not rejecting this policy: He was simply noting that the Zionists should not openly proclaim it. Indeed, he said that they should not "discourage other people, British or American, who favor transfer from advocating this course, but we should in no way make it part of our program."

We close with a final comment about the controversy surrounding our article. Although we are not surprised by the hostility directed at us, we are still disappointed that more attention has not been paid to the substance of the piece. The fact remains that the United States is in deep trouble in the Middle East, and it will not be able to develop effective policies if it is impossible to have a civilized discussion about the role of Israel in American foreign policy.

John Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at Chicago. Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

BY RABBI BRUCE WARSHAL

Oh my God, someone has publicly outed the "Israel Lobby." For those readers who do not closely follow the machinations in academia, let me explain. John Walt, the academic dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, have written a blistering critique of the Jewish lobby, focusing primarily on AIPAC.

Their main complaint is that "the thrust of US policy in the region (the Middle East) derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the 'Israel Lobby'." There is much with which to disagree in the paper, including their assertion that Israel is not a vital strategic asset (there are many generals who would challenge that assertion). But there is also much truth, if we would only be honest with ourselves.

The usual suspects have jumped on the bandwagon, not merely to criticize but to condemn the paper in vitriolic words. Rep. Eliot Engel, a Democrat who represents the Bronx, declared it "anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel." This is somewhat ironic since one of the complaints of Walt and Mearsheimer is that anyone who criticizes Israel is automatically labeled anti-Semitic. The ubiquitous Alan Dershowitz accused the authors of cribbing from neo-Nazi Web sites, which was a sophisticated way of tarnishing them as anti-Semites without using the phrase. The right-wing New York Sun called it a "scandal" and warned that if Harvard is not careful, "the Kennedy School will become known as Bir Zeit on the Charles."

The Forward was most responsible. Before writing an extensive critical analysis of the paper it acknowledged that "the authors are not fringe gadflies but two of America's most respected foreign-affairs theorists. ... Though it's tempting, they can't be dismissed as cranks outside the mainstream. They are the mainstream."

I agree with Walt and Mearsheimer that AIPAC controls our American government policy toward Israel. But in their paper the two political scientists point out that, "In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers' unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy; the Lobby's activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Coming from South Florida, I am acutely aware that our government policy toward Cuba is dictated by the Cuban Lobby. Why else would we have such an absurd opposition to Castro? If we can make peace with Red China and the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union, why do we continue an embargo against an obscure Communist island, if it were not for domestic political pressure? So it is with the Jewish domestic lobby. My complaint is that the self-appointed Jewish leaders who control AIPAC and other positions of power within the Jewish community do not represent the best interests of Jews, Israel or the United States in the long run.

Let's zero in on AIPAC. It is controlled by right-wing, rich Jewish neo-conservatives. As one manifestation of the truth of this assertion one merely has to look at its annual meeting this past month. At a time when Vice President Cheney's popularity has dropped below 20 percent, the 4,500 delegates to the AIPAC convention gave him a standing ovation for almost a minute before he even opened his mouth and then proceeded to give him 48 rounds of applause in a 35-minute speech. (As my colleague Leonard Fein pointed out, that's once every 43.7 seconds). Considering that 75 percent of American Jews voted for Kerry, it is obvious that these people are out of the mainstream of Jewish thought.

At the same conference, preceding the recent Israeli elections, these delegates were addressed by Ehud Olmert (Kadima), Amir Peretz (Labor) and Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) by video link from Israel. Olmert and Peretz received polite applause. The AIPAC delegates cheered enthusiastically for Netanyahu, especially when he presented his hard line that was overwhelmingly rejected by the Israeli electorate. Once a great organization, today AIPAC does not even represent the feelings of the average Israeli, let alone the average American Jew.

This American Jewish neo-conservatism is unhealthy not only for America but for Israel as well. A prime example: The Israeli press reports that Israel is trying to find a way to deal with the Palestinians while not dealing with Hamas. Official public statements aside, they realize that they cannot cut off all contacts with the Palestinians and that the world cannot discontinue financial help; otherwise Israel will find a million starving Palestinians on its border, and this will not lead to peace or security for Israel. Privately, the Israeli government was against the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act (the Ross-Lehtinen-Lantos bill) which recently passed the House of Representatives. It would cut off all American contacts with the Palestinian Authority, even with its president Mahmoud Abbas, who is a moderate seeking peace. Despite Israel's private reservations, AIPAC not only pushed this bill, it was instrumental in writing it. Even though the AIPAC candidate lost in Israel, he won in the U.S. House of Representatives. Hopefully, the Senate and the White House will correct this.

Beware that you are reading treasonable material. If you "out" the Israeli lobby and you are Gentile, you're branded an anti-Semite; if you are Jewish, you're obviously a self-hating Jew. The Jewish establishment abides no criticism of Israel. You don't agree with me? Take this example: Last month a pro-Palestinian play entitled My Name is Rachel Corrie was to open at the New York Theatre Workshop, a "progressive" company on East Fourth Street. The play is based on the writings of a young British girl who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer when she was protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in Gaza two years ago. Although the play was widely praised in London last year, it never opened in New York. The theater producers spoke to the ADL and other Jewish leaders, including big-money Jews on its board, and that was the end of that. But, of course, we don't "censor" discussion concerning Israel. We just politely give our opinions and the voice of the other side disappears.

Another example: 400 rabbis, including myself, signed a letter sponsored by Brit Tzedek v'Shalom that appeared in the Forward this past month. It was a mildly liberal statement that proclaimed that "we are deeply troubled by the recent victory of Hamas," but went on to urge "indirect assistance to the Palestinian people via NGO's, with the appropriate conditions to ensure that it does not reach the hands of terrorists." Pretty mild stuff. Yet pulpit rabbis across this country who signed the letter have reported a concerted effort to silence them. The letter has been branded a "piece of back-stabbing abandonment of the Jews of Israel." Synagogue boards have been pressured to silence their rabbis by that loose coalition called the "Israel Lobby."

Just another example of the Jewish establishment stifling any discussion of Israel that does not conform to the neo-conservative tenets of AIPAC and its cohorts. Beware of these self-appointed guardians of Israel and Jewish values. In the end they will destroy everything that makes Judaism a compassionate religion, and if in their zeal they do not destroy Israel, they certainly will not make it more secure.

go hand in hand

Theres always a conspiracy nut out there. Aipac is a lobby, an in the U.S.,pretyy much every special interest group has a lobby, many far bigger and better finaced. In California, the Prison guard union has a formitable lobby. On the other hand, its sheer idiocy to assert that Aipac has some sort of secret control over the U.S. government. Thats just nuts.

How can you defend this?
SchtarkerYid
by Good Choice! Monday, May. 01, 2006 at 2:12 PM

right there by Superior Granite and the St.Paul mission? Only two ways in or out? San Pablo or MLK? Lots of people, lots of cover? Good choice! We'll see you there.
Hows this?
by Tia Monday, May. 01, 2006 at 3:40 PM

Come on Yid- now you are getting weird, even by my very loose standards.
The only way to do something that has any intergrity is to do it open and notoriously.
The sneaky thing just doesn't fly. Most times. The threatening thing just doesn't fly. Ever.
Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005 at 10:05 AM

Hey, I was there last night where were you? I was the guy in the plaid shirt and black knit watch cap standing across the street by Quiznos. Watching. Waiting.
What a fucking nut.

>maybe for once they'll prove me wrong.

Not this time.

It must be embarrassing for others, only peripherally inolvedin these issues to have to deal with these wackos on their side.

MAKING THREATS, STEAKING OUT LOCATIONS....NOT VERY JOYOUS OR SPIRITUAL YIDDY-KINS
How can you defend this?
SchtarkerYid
by Good Choice! Monday, May. 01, 2006 at 2:12 PM

right there by Superior Granite and the St.Paul mission? Only two ways in or out? San Pablo or MLK? Lots of people, lots of cover? Good choice! We'll see you there.
Hows this?
by Tia Monday, May. 01, 2006 at 3:40 PM

Come on Yid- now you are getting weird, even by my very loose standards.
The only way to do something that has any intergrity is to do it open and notoriously.
The sneaky thing just doesn't fly. Most times. The threatening thing just doesn't fly. Ever.
Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005 at 10:05 AM

Hey, I was there last night where were you? I was the guy in the plaid shirt and black knit watch cap standing across the street by Quiznos. Watching. Waiting.
What a fucking nut.

He's just raving now. Thats also pretty typical of the genre. The "melt down' is prrobably another symptom.

What is it that you think they don't want to be observed doing or saying?

obviously the Israeli lobby doesn't like being discussed and devotes some resources to shutting down discussion. Oh well.
All lobbies are legalized bribery.
The Israel lobby however seems to want to not only defend itself but attack any questions about it.

That is, if you honestly believe only an Israel lobby would try to counterattack those raising questions about it.

Poor 'Sheepdog', the untermenschen refuse to fall in line.

I guess it's difficult to reconcile the hypocrisy involved here:
On the one hand, Yidiot espouses values/sprituality/joyousness/blah/blah,
on the other hand he is documented as spying, threatening, and steaking out meetings.
whhat a fucking fruit loop!
I like the "Watching. Waiting" part. OOOOOOOOOhhhhh! Skeeery!
LMFAO---even Tia had to call you on your insanity!
LOL

SchtarkerYid
by Good Choice! Monday, May. 01, 2006 at 2:12 PM

right there by Superior Granite and the St.Paul mission? Only two ways in or out? San Pablo or MLK? Lots of people, lots of cover? Good choice! We'll see you there.
Hows this?
by Tia Monday, May. 01, 2006 at 3:40 PM

Come on Yid- now you are getting weird, even by my very loose standards.
The only way to do something that has any intergrity is to do it open and notoriously.
The sneaky thing just doesn't fly. Most times. The threatening thing just doesn't fly. Ever.
Thursday, Nov. 17, 2005 at 10:05 AM

Hey, I was there last night where were you? I was the guy in the plaid shirt and black knit watch cap standing across the street by Quiznos. Watching. Waiting.

Try this. See what they delete and what stays up.

http://makeashorterlink.com/?V20F52FDB

after seeing you dance... ha ha

Tell you what... don't ever entertain any idea that I would ever take anything you posted as 'fact'.
So far, in my... observations, you worms always can be counted on to lie.
Hit don't matter whatcha say 'cause yer so fulloshit.
But that's only my personal opinion.
Shared with many.

I guess its just not in their stars to propagandize over there. They lost.
BAWAWAWAWAWAWAWWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Now that I took the bait for that last one...
Hey! Anyone want to tell me why we allow our media to take unlimited political commercial time?
'Cause only the lobbyists can afford to pay for them to?

And this here Israeli lobby sure is a pain in the ass w/ their hired weasels
trying to make trouble and talk shit like the sacksoshit they are.
Ask Jack Abrimoff, that Israeli/ American citizen so quietly in the news, just how far down into the cookie jar ya have to reach to hit bottom.

...you're saying la la la I don't hear you.
I do have an inkling where I first encountered that Orwelian newspeak "facts are fiction... truth is lies...etc." So typically anti-"Zionist" by now.

Now that we're boringly familiar with your interpretation of weaselry, can you share your definitions of courage and bravery?

Damn, that's like trying to teach colors to a blind person.
To me it's doing the right thing even under fire.
What's yours'?

The inevitable "meltdown". Perhaps it is a symptom.

I'm now grateful that you dolt recently pushed the site toward its certain demise and that I had the chance to wish the "Zionists" a happy Israeli Independence Day, a peaceful Shabbat and more in Hebrew fonts, no less. You were dumb enough not to prevent that! So much for your dumbfucked bragging about victory.

Care to share with us more details of your own sexual aspect?

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
CHAPS THAT ASS TO LOSE. TO BE POWERLESS THERE. IMPOTENT ANGRY LITTL INEFFECTUAL TROLLS.
YOU MAY GO NOW. CLASS IS OVER.

What they have proven instead is that they are so *afraid* of people examining the Israel Lobby that they'll do anything to prevent it, even make fools of themselves, even prove "nessie" was telling the truth about them all along. That's how afraid they are.

What 'nessie' has proven is that he is so *afraid* of people examining his anti-Israel lies and hypocricy that he'll do anything to prevent it, even make a complete fool of himself, especially prove "the Zionists" were telling the truth about him all along. That's how afraid he is.

they are certainly proving the points I made about coordinated assault from a common vector.
The Israeli lobby ( & their weasel assistants) has far too much time on their hands to derail the issue.
How many do we have now? Or maybe just one who is very personality conflicted.

Just wanted to remind everyone that AIPAC isn't working alone in the financial/political lobbying support of Israeli apartheid & militarization. Over the past few decades Christian Zionist tele-evangalists like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and others have used their clout with cable media broadcasting (Christian Broadcasting Network, 700 Club, etc..) to raise money in support of Israel apartheid/militarization. Not only the militarization of Israel, also the relocation of Russian/Eastern European Jews to the settlements in the West Bank, thus escalating tensions between Palestinians and newcomer Israelis..

Christian Zionists have formed an alliance with Jewish neo-conservative Zionists for the purpose of supporting relocation and military support of Jewish people in Israel. The Christian Zionists believe that this process (returning Jews to Israel) will influence the "second coming of Christ" aka "Rapture" aka "Battle of Armageddon" (named after a valley in Israel). Most likely the "flames of Rapture" will take the form of some kind of nuclear weapon brandished by the US/Israeli military. Regardless of how silly this sounds to logical people, the Christian Zionists believe this as a real future event and they are wealthy enough to broadcast their voices over various medias and influence many people who are easily misled by misinformation. In other words, Christian Zionists are powerful enough to make their delusion of "Rapture" into a human made reality via military nuclear weapons..

One recent example is John Hagee, another Christian Zionist tele-evangelist with ideology similar to Pat Robertson. Hagee has a church in San Antonio, TX with 500,000 followers, not including his cable television audience. He recently formed a Christian version of AIPAC (CUFI; Christians United For Israel) that will lobby in support of Israeli government's apartheid and increased militarization..

This from Challenging Christian Zionism website;

"So - its official. John Hagee has launched his "Christian AIPAC". To see what he's up to check out the webpage by clicking on the link above.

Here's their statement of purpose:

Statement of Purpose

The purpose of Christians United For Israel (C.U.F.I.) is to provide a national association through which every pro-Israel church, Para-church organization, ministry or individual in America can speak and act with one voice in support of Israel in matters related to Biblical issues.

"The Lord answered me and said: 'Write the vision, And make it plain on tablets. That he may run who reads it.'"

Habakkuk 2:2


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Comments:

Once again a Christian Zionist organization has chosen to co opt the name "Christian" with the suggestion that what they do somehow reflects core Christian principles. Not so. This is power politics operating under the guise of Christianity.

The assumption made is that only those who adopt the extremist agenda of John Hagee are "pro Israel". A much stronger case can be made for the fact that those who support genuine peace making efforts opposed by Hagee are, in fact, more pro Israel than those who will become part of CUFI.

The more troubling assertion is the subtle suggestion that those who come under the CUFI umbrella are operating as agents of God in fulfillment of Habbakkuk 2:2. They alone are able to "run" with what God has written. This is a common claim of Christian Zionists - that they alone are able to interpret scripture rightly. No room for discussion here. They know God's mind . . .

Is there any more proof needed that we are dealing with a troubling phenomenon here? Christians claiming divine imperative for activities which are anything but. . .

Be careful giving any credence or support to this group."

more info on the influence of Christian Zionism;

http://www.christianzionism.org/

also;

Straight outta the jackass's mouth..

"Think of CUFI as a Christian version of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)," the powerful pro-Israel lobby, Hagee told The Jerusalem Post in an interview a few days before the early February summit. "We need to be able to respond instantly to Washington with our concerns about Israel. We must join forces to speak as one group and move as one body to [respond to] the crisis Israel will be facing in the near future."

While Hagee wouldn't spell out which particular crisis he was concerned with, he did tell the Israeli newspaper that "'the Bible issue,' namely what he considers to be the mistaken policy of trading parts of the biblical Land of Israel for peace," was at the top of CUFI's list."

<-->

Who is paying for the relocation of Russian Jews into the West Bank settlements (source of increasing tension between Palestinians/Israelis as land becomes more densely populated)??

"The Texas Observer reported that "At the climax of the evening, Hagee presented a giant cardboard check for $1.5 million to the President and CEO of the United Jewish Communities," to be used for [the relocation of] Russian Jews to Israel. Hagee believes that bringing Jews to Israel will help to fulfill the biblical prophecy of 'the beginning of the end.'"

Instead of the Book of Revelations, talk of statecraft -- radical Christian Republican-style -- dominated. Together Hagee, DeLay, and [former Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu [via a video feed from Israel] hit similar points: Jerusalem belongs to Israel; the west bank belongs to Israel; the Temple Mount belongs to Israel; the U.S. Embassy should be in Jerusalem not Tel Aviv; Yasser Arafat is a terrorist with whom one cannot negotiate; and unconditional support for Israel is the only option. As Hagee repeatedly noted, "Israel is the only nation on earth created by a sovereign act of God."
"

What about the environment, global warming air pollution, etc..? Well, since Hagee believes we're all heading straight into the burnin' flames o' Rapture, guess the ecosystem doesn't matter much anyway. Just so long as people continue burning that good Saudi oil while waiting for the Rapture!!

"In addition to spearheading the launch of Christians United for Israel, and appearing on a panel at the recently concluded National Religious Broadcasters convention, Hagee has aligned himself with a number of Christian right evangelicals who condemned the Evangelical Climate Initiative -- an initiative signed by 86 evangelical leaders acknowledging the seriousness of global warming and pledging to press for legislation to limit carbon dioxide emissions."

entire article @

http://www.mediatransparency.org/storyprinterfriendly.php?storyID=116

Once again they demonstrate what fundamentally dishonest people they are:


http://www.sfimc.net/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1692248

(snip)

Sometimes they take something that an anti-Zionist has written, subtly alter it’s meaning by changing a few words, and post it under the name of the original author.

(snip)

He spammed his pet URL again. So predictable.

@%<

Notice how they fail to even *try* to prove that anything in that URL is untrue. That's because they can't. So they try instead to distract you with a logical fallacy. Their rapid response, eight minutes in this case, reveals how important it is to them to distract you from this particular truth. We can learn a lot about our enemies by observing how they react to various stimuli. This can prove extremely valuable.

See:

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/04/155160_comment.php#157619

nessie: "Notice how they fail to even *try* to prove that anything in that URL is untrue. "

Ah, wakey wakey, nessie, I've proved it's untrue quite a while ago -- especially the part in which you claim that you aren't an antisemite.

@%<

>. . . especially the part in which you claim that you aren't an antisemite.

To gehrig, an "anti-Semite" is anyone who refuses to cut a racist slack, just because he or she happens to be a Jew.

That is itself a racist analysis. A racist is a racist is a racist. Whether or not they happen to be Jews, or Serbs, or Hutus, or whatever, matters only to racists.

nessie: "To gehrig, an "anti-Semite" is anyone who refuses to cut a racist slack, just because he or she happens to be a Jew. "

* rolling eyes *

Stupid, even by nessie standards. But then, wasn't nessie the one saying that, if you didn't hate every last Jew on earth, you couldn't possibly be an antisemite?

But what the hell. Please point to any post I've made, anywhere at any time, when I have said that no Jews should ever be considered racist. Please post the URL in which I said, "No Jews should ever be called racist."

What? You can't? You're talking out your ass _AGAIN_? All those posts, dozens of them,where you've insisted that's what I believe, and each and every one of those posts was a lie? How -- how nessiesque!

@%<

they are Jews, you are an anti-Semite. If you hate people who happen to be Jews for some other reason than because they are Jews, you are not an anti-Semite.

I hate all racists. Whether they are Jews or not, or Serbs or Hutus or whatever, I consider irrelevant.

Gehrig claims that 99% of American Jews are Zionists. I question the percentage, but do agree that at least some American Jews are are Zionists. Whether it is .01% or 99.9% is irrelevant. Either way, Zionism is racism. Ergo, they are racists. Ergo, I hate them, just like I hate non-Jews who are racists.

Gehrig claims that this makes me an anti-Semite. In his sick, twisted, *racist* world view, to hate any Jew, for any reason, is anti-Semitism.

So I hate him, too, and everyone like him, no matter whom their mothers were, or what name, if any, they use for deity. So should you. You should hate all racists, no matter who they are. Anything less is immoral.

nessie: "yammity yammity yammity"

So, nessie, answer the damned question already. Is it possible to be an antisemite if you don't have _every last Jew_ in the world?

Yes or no?

Not "Let me give you five more paragraphs of boilerplate yammity yammity yammity", but yes or no.

@%<

>Is it possible to be an antisemite if you don't have (sic) _every last Jew_ in the world?


No. By definition, an anti-Semite hates Jews, not *some* Jews, not *a* Jew, Jews.

thanks for the post.'Christian Zionist version of AIPAC Monday, May. 15, 2006 at 4:31 PM '
it was informative.
hence, the dump truck.

Once again he demonstrates what fundamentally dishonest a person he is:


http://www.sfimc.net/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1962248

(snip)

Sometimes he takes something that a Zionist has written, subtly alters its meaning by changing a few words, and posts it under the name of the original author.

(snip)

"You should hate all racists, no matter who they are. Anything less is immoral."

No. There is already too much hate in the world.
You should educate racists. You should inform racists. You should expose them to new ideas. That is the only thing that will work in t he long run. Hate is a cancer that seeks to perpetuate itself. It destroys eevryone involved.

Less Hate. More Understanding. More tolerance. Easy formula.

nessie: "No. By definition, an anti-Semite hates Jews, not *some* Jews, not *a* Jew, Jews."

A perfect example of how nessie's black-and-white view of the world cripple him into intellectual futility. If you hate every Jew in the world, want them dead, would gladly kill them personally, but make an exception for Jerry Seinfeld because he makes you laugh, then by nessie's crazy stance, you can't possibly be an antisemite.

But, hell, let's plumb the depths of your word games. Is it possible to be an anti-Palestinian bigot without hating every last Palestinian in the world, or does your magically restrictive definition only become magically restrictive when you're talking about the Jews?

Please expose more of your hypocrisy for us, nessie. You have such an infinite stock of it.

@%<

It's truly an affair. It's surely not a debate. They've been sayin the same things to eachother in their devoid of relevant content exchanges for years--it's just "antisemite..yammity...yammity.." and "racist....yammity..yammity"
Hilarious.

Zionists *love* to sign their enemies' names to things for which they are not responsible. False flag ops are their speciality. People who do things like this cannot be believed about anything. Now that we've seen how they behave online, we can understand how they behave ofline. How many atrocities have they signed Osama bin Laden's name to, or Hamas' or the PLO's?

RAbid anti-Zionists *love* to assign their enemies things for which they are not responsible. False flag ops accusations are their speciality. People who do things like this cannot be believed about anything. Now that we've seen how they behave online, we can understand how they behave ofline. How many atrocities have they assigned DAvid Ben-Gurion's name to, or Haganah's or HaShomer's?

Probably nowhere near as many as they committed. After all, the secret Isralie archives in Tel Aviv have not been opened yet.

That's probably why Benny Morris was able to confidently arrive at a figure of under 1000 massacred Arabs committed by all Zionist forces, not those solely under Mapai (Ben Gurion) command.
There's no limit to anti-Zionist ("wink-wink") hyperbole, so I wouldn't put any stock in your guess.

Why don't you run by us again that bit about the "Zionist" (wink-wink) prosecutor and judge in the Rosenbergs' trial, heh. I'd love to see some proof they were actually Zionist while you're at it. (You can also harrangue me once more with the pointed question about the cozy Israeli relations with apartheid S. Africa if it makes you elated.)

Once again they demonstrate what fundamentally dishonest people they are:


http://www.sfimc.net/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1692248

(snip)

Sometimes they take something that an anti-Zionist has written, subtly alter it’s meaning by changing a few words, and post it under the name of the original author.

(snip)

WOW! How does a thread about Israeli nutjobs turn into discussing the "Arabs"

Ever notice how rabid frothing at the mouth zionist whack jobs always either a. scream "antisemitism" or b. blame the Arabs
??????
Must mean the info/discussion threatens them.

Nothing like changing the subject instead of answering a point. What in the world to terrorist acts carried out by Palestinian resistance fighters have to do with the question of whether Ben Gurian and other main line zionists committed murder and other atrocities in 1948? How do Arab actions prove or disprove this charge?

Meyer London whines about others changing the topic instead of dealing with my own questions. But then, are we at all surprised?

Molly Ivins: Pro-Israel 'Nutjobs' on the Attack

The fanatic mouth frothing, bizarro sex obsessed anti-Zionists (wink-wink) were the first to change the topic. See above:

"IS THIS LEADING A JOYOUS JEWISH LIFE?I THINK A REAL SP[IRITUAL PERSON WOULD BE ASHAMED OFY
by HYPOCRISY Monday, May. 15, 2006 at 1:53 PM "


That's how fundamentality dishonest anti-Zionists are. They have to lie, because they know there's no defense for ethnic cleansing of Jews. They know history and truth are not their friends.

Once again they demonstrate what fundamentally dishonest people they are:


http://www.sfimc.net/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1692248

(snip)

Sometimes they take something that an anti-Zionist has written, subtly alter it’s meaning by changing a few words, and post it under the name of the original author.

(snip)

Once again he demonstrates what fundamentally dishonest a person he is:


http://www.sfimc.net/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1962248

(snip)

Sometimes he takes something that a Zionist has written, subtly alters its meaning by changing a few words, and posts it under the name of the original author.

(snip)

can't be trusted to tell the truth about anything.

A person in whose posts typos and redundant words appear so often cannot be trusted to relate the truth at all.

when an uncomfortable post comes up, there are piles of off topic spam, porn forgeries and of course the forgeries that make no sense turning anti-Zionist comments into strange and nonsensical pro-Zionist remarks having no basis in reality..
Warped little monkeys aren't they?

Evidently the rabid anti-Zionist porn and spam inundating these threads have caused you so much embarrassment presumably since you can't fathom the reality of anti-Zionists behaving this way, that you feel compelled to blame them on the "Zionists".

FWIW, I find most Zionist "forgeries" to make much sense and be rather reality-based. Apparently you've grown so accustomed to the Orwellian enviornment in which anti-Zionist propaganda has flourished that the facts strike you as weird.

"Porn forgeries"? Hee hee... Keep the laughs coming.

They're geniuses, I tell you. Anti-Zionists are geniuses.

@%<

Charlie, outside of your perverted head you've been outted daily by Gehrig and myself. That's the reality. You're a puny freeloading racist parasite, do-nothing, non-productive keyboard warrior.

I really don't appreciate the porn that is being anonymously posted. It damages this site. It can cause legal problems for LA. indymedia. Its crude, rude, and uncalled for.

Please stop!!

However, LA.indymedia readers can note that the porn is exclusively being posted by anti-Zionists in order to defame Zionists.

When one judges who is making the most rational arguments, presenting the most compelling evidence, and engaging in a dialogue on the issues ---it is the pro-Israel people.

It is the anti-Zionists who are posting under false names, posting filth, and using disreputable tactics.

A far more likely explanation is that it is posted by a Zionist sock puppet in an attempt to make anti-Zionists look bad.

They do this a lot:

http://www.sfimc.net/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1692248

(snip)

ometimes they post blatant anti-Semitism under the name of known anti-Zionists, myself included. Zionists are not the only people posting anti-Semitic propaganda on SF-IMC, or even the only forgers, but they are definitely among them, and by far the most aggressive and prolific. They can be doing it for one reason and one reason only, to make us look like anti-Semites, and thereby discredit us and discredit the anti-Zionist cause.

(snip)

In this particular case, it serves a dual purpose. Not only does it mislead people about anti-Zionists, it changes the subject. Whenever people attempt to focus on the Israel Lobby, the Zionist propaganda mill does everything in it's power to divert our attention. When that doesn't work, the smother the discussion with noise.

"A far more likely explanation is that it is posted by a Zionist sock puppet in an attempt to make anti-Zionists look bad."

And the most likely explanation of all is that they're being posted by nessie, who gets to (a) get his antisemitic aggressions out by graphically raging at The Jew, and then (b) blame the postings on The Nefarious Zi-i-i-i-ionists. It's simply a win-win for nessie.

@%<

Sure was right on target about the rabid attacks the Zionist lobby mounts upon this wire for any examination of the influence of the Israeli lobby.
:>)

And they know it, too. That's why they resort to ad hominems, instead of attempting to deny it.

This Israeli Lobby thing...
You can tell when you're over target by the flack.

All lobbies must be criminalized.
AIPAC seems to be doing that on their own ( chuckle )
Good ol' Jack Abramoff, 'what a guy'.
:>)

Well I have been the victim of both my name being forged on postings, and obscene pictures posted which were labeled with my name.

Since I am not an anti-Zionist, and my views are pretty well known, I assume it was someone who disagrees with my postings.

Hence: the most likely conclusion is that it was an anti-Zionist who fraudelently posted under my name, and who posted pornographic photos.

Saying that I would insult myself to make anti-zionists look bad defies reason.

Well I have been the victim of both my name being forged on postings, and obscene pictures posted which were labeled with my name.

Since I am not an anti-Zionist, and my views are pretty well known, I assume it was someone who disagrees with my postings.

Hence: the most likely conclusion is that it was an anti-Zionist who fraudelently posted under my name, and who posted pornographic photos.

Saying that I would insult myself to make anti-zionists look bad defies reason.

Like anyone cares? Who else but your own weasel crew is playing with forgeries
It's these dual citizen; Israeli/American with their questionable loyalties who are members of these gangsters in our government and their paid suck ups that are the problem, not your simple parroting of zionazi talking points.

Remember Project MOCKINGBIRD. What would you say the odds are that the Mossad has a parallel program in the american media? And congress?
Certainly the cabinet of this reeking criminal administration.

>I have been the victim of both my name being forged on postings, and obscene pictures posted which were labeled with my name.

That's her version. It is at least equally likely that she faked it, because she has seen people like her get a lot of milage out of victimhood in the past, and wants some for herself.

Remember, only a fool takes a Zionist, or *any* racist, at their word about anything. These people lie through their teeth as a matter of routine.

I do and a few others also. You're dismissed, goosestepper.

nessie: "That's her version. "

Says nessie, defending forgers.

Why does nessie defend forgers?

@%<

It is highly inappropriate that someone, who is a zionist idiot, keeps foging my name. Let's be very, very very clear here: I am anti-zionist. I believe strongly that the racist policies of Israel (zionism) are causing many of the problems we see in the middle east today.

but I'm fooling noone cuz everyone knows only Zionists get autoblocked at my site. That's how moronic I am.

it's getting really confusing
Let's get it straight: Zionism is racism.
All these rabid frothing at the mouth flailing trolls for israel better stop forging posts.

but I'm fooling noone cuz everyone knows only Zionists get autoblocked at my site. That's how moronic I am.

Hey, who's the real Indybay ediotor???

>Says nessie, defending forgers.

No, did not "defend" forgers, as anyone who knows how to use a scroll bar can tell. I merely pointed out that the most likely suspects are the Zionists, who have a *ver* long recoord of impersonating other people. False flag ops are their specialty.

>Why does nessie defend forgers?

Why does gehrig beg the question?

Oh, right. Now I remember. He'll do *anything* to distract you from thinking about the Israel Lobby, and neither logic nor truth will do the trick.

Now back to the topic. How can ordinary Americans combat the Israel Lobby? Anybody have any suggestions?

One thing I'm personally working on is gathering a list of Israeli / American dual citizens currently in government and media who may be involved in a Project MOCKINGBIRD parallel being carried out by the Israeli intelligence services.
It's somewhat difficult to compile data, since none exist at this time on the criteria listed. I have here a list...
Digging....

Palinazi, you're putting Joseph McCarthy to shame. The only question now left to ask is whether you'll end up putting the Gestapo to shame also en route to your Final Solution.

Are you the same zionist basket case dribbling monkey that has been posting under "indybay editor"
If so, it's really taking this IMC down the tubes. Please stop.

Try Project for the New American Century website for starters, plenty of neocon zionist war pig scum there..
http://www.newamericancentury.org/

It's not my solution, little weasel.
My solution would require protracted rest and therapy in a nice quite environment, away from stressful situations, for the individuals who are merely 'disturbed', jail time for the criminals and hanging for the traitors.

Feel free to ask about my Sheepdog's Society.
Here are two of my society planks...
Everyone is REQUIRED to possess ONLY a single shot weapon of their choice.
Procreation by physical and mental trial at which + 50% fail.
That will due for starters.

And I'm uproarously laughing as all the sane and serious readers dismiss me for the lying forging clown I am. I imagine I'm angering 'autoblocked' but I know I ain't.
But I won't rest till I tear down this IMC. There will be no sanctuary for anyone who disagrees with me about my pro-Hamas stance.

Click here:

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/158130.php

Now I'm digging into the Congress, and media 'captains' who carry dual citizenship. Thanks.

After reading this paper, I am sickened by the fact that we allow them to permeate our govt., having such a hand in policy formation....and still we give them billions in handouts, cash and military welfare every year. Shameful

So your uebermensch Solution is the Soviet/CIA inspired psychiatric conditioning at best, and Anglo-American inspired execution at worst. I'll keep the Guinness Book staff posted in the not unlikely event you break the Gestapo record.

Members of the House and Senate who hold dual citizenship as well as the media assets who form public perception and are the real power in this nation, are the main concerns that I have.
We've seen how the CIA manipulates public awareness and not investigating the effects and persons responsible for the current blackout on Israeli criminality and acts as an advocate for military and financial aid, would be short sighted.
And ineffectual.

The Israeli Torture Template
Rape, Feces and Urine-Dipped Cloth Sacks
By WAYNE MADSEN

With mounting evidence that a shadowy group of former Israeli Defense Force and General Security Service (Shin Bet) Arabic-speaking interrogators were hired by the Pentagon under a classified "carve out" sub-contract to brutally interrogate Iraqi prisoners at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison, one only needs to examine the record of abuse of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in Israel to understand what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld meant, when referring to new, yet to be released photos and videos, he said, "if these images are released to the public, obviously its going to make matters worse."

According to a political appointee within the Bush administration and U.S. intelligence sources, the interrogators at Abu Ghraib included a number of Arabic-speaking Israelis who also helped U.S. interrogators develop the "R2I" (Resistance to Interrogation) techniques. Many of the torture methods were developed by the Israelis over many years of interrogating Arab prisoners on the occupied West Bank and in Israel itself.

Clues about worse photos and videos of abuse may be found in Israeli files about similar abuse of Palestinian and other Arab prisoners. In March 2000, a lawyer for a Lebanese prisoner kidnapped in 1994 by the Israelis in Lebanon claimed that his client had been subjected to torture, including rape. The type of compensation offered by Rumsfeld in his testimony has its roots in cases of Israeli torture of Arabs. In the case of the Lebanese man, said to have been raped by his Israeli captors, his lawyer demanded compensation of $1.47 million. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel documented the types of torture meted out on Arab prisoners. Many of the tactics coincide with those contained in the Taguba report: beatings and prolonged periods handcuffed to furniture. In an article in the December 1998 issue of The Progressive, Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb reported on the treatment given to a 23-year old Palestinian held on "administrative detention." The prisoner was "cuffed behind a chair 17 hours a day for 120 days . . . [he] had his head covered with a sack, which was often dipped in urine or feces. Guards played loud music right next to his ears and frequently taunted him with threats of physical and sexual violence." If additional photos and videos document such practices, the Bush administration and the American people have, indeed, "seen nothing yet."

Although it is still largely undocumented if any of the contractor named in the report of General Antonio Taguba were associated with the Israeli military or intelligence services, it is noteworthy that one, John Israel, who was identified in the report as being employed by both CACI International of Arlington, Virginia, and Titan, Inc., of San Diego, may not have even been a U.S. citizen. The Taguba report states that Israel did not have a security clearance, a requirement for employment as an interrogator for CACI. According to CACI's web site, "a Top Secret Clearance (TS) that is current and US citizenship" are required for CACI interrogators working in Iraq. In addition, CACI requires that its interrogators "have at least two years experience as a military policeman or similar type of law enforcement/intelligence agency whereby the individual utilized interviewing techniques."

Speculation that "John Israel" may be an intelligence cover name has fueled speculation whether this individual could have been one of a number of Israeli interrogators hired under a classified contract. Because U.S. citizenship and documentation thereof are requirements for a U.S. security clearance, Israeli citizens would not be permitted to hold a Top Secret clearance. However, dual U.S.-Israeli citizens could have satisfied Pentagon requirements that interrogators hold U.S. citizenship and a Top Secret clearance. Although the Taguba report refers twice to Israel as an employee of Titan, the company claims he is one of their sub-contractors. CACI stated that one of the men listed in the report "is not and never has been a CACI employee" without providing more detail. A U.S. intelligence source revealed that in the world of intelligence "carve out" subcontracts such confusion is often the case with "plausible deniability" being a foremost concern.

In fact, the Taguba report does reference the presence of non-U.S. and non-Iraqi interrogators at Abu Ghraib. The report states, "In general, US civilian contract personnel (Titan Corporation, CACI, etc), third country nationals, and local contractors do not appear to be properly supervised within the detention facility at Abu Ghraib."

The Pentagon is clearly concerned about the outing of the Taguba report and its references to CACI, Titan, and third country nationals, which could permanently damage U.S. relations with Arab and Islamic nations. The Pentagon's angst may explain why the Taguba report is classified Secret No Foreign Dissemination.

The leak of the Taguba report was so radioactive, Daniel R. Dunn, the Information Assurance Officer for Douglas Feith's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, Policy (Policy Automation Services Security Team), sent a May 6, 2004, For Official Use Only Urgent E-mail to Pentagon staffers stating, "THE INFORMATION CONTAINED IN THIS REPORT IS CLASSIFIED; DO NOT GO TO FOX NEWS TO READ OR OBTAIN A COPY." Considering Feith's close ties to the Israelis, such a reaction by his top computer security officer, a Certified Information System Security Professional (CISSP), is understandable, although considering the fact that CISSPs are to act on behalf of the public good, it is also regrettable..

The reference to "third country nationals" in a report that restricts its dissemination to U.S. coalition partners (Great Britain, Poland, Italy, etc.) is another indication of the possible involvement of Israelis in the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners. Knowledge that the U.S. may have been using Israeli interrogators could have severely fractured the Bush administration's tenuous "coalition of the willing' in Iraq. General Taguba's findings were transmitted to the Coalition Forces Land Component Command on March 9, 2004, just six days before the Spanish general election, one that the opposition anti-Iraq war Socialists won. The Spanish ultimately withdrew their forces from Iraq.

During his testimony before the Senate Armed Service Committee, Rumsfeld was pressed upon by Senator John McCain about the role of the private contractors in the interrogations and abuse. McCain asked Rumsfeld four pertinent questions, ". . . who was in charge? What agency or private contractor was in charge of the interrogations? Did they have authority over the guards? And what were the instructions that they gave to the guards?"

When Rumsfeld had problems answering McCain's question, Lt. Gen. Lance Smith, the Deputy Commander of the U.S. Central Command, said there were 37 contract interrogators used in Abu Ghraib. The two named contractors, CACI and Titan, have close ties to the Israeli military and technology communities. Last January 14, after Provost Marshal General of the Army, Major General Donald Ryder, had already uncovered abuse at Abu Ghraib, CACI's President and CEO, Dr. J.P. (Jack) London was receiving the Jerusalem Fund of Aish HaTorah's Albert Einstein Technology award at the Jerusalem City Hall, with right-wing Likud politician Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski in attendance. Oddly, CACI waited until February 2 to publicly announce the award in a press release. CACI has also received grants from U.S.-Israeli bi-national foundations.

Titan also has had close connections to Israeli interests. After his stint as CIA Director, James Woolsey served as a Titan director. Woolsey is an architect of America's Iraq policy and the chief proponent of and lobbyist for Ahmad Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress. An adviser to the neo-conservative Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, Project for the New American Century, Center for Security Policy, Freedom House, and Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, Woolsey is close to Stephen Cambone, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, a key person in the chain of command who would have not only known about the torture tactics used by U.S. and Israeli interrogators in Iraq but who would have also approved them. Cambone was associated with the Project for the New American Century and is viewed as a member of Rumsfeld's neo-conservative "cabal" within the Pentagon.

Another person considered by Pentagon insiders to have been knowledgeable about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners is U.S. Army Col. Steven Bucci, a Green Beret and Rumsfeld's military assistant and chief traffic cop for the information flow to the Defense Secretary. According to Pentagon insiders, Bucci was involved in the direction of a special covert operations unit composed of former U.S. special operations personnel who answered to the Pentagon rather than the CIA's Special Activities Division, the agency's own paramilitary group. The Pentagon group included Arabic linguists and former members of the Green Berets and Delta Force who operated covertly in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan. Titan also uses linguists trained in the languages (Arabic, Dari, Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, and Tajik) of those same countries. It is not known if a link exists between Rumsfeld's covert operations unit and Titan's covert operations linguists.

Another Titan employee named in the Taguba report is Adel L. Nakhla. Nakhla is a name common among Egypt's Coptic Christian community, however, it is not known if Adel Nakhla is either an Egyptian-American or a national of Egypt. A CACI employee identified in the report, Steven Stephanowicz, is referred to as "Stefanowicz" in a number of articles on the prison abuse. Stefanowicz is the spelling used by Joe Ryan, another CACI employee assigned with Stefanowicz to Abu Ghraib. Ryan is a radio personality on KSTP, a conservative radio station in Minneapolis, who maintained a daily log of his activities in Iraq on the radio's web site before it was taken down. Ryan indicated that Stefanowicz (or Stephanowicz) continued to hold his interrogation job in Iraq even though General Taguba recommended he lose his security clearance and be terminated for the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

In an even more bizarre twist, the Philadelphia Daily News identified a former expatriate public relations specialist for the government of South Australia in Adelaide named Steve Stefanowicz as possibly being the same person identified in the Taguba report. In 2000, Stefanowicz, who grew up in the Philadelphia and Allentown areas, left for Australia. On September 16, 2001, he was quoted by the Sunday Mail of Adelaide on the 911 attacks. He said of the attacks, "It was one of the most incredible and most devastating things I have ever seen. I have been in constant contact with my family and friends in the US and the mood was very solemn and quiet. But this is progressing into anger." Stefanowicz returned to the United States and volunteered for the Navy in a reserve status. His mother told the Allentown Morning Call in April 2002 that Stefanowicz was stationed somewhere in the Middle East but did not know where because of what Stefanowicz said was "security concerns." His mother told the Philadelphia Daily News that her son was in Iraq but she knew nothing about his current status.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He served in the National Security Agency (NSA) during the Reagan administration and wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth. He is the co-author, with John Stanton, of "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II." His forthcoming book is titled: "Jaded Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops, and Brass Plates."

Some IMCs are awash with stories from your "Israeli criminality" angle. If you manage to force the mainstream media to air your lies, that would be a breakthrough for you. But if your fellow racist hater Allison Weird's record of such attempts is anything to go by, you're out of luck.

It's not working because he too seems to be a Zionist.

Here's a little on it:
http://www.oilempire.us/chertoff.html
Here's about some members (this is a bit old--2003) many of the names are familiar and many hold dual citizenship
Richard Perle
One of Bush's foreign policy advisors, he is the chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. A very likely Israeli government agent, Perle was expelled from Senator Henry Jackson's office in the 1970's after the National Security Agency (NSA) caught him passing Highly-Classified (National Security) documents to the Israeli Embassy. He later worked for the Israeli weapons firm, Soltam. Perle came from one the above mentioned pro-Israel thinktanks, the AEI. Perle is one of the leading pro-Israeli fanatics leading this Iraq war mongering within the administration and now in the media.


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Paul Wolfowitz
Deputy Defense Secretary, and member of Perle's Defense Policy Board, in the Pentagon. Wolfowitz is a close associate of Perle, and reportedly has close ties to the Israeli military. His sister lives in Israel. Wolfowitz came from the above mentioned Jewish thinktank, JINSA. Wolfowitz is the number two leader within the administration behind this Iraq war mongering.


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Douglas Feith
Under Secretary of Defense and Policy Advisor at the Pentagon. He is a close associate of Perle and served as his Special Counsel. Like Perle and the others, Feith is a pro-Israel extremist, who has advocated anti-Arab policies in the past. He is closely associated with the extremist group, the Zionist Organization of America, which even attacks Jews that don't agree with its extremist views. Feith frequently speaks at ZOA conferences. Feith runs a small law firm, Feith and Zell, which only has one International office, in Israel. The majority of their legal work is representing Israeli interests. His firm's own website stated, prior to his appointment, that Feith "represents Israeli Armaments Manufacturer." Feith basically represents the Israeli War Machine. Feith also came from the Jewish thinktank JINSA. Feith, like Perle and Wolfowitz, are campaigning hard for this Israeli proxy war against Iraq.


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Edward Luttwak
Member of the National Security Study Group of the Department of Defence at the Pentagon. Luttwak is reportedly an Israeli citizen and has taught in Israel. He frequently writes for Israeli and pro-Israeli newspapers and journals. Luttwak is an Israeli extremist whose main theme in many of his articles is the necessity of the U.S. waging war against Iraq.


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Henry Kissinger
One of many Pentagon Advisors, Kissinger sits on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board under Perle. For detailed information about Kissinger's evil past, read Seymour Hersch's book (Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House). Kissinger likely had a part in the Watergate crimes, Southeast Asia mass murders (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos), Installing Chilean mass murdering dictator Pinochet, Operation Condor's mass killings in South America, and more recently served as Serbia's Ex-Dictator Slobodan Milosevic's Advisor. He consistently advocates going to war against Iraq. Kissinger is the Ariel Sharon of the U.S. Unfortunately, President Bush nominated Kissinger as chairman of the September 11 investigating commission. It's like picking a bank robber to investigate a fraud scandal.


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Dov Zakheim
Under Secretary of Defense, Comptroller, and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for the Department of Defense. He is an ordained rabbi and reportedly holds Israeli citizenship. Zakheim attended attended Jew’s College in London and became an ordained Orthodox Jewish Rabbi in 1973. He was adjunct professor at New York's Jewish Yeshiva University. Zakheim is close to the Israeli lobby.


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Kenneth Adelman
One of many Pentagon Advisors, Adelman also sits on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board under Perle, and is another extremist pro-Israel advisor, who supports going to war against Iraq. Adelman frequently is a guest on Fox News, and often expresses extremist and often ridiculus anti-Arab and anti-Muslim views. Through his hatred or stupidity, he actually called Arabs "anti-Semitic" on Fox News (11/28/2001), when he could have looked it up in the dictionary to find out that Arabs by definition are Semites.


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I. Lewis Libby
Vice President Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff. The chief pro-Israel Jewish advisor to Cheney, it helps explains why Cheney is so gun-ho to invade Iraq. Libby is longtime associate of Wolfowitz. Libby was also a lawyer for convicted felon and Israeli spy Marc Rich, whom Clinton pardoned, in his last days as president.


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Robert Satloff
U.S. National Security Council Advisor, Satloff was the executive director of the Israeli lobby's "think tank," Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Many of the Israeli lobby's "experts" come from this front group, like Martin Indyk.


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Elliott Abrams
National Security Council Advisor. He previously worked at Washington-based "Think Tank" Ethics and Public Policy Center. During the Reagan Adminstration, Abrams was the Assistant Secretary of State, handling, for the most part, Latin American affairs. He played an important role in the Iran-Contra Scandal, which involved illegally selling U.S. weapons to Iran to fight Iraq, and illegally funding the contra rebels fighting to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista government. He also actively deceived three congressional committees about his involvement and thereby faced felony charges based on his testimony. Abrams pled guilty in 1991 to two misdemeanors and was sentenced to a year's probation and 100 hours of community service. A year later, former President Bush (Senior) granted Abrams a full pardon. He was one of the more hawkish pro-Israel Jews in the Reagan Administration's State Department.


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Marc Grossman
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. He was Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources at the Department of State. Grossman is one of many of the pro-Israel Jewish officials from the Clinton Administration that Bush has promoted to higher posts.


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Richard Haass
Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and Ambassador at large. He is also Director of National Security Programs and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He was one of the more hawkish pro-Israel Jews in the first Bush (Sr) Administration who sat on the National Security Council, and who consistently advocates going to war against Iraq. Haass is also a member of the Defense Department's National Security Study Group, at the Pentagon.


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Robert Zoellick
U.S. Trade Representative, a cabinet-level position. He is also one of the more hawkish pro-Israel Jews in the Bush (Jr) Administration who advocated invading Iraq and occupying a portion of the country in order to set up setting up a Vichy-style puppet government. He consistently advocates going to war against Iraq.


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Ari Fleischer
Official White House Spokesman for the Bush (Jr) Administration. Prominent in the Jewish community, some reports state that he holds Israeli citizenship. Fleischer is closely connected to the extremist Jewish group called the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidics, who follow the Qabala, and hold very extremist and insulting views of non-Jews. Fleischer was the co-president of Chabad's Capitol Jewish Forum. He received the Young Leadership Award from the American Friends of Lubavitch in October, 2001.


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James Schlesinger
One of many Pentagon Advisors, Schlesinger also sits on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board under Perle and is another extremist pro-Israel advisor, who supports going to war against Iraq. Schlesinger is also a commissioner of the Defense Department's National Security Study Group, at the Pentagon.


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David Frum
White House speechwriter behind the "Axis of Evil" label. He lumps together all the lies and accusations against Iraq for Bush to justify the war.


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Joshua Bolten
White House Deputy Chief of Staff, Bolten was previously a banker, former legislative aide, and prominent in the Jewish community.


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John Bolton
Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security. Bolton is also a Senior Advisor to President Bush. Prior to this position, Bolton was Senior Vice President of the above mentioned pro-Israel thinktank, AEI. He recently (October 2002) accused Syria of having a nuclear program, so that they can attack Syria after Iraq. He must have forgotten that Israel has 400 nuclear warheads, some of which are thermonuclear weapons (according to a recent U.S. Air Force report).


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David Wurmser
Special Assistant to John Bolton (above), the under-secretary for arms control and international security. Wurmser also worked at the AEI with Perle and Bolton. His wife, Meyrav Wurmser, along with Colonel Yigal Carmon, formerly of Israeli military intelligence, co-founded the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri),a Washington-based Israeli outfit which distributes articles translated from Arabic newspapers portraying Arabs in a bad light.


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Eliot Cohen
Member of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board under Perle and is another extremist pro-Israel advisor. Like Adelman, he often expresses extremist and often ridiculus anti-Arab and anti-Muslim views. More recently, he wrote an opinion article in the Wall Street Journal openly admitting his rascist hatred of Islam claiming that Islam should be the enemy, not terrorism.


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Mel Sembler
President of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. A Prominent Jewish Republican and Former National Finance Chairman of the Republican National Committee. The Export-Import Bank facilitates trade relationships between U.S. businesses and foreign countries, specifically those with financial problems.


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Michael Chertoff
Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division, at the Justice Department.


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Steve Goldsmith
Senior Advisor to the President, and Bush's Jewish domestic policy advisor. He also serves as liaison in the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives (White House OFBCI) within the Executive Office of the President. He was the former mayor of Indianapolis. He is also friends with Israeli Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert and often visits Israel to coach mayors on privatization initiatives.


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Adam Goldman
White House's Special Liaison to the Jewish Community.


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Joseph Gildenhorn
Bush Campaign's Special Liaison to the Jewish Community. He was the DC finance chairman for the Bush campaign, as well as campaign coordinator, and former ambassador to Switzerland.


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Christopher Gersten
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Administration for Children and Families at HHS. Gersten was the former Executive Director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, Husband of Labor Secretary, Linda Chavez, and reportedly very pro-Israel. Their children are being raised Jewish.


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Mark Weinberger
Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Public Affairs.


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Samuel Bodman
Deputy Secretary of Commerce. He was the Chairman and CEO of Cabot Corporation in Boston, Massachusetts.


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Bonnie Cohen
Under Secretary of State for Management.


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Ruth Davis
Director of Foreign Service Institute, who reports to the Office of Under Secretary for Management. This Office is responsible for training all Department of State staff (including ambassadors).


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Daniel Kurtzer
Ambassador to Israel.

Cliff Sobel
Ambassador to the Netherlands.

Stuart Bernstein
Ambassador to Denmark.

Nancy Brinker
Ambassador to Hungary

Frank Lavin
Ambassador to Singapore.

Ron Weiser
Ambassador to Slovakia.

Mel Sembler
Ambassador to Italy.

Martin Silverstein
Ambassador to Uruguay.


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Lincoln Bloomfield
Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs.


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Jay Lefkowitz
Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council.


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Ken Melman
White House Political Director.


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Brad Blakeman
White House Director of Scheduling.

The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

By John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

03/17/06 "LRB" -- -- For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing that given to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct economic and military assistance since 1976, and is the largest recipient in total since World War Two, to the tune of well over $140 billion (in 2004 dollars). Israel receives about $3 billion in direct assistance each year, roughly one-fifth of the foreign aid budget, and worth about $500 a year for every Israeli. This largesse is especially striking since Israel is now a wealthy industrial state with a per capita income roughly equal to that of South Korea or Spain.

Other recipients get their money in quarterly installments, but Israel receives its entire appropriation at the beginning of each fiscal year and can thus earn interest on it. Most recipients of aid given for military purposes are required to spend all of it in the US, but Israel is allowed to use roughly 25 per cent of its allocation to subsidise its own defence industry. It is the only recipient that does not have to account for how the aid is spent, which makes it virtually impossible to prevent the money from being used for purposes the US opposes, such as building settlements on the West Bank. Moreover, the US has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems, and given it access to such top-drawer weaponry as Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the US gives Israel access to intelligence it denies to its Nato allies and has turned a blind eye to Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Washington also provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the US has vetoed 32 Security Council resolutions critical of Israel, more than the total number of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It blocks the efforts of Arab states to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the IAEA’s agenda. The US comes to the rescue in wartime and takes Israel’s side when negotiating peace. The Nixon administration protected it from the threat of Soviet intervention and resupplied it during the October War. Washington was deeply involved in the negotiations that ended that war, as well as in the lengthy ‘step-by-step’ process that followed, just as it played a key role in the negotiations that preceded and followed the 1993 Oslo Accords. In each case there was occasional friction between US and Israeli officials, but the US consistently supported the Israeli position. One American participant at Camp David in 2000 later said: ‘Far too often, we functioned . . . as Israel’s lawyer.’ Finally, the Bush administration’s ambition to transform the Middle East is at least partly aimed at improving Israel’s strategic situation.

This extraordinary generosity might be understandable if Israel were a vital strategic asset or if there were a compelling moral case for US backing. But neither explanation is convincing. One might argue that Israel was an asset during the Cold War. By serving as America’s proxy after 1967, it helped contain Soviet expansion in the region and inflicted humiliating defeats on Soviet clients like Egypt and Syria. It occasionally helped protect other US allies (like King Hussein of Jordan) and its military prowess forced Moscow to spend more on backing its own client states. It also provided useful intelligence about Soviet capabilities.

Backing Israel was not cheap, however, and it complicated America’s relations with the Arab world. For example, the decision to give $2.2 billion in emergency military aid during the October War triggered an Opec oil embargo that inflicted considerable damage on Western economies. For all that, Israel’s armed forces were not in a position to protect US interests in the region. The US could not, for example, rely on Israel when the Iranian Revolution in 1979 raised concerns about the security of oil supplies, and had to create its own Rapid Deployment Force instead.

The first Gulf War revealed the extent to which Israel was becoming a strategic burden. The US could not use Israeli bases without rupturing the anti-Iraq coalition, and had to divert resources (e.g. Patriot missile batteries) to prevent Tel Aviv doing anything that might harm the alliance against Saddam Hussein. History repeated itself in 2003: although Israel was eager for the US to attack Iraq, Bush could not ask it to help without triggering Arab opposition. So Israel stayed on the sidelines once again.

Beginning in the 1990s, and even more after 9/11, US support has been justified by the claim that both states are threatened by terrorist groups originating in the Arab and Muslim world, and by ‘rogue states’ that back these groups and seek weapons of mass destruction. This is taken to mean not only that Washington should give Israel a free hand in dealing with the Palestinians and not press it to make concessions until all Palestinian terrorists are imprisoned or dead, but that the US should go after countries like Iran and Syria. Israel is thus seen as a crucial ally in the war on terror, because its enemies are America’s enemies. In fact, Israel is a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.

‘Terrorism’ is not a single adversary, but a tactic employed by a wide array of political groups. The terrorist organisations that threaten Israel do not threaten the United States, except when it intervenes against them (as in Lebanon in 1982). Moreover, Palestinian terrorism is not random violence directed against Israel or ‘the West’; it is largely a response to Israel’s prolonged campaign to colonise the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

More important, saying that Israel and the US are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: the US has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around. Support for Israel is not the only source of anti-American terrorism, but it is an important one, and it makes winning the war on terror more difficult. There is no question that many al-Qaida leaders, including Osama bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem and the plight of the Palestinians. Unconditional support for Israel makes it easier for extremists to rally popular support and to attract recruits.

As for so-called rogue states in the Middle East, they are not a dire threat to vital US interests, except inasmuch as they are a threat to Israel. Even if these states acquire nuclear weapons – which is obviously undesirable – neither America nor Israel could be blackmailed, because the blackmailer could not carry out the threat without suffering overwhelming retaliation. The danger of a nuclear handover to terrorists is equally remote, because a rogue state could not be sure the transfer would go undetected or that it would not be blamed and punished afterwards. The relationship with Israel actually makes it harder for the US to deal with these states. Israel’s nuclear arsenal is one reason some of its neighbours want nuclear weapons, and threatening them with regime change merely increases that desire.

A final reason to question Israel’s strategic value is that it does not behave like a loyal ally. Israeli officials frequently ignore US requests and renege on promises (including pledges to stop building settlements and to refrain from ‘targeted assassinations’ of Palestinian leaders). Israel has provided sensitive military technology to potential rivals like China, in what the State Department inspector-general called ‘a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorised transfers’. According to the General Accounting Office, Israel also ‘conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the US of any ally’. In addition to the case of Jonathan Pollard, who gave Israel large quantities of classified material in the early 1980s (which it reportedly passed on to the Soviet Union in return for more exit visas for Soviet Jews), a new controversy erupted in 2004 when it was revealed that a key Pentagon official called Larry Franklin had passed classified information to an Israeli diplomat. Israel is hardly the only country that spies on the US, but its willingness to spy on its principal patron casts further doubt on its strategic value.

Israel’s strategic value isn’t the only issue. Its backers also argue that it deserves unqualified support because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel’s conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive. There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence, but that is not in jeopardy. Viewed objectively, its past and present conduct offers no moral basis for privileging it over the Palestinians.

Israel is often portrayed as David confronted by Goliath, but the converse is closer to the truth. Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better equipped and better led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence, and the Israel Defence Forces won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan and Syria in 1967 – all of this before large-scale US aid began flowing. Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to those of its neighbours and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons. Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so. Syria has lost its Soviet patron, Iraq has been devastated by three disastrous wars and Iran is hundreds of miles away. The Palestinians barely have an effective police force, let alone an army that could pose a threat to Israel. According to a 2005 assessment by Tel Aviv University’s Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, ‘the strategic balance decidedly favours Israel, which has continued to widen the qualitative gap between its own military capability and deterrence powers and those of its neighbours.’ If backing the underdog were a compelling motive, the United States would be supporting Israel’s opponents.

That Israel is a fellow democracy surrounded by hostile dictatorships cannot account for the current level of aid: there are many democracies around the world, but none receives the same lavish support. The US has overthrown democratic governments in the past and supported dictators when this was thought to advance its interests – it has good relations with a number of dictatorships today.

Some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values. Unlike the US, where people are supposed to enjoy equal rights irrespective of race, religion or ethnicity, Israel was explicitly founded as a Jewish state and citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship. Given this, it is not surprising that its 1.3 million Arabs are treated as second-class citizens, or that a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a ‘neglectful and discriminatory’ manner towards them. Its democratic status is also undermined by its refusal to grant the Palestinians a viable state of their own or full political rights.

A third justification is the history of Jewish suffering in the Christian West, especially during the Holocaust. Because Jews were persecuted for centuries and could feel safe only in a Jewish homeland, many people now believe that Israel deserves special treatment from the United States. The country’s creation was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews, but it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the Palestinians.

This was well understood by Israel’s early leaders. David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldmann, the president of the World Jewish Congress:

If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country . . . We come from Israel, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?

Since then, Israeli leaders have repeatedly sought to deny the Palestinians’ national ambitions. When she was prime minister, Golda Meir famously remarked that ‘there is no such thing as a Palestinian.’ Pressure from extremist violence and Palestinian population growth has forced subsequent Israeli leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not obligate the US to help Israel today no matter what it does.

Israel’s backers also portray it as a country that has sought peace at every turn and shown great restraint even when provoked. The Arabs, by contrast, are said to have acted with great wickedness. Yet on the ground, Israel’s record is not distinguishable from that of its opponents. Ben-Gurion acknowledged that the early Zionists were far from benevolent towards the Palestinian Arabs, who resisted their encroachments – which is hardly surprising, given that the Zionists were trying to create their own state on Arab land. In the same way, the creation of Israel in 1947-48 involved acts of ethnic cleansing, including executions, massacres and rapes by Jews, and Israel’s subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority. Between 1949 and 1956, for example, Israeli security forces killed between 2700 and 5000 Arab infiltrators, the overwhelming majority of them unarmed. The IDF murdered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war in both the 1956 and 1967 wars, while in 1967, it expelled between 100,000 and 260,000 Palestinians from the newly conquered West Bank, and drove 80,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights.

During the first intifada, the IDF distributed truncheons to its troops and encouraged them to break the bones of Palestinian protesters. The Swedish branch of Save the Children estimated that ‘23,600 to 29,900 children required medical treatment for their beating injuries in the first two years of the intifada.’ Nearly a third of them were aged ten or under. The response to the second intifada has been even more violent, leading Ha’aretz to declare that ‘the IDF . . . is turning into a killing machine whose efficiency is awe-inspiring, yet shocking.’ The IDF fired one million bullets in the first days of the uprising. Since then, for every Israeli lost, Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians, the majority of whom have been innocent bystanders; the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli children killed is even higher (5.7:1). It is also worth bearing in mind that the Zionists relied on terrorist bombs to drive the British from Palestine, and that Yitzhak Shamir, once a terrorist and later prime minister, declared that ‘neither Jewish ethics nor Jewish tradition can disqualify terrorism as a means of combat.’

The Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn’t surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions. As Ehud Barak once admitted, had he been born a Palestinian, he ‘would have joined a terrorist organisation’.

So if neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America’s support for Israel, how are we to explain it?

The explanation is the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby. We use ‘the Lobby’ as shorthand for the loose coalition of individuals and organisations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction. This is not meant to suggest that ‘the Lobby’ is a unified movement with a central leadership, or that individuals within it do not disagree on certain issues. Not all Jewish Americans are part of the Lobby, because Israel is not a salient issue for many of them. In a 2004 survey, for example, roughly 36 per cent of American Jews said they were either ‘not very’ or ‘not at all’ emotionally attached to Israel.

Jewish Americans also differ on specific Israeli policies. Many of the key organisations in the Lobby, such as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organisations, are run by hardliners who generally support the Likud Party’s expansionist policies, including its hostility to the Oslo peace process. The bulk of US Jewry, meanwhile, is more inclined to make concessions to the Palestinians, and a few groups – such as Jewish Voice for Peace – strongly advocate such steps. Despite these differences, moderates and hardliners both favour giving steadfast support to Israel.

Not surprisingly, American Jewish leaders often consult Israeli officials, to make sure that their actions advance Israeli goals. As one activist from a major Jewish organisation wrote, ‘it is routine for us to say: “This is our policy on a certain issue, but we must check what the Israelis think.” We as a community do it all the time.’ There is a strong prejudice against criticising Israeli policy, and putting pressure on Israel is considered out of order. Edgar Bronfman Sr, the president of the World Jewish Congress, was accused of ‘perfidy’ when he wrote a letter to President Bush in mid-2003 urging him to persuade Israel to curb construction of its controversial ‘security fence’. His critics said that ‘it would be obscene at any time for the president of the World Jewish Congress to lobby the president of the United States to resist policies being promoted by the government of Israel.’

Similarly, when the president of the Israel Policy Forum, Seymour Reich, advised Condoleezza Rice in November 2005 to ask Israel to reopen a critical border crossing in the Gaza Strip, his action was denounced as ‘irresponsible’: ‘There is,’ his critics said, ‘absolutely no room in the Jewish mainstream for actively canvassing against the security-related policies . . . of Israel.’ Recoiling from these attacks, Reich announced that ‘the word “pressure” is not in my vocabulary when it comes to Israel.’

Jewish Americans have set up an impressive array of organisations to influence American foreign policy, of which AIPAC is the most powerful and best known. In 1997, Fortune magazine asked members of Congress and their staffs to list the most powerful lobbies in Washington. AIPAC was ranked second behind the American Association of Retired People, but ahead of the AFL-CIO and the National Rifle Association. A National Journal study in March 2005 reached a similar conclusion, placing AIPAC in second place (tied with AARP) in the Washington ‘muscle rankings’.

The Lobby also includes prominent Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s will. Neo-conservative gentiles such as John Bolton; Robert Bartley, the former Wall Street Journal editor; William Bennett, the former secretary of education; Jeane Kirkpatrick, the former UN ambassador; and the influential columnist George Will are also steadfast supporters.

The US form of government offers activists many ways of influencing the policy process. Interest groups can lobby elected representatives and members of the executive branch, make campaign contributions, vote in elections, try to mould public opinion etc. They enjoy a disproportionate amount of influence when they are committed to an issue to which the bulk of the population is indifferent. Policymakers will tend to accommodate those who care about the issue, even if their numbers are small, confident that the rest of the population will not penalise them for doing so.

In its basic operations, the Israel Lobby is no different from the farm lobby, steel or textile workers’ unions, or other ethnic lobbies. There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better. By contrast, pro-Arab interest groups, in so far as they exist at all, are weak, which makes the Israel Lobby’s task even easier.

The Lobby pursues two broad strategies. First, it wields its significant influence in Washington, pressuring both Congress and the executive branch. Whatever an individual lawmaker or policymaker’s own views may be, the Lobby tries to make supporting Israel the ‘smart’ choice. Second, it strives to ensure that public discourse portrays Israel in a positive light, by repeating myths about its founding and by promoting its point of view in policy debates. The goal is to prevent critical comments from getting a fair hearing in the political arena. Controlling the debate is essential to guaranteeing US support, because a candid discussion of US-Israeli relations might lead Americans to favour a different policy.

A key pillar of the Lobby’s effectiveness is its influence in Congress, where Israel is virtually immune from criticism. This in itself is remarkable, because Congress rarely shies away from contentious issues. Where Israel is concerned, however, potential critics fall silent. One reason is that some key members are Christian Zionists like Dick Armey, who said in September 2002: ‘My No. 1 priority in foreign policy is to protect Israel.’ One might think that the No. 1 priority for any congressman would be to protect America. There are also Jewish senators and congressmen who work to ensure that US foreign policy supports Israel’s interests.

Another source of the Lobby’s power is its use of pro-Israel congressional staffers. As Morris Amitay, a former head of AIPAC, once admitted, ‘there are a lot of guys at the working level up here’ – on Capitol Hill – ‘who happen to be Jewish, who are willing . . . to look at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness . . . These are all guys who are in a position to make the decision in these areas for those senators . . . You can get an awful lot done just at the staff level.’

AIPAC itself, however, forms the core of the Lobby’s influence in Congress. Its success is due to its ability to reward legislators and congressional candidates who support its agenda, and to punish those who challenge it. Money is critical to US elections (as the scandal over the lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s shady dealings reminds us), and AIPAC makes sure that its friends get strong financial support from the many pro-Israel political action committees. Anyone who is seen as hostile to Israel can be sure that AIPAC will direct campaign contributions to his or her political opponents. AIPAC also organises letter-writing campaigns and encourages newspaper editors to endorse pro-Israel candidates.

There is no doubt about the efficacy of these tactics. Here is one example: in the 1984 elections, AIPAC helped defeat Senator Charles Percy from Illinois, who, according to a prominent Lobby figure, had ‘displayed insensitivity and even hostility to our concerns’. Thomas Dine, the head of AIPAC at the time, explained what happened: ‘All the Jews in America, from coast to coast, gathered to oust Percy. And the American politicians – those who hold public positions now, and those who aspire – got the message.’

AIPAC’s influence on Capitol Hill goes even further. According to Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staff member, ‘it is common for members of Congress and their staffs to turn to AIPAC first when they need information, before calling the Library of Congress, the Congressional Research Service, committee staff or administration experts.’ More important, he notes that AIPAC is ‘often called on to draft speeches, work on legislation, advise on tactics, perform research, collect co-sponsors and marshal votes’.

The bottom line is that AIPAC, a de facto agent for a foreign government, has a stranglehold on Congress, with the result that US policy towards Israel is not debated there, even though that policy has important consequences for the entire world. In other words, one of the three main branches of the government is firmly committed to supporting Israel. As one former Democratic senator, Ernest Hollings, noted on leaving office, ‘you can’t have an Israeli policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here.’ Or as Ariel Sharon once told an American audience, ‘when people ask me how they can help Israel, I tell them: “Help AIPAC.”’

Thanks in part to the influence Jewish voters have on presidential elections, the Lobby also has significant leverage over the executive branch. Although they make up fewer than 3 per cent of the population, they make large campaign donations to candidates from both parties. The Washington Post once estimated that Democratic presidential candidates ‘depend on Jewish supporters to supply as much as 60 per cent of the money’. And because Jewish voters have high turn-out rates and are concentrated in key states like California, Florida, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania, presidential candidates go to great lengths not to antagonise them.

Key organisations in the Lobby make it their business to ensure that critics of Israel do not get important foreign policy jobs. Jimmy Carter wanted to make George Ball his first secretary of state, but knew that Ball was seen as critical of Israel and that the Lobby would oppose the appointment. In this way any aspiring policymaker is encouraged to become an overt supporter of Israel, which is why public critics of Israeli policy have become an endangered species in the foreign policy establishment.

When Howard Dean called for the United States to take a more ‘even-handed role’ in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Senator Joseph Lieberman accused him of selling Israel down the river and said his statement was ‘irresponsible’. Virtually all the top Democrats in the House signed a letter criticising Dean’s remarks, and the Chicago Jewish Star reported that ‘anonymous attackers . . . are clogging the email inboxes of Jewish leaders around the country, warning – without much evidence – that Dean would somehow be bad for Israel.’

This worry was absurd; Dean is in fact quite hawkish on Israel: his campaign co-chair was a former AIPAC president, and Dean said his own views on the Middle East more closely reflected those of AIPAC than those of the more moderate Americans for Peace Now. He had merely suggested that to ‘bring the sides together’, Washington should act as an honest broker. This is hardly a radical idea, but the Lobby doesn’t tolerate even-handedness.

During the Clinton administration, Middle Eastern policy was largely shaped by officials with close ties to Israel or to prominent pro-Israel organisations; among them, Martin Indyk, the former deputy director of research at AIPAC and co-founder of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP); Dennis Ross, who joined WINEP after leaving government in 2001; and Aaron Miller, who has lived in Israel and often visits the country. These men were among Clinton’s closest advisers at the Camp David summit in July 2000. Although all three supported the Oslo peace process and favoured the creation of a Palestinian state, they did so only within the limits of what would be acceptable to Israel. The American delegation took its cues from Ehud Barak, co-ordinated its negotiating positions with Israel in advance, and did not offer independent proposals. Not surprisingly, Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams – one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag’.

The situation is even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (‘Scooter’) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favoured by Israel and backed by organisations in the Lobby.

The Lobby doesn’t want an open debate, of course, because that might lead Americans to question the level of support they provide. Accordingly, pro-Israel organisations work hard to influence the institutions that do most to shape popular opinion.

The Lobby’s perspective prevails in the mainstream media: the debate among Middle East pundits, the journalist Eric Alterman writes, is ‘dominated by people who cannot imagine criticising Israel’. He lists 61 ‘columnists and commentators who can be counted on to support Israel reflexively and without qualification’. Conversely, he found just five pundits who consistently criticise Israeli actions or endorse Arab positions. Newspapers occasionally publish guest op-eds challenging Israeli policy, but the balance of opinion clearly favours the other side. It is hard to imagine any mainstream media outlet in the United States publishing a piece like this one.

‘Shamir, Sharon, Bibi – whatever those guys want is pretty much fine by me,’ Robert Bartley once remarked. Not surprisingly, his newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, along with other prominent papers like the Chicago Sun-Times and the Washington Times, regularly runs editorials that strongly support Israel. Magazines like Commentary, the New Republic and the Weekly Standard defend Israel at every turn.

Editorial bias is also found in papers like the New York Times, which occasionally criticises Israeli policies and sometimes concedes that the Palestinians have legitimate grievances, but is not even-handed. In his memoirs the paper’s former executive editor Max Frankel acknowledges the impact his own attitude had on his editorial decisions: ‘I was much more deeply devoted to Israel than I dared to assert . . . Fortified by my knowledge of Israel and my friendships there, I myself wrote most of our Middle East commentaries. As more Arab than Jewish readers recognised, I wrote them from a pro-Israel perspective.’

News reports are more even-handed, in part because reporters strive to be objective, but also because it is difficult to cover events in the Occupied Territories without acknowledging Israel’s actions on the ground. To discourage unfavourable reporting, the Lobby organises letter-writing campaigns, demonstrations and boycotts of news outlets whose content it considers anti-Israel. One CNN executive has said that he sometimes gets 6000 email messages in a single day complaining about a story. In May 2003, the pro-Israel Committee for Accurate Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) organised demonstrations outside National Public Radio stations in 33 cities; it also tried to persuade contributors to withhold support from NPR until its Middle East coverage becomes more sympathetic to Israel. Boston’s NPR station, WBUR, reportedly lost more than $1 million in contributions as a result of these efforts. Further pressure on NPR has come from Israel’s friends in Congress, who have asked for an internal audit of its Middle East coverage as well as more oversight.

The Israeli side also dominates the think tanks which play an important role in shaping public debate as well as actual policy. The Lobby created its own think tank in 1985, when Martin Indyk helped to found WINEP. Although WINEP plays down its links to Israel, claiming instead to provide a ‘balanced and realistic’ perspective on Middle East issues, it is funded and run by individuals deeply committed to advancing Israel’s agenda.

The Lobby’s influence extends well beyond WINEP, however. Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks employ few, if any, critics of US support for Israel.

Take the Brookings Institution. For many years, its senior expert on the Middle East was William Quandt, a former NSC official with a well-deserved reputation for even-handedness. Today, Brookings’s coverage is conducted through the Saban Center for Middle East Studies, which is financed by Haim Saban, an Israeli-American businessman and ardent Zionist. The centre’s director is the ubiquitous Martin Indyk. What was once a non-partisan policy institute is now part of the pro-Israel chorus.

Where the Lobby has had the most difficulty is in stifling debate on university campuses. In the 1990s, when the Oslo peace process was underway, there was only mild criticism of Israel, but it grew stronger with Oslo’s collapse and Sharon’s access to power, becoming quite vociferous when the IDF reoccupied the West Bank in spring 2002 and employed massive force to subdue the second intifada.

The Lobby moved immediately to ‘take back the campuses’. New groups sprang up, like the Caravan for Democracy, which brought Israeli speakers to US colleges. Established groups like the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Hillel joined in, and a new group, the Israel on Campus Coalition, was formed to co-ordinate the many bodies that now sought to put Israel’s case. Finally, AIPAC more than tripled its spending on programmes to monitor university activities and to train young advocates, in order to ‘vastly expand the number of students involved on campus . . . in the national pro-Israel effort’.

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel. This transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars provoked a harsh reaction and Pipes and Kramer later removed the dossiers, but the website still invites students to report ‘anti-Israel’ activity.

Groups within the Lobby put pressure on particular academics and universities. Columbia has been a frequent target, no doubt because of the presence of the late Edward Said on its faculty. ‘One can be sure that any public statement in support of the Palestinian people by the pre-eminent literary critic Edward Said will elicit hundreds of emails, letters and journalistic accounts that call on us to denounce Said and to either sanction or fire him,’ Jonathan Cole, its former provost, reported. When Columbia recruited the historian Rashid Khalidi from Chicago, the same thing happened. It was a problem Princeton also faced a few years later when it considered wooing Khalidi away from Columbia.

A classic illustration of the effort to police academia occurred towards the end of 2004, when the David Project produced a film alleging that faculty members of Columbia’s Middle East Studies programme were anti-semitic and were intimidating Jewish students who stood up for Israel. Columbia was hauled over the coals, but a faculty committee which was assigned to investigate the charges found no evidence of anti-semitism and the only incident possibly worth noting was that one professor had ‘responded heatedly’ to a student’s question. The committee also discovered that the academics in question had themselves been the target of an overt campaign of intimidation.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all this is the efforts Jewish groups have made to push Congress into establishing mechanisms to monitor what professors say. If they manage to get this passed, universities judged to have an anti-Israel bias would be denied federal funding. Their efforts have not yet succeeded, but they are an indication of the importance placed on controlling debate.

A number of Jewish philanthropists have recently established Israel Studies programmes (in addition to the roughly 130 Jewish Studies programmes already in existence) so as to increase the number of Israel-friendly scholars on campus. In May 2003, NYU announced the establishment of the Taub Center for Israel Studies; similar programmes have been set up at Berkeley, Brandeis and Emory. Academic administrators emphasise their pedagogical value, but the truth is that they are intended in large part to promote Israel’s image. Fred Laffer, the head of the Taub Foundation, makes it clear that his foundation funded the NYU centre to help counter the ‘Arabic [sic] point of view’ that he thinks is prevalent in NYU’s Middle East programmes.

No discussion of the Lobby would be complete without an examination of one of its most powerful weapons: the charge of anti-semitism. Anyone who criticises Israel’s actions or argues that pro-Israel groups have significant influence over US Middle Eastern policy – an influence AIPAC celebrates – stands a good chance of being labelled an anti-semite. Indeed, anyone who merely claims that there is an Israel Lobby runs the risk of being charged with anti-semitism, even though the Israeli media refer to America’s ‘Jewish Lobby’. In other words, the Lobby first boasts of its influence and then attacks anyone who calls attention to it. It’s a very effective tactic: anti-semitism is something no one wants to be accused of.

Europeans have been more willing than Americans to criticise Israeli policy, which some people attribute to a resurgence of anti-semitism in Europe. We are ‘getting to a point’, the US ambassador to the EU said in early 2004, ‘where it is as bad as it was in the 1930s’. Measuring anti-semitism is a complicated matter, but the weight of evidence points in the opposite direction. In the spring of 2004, when accusations of European anti-semitism filled the air in America, separate surveys of European public opinion conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League and the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that it was in fact declining. In the 1930s, by contrast, anti-semitism was not only widespread among Europeans of all classes but considered quite acceptable.

The Lobby and its friends often portray France as the most anti-semitic country in Europe. But in 2003, the head of the French Jewish community said that ‘France is not more anti-semitic than America.’ According to a recent article in Ha’aretz, the French police have reported that anti-semitic incidents declined by almost 50 per cent in 2005; and this even though France has the largest Muslim population of any European country. Finally, when a French Jew was murdered in Paris last month by a Muslim gang, tens of thousands of demonstrators poured into the streets to condemn anti-semitism. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin both attended the victim’s memorial service to show their solidarity.

No one would deny that there is anti-semitism among European Muslims, some of it provoked by Israel’s conduct towards the Palestinians and some of it straightforwardly racist. But this is a separate matter with little bearing on whether or not Europe today is like Europe in the 1930s. Nor would anyone deny that there are still some virulent autochthonous anti-semites in Europe (as there are in the United States) but their numbers are small and their views are rejected by the vast majority of Europeans.

Israel’s advocates, when pressed to go beyond mere assertion, claim that there is a ‘new anti-semitism’, which they equate with criticism of Israel. In other words, criticise Israeli policy and you are by definition an anti-semite. When the synod of the Church of England recently voted to divest from Caterpillar Inc on the grounds that it manufactures the bulldozers used by the Israelis to demolish Palestinian homes, the Chief Rabbi complained that this would ‘have the most adverse repercussions on . . . Jewish-Christian relations in Britain’, while Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement, said: ‘There is a clear problem of anti-Zionist – verging on anti-semitic – attitudes emerging in the grass-roots, and even in the middle ranks of the Church.’ But the Church was guilty merely of protesting against Israeli government policy.

Critics are also accused of holding Israel to an unfair standard or questioning its right to exist. But these are bogus charges too. Western critics of Israel hardly ever question its right to exist: they question its behaviour towards the Palestinians, as do Israelis themselves. Nor is Israel being judged unfairly. Israeli treatment of the Palestinians elicits criticism because it is contrary to widely accepted notions of human rights, to international law and to the principle of national self-determination. And it is hardly the only state that has faced sharp criticism on these grounds.

In the autumn of 2001, and especially in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration tried to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and undermine support for terrorist groups like al-Qaida by halting Israel’s expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Bush had very significant means of persuasion at his disposal. He could have threatened to reduce economic and diplomatic support for Israel, and the American people would almost certainly have supported him. A May 2003 poll reported that more than 60 per cent of Americans were willing to withhold aid if Israel resisted US pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 per cent among the ‘politically active’. Indeed, 73 per cent said that the United States should not favour either side.

Yet the administration failed to change Israeli policy, and Washington ended up backing it. Over time, the administration also adopted Israel’s own justifications of its position, so that US rhetoric began to mimic Israeli rhetoric. By February 2003, a Washington Post headline summarised the situation: ‘Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy.’ The main reason for this switch was the Lobby.

The story begins in late September 2001, when Bush began urging Sharon to show restraint in the Occupied Territories. He also pressed him to allow Israel’s foreign minister, Shimon Peres, to meet with Yasser Arafat, even though he (Bush) was highly critical of Arafat’s leadership. Bush even said publicly that he supported the creation of a Palestinian state. Alarmed, Sharon accused him of trying ‘to appease the Arabs at our expense’, warning that Israel ‘will not be Czechoslovakia’.

Bush was reportedly furious at being compared to Chamberlain, and the White House press secretary called Sharon’s remarks ‘unacceptable’. Sharon offered a pro forma apology, but quickly joined forces with the Lobby to persuade the administration and the American people that the United States and Israel faced a common threat from terrorism. Israeli officials and Lobby representatives insisted that there was no real difference between Arafat and Osama bin Laden: the United States and Israel, they said, should isolate the Palestinians’ elected leader and have nothing to do with him.

The Lobby also went to work in Congress. On 16 November, 89 senators sent Bush a letter praising him for refusing to meet with Arafat, but also demanding that the US not restrain Israel from retaliating against the Palestinians; the administration, they wrote, must state publicly that it stood behind Israel. According to the New York Times, the letter ‘stemmed’ from a meeting two weeks before between ‘leaders of the American Jewish community and key senators’, adding that AIPAC was ‘particularly active in providing advice on the letter’.

By late November, relations between Tel Aviv and Washington had improved considerably. This was thanks in part to the Lobby’s efforts, but also to America’s initial victory in Afghanistan, which reduced the perceived need for Arab support in dealing with al-Qaida. Sharon visited the White House in early December and had a friendly meeting with Bush.

In April 2002 trouble erupted again, after the IDF launched Operation Defensive Shield and resumed control of virtually all the major Palestinian areas on the West Bank. Bush knew that Israel’s actions would damage America’s image in the Islamic world and undermine the war on terrorism, so he demanded that Sharon ‘halt the incursions and begin withdrawal’. He underscored this message two days later, saying he wanted Israel to ‘withdraw without delay’. On 7 April, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters: ‘“Without delay” means without delay. It means now.’ That same day Colin Powell set out for the Middle East to persuade all sides to stop fighting and start negotiating.

Israel and the Lobby swung into action. Pro-Israel officials in the vice-president’s office and the Pentagon, as well as neo-conservative pundits like Robert Kagan and William Kristol, put the heat on Powell. They even accused him of having ‘virtually obliterated the distinction between terrorists and those fighting terrorists’. Bush himself was being pressed by Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals. Tom DeLay and Dick Armey were especially outspoken about the need to support Israel, and DeLay and the Senate minority leader, Trent Lott, visited the White House and warned Bush to back off.

The first sign that Bush was caving in came on 11 April – a week after he told Sharon to withdraw his forces – when the White House press secretary said that the president believed Sharon was ‘a man of peace’. Bush repeated this statement publicly on Powell’s return from his abortive mission, and told reporters that Sharon had responded satisfactorily to his call for a full and immediate withdrawal. Sharon had done no such thing, but Bush was no longer willing to make an issue of it.

Meanwhile, Congress was also moving to back Sharon. On 2 May, it overrode the administration’s objections and passed two resolutions reaffirming support for Israel. (The Senate vote was 94 to 2; the House of Representatives version passed 352 to 21.) Both resolutions held that the United States ‘stands in solidarity with Israel’ and that the two countries were, to quote the House resolution, ‘now engaged in a common struggle against terrorism’. The House version also condemned ‘the ongoing support and co-ordination of terror by Yasser Arafat’, who was portrayed as a central part of the terrorism problem. Both resolutions were drawn up with the help of the Lobby. A few days later, a bipartisan congressional delegation on a fact-finding mission to Israel stated that Sharon should resist US pressure to negotiate with Arafat. On 9 May, a House appropriations subcommittee met to consider giving Israel an extra $200 million to fight terrorism. Powell opposed the package, but the Lobby backed it and Powell lost.

In short, Sharon and the Lobby took on the president of the United States and triumphed. Hemi Shalev, a journalist on the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv, reported that Sharon’s aides ‘could not hide their satisfaction in view of Powell’s failure. Sharon saw the whites of President Bush’s eyes, they bragged, and the president blinked first.’ But it was Israel’s champions in the United States, not Sharon or Israel, that played the key role in defeating Bush.

The situation has changed little since then. The Bush administration refused ever again to have dealings with Arafat. After his death, it embraced the new Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, but has done little to help him. Sharon continued to develop his plan to impose a unilateral settlement on the Palestinians, based on ‘disengagement’ from Gaza coupled with continued expansion on the West Bank. By refusing to negotiate with Abbas and making it impossible for him to deliver tangible benefits to the Palestinian people, Sharon’s strategy contributed directly to Hamas’s electoral victory. With Hamas in power, however, Israel has another excuse not to negotiate. The US administration has supported Sharon’s actions (and those of his successor, Ehud Olmert). Bush has even endorsed unilateral Israeli annexations in the Occupied Territories, reversing the stated policy of every president since Lyndon Johnson.

US officials have offered mild criticisms of a few Israeli actions, but have done little to help create a viable Palestinian state. Sharon has Bush ‘wrapped around his little finger’, the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft said in October 2004. If Bush tries to distance the US from Israel, or even criticises Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories, he is certain to face the wrath of the Lobby and its supporters in Congress. Democratic presidential candidates understand that these are facts of life, which is the reason John Kerry went to great lengths to display unalloyed support for Israel in 2004, and why Hillary Clinton is doing the same thing today.

Maintaining US support for Israel’s policies against the Palestinians is essential as far as the Lobby is concerned, but its ambitions do not stop there. It also wants America to help Israel remain the dominant regional power. The Israeli government and pro-Israel groups in the United States have worked together to shape the administration’s policy towards Iraq, Syria and Iran, as well as its grand scheme for reordering the Middle East.

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical. Some Americans believe that this was a war for oil, but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a former member of the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now a counsellor to Condoleezza Rice, the ‘real threat’ from Iraq was not a threat to the United States. The ‘unstated threat’ was the ‘threat against Israel’, Zelikow told an audience at the University of Virginia in September 2002. ‘The American government,’ he added, ‘doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.’

On 16 August 2002, 11 days before Dick Cheney kicked off the campaign for war with a hardline speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Washington Post reported that ‘Israel is urging US officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.’ By this point, according to Sharon, strategic co-ordination between Israel and the US had reached ‘unprecedented dimensions’, and Israeli intelligence officials had given Washington a variety of alarming reports about Iraq’s WMD programmes. As one retired Israeli general later put it, ‘Israeli intelligence was a full partner to the picture presented by American and British intelligence regarding Iraq’s non-conventional capabilities.’

Israeli leaders were deeply distressed when Bush decided to seek Security Council authorisation for war, and even more worried when Saddam agreed to let UN inspectors back in. ‘The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must,’ Shimon Peres told reporters in September 2002. ‘Inspections and inspectors are good for decent people, but dishonest people can overcome easily inspections and inspectors.’

At the same time, Ehud Barak wrote a New York Times op-ed warning that ‘the greatest risk now lies in inaction.’ His predecessor as prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, published a similar piece in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: ‘The Case for Toppling Saddam’. ‘Today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do,’ he declared. ‘I believe I speak for the overwhelming majority of Israelis in supporting a pre-emptive strike against Saddam’s regime.’ Or as Ha’aretz reported in February 2003, ‘the military and political leadership yearns for war in Iraq.’

As Netanyahu suggested, however, the desire for war was not confined to Israel’s leaders. Apart from Kuwait, which Saddam invaded in 1990, Israel was the only country in the world where both politicians and public favoured war. As the journalist Gideon Levy observed at the time, ‘Israel is the only country in the West whose leaders support the war unreservedly and where no alternative opinion is voiced.’ In fact, Israelis were so gung-ho that their allies in America told them to damp down their rhetoric, or it would look as if the war would be fought on Israel’s behalf.

Within the US, the main driving force behind the war was a small band of neo-conservatives, many with ties to Likud. But leaders of the Lobby’s major organisations lent their voices to the campaign. ‘As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq,’ the Forward reported, ‘America’s most important Jewish organisations rallied as one to his defence. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.’ The editorial goes on to say that ‘concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.’

Although neo-conservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not. Just after the war started, Samuel Freedman reported that ‘a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52 per cent to 62 per cent.’ Clearly, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on ‘Jewish influence’. Rather, it was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially that of the neo-conservatives within it.

The neo-conservatives had been determined to topple Saddam even before Bush became president. They caused a stir early in 1998 by publishing two open letters to Clinton, calling for Saddam’s removal from power. The signatories, many of whom had close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA or WINEP, and who included Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, had little trouble persuading the Clinton administration to adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam. But they were unable to sell a war to achieve that objective. They were no more able to generate enthusiasm for invading Iraq in the early months of the Bush administration. They needed help to achieve their aim. That help arrived with 9/11. Specifically, the events of that day led Bush and Cheney to reverse course and become strong proponents of a preventive war.

At a key meeting with Bush at Camp David on 15 September, Wolfowitz advocated attacking Iraq before Afghanistan, even though there was no evidence that Saddam was involved in the attacks on the US and bin Laden was known to be in Afghanistan. Bush rejected his advice and chose to go after Afghanistan instead, but war with Iraq was now regarded as a serious possibility and on 21 November the president charged military planners with developing concrete plans for an invasion.

Other neo-conservatives were meanwhile at work in the corridors of power. We don’t have the full story yet, but scholars like Bernard Lewis of Princeton and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins reportedly played important roles in persuading Cheney that war was the best option, though neo-conservatives on his staff – Eric Edelman, John Hannah and Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff and one of the most powerful individuals in the administration – also played their part. By early 2002 Cheney had persuaded Bush; and with Bush and Cheney on board, war was inevitable.

Outside the administration, neo-conservative pundits lost no time in making the case that invading Iraq was essential to winning the war on terrorism. Their efforts were designed partly to keep up the pressure on Bush, and partly to overcome opposition to the war inside and outside the government. On 20 September, a group of prominent neo-conservatives and their allies published another open letter: ‘Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,’ it read, ‘any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.’ The letter also reminded Bush that ‘Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism.’ In the 1 October issue of the Weekly Standard, Robert Kagan and William Kristol called for regime change in Iraq as soon as the Taliban was defeated. That same day, Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after the US was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq: ‘The war on terrorism will conclude in Baghdad,’ when we finish off ‘the most dangerous terrorist regime in the world’.

This was the beginning of an unrelenting public relations campaign to win support for an invasion of Iraq, a crucial part of which was the manipulation of intelligence in such a way as to make it seem as if Saddam posed an imminent threat. For example, Libby pressured CIA analysts to find evidence supporting the case for war and helped prepare Colin Powell’s now discredited briefing to the UN Security Council. Within the Pentagon, the Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group was charged with finding links between al-Qaida and Iraq that the intelligence community had supposedly missed. Its two key members were David Wurmser, a hard-core neo-conservative, and Michael Maloof, a Lebanese-American with close ties to Perle. Another Pentagon group, the so-called Office of Special Plans, was given the task of uncovering evidence that could be used to sell the war. It was headed by Abram Shulsky, a neo-conservative with long-standing ties to Wolfowitz, and its ranks included recruits from pro-Israel think tanks. Both these organisations were created after 9/11 and reported directly to Douglas Feith.

Like virtually all the neo-conservatives, Feith is deeply committed to Israel; he also has long-term ties to Likud. He wrote articles in the 1990s supporting the settlements and arguing that Israel should retain the Occupied Territories. More important, along with Perle and Wurmser, he wrote the famous ‘Clean Break’ report in June 1996 for Netanyahu, who had just become prime minister. Among other things, it recommended that Netanyahu ‘focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right’. It also called for Israel to take steps to reorder the entire Middle East. Netanyahu did not follow their advice, but Feith, Perle and Wurmser were soon urging the Bush administration to pursue those same goals. The Ha’aretz columnist Akiva Eldar warned that Feith and Perle ‘are walking a fine line between their loyalty to American governments . . . and Israeli interests’.

Wolfowitz is equally committed to Israel. The Forward once described him as ‘the most hawkishly pro-Israel voice in the administration’, and selected him in 2002 as first among 50 notables who ‘have consciously pursued Jewish activism’. At about the same time, JINSA gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States; and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as ‘devoutly pro-Israel’, named him ‘Man of the Year’ in 2003.

Finally, a brief word is in order about the neo-conservatives’ prewar support of Ahmed Chalabi, the unscrupulous Iraqi exile who headed the Iraqi National Congress. They backed Chalabi because he had established close ties with Jewish-American groups and had pledged to foster good relations with Israel once he gained power. This was precisely what pro-Israel proponents of regime change wanted to hear. Matthew Berger laid out the essence of the bargain in the Jewish Journal: ‘The INC saw improved relations as a way to tap Jewish influence in Washington and Jerusalem and to drum up increased support for its cause. For their part, the Jewish groups saw an opportunity to pave the way for better relations between Israel and Iraq, if and when the INC is involved in replacing Saddam Hussein’s regime.’

Given the neo-conservatives’ devotion to Israel, their obsession with Iraq, and their influence in the Bush administration, it isn’t surprising that many Americans suspected that the war was designed to further Israeli interests. Last March, Barry Jacobs of the American Jewish Committee acknowledged that the belief that Israel and the neo-conservatives had conspired to get the US into a war in Iraq was ‘pervasive’ in the intelligence community. Yet few people would say so publicly, and most of those who did – including Senator Ernest Hollings and Representative James Moran – were condemned for raising the issue. Michael Kinsley wrote in late 2002 that ‘the lack of public discussion about the role of Israel . . . is the proverbial elephant in the room.’ The reason for the reluctance to talk about it, he observed, was fear of being labelled an anti-semite. There is little doubt that Israel and the Lobby were key factors in the decision to go to war. It’s a decision the US would have been far less likely to take without their efforts. And the war itself was intended to be only the first step. A front-page headline in the Wall Street Journal shortly after the war began says it all: ‘President’s Dream: Changing Not Just Regime but a Region: A Pro-US, Democratic Area Is a Goal that Has Israeli and Neo-Conservative Roots.’

Pro-Israel forces have long been interested in getting the US military more directly involved in the Middle East. But they had limited success during the Cold War, because America acted as an ‘off-shore balancer’ in the region. Most forces designated for the Middle East, like the Rapid Deployment Force, were kept ‘over the horizon’ and out of harm’s way. The idea was to play local powers off against each other – which is why the Reagan administration supported Saddam against revolutionary Iran during the Iran-Iraq War – in order to maintain a balance favourable to the US.

This policy changed after the first Gulf War, when the Clinton administration adopted a strategy of ‘dual containment’. Substantial US forces would be stationed in the region in order to contain both Iran and Iraq, instead of one being used to check the other. The father of dual containment was none other than Martin Indyk, who first outlined the strategy in May 1993 at WINEP and then implemented it as director for Near East and South Asian Affairs at the National Security Council.

By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of 1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze’ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha’aretz, noted at the time, ‘Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.’

By the late 1990s, however, the neo-conservatives were arguing that dual containment was not enough and that regime chan

So now I've spammed a pretty long screed. I'm a deadbeat bummer living off Social Security with loads of time on his hands. I don't do any positive activism offline. I never make a positive difference in my community. Everyone there knows I'm a nobody. So I harass Jews online.

Cease and desist with trashing this site or you will be blocked from posting.

http://www.swhomelandsecurity.com/speakers.aspx
Homeland security guys w/ dual citizenship...

I've been forging them both, but they're one and the same!!! Whodya thunk it?????

Instructors for torture, the Israeli way.
Yes, now I remember this involvement from Democracy now, a few years back. Quickly forgotten and never brought up again.

http://www.swhomelandsecurity.com/speakers.aspx
Homeland security guys w/ dual citizenship...

There is only one listed with dual citizenship.

Maybe this means that all the zionist spastic nut posts are from one zionist. Hmmmmmm.

Hey. That wasn';t me. sorry sheepdog. It's the zionist spammer forging my name again.

I'm about to explode with desperation. Now I need to pretend I'm the real 'autoblocked'.

I appreciate the lists of dual citizens.
Adding to list...
Still digging...
:>)

Sorry, children. I just sent this email to the LA IMC "powers that be". Your behavior is completely unacceptable. This is what moderators are for. Now lets see what happens.


The Palestine threads have been taken over by a raving lunatic. Whether or not the lunatic is zionist or anti-zionist is up for discussion but what is certain, is that s/he is trashing the threads and making dialog and exchange of information impossible.
I am loathe to call upon the powers that be to intercede, but this form of behavior is disruptive, inappropriate and disrespectful to the very concept of open publishing.


Thanks,
Tia

We need some sanity injected into this discussion. Things are getting confusing. Zionist forgeries everywhere.

And everybody knows I'm forging 'autoblocked' as I feign being greatful to Tia. I'm rabidly anti-Zionist. Even anti-Jewish.

(Apparently this post was hidden by error)

You may pretend your Indybay friend didn't relay a screed by forging "my" other nym on top, but I wouldn't take anything John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt said for granted after their faulty analysis on another topic was exposed a few weeks ago on this site.

Stop with all the rabid zionist forgeries already!
No more lies
Here's a good article about a Jew who's been victimized by zionism
http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.israel/browse_thread/thread/34a5c760415db3a0/13b77648350e833c%2313b77648350e833c

and can't extract myself from the the muckity muck of idiocy I've marred myself in through all these forgeries.

It's nice to get a different perspective on how Jews are victimized in their land by zionist war pigs. Much like here in the U.S.

Since its now clearly proven that "anti-zionists" lie whenever its convenient for their ideology, why would we believe ANYTHING they post?

The above posting was a forgery. I am not the zionist filth that the forger wants you to believe.

Toady, you are just pitiful.

I hope LA.indymedia readers are thoroughly disgusted with all the forged postings polluting this site.

I hope that Critical Thinker has found us here, at a site that has not, thus far anyway, caved into the censorship and smear jobs which are the hallmark of indybay.org these days.

If Critical Thinker IS autoblocked@indybay.org then it just goes to prove that the monitors at indybay just can't handle an articulate, knowledgable, Israeli Jew who can dispense with any lie, distortion, or departure from reality the anti-Zionists launch.

See how much simpler it is when people post under their own names ( or at least a pseudonym that doesn't change from thread to thread or site to site).

Is the point communication or obfuscation?

I couldn't imagine a US citizen with such a rather awesome command of English as yours would refer to me as articulate among the other adjectives you used. Never should it be said I feel unappreciated!

Can't say I've got the highest hopes that the editorial collective here will be capable of resisting the pressures to enact censorship over the long haul. 'Toady' has at least an implicit alliance with 'nessie' who's definitely in "it" for the long run, and from the very outset in Indybay, 'nessie' kept prodding, coaxing and pushing his censorship agenda on the collective with his efforts eventually having proven more fruitful than he bargained for. This doesn't bode well for this IMC.

>from the very outset in Indybay, 'nessie' kept prodding, coaxing and pushing his censorship agenda on the collective with his efforts eventually having proven more fruitful than he bargained for.

Indymedia can never be taken seriously by the world at large until there is a network wide policy of zero tolerance for racists.

Indymedia can never be taken seriously by the world at large until there is a network wide policy of zero tolerance for "anti-racist" anti-Zionist racists as well.

nessie: "Indymedia can never be taken seriously by the world at large until there is a network wide policy of zero tolerance for racists."

Indymedia can never be taken seriously the minute nessie steps up to the keyboard.

@%<

LA. indymedia readers beware!! When the anti-Zionists get their way, and institute wide censorship and IP blocking of posters they disagree with, the result is the site loses traffic.
I posted this article in the following thread:

http://www.indybay.org/news/2006/05/1821549.php

It was promptly deleted. In fact, of the 30 comments posted there, only 4 have been allowed to post. At least there are still readers there trying to post. This won't last long.

Here is my forbidden article. Judge for yourself if this was so over the line that it had to be censored:

According to reports, SF.indymedia.org has one thirtieth the traffic on the site since it was taken
over by editors who censored anyone they disagreed with. When you are rude, repeatedly censor anyone you slightly disagree with, use the site for smearing other activists, you drive readers and contributers away. Consider the following reposted from LA. indymedia.org which is allowing a debate to ocurr.


Is SF-Indymedia a dead site?
by Becky Johnson Friday, May. 05, 2006 at 10:31 AM
Santa Cruz

IS SF.INDYMEDIA A DEAD SITE?

Let's see how many comments have been posted?

There is No “Israel Lobby”
Published by Kim Petersen, May 01 10:48PM, Comments: 0

Yes Mr. Solana, the EU has abandoned the Palestinian people
Published by Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, May 03 9:13AM, Comments: 0

Weekly Summary of israeli War Crimes
Published by Tierra Insurgente / Intifada Al Ard, May 04 7:39AM, Comments: 0


3-Year-Old child crushed at Israeli checkpoint
Published by Arabic News, Apr 29 5:14PM, Comments: 0


One Palestinian Extra-Judicially Killed and another One Wounded by IOF in the Central Gaza
Published by Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Apr 28 12:40PM, Comments: 0


Israel protests Sweden's military snub
Published by Arabic News, Apr 28 12:32PM, Comments: 11 (only ONE comment is allowed to be displayed, though)

Swedish envoy summoned over NATO drill, visas for Hamas Published by Amos Harel and Aluf Benn, Haaretz, Apr 29 2:17PM, Comments: 1

Israeli soldiers attack Palestinian journalists
Published by Arabic News, Apr 28 12:22PM, Comments: 0

Irish MP slams EU "hypocrisy," calls for suspension of EU-Israel agreement Published by Press Release, Sinn Féin, 26 April 2006, Apr 28 9:34AM, Comments: 0

Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
Published by Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Apr 28 9:27AM, Comments: 0

Detained Palestinian professors lives in danger
Published by Arabic News, Apr 28 9:05AM, Comments: 0

Sweden withdraw because of Israeli forces participation Published by Arabic News, Apr 28 8:59AM, Comments: 10 (only 2 allowed to post--both critical of Israel of course)

Beirut march marks Qana bombing
Published by Al.Jazeera.net, Apr 28 7:11AM, Comments: 0

China unbending on Iran
Published by Chris Buckley, Reuters, UK, Apr 27 8:53PM, Comments: 0

Weekly Summary of israeli War Crimes
Published by Tierra Insurgente / Intifada Al Ard, Apr 27 7:46AM, Comments: 0

PCHR Condemns Extra-Judicial Execution of Two Palestinians by IOF in Bethlehem
Published by Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Apr 24 9:50PM, Comments: 0

-the site loses traffic-
Good. Without the yammering of rabid weasel zionazis, I bet the 'traffic' is indeed way down.

Only one wee problem: Indybay's collective had to undo its site to get rid of the "weasels". The demise is progressive and hasn't reached its culmination yet. You'll eventually follow their in their footsteps and remain without a soapbox to spew your racist stupidity until you set up home in another.

Once again they demonstrate what fundamentally dishonest people they are:


http://www.sfimc.net/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1692248

(snip)

Sometimes they take something that an anti-Zionist has written, subtly alter it’s meaning by changing a few words, and post it under the name of the original author.

(snip)

* * * * *

Zionists love to sign other people's names. False flag ops are their specialty. We cannot help but wonder how many atrocities they have signed Osama bin Laden's name to, or Hamas' or the PLO's.

Would a Zionist EVER publish anything quoting Norman Finkelstein, unless it was to point out what an untenable fraud he is?
Toadys trashing LA IMC and he ain't no Zionist. You know that as well as I.

Once again he demonstrates what fundamentally dishonest a person he is:


http://www.sfimc.net/news/2002/12/1555696_comment.php#1962248

(snip)

Sometimes he takes something that a Zionist has written, subtly alters its meaning by changing a few words, and posts it under the name of the original author.

(snip)

* * * * *

Deranged anti-Zionists love to sign other people's names. False flag ops are their specialty. We cannot help but wonder how many atrocities they have signed Ehud Barak's name to, or Irgun's or the Haganah's.

"Toadys trashing LA IMC and he ain't no Zionist. You know that as well as I. "

But, because he's nessie, he's going to demonstrate that famous nessie inability to see what's right in front of his face.

Hey, nessie, is Wendy Campbell an antisemite?

@%<

looks like the zionists have already trashed it. Just gehrig's constant hounding of nessie and trolling IMC's nationwide that don't meet his zionist standards trashes an IMC. Of course, the good news is that its only a very small percentage of people that spend any time on the comments. They come to read the news and activist reports/announcements/callouts/ect. 99.9% of the people would take one look at the rabid pro israel zionist comments and log out. Most come to to alternative media for an ALTERNATIVE, not for the same pro-war, pro-israel right wing slant that we experience in the corporate controlled media.

looks like the insane anti-zionists have already trashed it. Just my constant hounding of Zionists on nationwide that don't meet my anti-zionist standards trashes an IMC. Of course, the good news is that its only a very small percentage of the public that spend any time on the comments in IMCs. They come to read the news and activist reports/announcements/callouts/ect. 99.9% of the people would take one look at the rabid anti-israel comments and log out. Most come to alternative media for an ALTERNATIVE, not for the same pro-war, pro-Hamas far leftwing slant that we experience in the corporate and toady controlled media.

I am an indybay editor and someone is forging "indybay editor" on multiple posts. We are not right wing or zionist at indybay. Nor are we disturbed as apparently this angry poster is.
Thank You.

>Would a Zionist EVER publish anything quoting Norman Finkelstein, unless it was to point out what an untenable fraud he is?


Absolutely, if by doing so they made their enemies look like forgers. They will do *anything* to make their enemies look bad. They especially like using forgery. False flag ops are their specialty. They could always later claim, in a different comment, that they believe Finklestein is a fraud. And guess what? They did. He's not, of course, but that's a separate issue.

Just as the truth in any war must have a "bodyguard of lies," so too must a lie be guarded by truth. To be most believable, a lie must be embedded in as much truth as possible. It is common practice for intelligence agencies to construct elaborate facades of verifiable facts to conceal their deceptions. It's not the least bit unusual. Au contrair, it is the norm.

To understand what is going on here, we must look past the content and bylines, at the Zionist propaganda mill's primary motivation. Their single most important mission is to discredit the critics of Zionism. This strategy is based on the ad hominem attack. They are forced to rely on lies and logical fallacies, because the truth is not their friend. The truth of the matter is, Zionism is racism, Zionists are racists, and they lie through their teeth about it. When they get caught red handed lying, they try to distract you with with more lies, or when that doesn't work, with noise.

Among their favorite lies is that since "they do it, too," that justifies their own actions. They prattle on about the great injustice of dhimmitude, for example, while simultaneously making second and third class citizens of non Jews under their military control. It is easy to fixate on the obvious hypocrisy of such a ploy, but that obscures the main lesson we can learn from observing it. Yeah, they are hypocrites, but they are also too clever by half. Their hypocrisy, reprehensible as it is, conceals something far more important.

The main message of a "they do it, too" propaganda campaign is not so much that their own crimes are justified, but that their enemies are at least as bad as they are.

What is is the aim of such an essentially self depreciating message? It is aimed at more than one audience. The first is those people so stupid that they actually believe that "they do it, too" is a valid justification. But most people over seven see right through that. The campaign is primarily aimed at you who do understand that "they do it, too" justifies nothing. Its purpose is not to convince you that their crimes are justified, but that their enemies are just as bad as their are.

The Zionists would, of course, prefer you took their side. But, failing that, they prefer you take no side, that you be equally disgusted with them and their enemies and refuse to oppose either. Not opposing either is, of course, exactly and precisely the same thing as not opposing them. It's not as preferable as being able to convince you to take their side, but it is the next best thing.

That's the purpose of attempting to convince you that if you are the kind of person who refuses to side with forgers, and therefore refuse to side with the Zionists, that you will also refuse to side with the anti-Zionists. It's a trick. Don't fall for it. To not side with the anti-Zionists is immoral. It is no different that refusing to side against Nazis, or Chetniks, or Klansmen or the Interahame.

Zionism, like all racism like all colonialism, like all imperialism, like all oppression, is evil. We have a moral duty to oppose it. We have a moral duty to oppose all evil. All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing. You can't be neutral on a moving train.

One might be led to think that if international law enforcement authorities and Western intelligence agencies had discovered a twenty-year old document revealing a top-secret plan developed by the oldest Islamist organization with one of the most extensive terror networks in the world to launch a program of “cultural invasion” and eventual conquest of the West that virtually mirrors the tactics used by Islamists for more than two decades, that such news would scream from headlines published on the front pages and above the fold of the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Le Monde, Bild, and La Repubblica.

If that’s what you might think, you would be wrong.

In fact, such a document was recovered in a raid by Swiss authorities in November 2001, two months after the horror of 9/11. Since that time information about this document, known in counterterrorism circles as “The Project”, and discussion regarding its content has been limited to the top-secret world of Western intelligence communities. Only through the work of an intrepid Swiss journalist, Sylvain Besson of Le Temps, and his book published in October 2005 in France, La conquête de l'Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (The Conquest of the West: The Islamists' Secret Project), has information regarding The Project finally been made public. One Western official cited by Besson has described The Project as “a totalitarian ideology of infiltration which represents, in the end, the greatest danger for European societies.”


Now FrontPage readers will be the first to be able to read the complete English translation of The Project.

What Western intelligence authorities know about The Project begins with the raid of a luxurious villa in Campione, Switzerland on November 7, 2001. The target of the raid was Youssef Nada, director of the Al-Taqwa Bank of Lugano, who has had active association with the Muslim Brotherhood for more than 50 years and who admitted to being one of the organization’s international leaders. The Muslim Brotherhood, regarded as the oldest and one of the most important Islamist movements in the world, was founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928 and dedicated to the credo, “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

The raid was conducted by Swiss law enforcement at the request of the White House in the initial crackdown on terrorist finances in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. US and Swiss investigators had been looking at Al-Taqwa’s involvement in money laundering and funding a wide range of Islamic terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, HAMAS (the Palestinian affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood), the Algerian GIA, and the Tunisian Ennahdah.

Included in the documents seized during the raid of Nada’s Swiss villa was a 14-page plan written in Arabic and dated December 1, 1982, which outlines a 12-point strategy to “establish an Islamic government on earth” – identified as The Project. According to testimony given to Swiss authorities by Nada, the unsigned document was prepared by “Islamic researchers” associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

What makes The Project so different from the standard “Death of America! Death to Israel!” and “Establish the global caliphate!” Islamist rhetoric is that it represents a flexible, multi-phased, long-term approach to the “cultural invasion” of the West. Calling for the utilization of various tactics, ranging from immigration, infiltration, surveillance, propaganda, protest, deception, political legitimacy and terrorism, The Project has served for more than two decades as the Muslim Brotherhood “master plan”. As can be seen in a number of examples throughout Europe – including the political recognition of parallel Islamist government organizations in Sweden, the recent “cartoon” jihad in Denmark, the Parisian car-burning intifada last November, and the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London – the plan outlined in The Project has been overwhelmingly successful.

Rather than focusing on terrorism as the sole method of group action, as is the case with Al-Qaeda, in perfect postmodern fashion the use of terror falls into a multiplicity of options available to progressively infiltrate, confront, and eventually establish Islamic domination over the West. The following tactics and techniques are among the many recommendations made in The Project:

Networking and coordinating actions between likeminded Islamist organizations;
Avoiding open alliances with known terrorist organizations and individuals to maintain the appearance of “moderation”;
Infiltrating and taking over existing Muslim organizations to realign them towards the Muslim Brotherhood’s collective goals;
Using deception to mask the intended goals of Islamist actions, as long as it doesn’t conflict with shari’a law;
Avoiding social conflicts with Westerners locally, nationally or globally, that might damage the long-term ability to expand the Islamist powerbase in the West or provoke a lash back against Muslims;
Establishing financial networks to fund the work of conversion of the West, including the support of full-time administrators and workers;
Conducting surveillance, obtaining data, and establishing collection and data storage capabilities;
Putting into place a watchdog system for monitoring Western media to warn Muslims of “international plots fomented against them”;
Cultivating an Islamist intellectual community, including the establishment of think-tanks and advocacy groups, and publishing “academic” studies, to legitimize Islamist positions and to chronicle the history of Islamist movements;
Developing a comprehensive 100-year plan to advance Islamist ideology throughout the world;
Balancing international objectives with local flexibility;
Building extensive social networks of schools, hospitals and charitable organizations dedicated to Islamist ideals so that contact with the movement for Muslims in the West is constant;
Involving ideologically committed Muslims in democratically-elected institutions on all levels in the West, including government, NGOs, private organizations and labor unions;
Instrumentally using existing Western institutions until they can be converted and put into service of Islam;
Drafting Islamic constitutions, laws and policies for eventual implementation;
Avoiding conflict within the Islamist movements on all levels, including the development of processes for conflict resolution;
Instituting alliances with Western “progressive” organizations that share similar goals;
Creating autonomous “security forces” to protect Muslims in the West;
Inflaming violence and keeping Muslims living in the West “in a jihad frame of mind”;
Supporting jihad movements across the Muslim world through preaching, propaganda, personnel, funding, and technical and operational support;
Making the Palestinian cause a global wedge issue for Muslims;
Adopting the total liberation of Palestine from Israel and the creation of an Islamic state as a keystone in the plan for global Islamic domination;
Instigating a constant campaign to incite hatred by Muslims against Jews and rejecting any discussions of conciliation or coexistence with them;
Actively creating jihad terror cells within Palestine;
Linking the terrorist activities in Palestine with the global terror movement;
Collecting sufficient funds to indefinitely perpetuate and support jihad around the world;
In reading The Project, it should be kept in mind that it was drafted in 1982 when current tensions and terrorist activities in the Middle East were still very nascent. In many respects, The Project is extremely prescient for outlining the bulk of Islamist action, whether by “moderate” Islamist organizations or outright terror groups, over the past two decades.

At present, most of what is publicly known about The Project is the result of Sylvain Besson’s investigative work, including his book and a related article published last October in the Swiss daily, Le Temps, L'islamisme à la conquête du monde (Islamism and the Conquest of the World), profiling his book, which is only available in a French-language edition. At least one Egyptian newspaper, Al-Mussawar, published the entire Arabic text of The Project last November.

In the English-language press, the attention paid to Besson’s revelation of The Project has been almost non-existent. The only mention found in a mainstream media publication in the US has been as a secondary item in an article in the Weekly Standard (February 20, 2006) by Olivier Guitta, The Cartoon Jihad. The most extensive commentary on The Project has been by an American researcher and journalist living in London, Scott Burgess, who has posted his analysis of the document on his blog, The Daily Ablution. Along with his commentary, an English translation of the French text of The Project was serialized in December (Parts I, II, III, IV, V, Conclusion). The complete English translation prepared by Mr. Burgess is presented in its entirety here with his permission.

The lack of public discussion about The Project notwithstanding, the document and the plan it outlines has been the subject of considerable discussion amongst the Western intelligence agencies. One US counterterrorism official who spoke with Besson about The Project, and who is cited in Guitta’s Weekly Standard article, is current White House terrorism czar, Juan Zarate. Calling The Project a Muslim Brotherhood master plan for “spreading their political ideology,” Zarate expressed concerns to Besson because “the Muslim Brotherhood is a group that worries us not because it deals with philosophical or ideological ideas but because it defends the use of violence against civilians.”

One renowned international scholar of Islamist movements who also spoke with Besson, Reuven Paz, talked about The Project in its historical context:

The Project was part of the charter of the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was official established on July 29, 1982. It reflects a vast plan which was revived in the 1960s, with the immigration of Brotherhood intellectuals, principally Syrian and Egyptians, into Europe.

As Paz notes, The Project was drafted by the Muslim Brotherhood as part of its rechartering process in 1982, a time that marks an upswing in its organizational expansion internationally, as well as a turning point in the alternating periods of repression and toleration by the Egyptian government. In 1952, the organization played a critical support role to the Free Officers Movement led by Gamal Abdul Nasser, which overthrew King Faruq, but quickly fell out of favor with the new revolutionary regime because of Nasser’s refusal to follow the Muslim Brotherhood’s call to institute an ideologically committed Islamic state. At various times since the July Revolution in 1952, the Brotherhood has regularly been banned and its leaders killed and imprisoned by Egyptian authorities.

Since it was rechartered in 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood has spread its network across the Middle East, Europe, and even America. At home in Egypt, parliamentary elections in 2005 saw the Muslim Brotherhood winning 20 percent of the available legislative seats, comprising the largest opposition party block. Its Palestinian affiliate, known to the world as HAMAS, recently gained control of the Palestinian Authority after elections secured for them 74 of 132 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Its Syrian branch has historically been the largest organized group opposing the Assad regime, and the organization also has affiliates in Jordan, Sudan, and Iraq. In the US, the Muslim Brotherhood is primarily represented by the Muslim American Society (MAS).

Since its formation, the Muslim Brotherhood has advocated the use of terrorism as a means of advancing its agenda of global Islamic domination. But as the largest popular radical movement in the Islamic world, it has attracted many leading Islamist intellectuals. Included among this group of Muslim Brotherhood intellectuals is Youssef Qaradawi, an Egyptian-born, Qatar-based Islamist cleric.

As one of the leading Muslim Brotherhood spiritual figures and radical Islamic preachers (who has his own weekly program on Al-Jazeera), Qaradawi has been one of the leading apologists of suicide bombings in Israel and terrorism against Western interests in the Middle East. Both Sylvain Besson and Scott Burgess provide extensive comparisons between Qaradawi’s publication, Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase, published in 1990, and The Project, which predates Qaradawi’s Priorities by eight years. They note the striking similarities in the language used and the plans and methods both documents advocate. It is speculated that The Project was either used by Qaradawi as a template for his own work, or that he had a hand in its drafting in 1982. Perhaps coincidentally, Qaradawi was the fourth largest shareholder in the Al-Taqwa Bank of Lugano, the director of which, Youssef Nada, was the individual in whose possession The Project was found. Since 1999, Qaradawi has been banned from entering the US as a result of his connections to terrorist organizations and his outspoken advocacy of terrorism.

For those who have read The Project, what is most troubling is not that Islamists have developed a plan for global dominance; it has been assumed by experts that Islamist organizations and terrorist groups have been operating off an agreed-upon set of general principles, networks and methodology. What is startling is how effectively the Islamist plan for conquest outlined in The Project has been implemented by Muslims in the West for more than two decades. Equally troubling is the ideology that lies behind the plan: inciting hatred and violence against Jewish populations around the world; the deliberate co-opting and subversion of Western public and private institutions; its recommendation of a policy of deliberate escalating confrontation by Muslims living in the West against their neighbors and fellow-citizens; the acceptance of terrorism as a legitimate option for achieving their ends and the inevitable reality of jihad against non-Muslims; and its ultimate goal of forcibly instituting the Islamic rule of the caliphate by shari’a in the West, and eventually the whole world.

If the experience over the past quarter of a century seen in Europe and the US is any indication, the “Islamic researchers” who drafted The Project more than two decades ago must be pleased to see their long-term plan to conquer the West and to see the Green flag of Islam raised over its citizens realized so rapidly, efficiently and completely. If Islamists are equally successful in the years to come, Westerners ought to enjoy their personal and political freedoms while they last.

They just proved my point. This time it only took them six minutes. Zionists forge as a matter of course. False flag ops are their specialty. "They do it, too" is still bunk.

He just proved the point. This time it took him more than six minutes. Rabid anti-Zionists forge as a matter of course. False flag ops are their specialty. "They do it, too" is still bunk.

Israel massacres Palestinian refugees

BY AHMAD NIMER

RAMALLAH — Israel's attack on the Jenin refugee camp will be recorded as one of the bloodiest massacres in the history of the Zionist state.

The scenes of devastation go beyond anything describable in words. Friends of mine who have visited the area in recent days are unable to speak about what they saw — every few sentences they are choked by tears, unable to continue because of the horrors they have seen.

The refugee camp, located near the city of Jenin in the north of the West Bank, housed descendants of Palestinians evicted from their land near Haifa in 1948 by Zionist militias. It was densely packed, with 15,000 residents — 50% of them children — living in an area of around one square kilometer.

The camp barely exists today. For nine days, beginning on April 5, thousands of Israeli soldiers, supported by tanks, helicopter gunships and F16 warplanes, systematically bombarded the area with the clear aim of killing residents and razing the camp.

During the assault residents were trapped in their houses. Electricity and water supplies were cut off, and the camp was sealed off from the outside world. The Israeli army prevented anyone from leaving or entering the camp, including the Red Cross or any other medical services.

With the entire population imprisoned in their homes, hundreds of missiles were fired at houses and buildings in the camp. Bulldozers then systematically moved to demolish houses while residents were trapped inside, burying entire families alive. Many others — babies, the sick and the elderly — died because they had no access to food or medical supplies.

Stories from the survivors tell of unspeakable horrors. A journalist from the English Independent newspaper was told of "a woman with her leg all but ripped off by a helicopter rocket, the mangled remains hanging on by a thread of skin as she slowly bleeds to death; a 10-year-old boy lying dead in the street, his arm blown off and a great hole in his side; a mother shot dead when she ran into the street to scream for help for her dying son."

All those who have visited the camp in recent days speak of one thing — the stench of rotting bodies lying in the streets and under rubble.

Cover up

The Israeli army has tried desperately to cover up its crimes, barring journalists from entering the area and preventing ambulances and the Red Cross from coming to remove the bodies.

Countless survivors recount witnessing Israeli soldiers placing corpses in bags and dumping them in mass graves. The remains of houses were then bulldozed onto these graves and flattened by tanks in an attempt to hide evidence of the massacre.

Hundreds of people are missing, and conservative estimates place the death toll at around 400. Today, one third of the camp has been completely flattened with unknown numbers of corpses lying buried underneath.

The UN envoy to the Middle East, Terje Roed Larsen, usually known for his guarded diplomatic language, after visiting the camp on April 18, could not control his anger, calling the scene "horrifying beyond belief". Demanding immediate access for humanitarian organizations, Larsen stated from the centre of the camp, "Just seeing this area, it looks like there's been an earthquake here, and the stench of death is over many places where we are standing."

The Jenin residents have been made refugees once more. Thousands of men have been taken by the Israeli army to one village near the destroyed camp, while the women and children have been taken to another. The TV broadcasts countless interviews with sobbing parents, unsure where their children are or even if they are alive.

Some eyewitnesses speak of how they saw Israeli soldiers line up groups of men in the centre of the camp and execute them, each by a single bullet to the head. Others speak of seeing tanks moving back and forth over the bodies of people lying injured in the street.

These crimes were not accidental or the actions of undisciplined troops. They were led and directed by the highest echelons of the Israeli government and military. Several days into the attack, Israeli media reported that the local commander had been replaced by the highest-ranking Israeli military officer, chief of staff Lieutenant-General Shaul Mofaz, who personally led the attack from a helicopter hovering over the camp.

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon also spoke afterwards how he had spent considerable time at the military base near the camp, overseeing the attack. Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres even lamented that the massacre could be a problem — because it might damage Israel's image in North America and Europe.

Zionism's criminal record

The crimes committed by the Zionist regime in Jenin are nothing new. They are merely the latest link in an unbroken thread that stretches back to the founding of the Israeli state. In 1947-48, some 400 Palestinian villages were completely destroyed and their populations forcibly evicted by Zionist militias that eventually formed the Israeli army. The refugees that resulted from this expulsion of the indigenous population today live in refugee camps like Jenin.

In a terrible irony, the 54th anniversary of the infamous massacre of civilians by Zionist troops in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in April 1948 was marked while Israeli troops were carrying out the Jenin massacre.

The most common comparison being made today is with the massacres that took place in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla in Lebanon in 1982. These massacres were personally directed by Ariel Sharon, who was Israel's defense minister at the time. Even an inquiry carried out by the Israeli government found Sharon responsible for these massacres.

It is this same war criminal who is directly responsible for the crime in the Jenin refugee camp. It is the racist movement of Zionism, a colonial-settler movement that carried out the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948, which has nurtured people such as Sharon, Peres and the thousands of soldiers who so willingly kill to preserve their apartheid state.

There is hope however that this time the story won't be buried along with the corpses. Countless journalists, human rights organizations and solidarity activists are near the area of the camp, collecting stories and recording what happened from the survivors.

Some brave journalists have made it into the camp itself — despite the fact that it is still under an Israeli army curfew — and they have broadcast images to the world of the rotting corpses and weeping parents. Parliamentarians in Europe have called for an immediate inquiry, and Palestinian organizations have called for forensic experts to make their way to the area in order to help gather evidence.

On April 20, the US and Israel agreed to a UN "fact-finding mission" in Jenin. The US threatened to veto an earlier UN Security Council draft resolution that called for an "investigation". The US resolution, eventually adopted by the council, calls for a mission to "develop accurate information regarding recent events in the Jenin refugee camp".

Initially, Washington's UN ambassador, John Negroponte, said the US wouldn't support any investigation at all, telling the Security Council: "Alleviating the situation in Jenin should be our priority humanitarian objective at this time. Further Security Council action is not the best way to meet this objective."

Sitting trapped in our houses in Palestine we see images of the thousands of people marching on the streets in every country in the world demanding an end to the Israeli occupation. It is these expressions of solidarity which give us hope.

“We as American citizens can actually boycott Mid East oil. And the way you do that is you go to a gas station whose company doesn’t import the oil.”
-Bob Bevelacqua, former U.S. Army Green Beret, August 23, 2005, Fox News Channel.


In December of 2001, an e-mail was widely distributed across the internet calling for a boycott of all gas stations that purchase crude oil from the Middle East*. While the e-mail consisted of much emotionally charged language – understandably so, given the proximity to 9/11 – and while some of the information provided was faulty, the point that was being made was a valid one and should be revisited.

The e-mail began: “Nothing is more frustrating to me than the feeling that every time I fill-up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends. It turns out that some oil companies import a lot of middle eastern oil and others do not import any. I thought it might be interesting for Americans to know which oil companies are the best to buy their gas from.”

The piece then proceeded to list major gasoline companies that import Middle Eastern oil and those that do not or “do not import much.” Included on the list of importers were Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Marathon. As stated in the e-mail, for the period of September 1, 2000 through August 31, 2001, the companies ranged from importing just under 118,000,000 barrels to just under 206,000,000.

Included on the list of non-importers were Citgo, Sunoco, Conoco, Sinclair and Phillips (which merged with Conoco in 2002). BP Amoco made the bottom of the list (as a “not much”) with just over 62,000,000 barrels. [In later versions of the e-mail, further companies would be listed.]

According to the United States Energy Information Administration (EIA), in its ‘Crude Oil Imports From Persian Gulf** 2001’ report, Middle Eastern oil was indeed purchased by all of the companies listed in the e-mail as importers. However, many of the “non-importers” were listed as importers, as well. In fact, the only two that did not make the official government list for 2001 were Sunoco and Sinclair. And Chevron, which was listed on the e-mail as “not much,” made the top three!

But that was then. With the advent of the War on Terrorism, surely the gasoline companies, especially American-based ones, would begin to recognize and work to rectify this all too important matter. Surely something would be done to curb the amount of Mid East oil these companies import. That’s only common sense, but that never happened.

Nearly five years after the tragedy of September 11th, little has changed. The companies that were importing Middle Eastern oil still are, and the companies that weren’t still are not. This is according to the latest information available from the EIA. And it should be noted that, of the companies that are, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon and Shell get crude straight from Saudi Arabia – the same Saudi Arabia that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers – the same Saudi Arabia which gives millions to Hamas – the same Saudi Arabia that actively spreads its radical jihadist/Wahhabist ideology throughout the world, including the United States.

Besides Saudi Arabia, a number of other Middle Eastern nations, where oil is imported from, have dubious track records. Information derived from the U.S. State Department’s ‘22nd annual Report to the Congress on Voting Practices at the United Nations,’ underscores the antipathy towards the United States these nations harbor. The following are facts found within the report:

· Algeria (where Citgo and Shell get crude oil from), in 2004, out of 79 possible U.N. votes, voted against the United States 63 times.

· Iraq (BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon and Shell) voted against the U.S. 51 times [and that was even after liberation].

· Kuwait (ExxonMobil and Marathon) voted against the U.S. 63 times.

· Libya (Shell) voted against the U.S. 65 times.

· Oman (BP and ConocoPhillips) voted against the U.S. 64 times.

· Tunisia (Shell) voted against the U.S. 63 times.

On average these countries voted against the United States, in the year 2004, nearly 78 percent of the time. In the case of Saudi Arabia, it was 81 percent against.

The countries that have been discussed here are more in line ideologically with Iran, which shouts “Death to America,” than they are with the United States. In fact, five of the countries mentioned, along with Iran, make up the majority of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which sets the price of crude for the rest of the world, which tells us how much more money we have to spend on gas any given day.

In October of 1973, our dependence on Mid East oil brought us an embargo from the Arab world. The Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC), which, at the time, consisted of the Arab members of OPEC plus Bahrain, Egypt and Syria, called for an oil embargo against the West to coincide with the war they were preparing for Israel. This had a devastating effect on the economy, as America was held hostage to the whim of our “friends.” Why wait for a repeat performance, embargo or otherwise?

Of course, this money, at least in part, goes to fund our terrorist enemies, as well, both locally and abroad. It is this never-ending cycle – gasoline for money, money for terrorism – that could ultimately lead to our undoing, if nothing is done to stop it. And this problem is multiplied every second of the day, as we sink more and more of our hard earned dollars into our gas tanks. The question we all have to ask ourselves, when we go to the pumps, is are we willing to fund our own demise? And if we’re not, then we have to ask ourselves are we willing to work towards a solution to the problem.

Terror-Free Oil Initiative

The American Center for Democracy (ACD) has developed a new program called the Terror-Free Oil Initiative (TFOI). The purpose of the program is twofold: 1. to cut off the flow of money that goes to terrorists and 2. to decrease America’s dependency on foreign oil. As stated on the ACD website, “This project is dedicated to encouraging Americans to buy only gasoline that originated from countries that do not export or finance terrorism.”

While gasoline companies won’t shift their loyalties from Mid East oil overnight, Americans have to start somewhere. Americans must, once and for all, take a stand and support companies like Sunoco and Sinclair that don’t get their crude from ‘the crude.’

So which gas station will you fill up at?

Notes:


**Persian Gulf, as used in this article, includes Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates.

What hypocrisy!

Israelis Forbid War Crimes Investigation in Jenin
The nation founded on exploitation of a martyr complex over war crimes, now blocks investigation of its own crimes against humanity

Compiled by Michael A. Hoffman II

Worried that a UN investigation could form the basis for war crimes prosecutions against Israeli soldiers, the Israeli government announced April 30, 2002 that it wouldn't allow a U.N. investigation in Jenin, a Palestinian refugee camp that is overseen by UN agencies, within occupied territory that by treaty is controlled by the governing Palestinian Authority. Nonetheless, the Israeli security Cabinet--led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon--voted against letting the investigation proceed.

The UN investigators were to be led by former Finnish President Martti Ahtisaari. The 20-member UN commission was charged with assessing the civilian death toll from the April 2002 Israeli attack on Jenin, where hundreds of civilians were killed during three weeks of assaults by jets, helicopters and bulldozers in a "zone" closed to the media by the Israeli army.

"There are lots of accusations, lots of rumors, and we don't know what is true and what is not, and I really thought it was in everyone's interest to clarify this matter as soon as possible," said UN Secretary General Koffi Annan.

John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the world body, said the United States is opposed to the Jenin war crimes inquiry. Though the United States was the original sponsor of the Security Council resolution endorsing the Jenin investigation, American diplomats had come to view the UN inquiry as "a divisive and potentially dangerous distraction."

From the Israeli viewpoint, cancellation of the U.N. investigation would be preferable to an investigation it feared would reveal the extent of the war crimes committed by Israeli forces while the media and aid groups were banned from the area.

"Whatever penalty Israel will pay (in terms of lost prestige) is less than the cost of a report that is one-sided and uses terms such as 'war crimes," said Gerald Steinberg, a political scientist at Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv.

Annan sent a letter to the Israeli government April 27 assuring the Israelis that their soldiers and others interviewed by the fact-finding team would be guaranteed anonymity, and that there would be no transcripts that might be used in war crimes prosecutions.

In recent weeks the Israelis also refused entry into Jenin by a team of U.N. human rights investigators led by former Irish President Mary Robinson, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, and Felipe Gonzalez, a former Spanish prime minister.

The Israeli cabinet decision reflected a consensus among Israelis that the United Nations is biased against the Jewish state and that any U.N. inquiry into war crimes in the Jenin camp would inevitably end badly for Israeli public relations and Israel's image. One senior Foreign Ministry official said Israel had been wary of the war crimes investigation from the start. "We have every right in the world to be extremely suspicious about anything that comes out of the U.N.," said the diplomat. "We may be paranoid, but we have good reason to be."

As the U.N. undersecretary-general for political affairs, Kieran Prendergast, noted to the council April 30, the investigation was originally endorsed "on the basis of assurances of full Israeli cooperation" from the Israeli foreign and defense ministers. But when the UN named a team dominated by specialists in international law and war crimes, the Israelis retracted their promise of support. Israeli officials were also outraged by the remarks of Terje Roed-Larsen, the U.N. envoy to the Middle East, who described "horrifying scenes of human suffering" at the Jenin camp. Prendergast said that "with every passing day it becomes more difficult to determine what took place on the ground in Jenin."

In Jerusalem, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said he feared that the UN Security Council would "interpret our refusal as if we were scared that they might discover something." In an interview with Israeli radio, Peres said he told Secretary of State Colin Powell by telephone on April 29: "Our army is still fighting....What do you want, for us to put them on trial? Tell our soldiers that they should show up [to testify] with a lawyer?' We have no intention of letting [Israeli] soldiers be investigated or even give testimony..."

Saeb Erekat, a Palestinian official said, "I think this is equivalent to giving Sharon the license to do it again, to kill again and to commit slaughter again." On April 30, the group Physicians for Human Rights issued a preliminary forensic assessment of Jenin's dead and wounded, referring to the deliberate targeting of Palestinians civilians and blocked access to medical care.

Sharon, who was found by an Israeli commission to have been "indirectly responsible" for a 1982 massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp, took a defiant tone. To him and other senior Israeli officials, the United Nations inquiry is a case of selective investigation, to be followed by spurious prosecution. "No attempt to tarnish our name or to put us on trial before the world will succeed," Sharon said.

The Israelis sought to have American Major-General William Nash, of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), appointed to head the U.N. probe. The position of the CFR is that the Israelis should have been allowed to determine the make-up of the commission: "There should have been more consultation with the host government (Israel) before appointing the members," said David Philips, Nash's deputy at the CFR. "The composition of the initial group created the impression that the mission was being politicized."

Numerous war crimes investigations were conducted in Germany, Poland and Japanese colonies after World War Two, and more recently in the Balkans with regard to ethnic cleansing; and in Rwanda where genocide was determined to have been committed. War crimes investigations held in Germany and Japan after World War II set the standard for such proceedings, establishing the principle that soldiers must be held responsible for atrocities committed during war. Since then, a series of Geneva conventions have defined violations in three categories:

WAR CRIMES, such as mistreatment of prisoners and targeting civilians.

CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, such as deportation and murder of civilian populations, and racial, ethnic and political persecution.

GENOCIDE, defined as "deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Several Western governments have also established permanent tribunals for the investigation of elderly persons, many of them refugees from Communism, accused of having committed war crimes against Jews 60 years ago. For example, in the US, the Office of Special Investigation (OSI), was established in 1979 as part of the Department of Justice to investigate "war criminals living in the United States."

The OSI drove Andrije Artukovic, former minister of the interior of Croatia back to Communist Yugoslavia. The OSI deported Catholic Bishop Valerian Trifa back to Communist Romania. Arthur Rudolph, the distinguished NASA rocket scientist, was also investigated and driven out of the US as a "war criminal." In the cases of Alfred Deutscher and Michael Popczuk, the men committed suicide after being targeted by the OSI.

Claims that these war crimes investigations were politicized and tainted by pro-Communist or Zionist bias were dismissed out of hand as an obstruction of human rights and humanitarian and international law.

The traditions about war crimes committed against Jews is central to the maintenance of the Israeli state, a sly tool for obtaining Palestinian land and for portraying a nuclear power with a penchant for pulverizing dark-skinned civilians as a "victim of intolerance." Billions of dollars have been paid by Europeans--and continue to be paid-- to the Israeli government and its agencies as "war crimes reparations."

The Israelis, however, regard themselves as immune from international prosecution for war crimes or responsibility for reparations to Palestinians. On April 28, 2002 the Associated Press reported Foreign Minister Shimon Peres as declaring, "Israel won't sit in the place of the accused. Israel will sit in the place of the accuser."

The AP dispatch added that the Israeli foreign minister described charges of Israeli war crimes in Jenin as,"baseless blame, almost a blood libel, on Israel."

Very few Americans would support "incursions" into the predominately black ghetto of Los Angeles by tanks, helicopter gunships, D-9 armored bulldozers and F-16 jet fighters if a minority of African-Americans were planting suicide bombs in white areas. If the US military were to bulldoze and bomb black ghettos into a moonscape of rubble, with whole families buried beneath the wreckage, as collective punishment of all blacks for the actions of a few terrorists, most Americans would revolt at the injustice and virtual genocide such attacks would represent.

But so warped is the distorting prism of Jewish supremacy in the American media, that the monstrous Israeli policy of collective punishment of the entire Palestinian people is repeatedly upheld by Congress and the White House, in defiance of the Geneva Convention and the definition of war crimes imposed by the Americans themselves after WWII.

The current propaganda line describes a war against the Palestinian people in terms of a struggle against "terrorists," with the racist implication that all Palestinian people are terrorists, men, women and children. A similar racist innuendo was maintained by the American media with regard to the Vietnamese people during the early days of the American war in Southeast Asia.



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Iraq hits at UN for hypocrisy on Israel

"The Iraqi deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, accused the United Nations of double standards yesterday for imposing sanctions on Baghdad for eleven years, but failing to take any action against Israel for blocking a fact-finding inquiry into military action at the Jenin refugee camp. 'The secretary general cannot challenge America and its ally Israel,' Mr Aziz said in Baghdad..." The Guardian (U.K.), May 2, 2002.



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Milosevic's Deputy Surrenders to War Crimes Court

THE HAGUE - Nikola Sainovic, Slobodan Milosevic's deputy premier, joined his former leader behind bars in The Hague on May 2, 2002 to face charges of waging a 1999 terror campaign against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. --Reuters, May 2, 2002.



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Human Rights Watch: Israeli soldiers "committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions"

JENIN REFUGEE CAMP, West Bank, May 2 - A day after Israeli opposition killed plans for a United Nations fact-finding mission into the Israeli Army's disputed attack on this refugee camp, a weeklong investigation by an American rights group found that... Israeli forces used civilians to walk protectively in front of them throughout the incursion; destroyed more houses than needed for "any conceivable military purpose"; and blocked the passage of ambulances and relief groups to the camp for 11 days. The document, based on more than 100 interviews and written by Human Rights Watch, a group that is generally considered fair-minded, concluded that those actions, among others, constituted "strong prima facie evidence" that Israeli soldiers "committed grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, or war crimes" and called for further investigation by Israeli or international bodies. The Human Rights Watch senior researcher who led the project, Peter Bouckaert, said: "We have no doubt that extremely serious violations of the laws of war were committed. The evidence is certainly strong enough to warrant a war crimes investigation." Yet the inquiry may well be the last of its kind - especially since Secretary General Kofi Annan's decision May 1 to disband the (UN) fact-finding team. --N.Y. Times, May 3, 2002.



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israeli holocaust against arabs / archives / news / bookstore

Really good link
http://www.pnic.gov.ps/arabic/quds/eng/general%20report/quds_e_infring1.html

That was a great link!
Here's some interesting info that you don't get in the pro-israel mainstream media:


The Struggle to Liberate Palestine

Zionist mythology has it that the land of Palestine, whilst it may have been inhabited by a few Arab nomads, was mostly desert. One of the great feats of Zionist enterprise, it is claimed, has been to turn that desert green. Israeli exports of grapes and oranges around the world, grown on the kibbutzim, are proof indeed, if proof be needed.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Jaffa Orange which has come to symbolise Israeli agricultural endeavour actually confirms the opposite: that the orange groves and the vineyards were stolen from the Palestinian peasants who had tilled the soil for centuries. The orange groves of Jaffa go back at least until the beginning of the eighteenth century. By 1880, when the orange groves were entirely in Arab hands, they included 765,000 trees. Thirty million oranges were harvested there and many were exported to Europe. [1]

The Palestinian peasantry had a history – and a proud one. They resented the Zionist interloper from the beginning. This is not to say they resented a Jewish presence. Small Jewish communities were scattered throughout the Arab countries and had been for centuries. The resentment started when Britain offered “protection” to the Jewish minority in the early nineteenth century as a way of obtaining a toehold inside the Ottoman Empire – the so-called “Eastern Question”. [2] For the Zionist interlopers were seen for what they were – unwelcome visitors imposed on the Palestinians by their new rulers, the British Empire.

There were periodic clashes both between Palestinians and Zionists and Palestinians and the British authorities throughout the 1920s. The Palestinians resented the restriction of their rights both from British rule and from the continuous expansion of the Zionist settlements at Palestinian expense. Violence flared continuously. If the Jewish rate of immigration of the 1920s were to continue, then in 15 or 20 years, the Palestinians would soon have been a minority in their own land. Particularly fierce fighting erupted between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem in 1929 leaving over a hundred Arabs and a hundred Jews dead. Most of the Arabs were killed by British soldiers.

But, without doubt, the most important single event which occurred during the period of the British Mandate was the Palestinian General Strike in 1936.

This was nothing less than a revolt against British rule. The main slogan was “Independence for Palestine!” And the revolt involved the entire Palestinian nation. Every town, city and village had some form of organisation supporting the strike. Arab workers went on strike. Arab shops, businesses and markets closed down. Transport and communication ground to a halt.

The British authorities were taken aback. They made a series of mass arrests of local leaders, but the strike deepened. In Jaffa, where the strike was rock-solid, its organising centre was the ancient walled city. The British army sealed off the quarter and used a tactic that was gleefully borrowed later by the Zionists, the dynamiting of hundreds of houses.

By June the British High Commissioner reported that Palestine was in “a state of incipient revolution”. There was, he reported, “little control of lawless elements outside principal towns, main roads and railways”. [3] More than 2,500 Palestinians had been arrested. Over a thousand had been killed.

In July, backed by the Zionists, the British placed Palestine under martial law and rushed more troops out from Britain. More than 20,000 British soldiers now patrolled Palestine. Ships arrived loaded with tanks and machine-guns. The Royal Air Force began strafing the countryside. The British formed Zionist settlers into “night squads” to attack Palestinian villages. The Haganah, the Zionist army, were given their first taste of war.

The British approached King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan and King Faisal of Iraq to intervene. Despite demonstration against the kings’ interference, the tactic worked. The Palestinian leadership was drawn from the same kind of feudal strata as the kings – in particular the Mufti, the religious leader of Jerusalem. They had no stomach for a full-scale national war of independence.

As so often in the history of the Palestinian revolution, its turning points, victories or defeats, have been commemorated in poetry. The Palestinian poet Abu Salma wrote of the kings:

Shame to such kings, if kings are so low.
By God, their crowns are not fit to sole shoes.
We are the ones who will protect our homeland and heal its wounds. [4]


But the struggle was by no means over. Although the general strike ended (it had lasted six months, the longest general strike anywhere), the mood of resistance persisted. It was given added impetus by the British announcement in 1937 that Palestine would be partitioned under British control.

By the summer of 1937 guerrilla warfare had spread to the hills and rebellion engulfed most of the country. Most of the fighters were peasants. The British began arresting anyone in town wearing a keffiyah, the traditional peasant scarf. The level of unrest in the urban areas was such that a British general reported that “civil administration and control of the country was, to all practical purposes, non-existent.” [5]

In a four-month period the British dynamited 5,000 houses, added a thousand more prisoners to the 3,000 already in jail, and executed 148 prisoners in Acre prison alone.

This was the high point in the Palestinian struggle to throw British imperialism out of their country. It also underlined in blood how the Zionist settlement was an extension of the British Empire. The Zionists fought alongside the British in efforts to break the Palestinian will.

But this was not ultimately a struggle between “Arabs” and “Jews”. It was a struggle by the British to keep their grip on a strategically crucial centre of the Middle East. As the Second World War approached the British authorities were compelled to make temporary concessions to the Palestinians. A ceiling was imposed on Jewish immigration and vague pledges were made about Palestinian independence. Cynical as such concessions were, they were a tribute to the Palestinian struggle, as indeed was the simple fact that no less than one-third of all the troops of the British Empire had been needed to “restore order” in Palestine.

By 1939 20,000 Palestinians had been killed or wounded and thousands jailed or deported. Many of the best fighters and organised workers had been shot. The British did finally break the back of the movement – but its spirit lived on. 1936 would become a symbol of the Palestinian revolution.

The struggle was renewed after the Second World War on an entirely different plane. Now the USA had a vested interest in promoting Zionist territorial ambitions. The British were running scared and the Arab states would not support the Palestinians. The Zionists could mobilise world public opinion – and, more specifically, funds for arms – because of the shock of the Holocaust. America, which could easily have absorbed the Holocaust survivors, refused. Instead it recognised, as the British had recognised fifty years earlier, the advantages of transforming the tragic victims of European anti-semitism into aggressive defenders of Western imperialist interests in Arab lands. America’s doors remained firmly locked.

The Palestinians were left isolated and their sad exodus began.

Ghassan Kanafani, an exiled Palestinian writer, described the flight of his family from Jaffa in a story titled The Land of Sad Oranges. He recalled:

the long queues of lorries, leaving the land of oranges far behind and spreading out over the winding roads of Lebanon. Then I began to weep, howling with tears. As for my mother, she eyed the oranges silently and all the orange trees my father had left behind to the Jews were reflected in his eyes ... and glistened through the tears he could not check ... We arrived in Sidon that afternoon, we were homeless. [6]

The destruction of Palestine and the forcible expulsion of Palestinians quickly became the “refugee problem” in the eyes of the West. Stories of the “refugees” starving to death finally hit the headlines of the Western press. The needs of three-quarters of a million displaced people – 460,000 in Jordan, 200,000 in Gaza, 100,000 in Lebanon, 85,000 in Syria – were staggering. These Arab countries were desperately poor and the Arab cities were already swollen with people looking for work. Despite Zionist propaganda, it was hardly the responsibility of the Arab countries to absorb “the refugees”.

Finally in 1949 the United Nations made a gesture. It set up the United Nations Relief and Works Administration (UNRWA) to take over the running of sixty refugee camps from voluntary agencies. It kept people alive, but only just. Refugees who qualified for aid received roughly 37 dollars a year. Identification cards branded each person as a permanent refugee.

But the refugee status and the humiliation at the hands of the Zionists could not erase the memory of revolt that lingered on. As the Palestinian poet Fawaz Turki has written:

The people outside the camps (not to mention the Western tourists with their blessed sympathy ...) seeing our tattered rags hanging on us like white flags of surrender ... did not know what we had. A feeling inside us. Growing. Hope. [7]

In makeshift classrooms teachers encountered the most eager students “like ones possessed”. [8] Worn newspapers and leaflets telling of resistance to Israel were passed from tent to tent. Palestinians were preparing for one thing only – to return home. Life Magazine reported in 1951:

The refugees don’t want to be compensated for their lost lands. They want to go home ... “I will never change this idea,” says Said Kewash, a lean-faced man who comes from Mayroon, near the Lebanese border (inside Israel). Maud Saleem agrees. He says he has the key to his home in his pocket and he has told his son that if he dies, the key is to buried with him. [8]

A year earlier, 25,000 refugees had gone on hunger strike against UNRWA, saying they would rather starve than settle outside Palestine.

Where Palestinians had settled in Arab cities they joined in the growing Arab radical nationalist movements which were organising demonstrations against US involvement in the Middle East. Hatred for the puppet Arab leaders, such as King Abdullah, who had collaborated with Israel, grew as their true role in 1948 and afterwards was exposed. There were demonstrations against Abdullah in Jordan in 1951. In the same year a Palestinian tailor shot and killed him.

Throughout the 1950s Arab national consciousness grew and developed. British and French imperialism met defeat after defeat at the hands of mass-based armed national liberation movements throughout Africa and Asia. The mood spread like wildfire through the Arab countries of the Middle East, which, though nominally independent, were governed by feudal puppets of the West. The fate of Mossadeq in Iran in 1951 exposed the real face of US foreign policy for the region. American backing for Israel was identified as a further example of the US mailed fist.

The most important expression of the new independent Arab nationalism was Egypt, the most populated country in the Middle East and traditionally the country where radical and left-wing ideas were most widespread. In 1952 a radical army officer, Nasser, had seized power and toppled the feudal monarch. He made fierce speeches attacking the West and Israel. When in 1956 he nationalised the Suez Canal, he became the symbol of anti-imperialism throughout the region. The whole area was a tinderbox, with civil war erupting in Lebanon and British paratroopers flying to Amman, the capital of Jordan, to prop up King Hussein, Abdullah’s heir and grandson.

But Nasser’s defeat by Israel in the 1956 war set limits on his radical nationalism as repeated attempts to unite the Arab world behind his leadership failed. And although Nasser had become too the symbol of Palestinian resistance to Zionism, his repeated calls for unremitting war against the Zionist foe began to sound more and more hollow.

The Palestinians certainly appreciated that they were the victims of Western imperialism and saw their struggle as part of the wider Arab national revolution. But they came to question whether reliance on other Arab leaders would, in the end, bring salvation.

“Self-reliance” became the watchword as a new secret magazine, Falasteen, the voice of Fatah (“victory” in Arabic), was passed around the refugee camps and the Palestinian slums in Arab cities. Fawaz Turki has described the new mood:

At home there were tense scenes where I would argue with my father ... or in desperation rip Nasser’s picture off the wall and spit on it. I did not give the unhappy man the chance to hold on to that symbol of hope ... [9]

The 15 April 1963 edition of Falasteen summed up the new position:

The Palestinian alone is determined to refuse all colonialist plans . . . He is firmly convinced that armed struggle is the one and only means for the return to Palestine ... He refuses to allow the Arab governments to represent him in their lethargy, diplomacy and defeatism. As soon as he is able to tear away the fetters with which they had bound him he shall return to being what he was, a fedayeen [fighter]. [10]

Fatah became the largest of several armed guerrilla organisations. They recruited in the refugee camps and in the Arab cities. There was no shortage of volunteers as the new mood for independent armed struggle against Israel gripped the entire dispersed Palestinian nation. The political ideas were a confusing brew of Marx and Lenin and Mao, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh. Probably the idea of “Peoples War”, an idea most associated with Mao in China, Che in Cuba and Ho in Vietnam was the most powerful.

Nasser and the other Arab leaders, worried that they would lose control of the new Palestinian movement, called a summit meeting in 1964. They formed a new organisation, the Palestine Liberation Organisation, to control the guerrilla groups. Nevertheless this conservative influence could not hold back the new movement. On 1 January 1965 a Fatah armed unit launched its first attack on Israel.

The Arab refugee was becoming a Palestinian once again. For years the Zionists tried to deny it. As late as 1969 Golda Meir told The Times newspaper:

There were no such things as Palestinians. It was not as though there were a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. [11]

But the Palestinian guerrilla struggle shattered this mythology. After the second catastrophic defeat of the Arab countries at the hands of Israel in 1967 and the seizure of yet more Arab land, estimated at three times the size of Israel’s pre-1967 borders, the Palestinian armed struggle became the spearhead that transformed Palestinian awareness. For the first time the guerrilla organisations established mass support. The original leadership imposed on the Palestine Liberation Organisation was shaken off and the Fedayeen organisations took it over. By the 1970s the entire world had heard of the Palestinians. The Zionists could no longer pretend they did not exist.

In March 1968, 200 Palestinian guerrillas fought a twelve-hour battle against the Israeli army at the small Jordanian town of Karameh. Overnight the Fedayeen became heroes throughout the Arab world. Pictures of burned-out Israeli tanks appeared in the Arab press. Even King Hussein was forced to declare: “We are all fedayeen now!” [12] The guerrilla groups blossomed as fresh recruits poured in. But the Jordanian king’s solidarity they could have done without ...

Before Hussein’s eyes, the seeds of a new society were sprouting and threatening his rule. Jordanian officials watched as goods “For the Palestinian Nation” arrived in Amman. Aid from liberation movements such as that in Vietnam flowed into Jordan. In Amman, the guerrillas maintained their own military checkpoints, newspapers and offices.

Hussein knew that the Palestinians would like to see him overthrown. After all, the British had artificially carved Jordan from historic Palestine after the First World War and his grandfather had annexed the West Bank in 1948. Most of Jordan’s population were Palestinian.

In November 1968 Hussein’s army opened fire on Palestinian offices in Amman and on three refugee camps. Several camp-dwellers were killed but the fedayeen repulsed the attack. Nasser in Egypt refused to condemn Hussein, claiming that he could not violate Jordanian “sovereignty”.

The incident and the role of the Arab states sparked a debate amongst the guerrilla organisations on the role of Arab governments in the Palestinian struggle. Fatah, the largest group, argued that the revolution could not publicly challenge the internal structure of the Arab states without losing its base of operations against Israel. The two smaller and more left-wing organisations, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and the Democratic Front (DFLP), argued that they had no choice but to challenge the Arab regimes (though the PFLP fudged the question of relations with progressive’ Arab regimes). Fatah, effectively, won the argument but the debate anticipated the major flaw in PLO strategy which would haunt it for the next fifteen years.

Meanwhile Hussein was preparing to smash the Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan. Nasser had already stabbed the Palestinians in the back by agreeing to the American “Rogers Plan”, which would give Egypt back territory it had lost to Israel in the 1967 war, in return for Egyptian recognition of Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

Then in September 1970 Hussein launched an all-out attack on the Palestinians. With much better weapons and dropping US-manufactured napalm from the skies, Hussein was able to subdue them. Not for the first time, the Palestinians found themselves at war with an Arab government.

Hussein was victorious but at a terrible price. Thousands of Palestinians were killed in the fighting, which dragged on for over a year. [13] Although Hussein destroyed their base in Jordan he by no means destroyed their organisation. But the scars would go very deep.

A new desperation penetrated the thinking of many of the young Palestinians. The range of forces marshalled against them encouraged the belief that even more extreme and even more heroic military actions would be necessary. Many Palestinians named the month of Hussein’s attack “Black September”. And a few formed a new organisation of that name dedicated to revenge – whatever the price. Assassinations, hijackings and hostage-taking became their hallmark.

While many of their actions may have done little to further the cause of Palestine and, indeed, contributed to the labelling of the Palestinians as “Terrorists” in the West, the fact remained that most Palestinians understood only too well what motivated the Black September group. They understood, too, that the scale of “terror” used by Palestinians could never match the terror used by the Zionists to hijack their entire country.

The Palestinian movement appeared to receive a massive boost from the oil boycott of 1973. The boycott shook the West and forced the Americans to again go through the motions of searching for a “peace settlement”. In 1974 Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO, made his famous debut at the United Nations with a gun in one hand and an olive branch in the other. But this, while it may have symbolised world-wide recognition of the Palestinian case, by no means led to any concessions. The American “peace process” led to the Camp David Accords which, by bringing Egypt much closer to Israel, considerably weakened the Palestinians yet further.

Meanwhile the real battleground had switched to the Lebanon. The story of the Lebanon is complex, but what concerns us here is how the Palestinians were again betrayed by an Arab power – this time Syria’s leader, Assad. Syria was by now presenting itself as the leader of radical Arab nationalism. In addition, Syria had past historical claims on the land of Lebanon and saw itself as the power-broker there.

In 1975 civil war raged between the Christian rightist forces, who had traditionally ruled Lebanon and the Lebanese Moslem Left.

The Palestinian guerrilla movement had moved its base to Lebanon in the early 1970s after Black September. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had lived in Lebanon since their expulsion from Israel – so it was a natural base. At first the Palestinians were not fully involved in the fighting. But soon they were forced to be.

A combination of the Lebanese left and the Palestinians proved very powerful. So powerful in fact that there was the prospect, as in Jordan six years earlier, of the Palestinians actually being part of a takeover of the country. Then in June 1976 Assad intervened. Tens of thousands of Syrian troops and hundreds of tanks poured across the border. Assad was no more willing to countenance a takeover in Lebanon than Hussein had been in Jordan.

The key battle was for the Palestinian camp at Tal al Zaatar. For 53 days the Syrian army joined the Christian Right in laying siege to the camp. [14] Yet again thousands of Palestinians were killed. “Black June” would join Black September as a further deadly confirmation that, in the end, the Arab regimes, Right or “Left”, would leave the Palestinians to fight alone, or worse would turn on them ferociously if they became too strong.

By 1982 Lebanon had become the arena for Israel’s attempt to smash the Palestinians once and for all. At no time during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon did a single Arab government provide sustained military assistance to the PLO.

One might be led to think that if international law enforcement authorities and Western intelligence agencies had discovered a twenty-year old document revealing a top-secret plan developed by the oldest Islamist organization with one of the most extensive terror networks in the world to launch a program of “cultural invasion” and eventual conquest of the West that virtually mirrors the tactics used by Islamists for more than two decades, that such news would scream from headlines published on the front pages and above the fold of the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Le Monde, Bild, and La Repubblica.

If that’s what you might think, you would be wrong.

In fact, such a document was recovered in a raid by Swiss authorities in November 2001, two months after the horror of 9/11. Since that time information about this document, known in counterterrorism circles as “The Project”, and discussion regarding its content has been limited to the top-secret world of Western intelligence communities. Only through the work of an intrepid Swiss journalist, Sylvain Besson of Le Temps, and his book published in October 2005 in France, La conquête de l'Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (The Conquest of the West: The Islamists' Secret Project), has information regarding The Project finally been made public. One Western official cited by Besson has described The Project as “a totalitarian ideology of infiltration which represents, in the end, the greatest danger for European societies.”


Now FrontPage readers will be the first to be able to read the complete English translation of The Project.

What Western intelligence authorities know about The Project begins with the raid of a luxurious villa in Campione, Switzerland on November 7, 2001. The target of the raid was Youssef Nada, director of the Al-Taqwa Bank of Lugano, who has had active association with the Muslim Brotherhood for more than 50 years and who admitted to being one of the organization’s international leaders. The Muslim Brotherhood, regarded as the oldest and one of the most important Islamist movements in the world, was founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928 and dedicated to the credo, “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

The raid was conducted by Swiss law enforcement at the request of the White House in the initial crackdown on terrorist finances in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. US and Swiss investigators had been looking at Al-Taqwa’s involvement in money laundering and funding a wide range of Islamic terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, HAMAS (the Palestinian affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood), the Algerian GIA, and the Tunisian Ennahdah.

Included in the documents seized during the raid of Nada’s Swiss villa was a 14-page plan written in Arabic and dated December 1, 1982, which outlines a 12-point strategy to “establish an Islamic government on earth” – identified as The Project. According to testimony given to Swiss authorities by Nada, the unsigned document was prepared by “Islamic researchers” associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.

What makes The Project so different from the standard “Death of America! Death to Israel!” and “Establish the global caliphate!” Islamist rhetoric is that it represents a flexible, multi-phased, long-term approach to the “cultural invasion” of the West. Calling for the utilization of various tactics, ranging from immigration, infiltration, surveillance, propaganda, protest, deception, political legitimacy and terrorism, The Project has served for more than two decades as the Muslim Brotherhood “master plan”. As can be seen in a number of examples throughout Europe – including the political recognition of parallel Islamist government organizations in Sweden, the recent “cartoon” jihad in Denmark, the Parisian car-burning intifada last November, and the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London – the plan outlined in The Project has been overwhelmingly successful.

Rather than focusing on terrorism as the sole method of group action, as is the case with Al-Qaeda, in perfect postmodern fashion the use of terror falls into a multiplicity of options available to progressively infiltrate, confront, and eventually establish Islamic domination over the West. The following tactics and techniques are among the many recommendations made in The Project:

Networking and coordinating actions between likeminded Islamist organizations;
Avoiding open alliances with known terrorist organizations and individuals to maintain the appearance of “moderation”;
Infiltrating and taking over existing Muslim organizations to realign them towards the Muslim Brotherhood’s collective goals;
Using deception to mask the intended goals of Islamist actions, as long as it doesn’t conflict with shari’a law;
Avoiding social conflicts with Westerners locally, nationally or globally, that might damage the long-term ability to expand the Islamist powerbase in the West or provoke a lash back against Muslims;
Establishing financial networks to fund the work of conversion of the West, including the support of full-time administrators and workers;
Conducting surveillance, obtaining data, and establishing collection and data storage capabilities;
Putting into place a watchdog system for monitoring Western media to warn Muslims of “international plots fomented against them”;
Cultivating an Islamist intellectual community, including the establishment of think-tanks and advocacy groups, and publishing “academic” studies, to legitimize Islamist positions and to chronicle the history of Islamist movements;
Developing a comprehensive 100-year plan to advance Islamist ideology throughout the world;
Balancing international objectives with local flexibility;
Building extensive social networks of schools, hospitals and charitable organizations dedicated to Islamist ideals so that contact with the movement for Muslims in the West is constant;
Involving ideologically committed Muslims in democratically-elected institutions on all levels in the West, including government, NGOs, private organizations and labor unions;
Instrumentally using existing Western institutions until they can be converted and put into service of Islam;
Drafting Islamic constitutions, laws and policies for eventual implementation;
Avoiding conflict within the Islamist movements on all levels, including the development of processes for conflict resolution;
Instituting alliances with Western “progressive” organizations that share similar goals;
Creating autonomous “security forces” to protect Muslims in the West;
Inflaming violence and keeping Muslims living in the West “in a jihad frame of mind”;
Supporting jihad movements across the Muslim world through preaching, propaganda, personnel, funding, and technical and operational support;
Making the Palestinian cause a global wedge issue for Muslims;
Adopting the total liberation of Palestine from Israel and the creation of an Islamic state as a keystone in the plan for global Islamic domination;
Instigating a constant campaign to incite hatred by Muslims against Jews and rejecting any discussions of conciliation or coexistence with them;
Actively creating jihad terror cells within Palestine;
Linking the terrorist activities in Palestine with the global terror movement;
Collecting sufficient funds to indefinitely perpetuate and support jihad around the world;
In reading The Project, it should be kept in mind that it was drafted in 1982 when current tensions and terrorist activities in the Middle East were still very nascent. In many respects, The Project is extremely prescient for outlining the bulk of Islamist action, whether by “moderate” Islamist organizations or outright terror groups, over the past two decades.

At present, most of what is publicly known about The Project is the result of Sylvain Besson’s investigative work, including his book and a related article published last October in the Swiss daily, Le Temps, L'islamisme à la conquête du monde (Islamism and the Conquest of the World), profiling his book, which is only available in a French-language edition. At least one Egyptian newspaper, Al-Mussawar, published the entire Arabic text of The Project last November.

In the English-language press, the attention paid to Besson’s revelation of The Project has been almost non-existent. The only mention found in a mainstream media publication in the US has been as a secondary item in an article in the Weekly Standard (February 20, 2006) by Olivier Guitta, The Cartoon Jihad. The most extensive commentary on The Project has been by an American researcher and journalist living in London, Scott Burgess, who has posted his analysis of the document on his blog, The Daily Ablution. Along with his commentary, an English translation of the French text of The Project was serialized in December (Parts I, II, III, IV, V, Conclusion). The complete English translation prepared by Mr. Burgess is presented in its entirety here with his permission.

The lack of public discussion about The Project notwithstanding, the document and the plan it outlines has been the subject of considerable discussion amongst the Western intelligence agencies. One US counterterrorism official who spoke with Besson about The Project, and who is cited in Guitta’s Weekly Standard article, is current White House terrorism czar, Juan Zarate. Calling The Project a Muslim Brotherhood master plan for “spreading their political ideology,” Zarate expressed concerns to Besson because “the Muslim Brotherhood is a group that worries us not because it deals with philosophical or ideological ideas but because it defends the use of violence against civilians.”

One renowned international scholar of Islamist movements who also spoke with Besson, Reuven Paz, talked about The Project in its historical context:

The Project was part of the charter of the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was official established on July 29, 1982. It reflects a vast plan which was revived in the 1960s, with the immigration of Brotherhood intellectuals, principally Syrian and Egyptians, into Europe.

As Paz notes, The Project was drafted by the Muslim Brotherhood as part of its rechartering process in 1982, a time that marks an upswing in its organizational expansion internationally, as well as a turning point in the alternating periods of repression and toleration by the Egyptian government. In 1952, the organization played a critical support role to the Free Officers Movement led by Gamal Abdul Nasser, which overthrew King Faruq, but quickly fell out of favor with the new revolutionary regime because of Nasser’s refusal to follow the Muslim Brotherhood’s call to institute an ideologically committed Islamic state. At various times since the July Revolution in 1952, the Brotherhood has regularly been banned and its leaders killed and imprisoned by Egyptian authorities.

Since it was rechartered in 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood has spread its network across the Middle East, Europe, and even America. At home in Egypt, parliamentary elections in 2005 saw the Muslim Brotherhood winning 20 percent of the available legislative seats, comprising the largest opposition party block. Its Palestinian affiliate, known to the world as HAMAS, recently gained control of the Palestinian Authority after elections secured for them 74 of 132 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Its Syrian branch has historically been the largest organized group opposing the Assad regime, and the organization also has affiliates in Jordan, Sudan, and Iraq. In the US, the Muslim Brotherhood is primarily represented by the Muslim American Society (MAS).

Since its formation, the Muslim Brotherhood has advocated the use of terrorism as a means of advancing its agenda of global Islamic domination. But as the largest popular radical movement in the Islamic world, it has attracted many leading Islamist intellectuals. Included among this group of Muslim Brotherhood intellectuals is Youssef Qaradawi, an Egyptian-born, Qatar-based Islamist cleric.

As one of the leading Muslim Brotherhood spiritual figures and radical Islamic preachers (who has his own weekly program on Al-Jazeera), Qaradawi has been one of the leading apologists of suicide bombings in Israel and terrorism against Western interests in the Middle East. Both Sylvain Besson and Scott Burgess provide extensive comparisons between Qaradawi’s publication, Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase, published in 1990, and The Project, which predates Qaradawi’s Priorities by eight years. They note the striking similarities in the language used and the plans and methods both documents advocate. It is speculated that The Project was either used by Qaradawi as a template for his own work, or that he had a hand in its drafting in 1982. Perhaps coincidentally, Qaradawi was the fourth largest shareholder in the Al-Taqwa Bank of Lugano, the director of which, Youssef Nada, was the individual in whose possession The Project was found. Since 1999, Qaradawi has been banned from entering the US as a result of his connections to terrorist organizations and his outspoken advocacy of terrorism.

For those who have read The Project, what is most troubling is not that Islamists have developed a plan for global dominance; it has been assumed by experts that Islamist organizations and terrorist groups have been operating off an agreed-upon set of general principles, networks and methodology. What is startling is how effectively the Islamist plan for conquest outlined in The Project has been implemented by Muslims in the West for more than two decades. Equally troubling is the ideology that lies behind the plan: inciting hatred and violence against Jewish populations around the world; the deliberate co-opting and subversion of Western public and private institutions; its recommendation of a policy of deliberate escalating confrontation by Muslims living in the West against their neighbors and fellow-citizens; the acceptance of terrorism as a legitimate option for achieving their ends and the inevitable reality of jihad against non-Muslims; and its ultimate goal of forcibly instituting the Islamic rule of the caliphate by shari’a in the West, and eventually the whole world.

If the experience over the past quarter of a century seen in Europe and the US is any indication, the “Islamic researchers” who drafted The Project more than two decades ago must be pleased to see their long-term plan to conquer the West and to see the Green flag of Islam raised over its citizens realized so rapidly, efficiently and completely. If Islamists are equally successful in the years to come, Westerners ought to enjoy their personal and political freedoms while they last.

1886-1973

Born in 1886 as David Green (Gruen) in Plonsk, Poland. He is considered one of the three founding figures of Zionism beside Chaim Weizmann and Herzl. Ben Gurion was the major factor behind Yishuv's (a term that refers to the Jews in Palestine prior to 1948) military power and is considered as the founder of the State of Israel. At an early stage, he developed a passion for socialism and Zionism, and in 1906 he immigrated to Palestine. From 1921-1935, he served as the secretary general of the Histadrut, the General Federation of Labor in Palestine, and in 1935 he was elected the chairman of the Jewish Agency which he held until 1948. From 1948 until his retirement in 1963, except for a brief interval in the early 1950s, Ben-Gurion served as Israel's Prime Minister and its Minister of Defense. Ben Gurion displayed a great aptitude for learning languages. In addition to his native Yiddish-Hebrew, he also learned Turkish, English, Russian, French, German, and later in life Spanish and ancient Greek. Ironically, he never bothered to learn the language of the people amongst whom he lived almost his entire life, Arabic.

Palestinians and Israeli often judge Ben-Gurion based on how he had served their interests. Palestinians see Ben-Gurion as a cruel, insensitive, and a racist individual since he was the primary force behind their dispossession. On the other hand, many Jews, Zionists, and most Western people see him as the savior of the "Jewish people" who was the primary force behind the create of the "Jewish state".

Zionism, as any other ideology, required leaders who were astute, articulate, and charismatic to formulate its vision, and in that regard, Theodor Herzl and Chaim Weizmann played the major roles. On the other hand, ideology on its own would become just an idea without the charismatic leaders who could implement its vision, and in that regard Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett played the major roles. After the implementation of the ideology, a new leadership must evolve to manage what has been created, otherwise it would stay stuck in the implementation phase. This is exactly one of the major problems Israelis face, they are stuck in Zionism's implementation phase, and rarely they have produced pragmatic leaders who can get their society to evolve to the next phase. Whenever Israel was able to develop pragmatic leaders (such as Moshe Sharett, Levy Eshkol, and even Moshe Dayan) who were capable of carrying it to the next phase, they were often branded as "appeasers", "cowards", and "naive". In a nutshell, Israel has been missing the Israeli version of France's Charles de Gaulle.

Based on our research, we can show that Ben-Gurion's personality was drastically transformed over the years, which can be broken down into three major phases as follows:

Idealism Phase: This phase started from the time he immigrated to Palestine and ended just before the Nazis rose to power in Germany in 1933. During this phase, Ben-Gurion is credited in building the Histadrut from the ground up as an effective political, military, financial, educational, and social organization that had roots in all sectors, almost a "Jewish state" before May 14th, 1948. During this phase, he made a lot of assumptions, many of which turned to be wrong. For example:
He saw Zionism as just, and thought that Palestinians and the neighboring Arab states would benefit from Zionism, and that therefore, they would welcome the new Jewish immigrants.

He envisioned that Jews from all over the world would immigrate to Palestine in in great numbers, and that over time they would become a majority or a fact on the ground.

He did not think that Palestinians had any collective rights whatsoever, such as the right of self-determination. He did not believe that they had any sense of nationalism, therefore, they could be ignored. Sometimes he argued that even if Palestinian nationalism did exist, that it could be bought or bribed.

He contemplated Palestinian "transfer", where the use of force would not be necessary. He envisioned that Palestinians could be enticed to leaving their country in favor of the new Jewish immigrants.

He did not envision Europe's Jews would die so qucikly, and in such big numbers.
Transformation Phase: This phase dominated most of the 1930s and early 1940s, when Ben-Gurion started to confront events that contradicted many of his earlier assumptions. From the quotes below, you will see how he struggled to transform himself, from an idealist to realist. The primary wrong assumptions that caused him extreme discomfort were:
He felt that the sword was hanging over Europe's Jewish citizens, which forced him to re-examine many of his earlier assumptions.
Jews could not become a majority without infringing Palestinian rights.

Zionists were the primary force behind the maturing of the Palestinian national movement. This became evident when the first popular Palestinian uprising took place between 1936-1939.

Palestinian national movement could not be bought, but it could be curbed.
In other words, he became a believer of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's famous doctrine, that of the IRON WALL doctrine. When Jabotinsky first came out with his famous doctrine in 1923, Ben-Gurion exploited its racist and inhuman nature to score political points against Jabotinsky (similarly, Deir Yassin's massacre had been used demonize the Herut and Likud parties in spite of Haganah's role in the atrocity, click here for details).

Although he passionately despised Jabotinsky (actually, when Ben-Gurion was the Prime Minister, he had refused to let his remains to be reburied in the "Jewish state"), the evidence shows that Ben-Gurion was one of his major silent admirers.

During this phase, Ben-Gurion is credited with restraining the Haganah in its actions against the Palestinian resistance during the 1st Intifada. Actually, he demanded that the Yishuv play a low key, for almost three years, despite of Jabotinsky's stinging criticisms. This policy was completely reversed during the next phase, where Ben-Gurion transformed himself into a hawk.

Implementation Phase: This phase started soon after WWII ended, and shaped his way of thinking all the way until the early 1960s. During this phase, Ben-Gurion felt guilty for what happened during the holocaust (as Menachem Begin did), and in a way also felt responsible. It agonized him that Jews could be led to the gas chambers without fighting back. This fact drastically changed him, and as a result he became cruel, insensitive, inflexible, undiplomatic, and quick to use force to send a message, especially to the neighboring Arab states. While self-restraint had been his motto during the First Palestinian Intifada between 1936-1939, he now became the complete opposite. As it will be proved from the quotes below, there are ample evidence to show how Ben-Gurion was the primary force behind the collective dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people during the 1948 war.
Finally, it should be pointed out that Ben-Gurion's transformation was one of his major assets. However, he never admitted the transformation had happened, and he never credited the Israeli political Right for shaping Israeli politics (regardless if their policies were right or wrong). He was able to change course almost immediately when proven wrong. The questions which beg to be asked are:

What if the holocaust had not happened?
In which direction would Ben-Gurion and Weizmann have directed the Zionist Movement?



Sources

Iron Wall, p. 16-17
Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 18

Related Links

More About Ben-Gurion and 'Transfer' by Rabbi Dr. Chaim Simons
Famous Quotes
In describing the following encounter, Shabtai Teveth (one of Ben-Gurion's official biographers) briefly summarized Ben-Gurion's relations with the Palestinian Arabs, Teveth stated:

"Four days after the constituent meeting, on October 8, 1906, the ten members of the platform committee met in an Arab hostel in Ramleh. For THREE DAYS they sat on stools debating, and at night they slept on mats. An Arab boy brought them coffee in small cups. They left the hostel only to grab an occasional bite in the marketplace. On the first evening, they stole three hours to tour the marketplace of Ramleh and the ruins of the nearby fortress. Ben-Gurion remarked only on the buildings, ruins, and scenery. He gave no thought to the [Palestinian] Arabs, their problems, their social conditions, or their cultural life. Nor had he yet acquainted himself with the Jewish community in Palestine [which was mostly non-Zionist Orthodox Jews prior to 1920]. In all of Palestine there were [in 1906] 700,000 inhabitants, only 55,000 of whom were Jews, and only 550 of these were [Zionists] pioneers." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 9-10)

This attitude of ignoring the political rights of the Palestinian people was (and still is) the rule among most Zionists. According to Ben-Gurion's biographer, it's not only that Palestinians were the majority in their homeland as early as 1906, it also should be noted that:

The majority of Palestine's Jews were not citizens of the country, but guests from Tsarist Russia.

The Jews in Palestinian were mostly Orthodox Jews who made up 7.8% of the total population.

At the time, the majority of Orthodox Jews were non-Zionist. Actually, the majority were anti-Zionist.

Zionist pioneers were almost absent in Palestine as of 1906, and constituted only 1% of the total Jewish population in Palestine.

As early as 1914, Ben-Gurion admitted secretly that Palestinian nationalism existed, at least among the working masses. He explained that Palestinians' hatred of Zionism was based on their fear of being dispossessed. Ben-Gurion analyzed this hatred and stated:

"this hatred originates with the [Palestinian] Arab workers in Jewish settlements. Like any worker, the [Palestinian] Arab worker detests his taskmaster and exploiter. But because this class conflict overlaps a national difference between farmers and workers, this hatred takes a national form. Indeed, the national overwhelms the class aspect of the conflict in the minds of the [Palestinian] Arab working masses, and inflames an intense hatred toward the Jews." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 18-19)

By the turn of the 20th century, Ben-Gurion advocated exclusively Jewish labor (Avodah Ivrit) in Jewish businesses. He explained why a Jewish laborer should earn a higher salary because:

"[he was] more intelligent and diligent" than the Arab. (Shabtai Teveth, p. 12-13)

What if the average Christian American was more "intelligent and diligent" than his Jewish American, would that justify discrimination in the work force? How could the question of whether someone was more "intelligent and diligent" or not be measured in a fair and a balanced way?

From the beginning, Zionists advocated a "Jewish State" not just in Palestine, but also in Jordan, southern Lebanon, and the Golan Heights as well. In 1918 Ben-Gurion described the future "Jewish state's" frontiers in details as follows:

"to the north, the Litani river [in southern Lebanon], to the northeast, the Wadi 'Owja, twenty miles south of Damascus; the southern border will be mobile and pushed into Sinai at least up to Wadi al-'Arish; and to the east, the Syrian Desert, including the furthest edge of Transjordan" (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 87) Click here to view the "Greater Israel" map that was submitted by the Zionists to the peace conference after WWI.

In an article published by Ben-Gurion in 1918, titled "The Rights of the Jews and others in Palestine," he conceded that the Palestinian Arabs have the same rights as Jews. He explained that Palestinians had these rights since they had inhabited the land "for hundreds of years". He stated in the article:

"Palestine is not an empty country . . . on no account must we injure the rights of the inhabitants." Ben-Gurion often returned to this point, emphasizing that Palestinian Arabs had "the full right" to an independent economic, cultural, and communal life, but not political. (Shabtai Teveth, p. 37-38)

But Ben-Gurion set limits. The Palestinian people were incapable by themselves of developing Palestine, and they had no right to stand in the way of the Jews. He argued in 1918, that Jews' rights sprang not only from the past, but also from the future. In 1924 he declared:

"We do not recognize the right of the [Palestinian] Arabs to rule the country, since Palestine is still undeveloped and awaits its builders." In 1928 he pronounced that "the [Palestinian] Arabs have no right to close the country to us [Jews]. What right do they have to the Negev desert, which is uninhabited?"; and in 1930, "The [Palestinian] Arabs have no right to the Jordan river, and no right to prevent the construction of a power plant [by a Jewish concern]. They have a right only to that which they have created and to their homes." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 38)


In other words, the Palestinian people are entitled to no political rights whatsoever, and if they have any rights at all, these rights are confined to their places of residence. Ironically, this statement was written when the Palestinian people constituted 85% of Palestine's population, and owned and operated over 97% of its lands!

As WWI was ending, Ben-Gurion went on to draw a map of the "Jewish state" to be. This map clearly excluded Damascus (although it was part of Biblical "Eretz Yisrael"), and limited the "Jewish state's" future northern borders to 20 km south of the Syrian Capital. He rationalized this decision as follows:

"It is unthinkable that the Jewish state, in our day and age, could include the city of Damascus. . . . This is a large Arab city, and one of the four centers of Islam. The Jewish community there is small. The Arabs will never allow Damascus, their pride, to come under Jewish control, and there can be no doubt that the English, even were it in their power, would agree to such a thing." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 34)

If these are all sound reasons to exclude Damascus from being under Jewish control, then what makes Zionists think that occupied Jerusalem is any different? Although Damascus was never occupied by the Christian Crusaders, Jerusalem was occupied and pillaged, and to liberate it almost a million Muslim and Arab were martyred! Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims often wonder where the Zionist Jews were when their "Promised Land" needed them during the Crusaders' genocide!

A few months before the peace conference convened at Versailles in 1919 and after WWI ended, Ben-Gurion envisioned future Jewish and Palestinian Arab relations as follows:

"Everybody sees the problem in the relations between the Jews and the [Palestinian] Arabs. But not everybody sees that there's no solution to it. There is no solution! . . . The conflict between the interests of the Jews and the interests of the [Palestinian] Arabs in Palestine cannot be resolved by sophisms. I don't know any Arabs who would agree to Palestine being ours---even if we learn Arabic . . .and I have no need to learn Arabic. On the other hand, I don't see why 'Mustafa' should learn Hebrew. . . . There's a national question here. We want the country to be ours. The Arabs want the country to be theirs." (One Palestine Complete, p. 116)

As WWI was winding down, Ben-Gurion clearly stated that Zionism's ultimate objective is to make Palestine (inclusive of Trans-Jordan) a land with a Jewish majority. He stated in November 1917:

"Within then the next twenty years, we must have a Jewish majority in Palestine." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 43)

From the start, Ben-Gurion wanted to segregate Arab and Jewish societies in all sectors. For example, Jews in Palestine had their separate economical, social, health, educational, media, and political sectors that were opened to Jews only. The segregation of Palestine's society was nurtured by the Zionists to make it easier to partition the country when the "appropriate" time comes. In that regards, he stated in the 1920s:

"The assets of the Jewish National Home must be created exclusively through our own work, for only the product of the Hebrew labor can serve as the national estate." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 66)

Similarly, he stated in the early 1920s:

"Without Hebrew labor there is no way to absorb the Jewish masses. Without Hebrew labor, there will be no Jewish economy; without Hebrew labor, there will be no [Jewish] homeland. And anyone who does anything counter to the principle of Hebrew labor harms the most precious asset we have for fulfilling Zionism." (One Palestine Complete, p. 288)

Early on, Ben-Gurion envisioned that Zionism would not be in conflict with Palestinian Arab rights. He stated in 1925:

"I am unwilling to forego even one percent of Zionism for 'peace'---yet I do not want Zionism to infringe upon even one percent of legitimate [Palestinian] Arab rights" (Shabtai Teveth, p. 70)

As the Nazis rose to power in Germany in the early 1930s, the need to save European Jewry became more acute. Ben-Gurion then recognized that Zionism could not be realized without infringing Palestinian rights. The shift in Ben Gurion's opinion becomes clearer as you examine more quotes, especially the ones dated 1930 and onwards. It should be noted that the Palestinian people were a 2/3 majority of the population of Palestine as of 1946, click here for a map illustration. Ironically, the demographic picture persists to this date, but with one exception. 65% of the Palestinian people are dispossessed refugees who live outside Palestine, mostly living in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

As the first popular response against the Balfour Declaration (in which Britain promised the Zionists to turn Palestine to a "Jewish National Home"), Palestinians organized their first commercial strike in 1922. Ben-Gurion acknowledged privately that a Palestinian national movement was evolving. He wrote in his diary:

"The success of the [Palestinian] Arabs in organizing the closure of shops shows that we are dealing here with a national movement. For the [Palestinian] Arabs, this is an important education step." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 80)

Similarly in 1929, he also wrote of the Palestinian political national movement:

"It's true that the Arab national movement has no positive content. The leaders of the movement are unconcerned with betterment of the people and provision of their essential needs. They do not aid the fellah; to the contrary, the leaders suck his blood, and exploit the popular awakening for private gain. But we err if we measure the [Palestinian] Arabs and their movement by our standards. Every people is worthy of its national movement. The obvious characteristic of a political movement is that it knows how to mobilize the masses. From this prospective there is no doubt that we are facing a political movement, and we should not underestimate it."

"A national movement mobilizes masses, and that is the main thing. The [Palestinian] Arab is not one of revival, and its moral value is dubious. But in a political sense, this is a national movement." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 83)

When it was proposed that the Jews in Palestine organize an army and seize power in November 1929, Ben-Gurion offered these objections, first,

"The world will not permit the Jewish people to seize the state as a spoil, by force." Second the Jewish people did not have the means to do so. And third and most important, it would be immoral, and the Jews of the world would never by this immoral cause. "We would then be unable to awaken the necessary forces for building the country among thousands of young people. We would not be able to secure necessary means from the Jewish people, and the moral and the political sustenance of the enlightened world. . . . Our conscience must be clean . . . and so we must endorse the premise in relation to the [Palestinian] Arabs: The [Palestinian] Arabs have full rights as citizens of the country, but they do not have the right of ownership over it." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 97)

Similarly in 1928, Ben-Gurion stated that there is no contradiction between Zionist and Arab aspirations. He stated that Zionism stands for absolute justice for both parties. He explained that:

"our sense of morality forbids us to deny the right of a single [Palestinian] Arab child, even though by such denial we might attain all that we seek." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 159)

It is not only that Ben-Gurion was 100% wrong with his earlier assessments, but also:

The world permitted the "Jewish state" to occupy and seize by force the spoils of war.


After the holocaust, most Jews (along with the whole Western World) supported the "Jewish state" regardless of whether it was moral or immoral. This support was successful because of an effective propaganda campaign that carefully exploited the tragedy of the holocaust.


As of 1929, the Palestinian people owned and operated over 96% of Palestine's lands, and as of 1946 they owned 93% of the country, click here for a map illustration.


The mass majority of the Palestinian children, if not all, are even today denied their basic human rights because Zionism had to "attain all that it seeks."

Prior to 1928-1929, we find no evidence that Ben-Gurion intended to dispossess and to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian people. However, everything changed as the sword hung over the German and Polish Jews in the mid 1930s. Ben-Gurion abandoned the goal of achieving peace with Palestinians in favor of increasing Jewish immigration. As the number of Jews in Palestine doubled between 1930-1936, the Palestinian people feared future dispossession and displacement. This fear triggered the First popular Intifada between 1936-1939, examine the following few quotes for more details. According to Ben-Gurion, the survival of the European Jewry was in question, and he looked at the matter as a life or death one for Zionism (and maybe for the "Jewish people" as well). For example, he stated in the early 1930's:

"If Zionism returns to be what it was ten or fifteen years ago--with Jews entering the country one by one-- then the issue of Palestine is liable to be dropped from the Jewish people's agenda. The Jews of Germany must be gotten out of there, and if it's impossible to bring them to Palestine, then they will go somewhere less, and Palestine will become the hobby of enthusiasts."

"If Zionism over the coming years does not provide an answer to the calamity which has befallen the Jewish people, then it will disappear from the Jewish stage." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 154)

The concept of a "Jewish Majority" in Palestine is one of Zionism's major pillars. This point was eloquently articulated by Ben-Gurion when he stated in 1929:

"A Jewish majority is not Zionism's last station, but it is a very important station on the route to Zionism's political triumph. It will give our security and presence a sound foundation, and allow us to concentrate masses of Jews in this country and the region." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 103)

In the context of the 1929 disturbance, Ben Gurion spoke of the emerging Palestinian nationalism, and the main goal of Zionism (where Palestine's population becomes a "Jewish majority") to the secretariat of the major Zionist groupings. He said:

"The debate as to whether or not an Arab national movement exists is a pointless verbal exercise; the main thing for us is that the movement attracts the masses. We do not regard it as a resurgence movement and its moral worth is dubious. But politically speaking it is a national movement . . . . The Arab must not and cannot be a Zionist. He could never wish the Jews to become a majority. This is the true antagonism between us and the Arabs. We both want to be the majority." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 18)

Since Jews in Palestine (Yishuv) could not become a majority as of 1948 (click here for Palestine's demographic map as of 1946), Zionists resorted to compulsory population transfer (Ethnic Cleansing) to solve what they referred to as the "Arab demographic problem". To hide their basic goals and intentions, they have concocted the myth that Palestinians left their homes, farms, and businesses on the orders of their leaders, click here to read our response to this argument.

Finally, Ben-Gurion admitted the mistake of trying to buy off the Palestinian national movement. In the early 1930s, he stated during a Mapai forum:

"We have erred for ten years now . . . the crux is not cooperation with the English, but with the [Palestinian] Arabs." By this he meant not merely a relationship of friendship and mutual aid, but political cooperation, which he called the "cornerstone" of the "Arab-Jewish-English rule in Palestine. Let's not deceive ourselves and think that when we approach the [Palestinian] Arabs and tell them 'We'll build schools and better your economic conditions,' that we have succeeded. Let's not think that the [Palestinian] Arabs by nature are different from us." In the heat of the argument, Ben-Gurion said to one of his critics and asked: "Do you think that, by extending economic favors to the [Palestinian] Arabs, you can make them forget their political rights in Palestine?" Did Mapai believe that by aiding the Palestinian Arabs to secure decent housing and grow bumper crops they could persuade the Palestinian Arabs to regard themselves "as complete strangers in the land which is theirs?" (Shabtai Teveth, p. 114)

As the numbers of Jews in Palestine (the Yishuv) doubled between 1931-1935, Palestinians feared future dispossession and displacement. In opposition to this, the Palestinian national movement was becoming more vocal and organized, which surprised Ben-Gurion. In his opinion, Palestinian demonstrations represented a "turning point" important enough to warrant Zionists' concern. He told his Mapai comrades:

". . . they [referring to Palestinians] showed new power and remarkable discipline. Many of them were killed . . . this time not murderers and rioters, but political demonstrators. Despite the tremendous unrest, the order not to harm Jews was obeyed. This shows exceptional political discipline. There is no doubt that these events will leave a profound imprint on the [Palestinian] Arab movement. This time we have seen a political movement which must evoke the respect of the world. (Shabtai Teveth, p. 126)

Ironically, often Zionists claim that Palestinian nationalism never existed as a justification for denying them the right of self determination. On the other hand, as we have seen in the previous quote, Palestinian nationalism was alive and well as early as 1936, click here if you wish to learn more about this subject.

When Ben-Gurion heard of the Passfield White Paper in 1931 (which proposed halting the implementation of the Balfour Declaration), he was furious with "these cowardly traitors" who were responsible for the proposed new policy. He stated:

"England is a great power, the greatest empire. But to shatter even the largest stones on earth, it takes only a small quantity of explosive powder. Such powder packs tremendous force. If the creative force within us is capable of stopping this EVIL EMPIRE, then the explosive force will ignite, and we will topple this blood-stained imperium. . . . We will be those who take this war upon ourselves and beware thee, British Empire!" (Shabtai Teveth, p. 111) Ben-Gurion called on his colleagues to "prepare for a long and difficult road, if we are left with no alternatives, a road of alliance with the Arabs against these despicable powers." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 112)

Although the British Government nullified the Passfield White Paper soon after, and the alliance between Great Britain and the Zionists continued to flourish until 1945, Ben-Gurion (who commanded the Haganah), Yitzhak Shamir (who commanded the Stern Gang), and Menachem Begin (who commanded the Irgun Gang) all joined forces to wage a war of terror against the British forces in Palestine and the Palestinian people between 1945-1947. Similarly, we predict that when Israel's alliance with the United States outlives its usefulness (especially when the American people recognize that supporting Israel, right or wrong, would not be in their national interests), then the American people will come face to face with a tyrant whom they have armed, financed, and trained. Now Israel has several hundred A-Bombs, and bulling it may not be an option! Time will tell if this "holy alliance" will last and won't collide with America's strategic national interests in the Middle East! In such a case, we wonder how America might react?

Ben-Gurion had strange ideas to justify why Jews have the right to settle in Palestine. He explained that the right of the Jews to Palestine rested on their capacity for developing its resources. He declared in 1930:

"We do not recognize any form of absolute ownership over any country. Any group of diligent persons, every industrious people, is entitled to enjoy the fruits of labor, and do with its talents as it pleases. it has no right to prevent others from doing the same, or to close the doors leading to nature's gifts in the faces of others. The five million inhabitants of Australia have no right to close the gates of their continent--which they alone cannot fully exploit-- and so exclude the masses of desperate people seeking a new place to work. This is the principle behind the right of free migration, championed by international socialism." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 37)

If this argument is sound for Jews to settle Palestine against the wishes of its indigenous population, why isn't it a good argument for Germans, Italians, and Palestinian refugees to immigrate and settle Israel? It's worth noting that over 85% of Israelis live in under 14% of the land and that Israel has the highest ratio of urban dwellers in the world, click here for a graph illustration.

On May 27, 1931, Ben-Gurion recognized the role Zionism played in maturing the Palestinian national movement. He explained that the "Arab question" is a

"tragic question of fate" that arose only as a consequence of Zionism, and so was a "question of Zionist fulfillment in the light of Arab reality." In other words, this was a Zionist rather than an Arab question, posed to Zionists who were perplexed about how they could fulfill their aspirations in a land already inhabited by a Palestinian Arab majority. (Shabtai Teveth, p. xii, Preface)

Ben-Gurion had set down the principal policy for Zionism with the British and the Palestinian people. He stated in January 1930:

"Zionist policy must be in agreement with the English and the [Palestinian] Arabs. . . [However,] without an agreement with the English, there is no point in talking about an agreement with the [Palestinian] Arabs, as long as we are not a majority." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 126)

To bring the maximum number of Jews to Palestine, Ben-Gurion was prepared to collaborate with the devil (the father of all evildoers). He stated in 1931 that he was prepared to:

"sup with the devil," so he hardly would have shunned a tactic of dissimulation for moral reasons. (Shabtai Teveth, p. xiii, Preface)

In a book Ben-Gurion published in 1931 (titled: We and Our Neighbors), he admitted that Palestinian Arabs had the same rights as Jews to exist in Palestine. He stated:

"The Arab community in Palestine is an organic, inseparable part of the landscape. It is embedded in the country. The [Palestinian] Arabs work the land, and will remain." Ben-Gurion even held that the Palestinian Arabs had full rights in Palestine, "since the only right by which a people can claim to possess a land indefinitely is the right conferred by willingness to work." They had the same opportunity to establish that right as the Zionists did. (Shabtai Teveth, p. 5-6)

When Hitler rose to power in 1933, Ben-Gurion predicted a world war. This war might threaten not only the Jewish citizens of Europe, but also the Yishuv as well. The sense of responsibility loosened his tongue, and he began to say things in public that he had kept to himself in the past. He no longer offered convoluted explanations for the Palestinian Arab resistance against Jews and British occupation. He stated in 1938:

"Almost every [Palestinian] Arab" opposed Zionism, "because he is an Arab, because he is a Muslim, because he dislikes foreigners, and because we are hateful to him in every way." The conflict had lasted thirty years, and was liable "to continue for perhaps hundreds more." This was a "real war, a war of life or death."( Shabtai Teveth, p. 184)

As European Jewry's immigration doubled the number of Jews in Palestine, Yishuv , between 1931-1935, Chancellor Judah Leon Magnes (the president of the Hebrew University who favored a bi-national state) asked Ben-Gurion to make concessions to Palestinians over Jewish immigration. Ben-Gurion explicitly told Magnes in 1935:

"The difference between me and you is that you are ready to sacrifice immigration for peace, while I am not, though peace is dear to me. And even if I was prepared to make concession, the Jews of Poland and Germany would not be, because they have no other option. For them immigration comes before peace." Ben-Gurion left no doubt that he identified, heart and soul, with this ordering of priorities. (Shabtai Teveth, p. 159)

Ben-Gurion was impressed with Izz al-Din al-Kassam's heroism in the mid 1930s, and he predicted Kassam's example would have a far-reaching effect on the Palestinian national movement. Ben-Gurion stated two weeks after Kassam's fateful battle with the British occupation nearby Ya'bad-Jinin:

"This is the event's importance. We would have educated our youth without Tel-Hai [an encounter with Palestinians in the Galilee in the early 1920s], because we have other important values, but the [Palestinian] Arab organizers have had less to work with. The [Palestinian] Arabs have no respect for any leader. They know that every single one is prepared to sell out the Arab people for his personal gain, and so the Arabs have no self-esteem. Now, for the first time, the [Palestinian] Arabs have seen someone offer his life for the cause. This will give the [Palestinian] Arabs the moral strength which they lack."

Ben-Gurion also stressed that

"this is not Nashashibi and not the Mufti. This is not the motivation out of career or greed. In Shaykh Qassam, we have a fanatic figure prepared to sacrifice his life in martyrdom. Now there are not one but dozens, hundreds, if not thousands like him. And the Arab people stand behind them." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 126)

During the early stages of the First Palestinian Intifada in 1936, Ben-Gurion was not free of ambivalence toward the Palestinian Arabs. He stated:

"I never felt hatred of the Arabs and none of their actions ever awakened vengeful emotions in me." On the other hand, he felt that Jaffa should be defaced: "The destruction of Jaffa, the city and the port, will happen and it will be for the best. This city, which grew fat on Jewish immigration and settlement, is asking for destruction when it swings a hatchet over the heads of its builders and benefactors. When Jaffa falls into hell I will not be among the mourners." (One Palestine Complete, p. 383)

On April 16, 1936, Ben-Gurion informed the Mapai party that no understanding could be reached with the Palestinian people until they reach one with the British. He explained that:

". . . . there is no chance for an understanding with the [Palestinian] Arabs unless we first reach an understanding with the British, by which we will come a preponderant force in Palestine. What can drive the [Palestinian] Arabs to a mutual understanding with us? . . . Facts [meaning achieving Jewish majority through immigration and increased military strength] Only after we manage to establish a great Jewish fact in this country . . . only then will the precondition for discussion with the [Palestinian] Arabs be met." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 155)

In the mid-1930s, Ben-Gurion met George Antonius (an advisor to al-Mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who was one of the few Palestinians whom Ben-Gurion had contacts with), and suggested that Palestinians should help the Zionists to expand the borders of their future "Jewish state" to include areas under French control, such as southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights. In response, Mr. Antonius burst laughing and answered:

"So, you propose that what England did not give you [as stated in the Balfour Declaration), you will get from us." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 162)

According to Ben-Gurion, Antonius had complained about Zionists who "want to bring to Palestine the largest number of Jews possible, without taking [the Palestinian] Arabs into consideration at all. With this type," said Antonius, "it is impossible to come to an understanding. They want a 100% Jewish state, and the [Palestinian] Arabs will remain in their shadow." By the end of their talk, Antonius could, with reason, conclude that Ben-Gurion belonged precisely to this category of Zionists. (Shabtai Teveth, p. 163)

According to Ben-Gurion, Palestine was a "matter of life and death" for the Jews. "Even pogroms in Germany or Poland, and in Palestine, we prefer the pogroms here." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 163)

Before the 1931-1932, Ben-Gurion had once viewed Zionism as a just ideology. As the Nazis rose to power in Germany in 1933, he started to lower his moral sight, according to him "these days it is not right but might which prevails". In April 1936, Ben-Gurion concluded that no people on earth determined its relations with other peoples by abstract moral calculations of justice. He stated that :

"There is only one thing that everyone accepts, Arabs and non-Arabs alike: facts." The Arabs would not make peace with the Jews "out of sentiment for justice," but because such a peace at some point would become worthwhile and advantageous. A Jewish state would encourage peace, because with it the Jew would "become a force, and the Arabs respect force." Ben-Gurion explained to the Mapai party "these days it is not right but might which prevails. It is more important to have force than justice on one's side." In a period of "power politics , the powers that become hard of hearing, and respond only to the roar of cannons. And the Jews in the Diaspora have no cannons." In order to survive in this evil world, the Jewish people needed cannons more than justice. (Shabtai Teveth, p. 191)

This racist and belligerent remark, about Arabs being respectful of force, became a radioactive cancer that infected all sectors of the Israeli society. Ironically, many Arabs respond to this form of racism with their own version of racism, meaning that "Israelis respect the language of force" as well, click here to read our response to these racist arguments.

After Ben-Gurion's encounter with George Antonius in May 1936, he was willing to concede the existence of a conflict between Palestinian and Jewish nationalisms for the first time. He stated in public that:

"There is a conflict, a great conflict." not in the economic but the political realm. "There is fundamental conflict. We and they want the same thing: We both want Palestine. And that is the fundamental conflict." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 166)

"I now say something which contradicts the theory which I once had on this question. At one time, I thought an agreement [with Palestinians] was possible." Ben-Gurion attached some reservation to this statement. A settlement might be possible between both peoples in the widest sense, between the entire "Jewish people" and the entire Arab people. But such an agreement could be achieved "once they despair of preventing a Jewish Palestine." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 171)

This statement signaled a shift in Ben-Gurion's mind set. Ironically, his conclusion is in complete agreement with Ze'ev Jabotinsky's IRON WALL doctrine. When Jabotinsky first published his famous doctrine in the early 1920s, Ben-Gurion and other Zionists in the Labor movement branded him as a "racist". As the previous quote demonstrates, Ben-Gurion finally recognized that Zionism had to rely on the IRON WALL doctrine for it to become a reality. Unfortunately for the Palestinian people, according to Ben-Gurion this was a matter of "life or death" for Zionism and Jews.

Over no issue was the conflict so severe as the question of immigration. On the same subject, he also stated:

"Arab leaders see no value in the economic dimension of the country's development, and while they will concede that our immigration has brought material blessings to Palestine [where exclusively Jewish labor was always the rule], they nevertheless contend---and from the [Palestinian] Arab point of view, they are right-- that they want neither the honey nor the bee sting." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 166)

As the First Palestinian Intifada was erupting in 1936, many Zionists complained that the British Mandate was not doing enough to combat Palestinian resistance (which often was referred to as "terror") to the British Mandate. In that regard, Ben-Gurion argued that:

"no government in the world can prevent individual terror. . . when a people is fighting for its land, it is not easy to prevent such acts." Nor did he criticize the British display of leniency: "I see why the government feels the need to show leniency towards the [Palestinian] Arabs . . . it is not easy to suppress a popular movement strictly by the use of force." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 166)

In rare situations, Ben-Gurion EMPATHIZED with the Palestinian people. He stated in a letter to Moshe Sharett in 1937:

"Were I an Arab, and Arab with nationalist political consciousness . . . I would rise up against an immigration liable in the future to hand the country and all of its [Palestinian] Arab inhabitants over to Jewish rule. What [Palestinian] Arab cannot do his math and understand what [Jewish] immigration at the rate of 60,000 a year means a Jewish state in all of Palestine." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 171-172)

Ben-Gurion also clearly stated that it was the Zionists who were the aggressors, at least from the political point of view. He stated in the contexts of the First Palestinian Intifada in 1938, :

"When we say that the Arabs are the aggressors and we defend ourselves ---- that is only half the truth. As regards our security and life we defend ourselves. . . . But the fighting is only one aspect of the conflict, which is in its essence a political one. And politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves." (Righteous Victims, p. 652)

Ben-Gurion stated how Zionists should be self-reliant in response to the Palestinian commercial strike, which was the prelude to the First Palestinian Intifada in 1936. He stated:

"The first and principal lesson of these disturbances. . . is that we must free ourselves from all economic dependence on the [Palestinian] Arabs. . . We must not find ourselves in situation where our enemies are in a position to starve us, to block our access to the sea, to deny us gravel and stones for construction." (Righteous Victims, p. 130)

Soon after the outbreak of the first Intifada in 1936, Ben-Gurion explained the reasons why Palestinians feared Zionism. He stated in a meeting with his Mapai party:

"The Arabs fear of our power is intensifying, [Palestinians] see exactly the opposite of what we see. It doesn't matter whether or not their view is correct.... They see [Jewish] immigration on a giant scale .... they see the Jews fortify themselves economically .. They see the best lands passing into our hands. They see England identify with Zionism. ..... [Arabs are] fighting dispossession ... The fear is not of losing land, but of losing the homeland of the Arab people, which others want to turn it into the homeland of the Jewish people. There is a fundamental conflict. We and they want the same thing: We both want Palestine ..... By our very presence and progress here, [we] have matured the [Arab] movement." (Righteous Victims, p. 136 & Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 18)

On the other hand, he denied the Palestinian any political rights. As a justification, he stated:

"There is no conflict between Jewish and Arab nationalism because the Jewish nation is not in Palestine and the Palestinians are not a nation." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 19)

Ben Gurion advocated exclusively Jewish labor in Jewish run enterprises. He stated in 1936:

"If we want Hebrew redemption 100%, then we must have 100% Hebrew settlement, a 100% Hebrew farm, and 100% Hebrew port." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 24)

Ben-Gurion emphasized that Zionism should seek peace with Palestinians ONLY as means to realize Zionism, not as an ultimate goal. He explained the policy in 1937 as follows:

"We do not seek an agreement with the [Palestinian] Arabs in order to secure the peace. Of course we regard peace as an essential thing. It is impossible to build up the country in a state of permanent warfare. But peace for us is a mean, and not an end. The end is the fulfillment of Zionism in its maximum scope. Only for this reason do we need peace, and do we need an agreement." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 168)

On July 29, 1937, Ben-Gurion stated to the World Convention of Ihud Po'alei Tzion in Zurich that Maronite ruled Lebanon would serve the Christian minority better if it allied itself with the future "Jewish state." He said:

"Having Lebanon as a neighbor ensures the Jewish state of a faithful ally from the first day of its establishment. It is not, also, unavoidable that across the northern side of the Jewish state border in southern Lebanon the first possibility of our expansion will come up through agreement, in good will, with our neighbors who need us." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 88)

In February 1937, Ben-Gurion was on the BRINK of a far reaching conclusion, that the Arabs of Palestine were a separate people, distinct from other Arabs and deserving of self-determination. He stated:

"The right which the Arabs in Palestine have is one due to the inhabitants of any country . . . because they live here, and not because they are Arabs . . . The Arab inhabitants of Palestine should enjoy all the rights of citizens and all political rights, not only as individuals, but as a national community, just like the Jews." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 170)

Ben-Gurion predicted a decisive war in which the neighboring Arab countries would come to aid Palestinians. He said in 1937 :

"It is very possible that the Arabs of the neighboring countries will come to their aid against us. But our strength will exceed theirs. Not only because we will be better organized and equipped , but because behind us there stands a still larger force, superior in quality and quantity .... the whole younger generation [ from Europe and America]". (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 66)

Ben-Gurion commented on the proposed Peel Commission Partition plan as follows in 1937:

"We must EXPEL ARABS and take their places .... and, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places-then we have force at our disposal." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 66). Note the premeditated plan to ethnically cleanse the Negev and Transjordan which were not allocated to the Jewish State by the Peel Commission, click here to view a map illustrating the areas allocated to the "Jewish State" by the Peel Commission in 1937.

During the tour which the Peel Commission did in Palestine in 1937, Ben Gurion told the commission that the Bible was the Jewish people's "Mandate." (One Palestine Complete, p. 401)

On July 12, 1937, David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary explaining the benefits of the compulsory population transfer (which was proposed by the British Peel Commission):

"The compulsory transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the first and second Temples. . . We are given an opportunity which we never dared to dream of in our wildest imaginings. This is MORE than a state, government and sovereignty----this is national consolidation in a free homeland." (Righteous Victims, p. 142)

Similarly on August 7, 1937 he also stated to the Zionist Assembly during their debate on the Peel Commission:

". . . In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the [Palestinian] Arab fellahin. . . it is important that this plan comes from the [British Peel] Commission and not from us. . . . Jewish power, which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out the transfer on a large scale. You must remember, that this system embodies an important humane and Zionist idea, to transfer parts of a people to their country and to settle empty lands. We believe that this action will also bring us closer to an agreement with the Arabs." (Righteous Victims, p. 143)

On the same subject, David Ben-Gurion wrote in 1937:

"With compulsory transfer we [would] have a vast area [for settlement] .... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it." (Righteous Victims, p. 144)

And in 1938, he also wrote:

"With compulsory transfer we [would] have vast areas .... I support compulsory [population] transfer. I do not see anything immoral in it. But compulsory transfer could only be carried out by England .... Had its implementation been dependent merely on our proposal I would have proposed; but this would be dangerous to propose when the British government has disassociated itself from compulsory transfer. .... But this question should not be removed from the agenda because it is central question. There are two issues here : 1) sovereignty and 2) the removal of a certain number of Arabs, and we must insist on both of them." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, 117)

In August 1937, the 20th Zionist Congress rejected the Peel Commission proposed partition plan because the area allotted to the "Jewish state" was smaller than expected. On the other hand, the concept of partitioning Palestine into two states was accepted as a launching pad for future Zionist expansions, and to secure unlimited Jewish immigrations. In September 1938, Ben-Gurion explained why he advocated partitioning the country NOW, and to accept the Peel Commission's proposal:

"The ONLY reason that we agreed to discuss the [Peel commission proposed] partition plan," Ben-Gurion wrote Moshe Sharett, "is mass immigration. Not in the future, and not according to abstract formula, but large immigration now." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 184)

And in October 1938, he wrote to his children that :

"I don't regard a state in part of Palestine as the final aim of Zionism, but as a mean toward that aim." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 188)

In September 1937, he stated to a group of American Jewish labor leaders in New York:

"the borders [of the Jewish state] will not be fixed for eternity." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 188)

On July 30, 1937 Yosef Bankover, a founding member and leader of Kibbutz Hameuhad movement and a member of Haganah's regional command of the coastal and central districts, stated that Ben-Gurion would accept the proposed Peel Commission partition plan under two conditions: 1) unlimited Jewish immigration 2) Compulsory population transfer for Palestinians. He stated that :

"Ben-Gurion said yesterday that he was prepared to accept the [Peel partition] proposal of the Royal commission but on two conditions: [Jewish] sovereignty and compulsory transfer ..... As for the compulsory transfer-- as a member of Kibbutz Ramat Hakovsh [founded in 1932 in central Palestine] I would be very pleased if it would be possible to be rid of the pleasant neighborliness of the people of Miski, Tirah, and Qalqilyah." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 70)

Similarly, he also stated to his son Amos in October 1937 that a "Jewish state" in part of Palestine was:

"not the end, but only the beginning." Its establishment would give a "powerful boost to our historic efforts to redeem the country in its entirety." For the "Jewish state" would have "outstanding army-- I have no doubt that our army will be among the world's outstanding--and so I am certain that we won't be constrained from settling in the rest of the country, either by mutual agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors, or by some other way. . . . . I still believe . . . . that after we become numerous and strong, the Arabs will understand that it is best for them to strike an alliance with us, and to benefit from our help, providing they allow us by their good will to settle in all parts of Palestine." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 188)

Regarding settling the Negev desert, which was allotted to the Palestinian state according to the Peel Commission, Ben-Gurion stated:

"It is very possible that in exchange for our financial, military, organizational and scientific assistance, the [Palestinian] Arabs will agree that we develop and build the Negev [which as of 2002, the Negev is still mostly populated by Palestinian-Israeli citizens]. It is also possible that they won't agree. No people always behaves according to logic, common sense, and best interests." If the Palestinian Arabs "act according to sterile nationalist emotion," and reject the idea of Jewish settlement, preferring that the Negev remain barren, then the Jewish army would act. "Because we cannot stand to see large areas of unsettled land capable of absorbing thousands of Jews remain empty, or to see Jews not return to their country because the [Palestinian] Arabs say that there is not enough room for them and us." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 188-189) It is worth noting that the Negev is still a barren desert, and under populated by Israeli Jews.

During a lecture in Tel-Aviv in front of Mapai activists in 1938, Ben-Gurion divided the realization of the "historic aim of the Jewish state" into two stages. The first stage, which would last ten to fifteen years, he called "the period of building and laying foundations." This would prepare the state for the second stage, "the period of expansion." The goal of both stages was the "gathering of the exiles in all of Palestine." And so "from the moment the state is established, it must calculate its actions with an eye toward this distant goal."

When Zionists were debating the Peel Commission's partition plan, Ben-Gurion advised his colleges to accept the concept of partitioning ONLY as a first stage of a complete conquest. He stated in 1937:

"Just as I do not see the proposed Jewish state as a final solution to the problems of the Jewish people, so I do now see partition as the final solution of the Palestine question. Those who reject partition are right in their claim that this country cannot be partitioned because it constitute one unit, not only from a historical point of view but also from that of nature and economy" (emphasis added). (Simha Flapan, p. 22)

and while addressing the Zionist executive, he again emphasized the tactical nature of his support for partition and his assumption that:

"after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the [Jewish] state, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of the Palestine" (emphasis added). (Simha Flapan, p. 22)

Similarly he also stated:

"The acceptance of partition does not commit us to renounce Transjordan. One does not demand from anybody to give up his vision. We shall accept a state in the boundaries fixed today--but the boundaries of the Zionist aspirations are the concern of the Jewish people and no external factor will be able to limit them." By 1949 Ben-Gurion had proved that he was as good as his word. (Simha Flapan, p. 52-53)

And regarding the Peel Commission, he also stated on June 9, 1937:

"In my opinion we must insist on the Peel Commission proposal, which sees in the transfer the only solution to this problem. And I have now to say that it is worthwhile that the Jewish people should bear GREATEST material sacrifices in order to ensure the success of transfer." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 70)

And on July 12, 1937 he also wrote how Zionists should insist on implementing the proposed compulsory population transfer, which was suggested earlier by the British Peel Commission. He said:

"the compulsory transfer of the [Palestinian] Arabs from the valleys of the projected Jewish state . . . . we have to stick to this conclusion the same way we grabbed at the Zionism itself." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 70)

David Ben-Gurion explained how compulsory population transfer could be implemented. He said in 1937:

".... because we will not be able to countenance large uninhabited areas absorb tens of thousands of Jews remaining empty .... And if we have to use force we shall use it without hesitation -- but only if we have no choice. We do not want and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places. Our whole desire is based on the assumption --- which has been corroborated in the course of all our activity in the country -- that there is enough room for us and the Arabs in the country and that if we have to use force - not in order to dispossess the Arabs from the Negev or Transjordan but in order to assure ourselves of the right, which is our due to settle there- then we have the force." (Righteous Victims, p. 142)

In 1938, Ben Gurion made it clear of his support for the establishment of a Jewish state on parts of Palestine ONLY as an intermediary stage, he wrote:

"[I am] satisfied with part of the country, but on the basis of the assumption that after we build up a strong force following the establishment of the state--we will abolish the partition of the country and we will expand to the whole Land of Israel." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 107, One Palestine Complete, p. 403)

He also stated that Arabs would come to terms with Zionism only when faced with a fait accompli. He said:

"This is only a stage in the realization of Zionism and it should prepare the ground for our expansion throughout the whole country through Jewish-Arab agreement .... the state, however, must enforce order and security and it will do this not by mobilizing and preaching 'sermons on the mount' but by the machine-guns, which we will need." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 108)

Ben-Gurion emphasized that the acceptance of the Peel Commission would not imply static borders for the future "Jewish state". In a letter Ben-Gurion sent to his son in 1937, he wrote:

"No Zionist can forgo the smallest portion of the Land Of Israel. [A] Jewish state in part [of Palestine] is not an end, but a beginning ..... Our possession is important not only for itself ... through this we increase our power, and every increase in power facilitates getting hold of the country in its entirety. Establishing a [small] state .... will serve as a very potent lever in our historical effort to redeem the whole country." (Righteous Victims, p. 138)

Ben-Gurion explained how the Palestinian Arab citizens of the Jewish state might be treated:

As Ben-Gurion explained, the advantage of the [Palestinian] Arabs having Arab citizenship was that in the event of hostilities, their legal status would be that of resident aliens, and they therefore "could be expelled" from the Jewish state for potential disloyalty. With Israeli citizenship, on the other hand, "it would only be possible to imprison them, and it would be better to expel them than to imprison them." (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 176)

Despite all the EXPANSIONIST Zionist policies, many Israelis and Zionists wonder why Arabs rejected UN GA proposed partition for Palestine in 1947? Click here to read our detailed response to this Israeli frequently asked question.

The tragedy of the European Jewry eventually strengthened the Yishuv in an unexpected way. In August 1937, Ben-Gurion noted that:

"Jewish suffering is also a political factor, and whoever says that Hitler diminished our strength, is not telling the truth." In one of history's crueler ironies, those words proved prophetic. Millions of Jews did not storm the beaches of Palestine, for they could not rise from the ashes of the death camps. But the Holocaust--they zenith of Jewish agony-- became the same "political force" of which Ben-Gurion spoke before he even imagined the systematic destruction of European Jewry. After the war, the Holocaust was a powerfully influential factor in turning world public in Zionism's favor, and was the decisive factor in defeating the policy of the British 1939 White Paper (which called for a united bi-national Palestinian state no later than 1949 and the cessation of Jewish immigration). Guilt, sorrow, and remorse---what might be called the collective conscience of humanity--led many nations (referring to 1947 UN proposed partition plan) finally to grant survivors, that which might have saved the many victims: a "Jewish state." (Shabtai Teveth, p. 196)

These comments by Ben-Gurion and his biographer (Shabtai Teveth) are a powerful reminder to the Christian West that Palestinians have been crucified for their sins. As the Gestapo slaughtered Europe's Jewish citizens, their fellow Christian European neighbors watched and aided the instruments of death in gassing and burning the Jews of Europe. The holocaust atrocity generated a collective sense of guilt in the Western World which has blinded them to the suffering that came upon the Palestinian people. It should be noted that the great majority of the Palestinian people, almost 10 million people, have been dispossessed and ethnically cleansed from their homes, farms and businesses. From the Palestinians points of view, the Western World has created two problems if not more:

The first was the destruction of most of Europe's Jewish community, and

The second is aiding in the collective dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Ironically, the so called "civilized world" have pitted two innocent people into a constant state of war for generations to come. And instead of solving one problem, they have created many!

Ben Gurion wrote twenty years after the 20th Zionists Congress, which rejected the Peel Commission partition plan in 1937, and contemplated how many Jews might have been saved, if the Peel Commission's Plan had been adopted. He wrote in 1958:

"Had partition been carried out, the history of our people would have been different and six million Jews in Europe would not have been killed---most of them would be in Israel" (One Palestine Complete, p. 414).

A month after the Nazi pogrom against Germany's Jews, famously known as Kristallnacht, Ben-Gurion provided an interesting mathematical formula for saving German Jewish kids. He stated in December 1938:

"If I knew it was possible to save all [Jewish] children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to Eretz-Yisrael, I would choose the latter----because we are faced not only with the accounting of these [Jewish] children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish People." (Righteous Victims, p. 162)

Similarly, Ben-Gurion provided another interesting mathematical formula. During the First Palestinian Intifada in 1936, Ben Gurion devised a scheme to increase Jewish immigration to Palestine. He proposed that the Jewish Agency would

How's Sharon doing? BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Is his family still crying over his turnip status?
I hope he's in eternal Zionist Hell......in pain, but forced to live through it for a while and can't communicate it to anyone....just stewing in misery...giving the war pig filth a taste of what he inflicted on the good peopla of Palestine....

He's getting his just desserts.