"Does our country not have the right to move forward like other democracies," says Nidal Mothman, a 35-year-old taxi driver in downtown Beirut. "We hate the American government for giving the green light for the Israelis to bomb us back to the stone age."

Mothman, like so many Lebanese in the capital city, is seething with anger over what he called "indiscriminate" Israeli aggression towards their country.

"How many Hezbollah have they killed," Mothman said. "Maybe just a few, while they've killed over 350 Lebanese civilians. What kind of war are they waging against my country?"

From the street to the leadership, most people seem to talk the same language. Last Thursday Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora told reporters that his country has been torn to shreds. "Can the international community stand by while such callous retribution by the state of Israel is inflicted on us?"

Siniora also accused Israel of massacring Lebanese civilians and attempting to destroy everything that allows the country to stay alive.

The facts on the ground add credence to his remarks. The humanitarian crisis continues to worsen by the hour, with close to a million Lebanese displaced. Officials say at least 64 bridges have been bombed. Many roads are cut by the bombing, and this is hindering transportation of food and aid supplies.

Other Israeli targets have included the country's largest milk factory, a food factory, two pharmaceutical plants, water treatment centres, power plants, grain silos, a Greek Orthodox Church, hospitals and an ambulance convoy.

In certain districts of Beirut life goes on as normal, but southern Beirut has been hit hard, with entire buildings brought to the ground by Israeli air raids.

"When do you think this war will end," 22-year-old student at the American University of Beirut Nishan Ishaqi said. "I lived in southern Beirut, and everything I know is totally destroyed now. I only want peace, and a safe place to stay."

Ishaqi, who was preparing to leave for Tripoli (north of Beirut in Lebanon) to stay with relatives, wept as he said, "Why must they do this to us? If they want to fight Hezbollah, let them fight them -- but not the Lebanese civilians."

Meanwhile, Israeli military operations continue to pummel southern Lebanon, including the city of Tyre, while Lebanese in Beirut had a day of relative calm Sunday.

Foreign war ships are crowding ports as evacuation of foreign nationals continues. "Yes, we see the priorities of the western countries as they evacuate their people," 55-year-old clothing merchant in the Hamra district of Beirut, Ayad Harrar said. "So you see, screw the Lebanese, they do not matter to us. This is what their governments are saying to us by these actions."

Harrar said people are shocked that his country was once again plunged into war, just when they thought they had found peace.

"This afternoon it is calm, but we all know that when they finish evacuating their people, we will be bombed once more," Harrar said. "It is not possible to live a life while we live under these conditions; not knowing when our day to die is coming from more Israeli bombs."

On Saturday, after meeting with members from a United Nations team who had just returned from the region, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters that the situation in Lebanon was part of the "birth pangs of a new Middle East," and said that Israel should ignore calls for a ceasefire.

Not many people in Beirut are able to see it that way. Suthir Amalat carrying her child in one arm as she bought water to take home for emergencies said she was preparing for everything to worsen.

"We are angry at Hezbollah for starting this catastrophe, but even more angry at the Israelis for destroying all of Lebanon," she said.

Right. The Israeli planes are probably really dropping medical supplies, to help the wounded.

what the reaction would be among US politicians and in the US media if an Arab group blew up 11 buildings in Tel Aviv and then claimed it was all justified, despite civilian casualties, because several zionist fanatics and Mossad agents were killed. For the next several months we would be treated to daily reminders of what beasts the Arab terrorists are, how the end never justifies the means, how superior Judeo-Christian values are to those of Islam, and how undeveloped Arab civilization really is. We would learn the life stories of many of the Israeli victims, and scores of their weeping relatives would be interviewed in depth. Clinton, Carter, and both Bushs would probably attend some of the funerals. Unspoken but unmistakably clear would be the implicit message that Israeli lives are worth far more than Arab lives.

This week I had the pleasure to appear on American radio, on the Laura Ingraham show. I was pitted against David Horowitz, a "Semite supremacist" who most recently made his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading McCarthyite witch-hunts against American professors who have the impertinence to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Arabs have minds and feelings like the rest of us.

It was a revealing experience, at least for a British journalist rarely exposed to the depths of ignorance and prejudice in the United States on Middle East matters -- well, apart from the regular whackos who fill my email in-tray. But five minutes of listening to Horowitz speak, and the sympathy with which his arguments were greeted by Laura ("The Professors -- your book's a great read, David"), left me a lot more frightened about the world's future.

Horowitz's response to every question, every development in the Middle East, whether it concerns Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria or Iran, is the same: "They want to drive the Jews into the sea". It's as simple as that. Not even a superficial attempt at analysis; just the message that the Arab world is trying to finish off the genocide started by Europe. And if Laura is any yardstick, a lot of Americans buy that stuff.

Horowitz is keen to bang the square peg of the Lebanon story into the round hole of his claims that the "Jews" are facing an imminent genocide in the Middle East. And to help him, he and the massed ranks of US apologists for Israel -- regulars, I suspect, of shows like Laura's -- are promoting at least four myths regarding Hizbullah's current rockets strikes on Israel. Unless they are challenged at every turn, the danger is that they will win the ground war against common sense in the US.

The first myth is that Israel was forced to pound Lebanon with its military hardware because Hizbullah began "raining down" rockets on the Galilee. Anyone with a short memory can probably recall that was not the first justification we were offered: that had to do with the two soldiers captured by Hizbullah on a border post on July 12.

But presumably Horowitz and his friends realised that 400 Lebanese dead and counting in little more than a week was hard to sell as a "proportionate" response. In any case Hizbullah kept telling the world how keen it was to return the soldiers in a prisoner swap.

Hundreds of dead in Lebanon, at least 1,000 severely injured and more than half a million refugees -- all because Israel is not ready to sit down at the negotiating table. Even Horowitz could not "advocate for Israel" on that one.

So the chronology of war has been reorganised: now we are being told that Israel was forced to attack Lebanon to defend itself from the barrage of Hizbullah rockets falling on Israeli civilians. The international community is buying the argument hook, line and sinker. "Israel has the right to defend itself", says every politician who can find a microphone to talk into.

...

The second myth is that Hizbullah's stockpile of 12,000 rockets -- the Israeli army's estimate -- poses an existential threat to Israel. According to Horowitz and others, Hizbullah collected its armoury with the sole intent of destroying the Jewish state.

If this really was Hizbullah's intention in amassing the weapons, it has a very deluded view of what is required to wipe Israel off the map. More likely, it collected the armoury in the hope that it might prove a deterrence -- even if a very inadequate one, as Lebanon is now discovering -- against a repeat of Israel's invasions of 1978 and 1982, and the occupation that lasted nearly two decades afterwards.

In fact, according to other figures supplied by the Israeli army, at least 2,000 Hizbullah rockets have already been fired into Israel while the army's bombardments have so far destroyed a further 2,000 rockets. In other words, northern Israel has already received a fifth of Hizbullah's arsenal. As someone living in the north, and within range of the rockets, I have to say Israel does not look close to being expunged. The Galilee may be emptier, as up to third of Israeli Jews seek temporary refuge in the south, but Israel's existence is in no doubt at all.

The third myth is that, while Israel is trying to fight a clean war by targeting only terrorists, Hizbullah prefers to bring death and destruction on innocents by firing rockets at Israeli civilians.

It is amazing that this myth even needs exploding, but after the efforts of Horowitz and co. it most certainly does. As the civilian death toll in Lebanon has rocketed, international criticism of Israel has remained at the mealy-mouthed level of diplomatic requests for "restraint" and "proportionate responses".

...

More
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5222.shtml

Guerrillas don't have to defeat their enemy to win. They just have to survive and keep fighting.

How about the 20,000 people killed in the Begin/Sharon barbarian invasion of 1982, and the many acts of Israeli military aggression since then? How about the military rampage against their fellow Arabs that is now going on in Gaza? Remember, there was no Hezbollah until the zionist war crimes of 1982.

"How about the 20,000 people killed in the Begin/Sharon barbarian invasion of 1982,"

How about the murder of hundreds and maiming of thousands of Israelis by Lebanon based PLO terrorists before that, and the scores of additional innocent Israelis that would have been murdered and maimed had it not been for the 1982 invasion?


"How about the military rampage against their fellow Arabs that is now going on in Gaza?"

We didn't even need a reminder. You also prefer to support Islamic Jihad, al-Aqsa Brigades and Hamas theocratic racists who launched aggression against Israel right after the Israeli evacuation of the Gaza strip.


"Remember, there was no Hezbollah until the zionist war crimes [sic] of 1982."

And there was no PA until Israel signed the oh-so low Oslo I Accord in 1993. And no Palestinian jurisdiction over any territories until Israel relinquished land control of the A and B areas to them under Oslo.

Applying the name Nazis to either Hezbollah or to Muslims in general is insulting and stupid. There is no essential difference between that and calling all Jews pawnshop owners or money grubbers. Furthermore, Nazism is an ideology of Aryan or Indo-European supremecy. Although there are many Indo-
European Muslims (in Iran, for example) virtually all the Muslims in Lebanon and Palestine are semites.

Wikipedia says;

German political agitator Wilhelm Marr coined the related German word Antisemitismus in his book "The Way to Victory of Germanicism over Judaism" in 1879. Marr used the phrase to mean Jew-hatred or Judenhass, and he used the new word antisemitism to make hatred of the Jews seem rational and sanctioned by scientific knowledge. Marr's book became very popular, and in the same year he founded the "League of Anti-Semites" ("Antisemiten-Liga"), the first German organization committed specifically to combatting the alleged threat to Germany posed by the Jews, and advocating their forced removal from the country.

So far as can be ascertained, the word was first widely printed in 1881, when Marr published "Zwanglose Antisemitische Hefte," and Wilhelm Scherer used the term "Antisemiten" in the "Neue Freie Presse" of January. The related word semitism was coined around 1885. See also the coinage of the term "Palestinian" by Germans to refer to the nation or people known as Jews, as distinct from the religion of Judaism.

Despite the use of the prefix "anti," the terms Semitic and Anti-Semitic are not antonyms. To avoid the confusion of the misnomer, many scholars on the subject (such as Emil Fackenheim of the Hebrew University) now favor the unhyphenated term antisemitism. Yehuda Bauer articulated this view in his writings and lectures: (the term) "Antisemitism, especially in its hyphenated spelling, is inane nonsense, because there is no Semitism that you can be anti to.")[6][7]

The term anti-Semitism has historically referred to prejudice towards Jews alone, and this was the only use of this word for more than a century. It does not traditionally refer to prejudice toward other people who speak Semitic languages (e.g. Arabs or Assyrians). Bernard Lewis, Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University, says that "Anti-Semitism has never anywhere been concerned with anyone but Jews."[8]

This is one of the most stupid posts I've ever read. The issue was calling Muslims Nazis. What do Lebanese Christians have to do with it? The Phalange is fascist but not Nazi. It is also the ally of Israel, perhaps because it operates on the principle that birds of a political feather should flock together. Perhaps you remember the incident in 1982 when Sharon let the Phalangists into a refugee camp to massacre Muslims.

long time no hear...vacation, I assume?

tail between legs?
Maybe your legs. On the run?
Ha ha ha ha .

his week I had the pleasure to appear on American radio, on the Laura Ingraham show. I was pitted against David Horowitz, a "Semite supremacist" who most recently made his name under the banner of Campus Watch, leading McCarthyite witch-hunts against American professors who have the impertinence to suggest that maybe, just maybe, Arabs have minds and feelings like the rest of us.

It was a revealing experience, at least for a British journalist rarely exposed to the depths of ignorance and prejudice in the United States on Middle East matters -- well, apart from the regular whackos who fill my email in-tray. But five minutes of listening to Horowitz speak, and the sympathy with which his arguments were greeted by Laura ("The Professors -- your book's a great read, David"), left me a lot more frightened about the world's future.

Horowitz's response to every question, every development in the Middle East, whether it concerns Lebanon, the Palestinians, Syria or Iran, is the same: "They want to drive the Jews into the sea". It's as simple as that. Not even a superficial attempt at analysis; just the message that the Arab world is trying to finish off the genocide started by Europe. And if Laura is any yardstick, a lot of Americans buy that stuff.

Horowitz is keen to bang the square peg of the Lebanon story into the round hole of his claims that the "Jews" are facing an imminent genocide in the Middle East. And to help him, he and the massed ranks of US apologists for Israel -- regulars, I suspect, of shows like Laura's -- are promoting at least four myths regarding Hizbullah's current rockets strikes on Israel. Unless they are challenged at every turn, the danger is that they will win the ground war against common sense in the US.

The first myth is that Israel was forced to pound Lebanon with its military hardware because Hizbullah began "raining down" rockets on the Galilee. Anyone with a short memory can probably recall that was not the first justification we were offered: that had to do with the two soldiers captured by Hizbullah on a border post on July 12.

But presumably Horowitz and his friends realised that 400 Lebanese dead and counting in little more than a week was hard to sell as a "proportionate" response. In any case Hizbullah kept telling the world how keen it was to return the soldiers in a prisoner swap.

Hundreds of dead in Lebanon, at least 1,000 severely injured and more than half a million refugees -- all because Israel is not ready to sit down at the negotiating table. Even Horowitz could not "advocate for Israel" on that one.

So the chronology of war has been reorganised: now we are being told that Israel was forced to attack Lebanon to defend itself from the barrage of Hizbullah rockets falling on Israeli civilians. The international community is buying the argument hook, line and sinker. "Israel has the right to defend itself", says every politician who can find a microphone to talk into.

...

The second myth is that Hizbullah's stockpile of 12,000 rockets -- the Israeli army's estimate -- poses an existential threat to Israel. According to Horowitz and others, Hizbullah collected its armoury with the sole intent of destroying the Jewish state.

If this really was Hizbullah's intention in amassing the weapons, it has a very deluded view of what is required to wipe Israel off the map. More likely, it collected the armoury in the hope that it might prove a deterrence -- even if a very inadequate one, as Lebanon is now discovering -- against a repeat of Israel's invasions of 1978 and 1982, and the occupation that lasted nearly two decades afterwards.

In fact, according to other figures supplied by the Israeli army, at least 2,000 Hizbullah rockets have already been fired into Israel while the army's bombardments have so far destroyed a further 2,000 rockets. In other words, northern Israel has already received a fifth of Hizbullah's arsenal. As someone living in the north, and within range of the rockets, I have to say Israel does not look close to being expunged. The Galilee may be emptier, as up to third of Israeli Jews seek temporary refuge in the south, but Israel's existence is in no doubt at all.

The third myth is that, while Israel is trying to fight a clean war by targeting only terrorists, Hizbullah prefers to bring death and destruction on innocents by firing rockets at Israeli civilians.

It is amazing that this myth even needs exploding, but after the efforts of Horowitz and co. it most certainly does. As the civilian death toll in Lebanon has rocketed, international criticism of Israel has remained at the mealy-mouthed level of diplomatic requests for "restraint" and "proportionate responses".

...

More
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5222.shtml

Israel is not using any weapons deemed illegal under international law. Take it to the bank.
You are reading propaganda.

Time will tell, won't it?

MEYER LONDON WRITES: nazis
Wednesday, Jul. 26, 2006 at 12:43 PM

"Applying the name Nazis to either Hezbollah or to Muslims in general is insulting and stupid."

BECKY: So how do you think Jewish people feel when they hear the term "Zionazis?" How MUCH MORE upsetting it must be to those who lost grandparents, parents, uncles, aunts, and brothers and sisters in the ovens of the third reich to hear smart-assed activists placarding the Star of David into a swastika?

MEYER LONDON WRITES: "There is no essential difference between that and calling all Jews pawnshop owners or money grubbers."

BECKY: Well that puts you ahead of Nessie. At least you think THAT is wrong.

MEYER LONDON WRITES: " Furthermore, Nazism is an ideology of Aryan or Indo-European supremecy. Although there are many Indo-European Muslims (in Iran, for example) virtually all the Muslims in Lebanon and Palestine are semites.

BECKY: See the accompanying photo for a direct link between Arab/Muslim leadership and Nazi party leadership. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Photo for above post

mission, calls for full investigUnited Nations Staff Council protests attacks on Lebanon ation of events
Report, UNStC, 26 July 2006
The United Nations Staff Council’s Standing Committee on the Security and Independence of the International Civil Service said today that the increased attacks directed against United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) personnel, which led to the death of four United Nations military observers yesterday, are unacceptable. The Committee strongly protests these actions and their tragic consequences.

The Committee calls on the Secretary-General to suspend UNIFIL operations and pull back its personnel from hazardous positions, until such time as the security situation improves.

The Committee also calls on the Secretary-General to launch an immediate and full investigation of the incident that resulted in the death of the observers.

The Committee calls upon all parties, including the Israeli authorities, to respect and protect all United Nations and other aid workers operating in the area in accordance with international law.

Since the outbreak of hostilities, says the mission, one UNIFIL international staff member and his wife were also killed, and four Ghanaian soldiers, one Indian soldier and one military observer were wounded as a result of firing.

This incident once again serves as a tragic reminder of the innumerable risks undertaken daily by United Nations personnel across the globe. The Committee, on behalf of all its members, extends its heartfelt sympathy to the families and colleagues of the victims.

Related Links
# BY TOPIC: Israel attacks Lebanon (12 July 2006-)
# Three UNIFIL peacekeepers dead, one missing, UNIFIL (26 July 2006)
# Annan ‘shocked’ by Israeli attack on UN Lebanon post, UN News (25 July 2006)

Remember how long it took Bush to get aid to New Orleans after the disaster? He seems to be working much faster now - to make the disaster in the Middle East worse. British authorities have protested the fact that US cargo planes are refueling in Scotland on their way to deliver more missles and other weapons Israel to use against the Lebanese and Palestinians.

So one religious leader sought help from Hitler. I guess you could also run pictures of members of the British Royal family sucking up to Adolf, or pictures of some of his American admirers - Charles Lindberg, Henry Ford, or US Ambassador to Britain and father of JFK Joseph P. Kennedy. I guess this would mean that it would be ok to refer to the people of Britain and the US as Nazis. You could also mention the friendly correspondence between some members of anti-British terrorist zionist groups and Adolf Eichman. That, by your reasoning, would mean that we could refer to Israelis as .... well, perhaps we shouldn't go there.

Every time they bring up Al-Husseini, I’m going to tell you about Polkes, Begin, Shamir and the rest of the Nazi collaborator/terrorist gang that founded the rogue state of Israel.

Hajj Amin Al Husseini wasn't Hitler's only stooge in British occupied Palestine. Consider the case of Fieval Polkes:

"Von Bolschwing was deeply involved in intelligence work--and in the persecution of innocent people -- for most of his adult life. He had joined the Nazi party at the age of twenty-three, in 1932, and had become an SD (party security service) informer almost immediately. In the years leading up to 1939, von Bolschwing became a leading Nazi intelligence agent in the Middle East, where he worked under cover as an importer in Jerusalem. One of his first brushes with Nazi espionage work, according to captured SS records, was a role in creating a covert agreement between the Nazis and Fieval Polkes, a commander of the militant Zionist organization Haganah, whom von Bolschwing had met through business associates in the Mideast. Under the arrangement the Haganah was permitted to run recruiting and training camps for Jewish youth inside Germany. These young people, as well as certain other Jews driven out of Germany by the Nazis, were encouraged to emigrate to Palestine. Polkes and the Haganah, in return, agreed to provide the SS with intelligence about British affairs in Palestine. Captured German records claim that Polkes believed the increasingly brutal Nazi persecution of the Jews could be turned to Zionist advantage -- at least temporarily -- by compelling Jewish immigration to Palestine, and that the Haganah commander's sole source of income, moreover, was secret funds from the SS.

It was in the course of these negotiations that the young Baron von Bolschwing gained the trust of Adolf Eichmann, who was at the time an obscure SS functionary specializing in intelligence on Freemasonry and Jewish affairs for the Nazi party. The acquaintance was more than a casual one, for von Bolschwing went on to play a central role in arranging conferences between Eichmann and Polkes in Vienna and Cairo, contacts that established Eichmann as the SS's Jewish affairs expert and laid the foundation for his later career as the architect of the extermination of European Jewry.”

-- Blowback : America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War by Christopher Simpson, ISBN: 1555841066, p 253

Simpson’s source on this is:

Sicherheitsdienst des RFSS SD-Hauptamt, Palastinareise Bericht (U.S. designation no. 173-b-16-14/61), now at Frames 2936012-2936068, microfilm roll 411, T-175, RG 242, NA, Washington, D.C.

* * * * *

After the war, von Bolschwing settled in California. He became a Republican Party activist and a personal friend of Richard Nixon. Among his other accomplishments, he perpetrated the single largest stock fraud in California’s history. He squirmed out of the charges when a patsy took the fall for him. Later he was partners in a defense electronics company called TCI with Iran-contra figures Richard Secord and (Iranian Jew) Albert Hakim.

What a guy, huh? For details, see:

http://www.newsmakingnews.com/mbtape11,22,81,520.htm

* * * * *

Then there was Menachem Begin, terrorist extrordinaire, who later was elected to the highest office in the land.

Before that, he waged war against Hitler enemies.

See:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/irgun.html

Irgun Zeva'i Le'umi
“The National Military Organization” (Etzel, I.Z.L.)

(snip)

From 1943 Etzel was headed by Menachem Begin. In February 1944, Etzel declared war against the British administration. It attacked and blew up government offices, military installations and police stations.

(snip)

* * * * *

Begin was not just a founding father of Israel, but also the butcher of Deir Yassin, Palestine’s very own Lidice:


See:

http://www.deiryassin.org/mas.html

(snip)

Early in the morning of Friday, April 9, 1948, commandos of the Irgun, headed by Menachem Begin, and the Stern Gang attacked Deir Yassin, a village with about 750 Palestinian residents. It was several weeks before the end of the British Mandate. The village lay outside of the area that the United Nations recommended be included in a future Jewish State. Deir Yassin had a peaceful reputation and was even said by a Jewish newspaper to have driven out some Arab militants. But it was located on high ground in the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and one plan, kept secret until years afterwards, called for it to be destroyed and the residents evacuated to make way for a small airfield that would supply the beleaguered Jewish residents of Jerusalem.

By noon over 100 people, half of them women and children, had been systematically murdered. Four commandos died at the hands of resisting Palestinians using old Mausers and muskets. Twenty-five male villagers were loaded into trucks, paraded through the Zakhron Yosef quarter in Jerusalem, and then taken to a stone quarry along the road between Givat Shaul and Deir Yassin and shot to death. The remaining residents were driven to Arab East Jerusalem.

That evening the Irgunists and the Sternists escorted a party of foreign correspondents to a house at Givat Shaul, a nearby Jewish settlement founded in 1906. Over tea and cookies they amplified the details of the operation and justified it, saying Deir Yassin had become a concentration point for Arabs, including Syrians and Iraqis, planning to attack the western suburbs of Jerusalem. They said that 25 members of the Haganah militia had reinforced the attack and claimed that an Arabic-speaking Jew had warned the villagers over a loudspeaker from an armored car. This was duly reported in The New York Times on April 10.

A final body count of 254 was reported by The New York Times on April 13, a day after they were finally buried. By then the leaders of the Haganah had distanced themselves from having participated in the attack and issued a statement denouncing the dissidents of Irgun and the Stern Gang, just as they had after the attack on the King David Hotel in July 1946. A 1987 study undertaken by Birzeit University's Center for Research and Documentation of Palestinian Society found "the numbers of those killed does not exceed 120".

The Haganah leaders admitted that the massacre "disgraced the cause of Jewish fighters and dishonored Jewish arms and the Jewish flag." They played down the fact that their militia had reinforced the terrorists' attack, even though they did not participate in the barbarism and looting during the subsequent "mopping up" operations.

They also played down the fact that, in Begin's words, "Deir Yassin was captured with the knowledge of the Haganah and with the approval of its commander" as a part of its "plan for establishing an airfield."

Ben Gurion even sent an apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But this horrific act served the future State of Israel well. According to Begin, “Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of ‘Irgun butchery,’ were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede. The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.”

(snip)

Of about 144 houses, 10 were dynamited. The cemetery was later bulldozed and, like hundreds of other Palestinian villages to follow, Deir Yassin was wiped off the map. By September, Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Poland, Rumania, and Slovakia were settled there over the objections of Martin Buber, Cecil Roth and other Jewish leaders, who believed that the site of the massacre should be left uninhabited. The center of the village was renamed Givat Shaul Bet. As Jerusalem expanded, the land of Deir Yassin became part of the city and is now known simply as the area between Givat Shaul and the settlement of Har Nof on the western slopes of the mountain.

The massacre of Palestinians at Deir Yassin is one of the most significant events in 20th-century Palestinian and Israeli history. This is not because of its size or its brutality, but because it stands as the starkest early warning of a calculated depopulation of over 400 Arab villages and cities and the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian inhabitants to make room for survivors of the Holocaust and other Jews from the rest of the world.

(snip)


* * * * *

Then there was Yitzhak Shamir . . .


http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/15-shamir.htm

(snip)

Shamir’s Background

(snip)

. . . was born Yitzhak Yzernitzky, in Rozeny, in what is now Byelorussia, in 1915.

(snip)

Little is known of his Irgun career, but one incident stands out. In 1938 Yzernitzky and a 15-year-old recruit, Eliyahu Bet Zouri, tried to blow up a WZO defence fund collection booth which levied a toll on Jewish travellers leaving Tel Aviv. They planted a crude gunpowder bomb which went off prematurely, severely burning Bet Zouri’s legs and scorching the face of Israel’s future Prime Minister. But this bizarre incident was a mere nothing compared to his career as a leading figure in the “Stern Gang”.

(snip)

* * * * *

>a 15-year-old recruit,

Just in case you were wondering who first armed children in Palestine.

These guys:

http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/07/170819_comment.php#170865

And Nessie, everytime you spam this ridiculous statement:
"The cemetery was later bulldozed and, like hundreds of other Palestinian villages to follow, Deir Yassin was wiped off the map. "

I will point out that the various Palestinian websites STILL haven't gotten around to coordinating their lies: According to that bastion of truth, "Palestine Remembered" " Deir Yassin mostly survived destruction " Bulldozed? Apparently not. And they go on to describe the Deir Yassin cemetery- which is still there, even today.

Didn't your blessed mother ever tell you that liars have short memories, Nessie?
If these websites lies about Deir Yassin, it makes you wonder just what else they are lying about. And Nessie, "History buff" if every time you post this tripe, I point out its historical inaccuracy, and you continue to post it, that makes you complicit in spreading the lies.

The dead are the issue.

The only difference between Nazism and Zionism is the name of the ethnic group favored for supremacy.

See:

http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/compos.htm

You are missing the point; I guess I will have to make it crystal clear, elementary school style. I did not say that all Israelis are Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. I was pointing out the example of a few members of zionist groups corresponding with Eichman to show that it would be as ridiculous to call all Muslims Nazis because of the actions of one clergyman as it would be to call all Jews Nazis because of the pro-Nazi activities of a few terrorists. Get the point now?
As for the Muslims in Lebanon and Palestine being Nazis, I've already pointed out how ridiculous that idea is. Nazism stands for the supremecy of so-called Aryans; virtually all Muslims in these two areas are Semites. Also, most Nazis were either Christian (Catholic or Protestant) or, in the case of some in Hitler's immediate circle, agnostics. This hardly fits in with the religious view of people you see as Muslim fanatics.

was your constant use of the term Islamonazis or something very similar. It is stupid and bigoted, as I have already pointed out.

As I have already pointed out, there are no Muslim groups in Lebanon or Palestine who have a Nazi ideology, which is based on Aryan supremecy and pseudo-Darwinist survival of the fittest races nonsense.
As I have already pointed out, Israel should be careful about accusing anyone else of using Nazi methods, in view of its own practices torturing prisoners, using aircraft for the terror bombing of cities, and imposing collective punishments on villages.

There is no such thing as a mild method of torture. If it was mild it would not be torture. The Israelis are not selective in their terror bombings of cities, which is one of the reasons why 20,000 people were killed during their 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Any kind of collective punishment of villages is ethically wrong by any standard, and demolishing houses, cutting down fruit trees and arresting every young man in sight are not benign measures.

All those nasty Muslims are up in orange trees throwing fruit at them so of course they have the right to invade Lebanon and destroy it with a blitzkrieg and a replay of the Battle of Britain - this time with the bombed country having no fighter planes with which to defend itself.
On the other hand, some of these zionist posters may have had over-ripe fruit fall on their heads because the owners of the fruit trees had been arrested or expelled from the country. That would explain their irrational thinking patterns and their tendency to fly into a rage when anyone points out any Israeli war crimes.

Just remember this one thing, stupid cattle, and you can't go wrong:

It's

NEVER

ISRAEL'S

FAULT

It's

NEVER

ISRAEL'S

FAULT

It's

NEVER

ISRAEL'S

FAULT

It's

NEVER

ISRAEL'S

FAULT

THE PRO-ISRAEL LOBBY
Edward S. Herman


The previous two articles in this series pointed up the extremely racist and abusive character of Israeli policy toward Arabs, and the simultaneous virtually unconditional U.S. support for Israel and enormous pro-Israel (and anti-Arab) bias of the mainstream media and intelligentsia. There is considerable dispute over the reasons for this bias and policy tilt. The two most prominent explanations are Israel's strategic value to the U.S. and the power of the pro-Israel lobby; others include western guilt and sympathy for the Jewish people as a result of the holocaust, and anti-Arab racism. I will review briefly these alternative explanations, but will devote most attention to the power of the lobby, which I consider of primary importance.



Western Guilt
As an explanation of western support for Israel, guilt over the holocaust and sympathy with the victim people is a non-starter. Guilt rarely if ever affects national policy, which is almost always grounded in more earthy considerations. Concern over the holocaust victims never extended so far as to allow significant numbers of Jewish survivors to emigrate to the U.S. after World War II, nor did it lead to extensive prosecutions of the holocaust managers and beneficiaries. Large numbers of these, including major death merchants, were protected and put to use in the Cold War. The question may also be raised, why should there be such guilt related to the holocaust and neither to black slavery and subsequent discrimination against blacks, nor to the destruction of the indigenous Indians? And why shouldn't there be guilt over western connivance in the expulsion of Palestinians from their homelands and victimization in 27 years of occupation?

Guilt, in short, is easily managed, and can be brought into play effectively by those powerful enough to mobilize it for their own purposes.



Anti-Arab Racism
Another possible source of the bias against the Palestinians is racism. This factor is more important than "guilt," but I don't think it deserves heavy weight either. Palestinian racial types are variable and overlap with those of Jews. There is also great variability in Palestinian culture, much of it overlapping with that of the West. If Palestinians and Arabs are looked down upon today, and if racist stereotypes are expounded with impunity by Martin Peretz, Fouad Ajami, Hollywood, and the culture at large, this racism is mainly an effect and reflection of interest and policy rather than a causal factor.

Arabs who cooperate with the West, like the Saudis, Mubarak, and Fouad Ajami are not subject to racial epithets and stereotypes. This suggests that if other Arabs were more tractable and responsive to western demands they would cease to be negatively stereotyped. Scapegoating is a function of power and interest. Unfortunately for the Palestinians and many other Arabs, they have little economic or military muscle and stand in the way of powerful interests. It is still ironic and horrifying that Jews like Podhoretz, Peretz, and Kissinger, and the organized Jewish establishment, should be in the forefront of racist derogation and dehumanization of Arabs: doing to others what was done, with such terrible consequences, to their own in-group.



Israel As Strategic Asset
A more compelling analysis explains the policy tilt and bias in terms of Israel's value to the U.S. as a strategic asset. Most important in this view, Israel serves U.S. interests as a western-oriented enclave and proxy military and political force in the Middle East. It has also made itself available as a surrogate in covertly supporting regimes difficult for the United States to support directly and openly (Duvalier's Haiti, Guatemala in the years of mass murder, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Zaire, etc.)

There is an important truth in this line of argument. If Israel's interests were in real conflict with that of core U.S. power interests, or could not be reconciled with them, there is little doubt that support for Israel would be weaker. But conflict may be pasted over by an artificial and strained reconciliation, that employs an inferior political strategy based on a pre-ordained priority accorded one party. If core U.S. interests call for access to and control over Middle East oil, has the pro-Israel policy served this end well? Israel has no oil, and is disliked and feared by the oil rich Arab states. Support for Israel has brought not peace and stability to the region, but polarization and a string of wars. The U.S. policy led to the organization of an Arab-centered oil producers cartel and the embargo and damaging price increases of 1973. There is no reason to believe that a more even-handed U.S. policy that forced a peace settlement wouldn't have been equally or more effective than the one followed. Arguably, the U.S. was lucky to maintain hegemony through the turmoil that resulted from a policy of aggressive support for the Arab states' enemy.

It is true that Israel and the pro-Israeli lobby geared well into the demands and policies of U.S. militarists and the Reagan administration in the 1970s and 1980s. Israel did serve the surrogate function, and it and the lobby supported aggressive strategies and the arms race, and shared common interests with the military-industrial-complex and were warmly admired by ideological hard-liners. This was, I believe, of greater importance in generating support for Israel in dominant U.S. circles than their supposed service in Middle East policy.

With the fall of the Soviet Union and the downturn in the arms budget, the compatibility of interests of Israel and the domestic MIC has become more problematic. Competition between U.S. and Israeli arms manufacturers is tending to replace joint efforts to enlarge and share the pie. Elements of the Pentagon and contractors resent Israel's power over U.S. political life, and this has manifested itself in the treatment of Pollard, the recent controversy over claims of illegal Israeli transfers of Patriot technology to China, and other cases. This growing conflict of interest may eventually reduce the power of the camp urging generous support for the "strategic asset."



The Pro-Israel Lobby
Another important reason to doubt the importance of Israel's strategic asset role in explaining the pro-Israel policy and intellectual bias is the character and evident impact of the pro-Israel lobby. If scores of Democratic politicians take large sums from the lobby, and speak and vote in ways consistent with its demands, we may reasonably doubt whether this political behavior results from a considered judgment of Middle East issues. Long-time Democratic congressman (and economist!) Clarence Long acknowledged to Paul Findley that "Long ago I decided that I'd vote for anything that AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] wants. I didn't want them on my back....I made up my mind I would get and keep their support." Long, of course, rationalized his submission and could not comprehend why David Obey would raise questions about the level of Israel's aid. A colleague chided Long: "Maybe he's thinking about our own national interest."

The lobby's power is manifested, first, then, in the virtually open submissiveness of a large number of legislators. The lobby can muster remarkable numbers in support of Israeli interests in general or on any specific issue: in 1989, after Secretary of State Baker at an AIPAC convention, called upon Israel to awaken from its dream of the Greater Land of Israel, "the Israeli lobby showed who rules the town by making 95 Senators and 235 congressmen sign a declaration of support of Israel" (in the words of Alon Pinkas, in the Israeli publication Davar[June 28, 1991]).

Second, the lobby's power is shown by its ability to maintain Israel's huge claim on the foreign aid budget, which remains at approximately $4 billion a year--untouchable and undebatable--even in a period of serious budgetary pressures and neglect of large domestic constituencies. Even Israeli commentators wonder at the phenomenon and ask whether this may not eventually backfire: speaking of the pressures on U.S. politicians in 1991 to provide a $10 billion guarantee to help absorb immigrants to Israel, Ben-Dror Yemini noted in the journal Al-Hamishmar, that "the U.S. is full of poverty-stricken and downtrodden people who don't have an AIPAC, but still want to obtain something for themselves." They may be legitimately angry at the ability of the lobby to obtain generous benefits for relatively affluent foreign refugees, "which they may or may not interpret in their own minds in the light of some tenets of malignant anti-Semitic nonsense."

Third, George Bush greatly antagonized the Israeli lobby and its media spokespersons by trying to tie the $10 billion loan guarantee to Israeli restraint on further settlements in the occupied territories. The resultant reaction was, I believe, an important factor in his defeat, second only to the economic stagnation. Clinton, by contrast, promised Rabin there would be no cuts in the Israeli grants, and redefined the "occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza as merely a matter of "disputed territory." As with Clarence Long, the Clinton administration finds it the better part of valor to give the lobby whatever it wants.

A fourth manifestation of lobby power is its ability to keep a lid on public discussion and exposure of Israeli abuses (e.g., torture, aid to terrorist states, cross-border terrorism of its own in Lebanon, illegal buildup of a nuclear arsenal). This even extends to covering up the massacre of U.S. military personnel. In 1976, following careful surveillance of the plainly marked U.S. intelligence vessel the USS Liberty, the Israelis attacked the ship repeatedly, killing 34 U.S. sailors and wounding 171. The Israelis aimed to sink the ship, apparently to prevent its intelligence gathering and reporting of an Israeli invasion of the Golan heights which took place the next day. Following the attack, there were delays in coming to the stricken vessel's aid, based on orders from Washington. Subsequent investigations involved a steady cover-up of the unquestionable fact of the deliberateness of the attack; the official and public line was "tragic error." The captain of the ship was eventually given a congressional medal of honor, but quietly, and only after it had been established that Israeli officials would not object. Admiral Thomas Moorer claimed that the Johnson administration covered up this crime strictly "for domestic political reasons. I don't think there is any question about it."

The basis of the lobby's power is political resources, intelligently and aggressively deployed, strong media and pundit representation and support, a well developed and powerful system of grassroots activism, and the absence of any seriously contesting opposition. Affluent Jews have responded generously in support of pro-Israel lobbying groups, especially in times of perceived threats to Israel. The leading U.S. lobbying group, AIPAC, with an annual budget of some $15 million in the early 1990s, is widely thought to be the most influential lobbying body in the country. There are more than 60 pro-Israel PACs, most of them closely linked to AIPAC, whose resources (supplemented by individual contributions) has made this collective the largest dispenser of single-issue money in U.S. politics. It is deployed aggressively and with sophistication, and its threat terrifies politicians, especially Democrats. They have seen what happens to a Charles Percy or Paul Findley, among many others. According to political analyst Stephen Isaacs, the Democratic National Committee gets about half of its money from Jewish sources, and he reports one non-Jewish strategist as saying: "You can't hope to go anywhere in national politics, if you're a Democrat, without Jewish money." Republicans have been less dependent on this source, but many of them (and their Christian right supporters) have been keen on Israel because of its harsh policies and support of U.S. militarism.

The lobby has benefited greatly from the sizable contingent of mass media pundits who aggressively push the Israeli foreign office and AIPAC line--George Will, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer, A. M. Rosenthal, and others. The rest of the mainstream media only rarely depart from the official U.S. line, which is basically strongly supportive of Israel, even if occasionally calling for small changes and symbolic gestures. Media adherence to the line is reinforced by the strength of the lobby's grass roots base and its activism. AIPAC has an estimated 50-60,000 active supporters, and the Jewish communities nationally have several hundred thousand more who follow the news, write letters and make phone calls to editors and reporters, and attend meetings where Middle East issues are addressed. They constitute a tremendous and effective flak machine that greatly constrains free speech and the scope of debate in this country.

As one illustration, when one of the officers injured in the Israeli attack on the Liberty, James Ennes, published a book on the case in 1980-- The Assault on the Liberty --he was under immediate and steady attack from Israeli officials, AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, and the grass roots activists, who would not tolerate a challenge to the official lie that the Liberty attack had been a mere unfortunate "error" and that there had been a major cover-up. Hecklers at his speeches called him a liar and anti-Semite, and when Ennes was announced as a guest on a talk show in San Francisco, the station got 500 protesting letters, and the show was inundated by hostile phone calls, including threats of physical harm to the author. His book became hard to get as his publisher, Random House, backed away from it.



The Lobby in Philadelphia
In Philadelphia, the grass roots activists of the lobby, including members of CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy [sic] in Middle East Affairs), the Zionist Organization of America, and others, monitor, protest, and threaten those with different viewpoints, and have greatly affected coverage of Middle East issues. At Penn, no posted signs for "hostile" speakers can stay intact for an hour, and speakers like Israel Shahak are treated to disruptions and extremely hostile questions. On local talk shows, speakers on the lobby hit list, or otherwise perceived as threatening, are subject to organized call-ins that include personal insults, invective, and bullying attempts to monopolize the discussion. All TV programs or Op Ed or news articles that depart from the lobby party line elicit a strong response. The pressure is incessant: there is a steady stream of letters, visits to editors to complain about unfairness, and sometimes threats. An insider at the Philadelphia Inquirer told one local academic that during the Senate campaign between Arlen Specter and Lynne Yeakel--the lobby strongly favoring Specter--the leading lobby spokesperson in the Philadelphia area faxed his comments and criticisms to the paper daily. With negligible responses from local Arabs, and episodic and unorganized responses from others, it is the pro-Israel lobby that the media most fear and to which they must and do adapt.

During the Specter-Yeakel campaign, the Inquirer 's reporter assigned to it repeatedly pointed out that Yeakel was wealthy and was putting money into the campaign, but never mentioned that Jewish PACs were pouring money into the Specter camp, although this information was publicly available. Yeakel's church had sponsored a Middle East program in which several of the speakers had criticized Israel. The Specter campaign took this up as showing "anti-Semitism," calling on Yeakel to dissociate herself from the program. The Inquirer played this up as real, never mentioning that Specter himself had been one of the speakers on the program. The paper published a series of letters by lobby members denouncing the church, and with ad hominem attacks on some of the church leaders, and blatantly false statements, such as "No Jewish leader has attempted to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism." The lobby leader who engaged in the daily faxing of criticisms had seven letters and four Op Ed columns published in the paper during 1991-92. A letter by this writer criticizing the Inquirer 's news coverage of the Senate campaign elicited a 5-single spaced page letter of reply from the Executive Editor, but the critical letter was not published. And replies from Yeakel's church group, even by individuals personally attacked, were refused publication by the paper. This cave-in and one sided policy on the editorial page paralleled serious bias in the news department. It is not clear that bias would not have been present without the incessant lobby pressure, but that surely took its toll.

Here's some resources:
http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/mideast/palestine/divestmentmedia.html

also:
http://www.ifamericansknew.org

How cheap of me to "distort the truth" with hard photographic evidence of Israel's war-crimes in Lebanon. I should just do like you and make my points with hollow unsupported mindless volleys of rhetoric

to learn that the conflict in Palestine is not simply a case of heroic Israeli freedom fighters defending democracy and the Bible revelations against hordes of crazed, Muslm fanatics who refuse to listen to the James Dobson radio show.

Today: A Hezbollah rocket hit the top floor window of the main hospital in the Israeli border town of Nahariya.


Do you want to see graphic photos? Would that make it more real for you? Do you want to see photos of Israeli victims? Or do Israeli deaths not count for you?

The anti-zionists , when faced with facts- like Hizzbolah's bombing an Israeli hospital, resort to insults, fraud and porn. What does this say about the strength of their arguments?

Do you condemn Hizzbolah for targeting Israel hospitals? Lets hear. Yes or no?

If there are such victims the US and Israeli governments seem pretty unconcerned about them. While the rest of the world is calling for a cease-fire, the zionist leaders and Condi "Shoe Collector" Rice have rejected the suggestion out of hand.

If there are such victims the US and Israeli governments seem pretty unconcerned about them. While the rest of the world is calling for a cease-fire, the zionist leaders and Condi "Shoe Collector" Rice have rejected the suggestion out of hand.

That ward was on the 4th floor of the Nahariya hospital. Nahariya is quote near the border but not really on it.

Israeli deaths don't count to me. They're just filthy Zionists pigs. Now shut up you coward kike.

When the kidnapped Israelis are returned, and Hizzbolah stops firing missiles at Israel, the war will end.

You get that, Meyer London?

Where have you learned that the US and Israeli governments seem pretty unconcerned about the hospital having been targetted? I don't see any substantiation beyond your conjecture. "The rest of the world" doesn't want Hizbollah to be ruduced to a militia that can't inflict harm on Israel. They're not asking for a ceasefire as such. Basically they're demanding Israel cease and do not care if Hizbollah continues to fire at Israel. Nice try though.

"Do you want to see graphic photos? Would that make it more real for you?"

Absolutely, positively. Otherwise I'd just be taking your word for it, in which case I might as well get the top of my head removed along with my brain so I can use my skull for something worthwhile, like as a planter for a nice spider plant

TW wants to see the graphic evidence so he can mock the destruction and the Israeli Jews. Basically he wants to rub his hands in glee.

Thank you for pointing out that the rest of the world is wrong and the US and Israel are right. Funny how things always work out that way. It used to be that the US, Israel, and South Africa were always right and the rest of the world wrong. But SA had an unfortuanate change of government - from the US/Israeli point of view.

I'd rub my hands with glee if Israel ran out of bombs and the US refused to supply it with more. Not much chance of that happening, though. But, on the other hand, some day it will.

Good thing that rocket didn't hit the psychiatric clinic at the hospital - some of the psychotic zionists who post here mignt not be able to get their meds.

There is NOTHING at the Nasariyah hospital, no tragedy, that remotely compares to any one of the pictures I posted above. The hospital was probably completely evacuated. The barking zio-maniacs are changing the subject because they can't play the picture-for-picture game, you see; they know if they try they'll just expose themselves as the hate-crazed fucking sadistic bullies that they are. The best they can do is cheat by twisting the knobs in your brain with pics of the Holocaust, which HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH M.E. politics

A few days ago I posted a few pictures of the destruction wrought in Israeli residential areas by your pet Islamonazi theocratic phychos but your editor comrades repeatedly removed the photos. At least learn to lie not like an amateur. If I can't match you on the gore scale with human pvictim photos, it's because Thuh Zionists consider these photos inappropriate for posting in public fora as it degrades the victims' dignity and their families'. So divert your raving tripe to a different channel you antizio screecher.

The occupants at the Nahariya hospital had been moved down into shelter rooms. Old surgery roms have been put back to use, etc.

Did TW lift the photos from the Hal Turner website? Thats where they originated, BTW. That bastion of truth and virtue, Hal Turner- the same one who claimed he was going "hunting" in New Orleans after Katrina.

When one side resorts to clearest propaganda, intended to evoke an emotional, rather than an intellectual reponse, you know it means they lack an ability to frame their arguments in logical terms.

The statement "the hospital was probably evacuated anyway..." this is a verbal sneer at Israeli life...it shows a bigoted, callused perspective.

When anti-Zionists are shown how wrong their stance is, they pull out irrelevent stuff about Israel-S.S. relations from the apartheid era as if this somehow bolsters their argument.
What I find unfortunate in the post-apartheid regime is that it has taken the morally preposterous pro-Arafat and pro-Hamas positions. They have therefore no business lecturing Israel on apartheid. They've forfeited their moral allowance to do so.


"Good thing that rocket didn't hit the psychiatric clinic at the hospital - some of the psychotic zionists who post here mignt not be able to get their meds"

I take it you mean the psycho that impersonates Zionists here day in and day out as he mass-spams the wire with garbage and occasionally presents himself as a bigtime activist writing policy papers in a bid to fool people that know much better.

Ah, yes, we all know that the 1980's are ancient history - it is a waste of time discussing that period (especially because it is so embarassing for Israel).
On the other hand, it is perfectly ok to keep bringing up the visit that the Mufti of Jerusalem paid to Adolf Hitler to show that Muslims are Nazis.

According to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now Show, an Irish officer has publicly reported that UN troops sent six different messages to the IDF stating that their bombs or rockets were falling near the observation tower where the UN soldiers were killed. All six messages were ignored. So the peacekeepers were either killed because of Israel's lack of concern for their safety, or they were murdered by the IDF as a warning to the UN not to get in the way. Either way, it shows the nature of the zionist state.

Scores of Syrians pray for Hezbollah chief to emulate Saladin’s victories in present time.

By Lamia Radi - DAMASCUS

By the tomb of Saladin in the old city of Damascus, dozens of Syrians each day pray for the repose of the warrior who liberated Jerusalem - and for Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah to emulate his victories today.

In the narrow lanes of the old town and the modern sector of the Syrian capital, posters of the leader of the Lebanese Shiite movement are plastered on cars and the front of shops alongside the yellow flag of Hezbollah.

On widely displayed pictures of former president Hafez al-Assad, his son and successor Bashar, Nasrallah's image has replaced that of Assad's eldest son Basel, who died in 1998 - a significant sign of popular and official support for the Hezbollah leader.

T-shirts bearing Nasrallah's effigy sell like loaves of bread.

Many Syrians see the Hezbollah chief as the embodiment of Saladin, for leading a war under the banner of Islam, of Gamal Abdel Nasser for defying Israel, and Che Guevara for his life as a guerrilla leader.

"He is all these heroes in one, but above all he is the Saladin of our time - this one who can liberate Jerusalem" - as did the Kurdish warrior in 1187 against the Crusaders, said Manar el-Samer, 31, standing near Saladin's tomb.

"Nasrallah is the only one to threaten Israel in the heart of its territory. For 15 days, his fighters have been fiercely resisting the most powerful military force in the region, while the Egyptian army collapsed in six days," added the medical workers, referring to the June 1967 war with Israel.

Munir Shehab al-Din, aged 45, commented: "Nasrallah is Saladin. It is someone audacious like he who will return Jerusalem (from Israel) and restore Arab glory."

Maha, a 21-year-old, recalls that the Hezbollah leader had not shielded his own son. "While Arab leaders fuss over their sons to make sure they inherit power, (Nasrallah's son) Hadi was killed in combat" in 1997.

Outside a store in Damascus's Souq al-Hamidiya, Mohammed uses his mobile to contact his supplier for new stocks of Nasrallah T-shirts which sell at 200 Syrian pounds (four dollars) each.

"I've been selling 600 to 700 of these each day since the start of the fighting. More than double the sales before the clashes began. Customers are of all ages, all classes. Many are Lebanese Shiites," he said.

Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers sparked the massive Israeli offensive against Lebanon on July 12, forcing thousands of Lebanese families to flee to neighbouring Syria to escape the relentless raids which have killed more than 400 people, most of them civilians.

In the Al-Qods (Jerusalem) bookshop, photos of the smiling and bearded face of Nasrallah provides strong competition to those of Arab pop stars.

"There's always been a demand for pictures of Nasrallah but that was mainly among our Shiite brothers. Since the beginning of the crisis, Sunnis and Christians have also bought many of them," said shop owner Shafik Musseili.

Inside the shop, Mohamed Moad was buying Nasrallah pictures in bulk for his own shop in the village of Deir Atteya, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the capital. His stock had run out.

"In our village, where the population is not mainly Shiite, photos of Nasrallah are everywhere - on cars, in shops, and there is not a single house where his picture does not have pride of place in the living room," said Moad.

The destruction in Lebanon has turned even Syrians with American links against the superpower with its unconditional backing for the bloody Israeli offensive.

Maha, an opthamologist whose three sons are studying in the United States, demanded to know how Israel's bombing of Lebanon's milk plants was linked to fighting Hezbollah.

"It's too much. The United States is guilty... I want Hezbollah to inflict the greatest possible losses" on Israel, she said, adding that she was not a Hezbollah supporter.

Another woman, also named Maha, aged 50, said originally she had denounced the capture of the two Israeli soldiers but the Jewish state's response had made her change her mind.

"It is a systematic destruction of Lebanon, its airports, roads, ports, bridges, telecommunication installations, not just the bases of Hezbollah," she said.

In the main road of the Damascus souq, a huge poster has this message for Nasrallah and his dead son.

"The Syrian people, from the depths of their hearts, tell you: 'We are with you and the resistance, Aba Hadi. They claim that you are a terrorist, while all religions say that he who fights the occupiers in defence of his homeland, is not a terrorist. May Allah see you emerge victorious."

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=17120

Yet another tiresome sniveling whining Israel apologist wrote:
"The statement "the hospital was probably evacuated anyway..." this is a verbal sneer at Israeli life...it shows a bigoted, callused perspective."

No, chutzpah-brain, it relates directly to this

"There is NOTHING at the Nasariyah hospital, no tragedy, that remotely compares to any one of the pictures I posted above."

Which is why it appeared in an adjacent sentence, marember? After which it was essentially corroborated by your pal, the Hebron baby-vampire

Just because pictures of babies actually killed by you semito-supremacists have a devastating impact, this does not make them "manipulative" or "dishonest." They just show your criminal mental disease in the starkest terms possible, that's all, so you have to insist (to yourself) that this impact is misleading. This is how pathologically dishonest and fucked up you are.

You should try your bullshit at a different Mos Eisely road-block. The guards at this one aren't quite weak-minded enough to fall for it

There's another group that always twisted everything around to see themselves as "Thuh Victims": the 'Good Germans' of the 1930s

Stand tall, zio, be proud. Congrats on becoming everything you claim to detest most. Maybe you should just do the world a favor and blow your nose with a rhino gun tonight. Nah, that would be too HONEST, silly me...

Too bad a UN officials had warned Israel officials a "dozen times"in that the IDF terror forces were lobbing their bombs too close. Yet the zionist idiot terrorists bombed away. This is now official knowledge.

Nobody that defies zio-omerta is EVER credible!

Israel's long-standing practice of unlawful collective punishment
Shane Darcy, The Electronic Intifada, 26 July 2006

A Palestinian man inspects the rubble of his house after it was demolished overnight by Israeli air attack in Rafah refugee camp, southern Gaza Strip, 25 July 2006. (MaanImages/Hatem Omar)

The extensive military operations that have been conducted by the Israeli army in and around the Gaza Strip over the past weeks have displayed a marked disregard for international humanitarian law and have involved the imposition of grave and unlawful measures of collective punishment on the Palestinian population. The principle of proportionality has been completely abandoned. As part of its attempt to secure the release of a single captured Israeli soldier, the army has destroyed bridges, government offices and civilian property, and cut off the electricity to over half the population of Gaza. One Israeli journalist has described the operation simply as an "act of vengeance".

Israel has long taken the view that it is justified in inflicting collective punishment because the Palestinian population is collectively responsible for any acts committed within its midst. Politicians frequently speak of the "heavy price" that must be paid for attacks on Israeli citizens or the army.

There is considerable historical precedent for such conduct. Reliance on collective responsibility was hitherto viewed as a lawful means of deterring the commission of hostile acts by a population in occupied territory. During the United States-Mexico War of 1847-48, US General Winfield Scott ordered that if individuals responsible for attacks on troops and army property were not handed over by the Mexican authorities then "the punishment shall fall upon entire cities, towns, or neighborhoods". The tactic of punishing on the basis of a notion of collective responsibility was also a common feature in colonial era conflicts - in the Boer War the British would respond to hostility by imposing fines, burning farms and destroying private property. The Black and Tans relied on similar means in pre-independence Ireland, as exemplified by notorious incidents such as 'The Sack of Balbriggan'.

It was during the Second World War, however, that this concept of collective responsibility was relied on in the bloodiest of ways. The treatment of the Russian population by the Nazis, for example, was described as a "punitive expedition in continuous operation", in which widespread collective penalties were inflicted in the form of mass executions and extensive destruction of property. On the Allied side, Winston Churchill proposed in the aftermath of several massacres in Czechoslovakia that three German villages should be razed for every one which had been destroyed by German troops. In the aftermath of the war several Nazi war criminals were convicted of the crime of collective punishment by Allied military tribunals.

Universal repugnance to the conduct of the Second World War led to the adoption in 1949 of the Geneva Conventions, marking a turning point in the way in which States would conduct themselves during warfare. More States have signed up to these important treaties than the United Nations Charter, demonstrating a universal commitment to be bound by the rules of international humanitarian law. The Fourth Geneva Convention protects civilians in occupied territories and states clearly that "[n]o protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited." While reliance on collective responsibility was not relegated to the past - Saddam Hussein is currently being tried for the murder of 143 people in Dujail as a collective punishment for an attack on his life there in 1982 - the unlawful character of such conduct is now established beyond doubt and can no longer be justified on the basis of some perceived deterrent effect.

Despite being a signatory to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, Israel has frequently resorted to collective punishment since the beginning of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. It has illegally demolished thousands of houses in response to hostile acts committed by one or more of the inhabitants. The Supreme Court has regularly upheld the lawfulness of this practice, regardless of the clear conflict with the rules of international law, and Justice Ben-Dror once commented that an individual who engages in terrorism "should know that his criminal acts will not only hurt him but also are apt to cause great suffering to his family". Although the practice of house demolition was temporarily suspended in 2004, the Israeli army has indicated a willingness to resurrect the practice if circumstances require it.

The imposition of collective punishment is a war crime under customary international law. Numerous individuals being tried before the Special Court of Sierra Leone have been charged with just such a crime. But in the most comprehensive codification of international crimes, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, collective punishment does not feature among the dozens of listed war crimes over which the Court has jurisdiction. Although Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute, its representatives did attend the 1998 diplomatic conference which led to the adoption of the instrument. It was at their behest that the war crime of collective punishment was excluded from the Court's jurisdiction.

The Israeli armed forces' actions in Gaza continue its long-standing tradition of taking harsh collective punitive measures against the Palestinian population. History has shown that such repressive measures rarely achieve their stated objectives. Rather than deter hostile conduct, such actions have tended to antagonize and embitter the local population, and provoke even further violent acts of resistance. In the context of this particular conflict, and especially in light of the political compromise that had been achieved between Hamas and Fatah days before the commencement of the Gaza offensive, it seems that a revival of hostilities may very well have been what the Israeli authorities had intended when they allowed the armed forces to take such extreme and disproportionate measures.

According to the Associated Press, about 100,000 barrels of oil have spilled from a power plant near Beirut that was bombed by Israeli planes (which of course don't target civilian buildings.) Eighty miles of the nation's once beautiful beaches are covered with the oil; the beaches are also littered with dead sea creatures. It is the worst environmental catastrophe in the history of the nation. It seems that zionism specializes in spreading filth and death.

It seems that Meyer London specializes in spreading defamatiom of Zionism alone at any cost.

Unconsciously, of course, many Americans also seem to believe that the shameful policies of the U.S. government toward Native Americans somehow make it acceptable for the government of Israel to pursue equally shameful policies toward the Palestinians. The U.S. needs to face its racist policies head on as much as it needs to confront the racism of its foremost partner, Israel."

I am reposting this article, which was hidden by LA Indymedia, because it is of great value. It is by no means a diatribe; it is by no means anti-Semitic.

It is important for oppressed peoples within the boundaries of the US to have a clear picture of occupied Palestine.

Like the US, South Africa under Apartheid, Australia, New Zealand and the former Rhodesia, Israel is a white colonial settler state.

The authors don't make that argument. Their argument is much milder. They fail to point out that in every single historcial instance, white colonial settler states must target the population whose land they steal. It goes with the territory, so to speak.

They fail to point out that the US is a white colonial settler regime, and that its system, like that of the Zionists, is inherently and inescapably racist.

This is especially important for the Chican@ people and other Native peoples to understand. It is a mirror of our own situation. Censoring this piece robs of us information and perspectives we need to understand in order to pursue our own freedom, and its censorship is an attack on our needs as a people.

For all its weaknesses, the essay provides much worthwhile food for thought, and a perspective silenced and censored in both the mainstream media - and, clearly, here at Indymedia.

Juan Santos


Zionism as a Racist Ideology
by The Christisons • Monday, Jul. 17, 2006 at 8:36 PM

What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is not genocide, it is not a holocaust, but it is, unmistakably, ethnicide. It is, unmistakably, racism. Israel worries constantly, and its American friends worry, about the destruction of Israel. We are all made to think always about the existential threat to Israel, to the Jewish people. But the nation in imminent danger of elimination today is not Israel but the Palestinians. Such a policy of national destruction must not be allowed to stand.

Zionism as a Racist Ideology
Reviving an Old Theme to Prevent Palestinian Ethnicide

By KATHLEEN and BILL CHRISTISON

During a presentation on the Palestinian-Israeli situation in 2001, an American-Israeli acquaintance of ours began with a typical attack on the Palestinians. Taking the overused line that "Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity," he asserted snidely that, if only the Palestinians had had any decency and not been so all-fired interested in pushing the Jews into the sea in 1948, they would have accepted the UN partition of Palestine. Those Palestinians who became refugees would instead have remained peacefully in their homes, and the state of Palestine could in the year 2001 be celebrating the 53rd anniversary of its independence. Everything could have been sweetness and light, he contended, but here the Palestinians were, then a year into a deadly intifada, still stateless, still hostile, and still trying, he claimed, to push the Jews into the sea.

It was a common line but with a new and intriguing twist: what if the Palestinians had accepted partition; would they in fact have lived in a state at peace since 1948? It was enough to make the audience stop and think. But later in the talk, the speaker tripped himself up by claiming, in a tone of deep alarm, that Palestinian insistence on the right of return for Palestinian refugees displaced when Israel was created would spell the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. He did not realize the inherent contradiction in his two assertions (until we later pointed it out to him, with no little glee). You cannot have it both ways, we told him: you cannot claim that, if Palestinians had not left the areas that became Israel in 1948, they would now be living peaceably, some inside and some alongside a Jewish-majority state, and then also claim that, if they returned now, Israel would lose its Jewish majority and its essential identity as a Jewish state.*

This exchange, and the massive propaganda effort by and on behalf of Israel to demonstrate the threat to Israel's Jewish character posed by the Palestinians' right of return, actually reveal the dirty little secret of Zionism. In its drive to establish and maintain a state in which Jews are always the majority, Zionism absolutely required that Palestinians, as non-Jews, be made to leave in 1948 and never be allowed to return. The dirty little secret is that this is blatant racism.

But didn't we finish with that old Zionism-is-racism issue over a decade ago, when in 1991 the UN repealed a 1975 General Assembly resolution that defined Zionism as "a form of racism or racial discrimination"? Hadn't we Americans always rejected this resolution as odious anti-Semitism, and didn't we, under the aegis of the first Bush administration, finally prevail on the rest of the world community to agree that it was not only inaccurate but downright evil to label Zionism as racist? Why bring it up again, now?

The UN General Assembly based its 1975 anti-Zionist resolution on the UN's own definition of racial discrimination, adopted in 1965. According to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, racial discrimination is "any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life." As a definition of racism and racial discrimination, this statement is unassailable and, if one is honest about what Zionism is and what it signifies, the statement is an accurate definition of Zionism. But in 1975, in the political atmosphere prevailing at the time, putting forth such a definition was utterly self-defeating.

So would a formal resolution be in today's political atmosphere. But enough has changed over the last decade or more that talk about Zionism as a system that either is inherently racist or at least fosters racism is increasingly possible and increasingly necessary. Despite the vehement knee-jerk opposition to any such discussion throughout the United States, serious scholars elsewhere and serious Israelis have begun increasingly to examine Zionism critically, and there is much greater receptivity to the notion that no real peace will be forged in Palestine-Israel unless the bases of Zionism are examined and in some way altered. It is for this reason that honestly labeling Zionism as a racist political philosophy is so necessary: unless the world's, and particularly the United States', blind support for Israel as an exclusivist Jewish state is undermined, unless the blind acceptance of Zionism as a noble ideology is undermined, and unless it is recognized that Israel's drive to maintain dominion over the occupied Palestinian territories is motivated by an exclusivist, racist ideology, no one will ever gain the political strength or the political will necessary to force Israel to relinquish territory and permit establishment of a truly sovereign and independent Palestinian state in a part of Palestine.

Recognizing Zionism's Racism

A racist ideology need not always manifest itself as such, and, if the circumstances are right, it need not always actually practice racism to maintain itself. For decades after its creation, the circumstances were right for Israel. If one forgot, as most people did, the fact that 750,000 Palestinians (non-Jews) had left their homeland under duress, thus making room for a Jewish-majority state, everyone could accept Israel as a genuine democracy, even to a certain extent for that small minority of Palestinians who had remained after 1948. That minority was not large enough to threaten Israel's Jewish majority; it faced considerable discrimination, but because Israeli Arabs could vote, this discrimination was viewed not as institutional, state-mandated racism but as the kind of discrimination, deplorable but not institutionalized, faced by blacks in the United States. The occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, with their two million (soon to become more than three million) Palestinian inhabitants, was seen to be temporary, its end awaiting only the Arabs' readiness to accept Israel's existence.

In these "right" circumstances, the issue of racism rarely arose, and the UN's labeling of Israel's fundamental ideology as racist came across to Americans and most westerners as nasty and vindictive. Outside the third world, Israel had come to be regarded as the perpetual innocent, not aggressive, certainly not racist, and desirous of nothing more than a peace agreement that would allow it to mind its own business inside its original borders in a democratic state. By the time the Zionism-is-racism resolution was rescinded in 1991, even the PLO had officially recognized Israel's right to exist in peace inside its 1967 borders, with its Jewish majority uncontested. In fact, this very acceptance of Israel by its principal adversary played no small part in facilitating the U.S. effort to garner support for overturning the resolution. (The fact of U.S. global dominance in the wake of the first Gulf war and the collapse of the Soviet Union earlier in 1991, and the atmosphere of optimism about prospects for peace created by the Madrid peace conference in October also played a significant part in winning over a majority of the UN when the Zionism resolution was brought to a vote of the General Assembly in December.)

Realities are very different today, and a recognition of Zionism's racist bases, as well as an understanding of the racist policies being played out in the occupied territories are essential if there is to be any hope at all of achieving a peaceful, just, and stable resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The egg of Palestine has been permanently scrambled, and it is now increasingly the case that, as Zionism is recognized as the driving force in the occupied territories as well as inside Israel proper, pre-1967 Israel can no longer be considered in isolation. It can no longer be allowed simply to go its own way as a Jewish-majority state, a state in which the circumstances are "right" for ignoring Zionism's fundamental racism.

As Israel increasingly inserts itself into the occupied territories, and as Israeli settlers, Israeli settlements, and Israeli-only roads proliferate and a state infrastructure benefiting only Jews takes over more and more territory, it becomes no longer possible to ignore the racist underpinnings of the Zionist ideology that directs this enterprise. It is no longer possible today to wink at the permanence of Zionism's thrust beyond Israel's pre-1967 borders. It is now clear that Israel's control over the occupied territories is, and has all along been intended to be, a drive to assert exclusive Jewish control, taming the Palestinians into submission and squeezing them into ever smaller, more disconnected segments of land or, failing that, forcing them to leave Palestine altogether. It is totally obvious to anyone who spends time on the ground in Palestine-Israel that the animating force behind the policies of the present and all past Israeli governments in Israel and in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem has always been a determination to assure the predominance of Jews over Palestinians. Such policies can only be described as racist, and we should stop trying any longer to avoid the word.

When you are on the ground in Palestine, you can see Zionism physically imprinted on the landscape. Not only can you see that there are settlements, built on land confiscated from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not live. Not only can you see roads in the occupied territories, again built on land taken from Palestinians, where Palestinians may not drive. Not only can you observe that water in the occupied territories is allocated, by Israeli governmental authorities, so inequitably that Israeli settlers are allocated five times the amount per capita as are Palestinians and, in periods of drought, Palestinians stand in line for drinking water while Israeli settlements enjoy lush gardens and swimming pools. Not only can you stand and watch as Israeli bulldozers flatten Palestinian olive groves and other agricultural land, destroy Palestinian wells, and demolish Palestinian homes to make way for the separation wall that Israel is constructing across the length and breadth of the West Bank. The wall fences off Palestinians from Israelis, supposedly to provide greater security for Israelis but in fact in order to cage Palestinians, to define a border for Israel that will exclude a maximum number of Palestinians.

But, if this is not enough to demonstrate the inherent racism of Israel's occupation, you can also drive through Palestinian towns and Palestinian neighborhoods in and near Jerusalem and see what is perhaps the most cruelly racist policy in Zionism's arsenal: house demolitions, the preeminent symbol of Zionism's drive to maintain Jewish predominance. Virtually every street has a house or houses reduced to rubble, one floor pancaked onto another or simply a pile of broken concrete bulldozed into an incoherent heap. Jeff Halper, founder and head of the non-governmental Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), an anthropologist and scholar of the occupation, has observed that Zionist and Israeli leaders going back 80 years have all conveyed what he calls "The Message" to Palestinians. The Message, Halper says, is "Submit. Only when you abandon your dreams for an independent state of your own, and accept that Palestine has become the Land of Israel, will we relent [i.e., stop attacking Palestinians]." The deeper meaning of The Message, as carried by the bulldozers so ubiquitous in targeted Palestinian neighborhoods today, is that "You [Palestinians] do not belong here. We uprooted you from your homes in 1948and now we will uproot you from all of the Land of Israel."

In the end, Halper says, the advance of Zionism has been a process of displacement, and house demolitions have been "at the center of the Israeli struggle against the Palestinians" since 1948. Halper enumerates a steady history of destruction: in the first six years of Israel's existence, it systematically razed 418 Palestinian villages inside Israel, fully 85 percent of the villages existing before 1948; since the occupation began in 1967, Israel has demolished 11,000 Palestinian homes. More homes are now being demolished in the path of Israel's "separation wall." It is estimated that more than 4,000 homes have been destroyed in the last two years alone.

The vast majority of these house demolitions, 95 percent, have nothing whatever to do with fighting terrorism, but are designed specifically to displace non-Jews and assure the advance of Zionism. In Jerusalem, from the beginning of the occupation of the eastern sector of the city in 1967, Israeli authorities have designed zoning plans specifically to prevent the growth of the Palestinian population. Maintaining the "Jewish character" of the city at the level existing in 1967 (71 percent Jewish, 29 percent Palestinian) required that Israel draw zoning boundaries to prevent Palestinian expansion beyond existing neighborhoods, expropriate Palestinian-owned lands, confiscate the Jerusalem residency permits of any Palestinian who cannot prove that Jerusalem is his "center of life," limit city services to Palestinian areas, limit development in Palestinian neighborhoods, refuse to issue residential building permits to Palestinians, and demolish Palestinian homes that are built without permits. None of these strictures is imposed on Jews. According to ICAHD, the housing shortage in Palestinian neighborhoods in Jerusalem is approximately 25,000 units, and 2,000 demolition orders are pending.

Halper has written that the human suffering involved in the destruction of a family home is incalculable. A home "is one's symbolic center, the site of one's most intimate personal life and an expression of one's status. It is a refuge, it is the physical representation of the family,maintainingcontinuity on one's ancestral land." Land expropriation is "an attack on one's very being and identity." Zionist governments, past and present, have understood this well, although not with the compassion or empathy that Halper conveys, and this attack on the "very being and identity" of non-Jews has been precisely the animating force behind Zionism.

Zionism's racism has, of course, been fundamental to Israel itself since its establishment in 1948. The Israeli government pursues policies against its own Bedouin minority very similar to its actions in the occupied territories. The Bedouin population has been forcibly relocated and squeezed into small areas in the Negev, again with the intent of forcing an exodus, and half of the 140,000 Bedouin in the Negev live in villages that the Israeli government does not recognize and does not provide services for. Every Bedouin home in an unrecognized village is slated for demolition; all homes, and the very presence of Bedouin in them, are officially illegal.

The problem of the Bedouins' unrecognized villages is only the partial evidence of a racist policy that has prevailed since Israel's foundation. After Zionist/Israeli leaders assured that the non-Jews (i.e., the Palestinians) making up the majority of Palestine's population (a two-thirds majority at the time) departed the scene in 1948, Israeli governments institutionalized favoritism toward Jews by law. As a Zionist state, Israel has always identified itself as the state of the Jews: as a state not of its Jewish and Palestinian citizens, but of all Jews everywhere in the world. The institutions of state guarantee the rights of and provide benefits for Jews. The Law of Return gives automatic citizenship to Jews from anywhere in the world, but to no other people. Some 92 percent of the land of Israel is state land, held by the Jewish National Fund "in trust" for the Jewish people; Palestinians may not purchase this land, even though most of it was Palestinian land before 1948, and in most instances they may not even lease the land. Both the Jewish National Fund, which deals with land acquisition and development, and the Jewish Agency, which deals primarily with Jewish immigration and immigrant absorption, have existed since before the state's establishment and now perform their duties specifically for Jews under an official mandate from the Israeli government.

Creating Enemies

Although few dare to give the reality of house demolitions and state institutions favoring Jews the label of racism, the phenomenon this reality describes is unmistakably racist. There is no other term for a process by which one people can achieve the essence of its political philosophy only by suppressing another people, by which one people guarantees its perpetual numerical superiority and its overwhelming predominance over another people through a deliberate process of repression and dispossession of those people. From the beginning, Zionism has been based on the supremacy of the Jewish people, whether this predominance was to be exercised in a full-fledged state or in some other kind of political entity, and Zionism could never have survived or certainly thrived in Palestine without ridding that land of most of its native population. The early Zionists themselves knew this (as did the Palestinians), even if naïve Americans have never quite gotten it. Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism, talked from the beginning of "spiriting" the native Palestinians out and across the border; discussion of "transfer" was common among the Zionist leadership in Palestine in the 1930s; talk of transfer is common today.

There has been a logical progression to the development of Zionism, leading inevitably to general acceptance of the sense that, because Jewish needs are paramount, Jews themselves are paramount. Zionism grew out of the sense that Jews needed a refuge from persecution, which led in turn to the belief that the refuge could be truly secure only if Jews guaranteed their own safety, which meant that the refuge must be exclusively or at least overwhelmingly Jewish, which meant in turn that Jews and their demands were superior, taking precedence over any other interests within that refuge. The mindset that in U.S. public discourse tends to view the Palestinian-Israeli conflict from a perspective almost exclusively focused on Israel arises out of this progression of Zionist thinking. By the very nature of a mindset, virtually no one examines the assumptions on which the Zionist mindset is based, and few recognize the racist base on which it rests.

Israeli governments through the decades have never been so innocent. Many officials in the current right-wing government are blatantly racist. Israel's outspoken education minister, Limor Livnat, spelled out the extreme right-wing defense of Zionism a year ago, when the government proposed to legalize the right of Jewish communities in Israel to exclude non-Jews. Livnat justified Israel's racism as a matter of Jewish self-preservation. "We're involved here," she said in a radio interview, "in a struggle for the existence of the State of Israel as the state of the Jews, as opposed tothose who want to force us to be a state of all its citizens." Israel is not "just another state like all the other states," she protested. "We are not just a state of all its citizens."

Livnat cautioned that Israel must be very watchful lest it find in another few years that the Galilee and the Negev, two areas inside Israel with large Arab populations, are "filled with Arab communities." To emphasize the point, she reiterated that Israel's "special purpose is our character as a Jewish state, our desire to preserve a Jewish community and Jewish majority hereso that it does not become a state of all its citizens." Livnat was speaking of Jewish self-preservation not in terms of saving the Jews or Israel from a territorial threat of military invasion by a marauding neighbor state, but in terms of preserving Jews from the mere existence of another people within spitting distance.

Most Zionists of a more moderate stripe might shudder at the explicitness of Livnat's message and deny that Zionism is really like this. But in fact this properly defines the racism that necessarily underlies Zionism. Most centrist and leftist Zionists deny the reality of Zionism's racism by trying to portray Zionism as a democratic system and manufacturing enemies in order to be able to sustain the inherent contradiction and hide or excuse the racism behind Zionism's drive for predominance.

Indeed, the most pernicious aspect of a political philosophy like Zionism that masquerades as democratic is that it requires an enemy in order to survive and, where an enemy does not already exist, it requires that one be created. In order to justify racist repression and dispossession, particularly in a system purporting to be democratic, those being repressed and displaced must be portrayed as murderous and predatory. And in order to keep its own population in line, to prevent a humane people from objecting to their own government's repressive policies, it requires that fear be instilled in the population: fear of "the other," fear of the terrorist, fear of the Jew-hater. The Jews of Israel must always be made to believe that they are the preyed-upon. This justifies having forced these enemies to leave, it justifies discriminating against those who remained, it justifies denying democratic rights to those who later came under Israel's control in the occupied territories.

Needing an enemy has meant that Zionism has from the beginning had to create myths about Palestinians, painting Palestinians and all Arabs as immutably hostile and intransigent. Thus the myth that in 1948 Palestinians left Palestine so that Arab armies could throw the Jews into the sea; thus the continuing myth that Palestinians remain determined to destroy Israel. Needing an enemy means that Zionism, as one veteran Israeli peace activist recently put it, has removed the Palestinians from history. Thus the myths that there is no such thing as a Palestinian, or that Palestinians all immigrated in modern times from other Arab countries, or that Jordan is Palestine and Palestinians should find their state there.

Needing an enemy means that Zionism has had to make its negotiating partner into a terrorist. It means that, for its own preservation, Zionism has had to devise a need to ignore its partner/enemy or expel him or assassinate him. It means that Zionism has had to reject any conciliatory effort by the Palestinians and portray them as "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity" to make peace. This includes in particular rejecting that most conciliatory gesture, the PLO's decision in 1988 to recognize Israel's existence, relinquish Palestinian claims to the three-quarters of Palestine lying inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, and even recognize Israel's "right" to exist there.

Needing an enemy means, ultimately, that Zionism had to create the myth of the "generous offer" at the Camp David summit in July 2000. It was Zionist racism that painted the Palestinians as hopelessly intransigent for refusing Israel's supposedly generous offer, actually an impossible offer that would have maintained Zionism's hold on the occupied territories and left the Palestinians with a disconnected, indefensible, non-viable state. Then, when the intifada erupted (after Palestinian demonstrators threw stones at Israeli police and the police responded by shooting several demonstrators to death), it was Zionist racism speaking when Israel put out the line that it was under siege and in a battle for its very survival with Palestinians intent on destroying it. When a few months later the issue of Palestinian refugees and their "right of return" arose publicly, it was Zionist racism speaking when Israel and its defenders, ignoring the several ways in which Palestinian negotiators signaled their readiness to compromise this demand, propagated the view that this too was intended as a way to destroy Israel, by flooding it with non-Jews and destroying its Jewish character.

The Zionist Dilemma

The supposed threat from "the other" is the eternal refuge of the majority of Israelis and Israeli supporters in the United States. The common line is that "We Israelis and friends of Israel long for peace, we support Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, we have always supported giving the Palestinians self-government. But 'they' hate us, they want to destroy Israel. Wasn't this obvious when Arafat turned his back on Israel's generous offer? Wasn't this obvious when Arafat started the intifada? Wasn't this obvious when Arafat demanded that the Palestinians be given the right of return, which would destroy Israel as a Jewish state? We have already made concession after concession. How can we give them any further concessions when they would only fight for more and more until Israel is gone?" This line relieves Israel of any responsibility to make concessions or move toward serious negotiations; it relieves Israelis of any need to treat Palestinians as equals; it relieves Israelis and their defenders of any need to think; it justifies racism, while calling it something else.

Increasing numbers of Israelis themselves (some of whom have long been non-Zionists, some of whom are only now beginning to see the problem with Zionism) are recognizing the inherent racism of their nation's raison d'etre. During the years of the peace process, and indeed for the last decade and a half since the PLO formally recognized Israel's existence, the Israeli left could ignore the problems of Zionism while pursuing efforts to promote the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza that would coexist with Israel. Zionism continued to be more or less a non-issue: Israel could organize itself in any way it chose inside its own borders, and the Palestinian state could fulfill Palestinian national aspirations inside its new borders.

Few of those nettlesome issues surrounding Zionism, such as how much democracy Zionism can allow to non-Jews without destroying its reason for being, would arise in a two-state situation. The issue of Zionism's responsibility for the Palestinians' dispossession could also be put aside. As Haim Hanegbi, a non-Zionist Israeli who recently went back to the fold of single-state binationalism (and who is a long-time cohort of Uri Avnery in the Gush Shalom movement), said in a recent interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, the promise of mutual recognition offered by the Oslo peace process mesmerized him and others in the peace movement and so "in the mid-1990s I had second thoughts about my traditional [binational] approach. I didn't think it was my task to go to Ramallah and present the Palestinians with the list of Zionist wrongs and tell them not to forget what our fathers did to their fathers." Nor were the Palestinians themselves reminding Zionists of these wrongs at the time.

As new wrongs in the occupied territories increasingly recall old wrongs from half a century ago, however, and as Zionism finds that it cannot cope with end-of-conflict demands like the Palestinians' insistence that Israel accept their right of return by acknowledging its role in their dispossession, more and more Israelis are coming to accept the reality that Zionism can never escape its past. It is becoming increasingly clear to many Israelis that Israel has absorbed so much of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem into itself that the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples can never be separated fairly. The separation wall, says Hanegbi, "is the great despairing solution of the Jewish-Zionist society. It is the last desperate act of those who cannot confront the Palestinian issue. Of those who are compelled to push the Palestinian issue out of their lives and out of their consciousness." For Hanegbi, born in Palestine before 1948, Palestinians "were always part of my landscape," and without them, "this is a barren country, a disabled country."

Old-line Zionist Meron Benvenisti, who has also moved to support for binationalism, used almost identical metaphors in a Ha'aretz interview run alongside Hanegbi's. Also Palestine-born and a contemporary of Hanegbi, Benvenisti believes "this is a country in which there were always Arabs. This is a country in which the Arabs are the landscape, the natives.I don't see myself living here without them. In my eyes, without Arabs this is a barren land."

Both men discuss the evolution of their thinking over the decades, and both describe a period in which, after the triumph of Zionism, they unthinkingly accepted its dispossession of the Palestinians. Each man describes the Palestinians simply disappearing when he was an adolescent ("They just sort of evaporated," says Hanegbi), and Benvenisti recalls a long period in which the Palestinian "tragedy simply did not penetrate my consciousness." But both speak in very un-Zionist terms of equality. Benvenisti touches on the crux of the Zionist dilemma. "This is where I am different from my friends in the left," he says, "because I am truly a native son of immigrants, who is drawn to the Arab culture and the Arabic language because it is here. It is the land.Whereas the right, certainly, but the left too hates Arabs. The Arabs bother them; they complicate things. The subject generates moral questions and that generates cultural unease."

Hanegbi goes farther. "I am not a psychologist," he says, "but I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds."

While some thoughtful Israelis like these men struggle with philosophical questions of existence and identity and the collective Jewish conscience, few American defenders of Israel seem troubled by such deep issues. Racism is often banal. Most of those who practice it, and most of those who support Israel as a Zionist state, would be horrified to be accused of racism, because their racist practices have become commonplace. They do not even think about what they do. We recently encountered a typical American supporter of Israel who would have argued vigorously if we had accused her of racism. During a presentation we were giving to a class, this (non-Jewish) woman rose to ask a question that went roughly like this: "I want to ask about the failure of the other Arabs to take care of the Palestinians. I must say I sympathize with Israel because Israel simply wants to have a secure state, but the other Arabs have refused to take the Palestinians in, and so they sit in camps and their hostility toward Israel just festers."

This is an extremely common American, and Israeli, perception, the idea being that if the Arab states would only absorb the Palestinians so that they became Lebanese or Syrians or Jordanians, they would forget about being Palestinian, forget that Israel had displaced and dispossessed them, and forget about "wanting to destroy Israel." Israel would then be able simply to go about its own business and live in peace, as it so desperately wants to do. This woman's assumption was that it is acceptable for Israel to have established itself as a Jewish state at the expense of (i.e., after the ethnic cleansing of) the land's non-Jewish inhabitants, that any Palestinian objection to this reality is illegitimate, and that all subsequent animosity toward Israel is ultimately the fault of neighboring Arab states who failed to smother the Palestinians' resistance by anesthetizing them to their plight and erasing their identity and their collective memory of Palestine.

When later in the class the subject arose of Israel ending the occupation, this same woman spoke up to object that, if Israel did give up control over the West Bank and Gaza, it would be economically disadvantaged, at least in the agricultural sector. "Wouldn't this leave Israel as just a desert?" she wondered. Apart from the fact that the answer is a clear "no" (Israel's agricultural capability inside its 1967 borders is quite high, and most of Israel is not desert), the woman's question was again based on the automatic assumption that Israel's interests take precedence over those of anyone else and that, in order to enhance its own agricultural economy (or, presumably, for any other perceived gain), Israel has the right to conquer and take permanent possession of another people's land.

The notion that the Jewish/Zionist state of Israel has a greater right to possess the land, or a greater right to security, or a greater right to a thriving economy, than the people who are native to that land is extremely racist, but this woman would probably object strenuously to having it pointed out that this is a Jewish supremacist viewpoint identical to past justifications for white South Africa's apartheid regime and to the rationale for all European colonial (racist) systems that exploited the human and natural resources of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia over the centuries for the sole benefit of the colonizers. Racism must necessarily be blind to its own immorality; the burden of conscience is otherwise too great. This is the banality of evil.

(Unconsciously, of course, many Americans also seem to believe that the shameful policies of the U.S. government toward Native Americans somehow make it acceptable for the government of Israel to pursue equally shameful policies toward the Palestinians. The U.S. needs to face its racist policies head on as much as it needs to confront the racism of its foremost partner, Israel.)

This woman's view is so very typical, something you hear constantly in casual conversation and casual encounters at social occasions, that it hardly seems significant. But this very banality is precisely the evil of it; what is evil is the very fact that it is "hardly significant" that Zionism by its nature is racist and that this reality goes unnoticed by decent people who count themselves defenders of Israel. The universal acceptability of a system that is at heart racist but proclaims itself to be benign, even noble, and the license this acceptability gives Israel to oppress another people, are striking testimony to the selectivity of the human conscience and its general disinterest in human questions of justice and human rights except when these are politically useful.

Countering the Counter-Arguments

To put some perspective on this issue, a few clarifying questions must be addressed. Many opponents of the occupation would argue that, although Israel's policies in the occupied territories are racist in practice, they are an abuse of Zionism and that racism is not inherent in it. This seems to be the position of several prominent commentators who have recently denounced Israel severely for what it does in the West Bank and Gaza but fail to recognize the racism in what Israel did upon its establishment in 1948. In a recent bitter denunciation of Zionist policies today, Avraham Burg, a former Knesset speaker, lamented that Zionism had become corrupted by ruling as an occupier over another people, and he longed for the days of Israel's youth when "our national destiny" was "as a light unto the nations and a society of peace, justice and equality." These are nice words, and it is heartening to hear credible mainstream Israelis so clearly denouncing the occupation, but Burg's assumption that before the occupation Zionism followed "a just path" and always had "an ethical leadership" ignores the unjust and unethical policy of ethnic cleansing that allowed Israel to become a so-called Jewish democracy in the first place.

Acknowledging the racist underpinnings of an ideology so long held up as the embodiment of justice and ethics appears to be impossible for many of the most intellectual of Israelis and Israeli defenders. Many who strongly oppose Israel's policies in the occupied territories still, despite their opposition, go through considerable contortions to "prove" that Israel itself is not racist. Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the Jewish magazine Tikkun and a long-time opponent of the occupation, rejects the notion that Zionism is racist on the narrow grounds that Jewishness is only a religious identity and that Israel welcomes Jews of all races and ethnicities and therefore cannot be called racist. But this confuses the point. Preference toward a particular religion, which is the only aspect of racism that Lerner has addressed and which he acknowledges occurs in Israel, is no more acceptable than preference on ethnic grounds.

But most important, racism has to do primarily with those discriminated against, not with those who do the discriminating. Using Lerner's reasoning, apartheid South Africa might also not be considered racist because it welcomed whites of all ethnicities. But its inherent evil lay in the fact that its very openness to whites discriminated against blacks. Discrimination against any people on the basis of "race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin" is the major characteristic of racism as the UN defines it. Discrimination against Palestinians and other non-Jews, simply because they are not Jews, is the basis on which Israel constitutes itself. Lerner seems to believe that, because the Palestinian citizens of Israel have the vote and are represented in the Knesset, there is no racial or ethnic discrimination in Israel. But, apart from skipping over the institutional racism that keeps Palestinian Israelis in perpetual second-class citizenship, this argument ignores the more essential reality that Israel reached its present ethnic balance, the point at which it could comfortably allow Palestinians to vote without endangering its Jewish character, only because in 1948 three-quarters of a million Palestinians were forced to leave what became the Jewish state of Israel.

More questions need to be addressed. Is every Israeli or every Jew a racist? Most assuredly not, as the examples of Jeff Halper, Haim Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti, and many others like them strikingly illustrate. Is every Zionist a racist? Probably not, if one accepts ignorance as an exonerating factor. No doubt the vast majority of Israelis, most very good-hearted people, are not consciously racist but "go along" unquestioningly, having been born into or moved to an apparently democratic state and never examined the issue closely, and having bought into the line fed them by every Israeli government from the beginning, that Palestinians and other Arabs are enemies and that whatever actions Israel takes against Palestinians are necessary to guarantee the personal security of Israelis.

Is it anti-Semitic to say that Zionism is a racist system? Certainly not. Political criticism is not ethnic or religious hatred. Stating a reality about a government's political system or its political conduct says nothing about the qualities of its citizens or its friends. Racism is not a part of the genetic makeup of Jews, any more than it was a part of the genetic makeup of Germans when Hitler ran a racist regime. Nor do Zionism's claim to speak for all Jews everywhere and Israel's claim to be the state of all Jews everywhere make all Jews Zionists. Zionism did not ask for or receive the consent of universal Jewry to speak in its name; therefore labeling Zionism as racist does not label all Jews and cannot be called anti-Semitic.

Why It Matters

Are there other racist systems, and are there governing systems and political philosophies, racist or not, that are worse than Zionism? Of course, but this fact does not relieve Zionism of culpability. (Racism obviously exists in the United States and in times past was pervasive throughout the country, but, unlike Israel, the U.S. is not a racist governing system, based on racist foundations and depending for its raison d'etre on a racist philosophy.) Many defenders of Israel (Michael Lerner and columnist Thomas Friedman come to mind) contend that when Israel is "singled out" for criticism not also leveled at oppressive regimes elsewhere, the attackers are exhibiting a special hatred for Jews. Anyone who does not also criticize Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il or Bashar al-Assad for atrocities far greater than Israel's, they charge, is showing that he is less concerned to uphold absolute values than to tear down Israel because it is Jewish. But this charge ignores several factors that demand criticism of Zionist racism. First, because the U.S. government supports Zionism and its racist policy on a continuing basis and props up Zionism's military machine with massive amounts of military aid, it is wholly appropriate for Americans (indeed, it is incumbent on Americans) to call greater attention to Zionism's racism than, for instance, to North Korea's appalling cruelties. The United States does not assist in North Korea's atrocities, but it does underwrite Zionism's brutality.

There is also a strong moral reason for denouncing Zionism as racist. Zionism advertises itself, and actually congratulates itself, as a uniquely moral system that stands as a "light unto the nations," putting itself forward as in a real sense the very embodiment of the values Americans hold dear. Many Zionist friends of Israel would have us believe that Zionism is us, and in many ways it is: most Americans, seeing Israelis as "like us," have grown up with the notion that Israel is a noble enterprise and that the ideology that spawned it is of the highest moral order. Substantial numbers of Americans, non-Jews as well as Jews, feel an emotional and psychological bond with Israel and Zionism that goes far beyond the ties to any other foreign ally. One scholar, describing the U.S.-Israeli tie, refers to Israel as part of the "being" of the United States. Precisely because of the intimacy of the relationship, it is imperative that Zionism's hypocrisy be exposed, that Americans not give aid and comfort to, or even remain associated with, a morally repugnant system that uses racism to exalt one people over all others while masquerading as something better than it is. The United States can remain supportive of Israel as a nation without any longer associating itself with Israel's racism.

Finally, there are critical practical reasons for acknowledging Zionism's racism and enunciating a U.S. policy clearly opposed to racism everywhere and to the repressive Israeli policies that arise from Zionist racism. Now more than at any time since the United States positioned itself as an enthusiastic supporter of Zionism, U.S. endorsement, and indeed facilitation, of Israel's racist policies put this country at great risk for terrorism on a massive scale. Terrorism arises, not as President Bush would have us believe from "hatred of our liberties," but from hatred of our oppressive, killing policies throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, and in a major way from our support for Israel's severe oppression of the Palestinians. Terrorism is never acceptable, but it is explainable, and it is usually avoidable. Supporting the oppression of Palestinians that arises from Israel's racism only encourages terrorism.

It is time to begin openly expressing revulsion at the racism against Palestinians that the United States has been supporting for decades. It is time to sound an alarm about the near irreversibility of Israel's absorption of the occupied territories into Israel, about the fact that this arises from a fundamentally racist ideology, about the fact that this racism is leading to the ethnicide of an entire nation of people, and about the fact that it is very likely to produce horrific terrorist retaliation against the U.S. because of its unquestioning support. Many who are intimately familiar with the situation on the ground are already sounding an alarm, usually without using the word racism but using other inflammatory terms. Israeli commentator Ran HaCohen recently observed that "Israel's atrocities have now intensified to an extent unimaginable in previous decades." Land confiscation, curfew, the "gradual pushing of Palestinians from areas designated for Jews" have accompanied the occupation all along, he wrote, but the level of oppression now "is quite another story.[This is] an eliminationist policy on the verge of genocide."

The Foundation for Middle East Peace, a Washington-based institution that has tracked Israeli settlement-building for decades, came to much the same conclusion, although using less attention-getting language, in its most recent bimonthly newsletter. Israel, it wrote, is "undertaking massive, unprecedented efforts beyond the construction of new settlement housing, which proceeds apace, to put the question of its control of these areas beyond the reach of diplomacy." Israel's actions, particularly the "relentless" increase in territorial control, the foundation concluded, have "compromised not only the prospect for genuine Palestinian independence but also, in ways not seen in Israel's 36-year occupation, the very sustainability of everyday Palestinian life."

It signals a remarkable change when Israeli commentators and normally staid foundations begin using terms like "unprecedented," "unimaginable in previous decades," "in ways not seen in Israel's 36-year occupation," even words like "eliminationist" and "genocide." While the Bush administration, every Democratic presidential candidate (including, to some degree, even the most progressive), Congress, and the mainstream U.S. media blithely ignore the extent of the destruction in Palestine, more and more voices outside the United States and outside the mainstream in the U.S. are finally coming to recognize that Israel is squeezing the life out of the Palestinian nation. Those who see this reality should begin to expose not only the reality but the racism that is at its root.

Some very thoughtful Israelis, including Haim Hanegbi, Meron Benvenisti, and activists like Jeff Halper, have come to the conclusion that Israel has absorbed so much of the occupied territories that a separate, truly independent Palestinian state can never be established in the West Bank and Gaza. They now regard a binational solution as the only way. In theory, this would mean an end to Zionism (and Zionist racism) by allowing the Jewish and the Palestinian peoples to form a single secular state in all of Palestine in which they live together in equality and democracy, in which neither people is superior, in which neither people identifies itself by its nationality or its religion but rather simply by its citizenship. Impossible? Idealized? Pie-in-the-sky? Probably so but maybe not.

Other Israeli and Jewish activists and thinkers, such as Israel's Uri Avnery and CounterPunch contributor Michael Neumann, have cogently challenged the wisdom and the realism of trying to pursue binationalism at the present time. But it is striking that their arguments center on what will best assure a decent outcome for Palestinians. In fact, what is most heartening about the newly emerging debate over the one- versus the two-state solution is the fact that intelligent, compassionate people have at long last been able to move beyond addressing Jewish victimhood and how best to assure a future for Jews, to begin debating how best to assure a future for both the Palestinian and the Jewish people. Progressives in the U.S., both supporters and opponents of present U.S. policies toward Israel, should encourage similar debate in this country. If this requires loudly attacking AIPAC and its intemperate charges of anti-Semitism, so be it.

We recently had occasion to raise the notion of Israeli racism, using the actual hated word, at a gathering of about 25 or 30 (mostly) progressive (mostly) Jews, and came away with two conclusions: 1) it is a hard concept to bring people to face, but 2) we were not run out of the room and, after the initial shock of hearing the word racist used in connection with Zionism, most people in the room, with only a few exceptions, took the idea aboard. Many specifically thanked us for what we had said. One man, raised as a Jew and now a Muslim, came up to us afterward to say that he thinks Zionism is nationalist rather than racist (to which we argued that nationalism was the motivation but racism is the resulting reality), but he acknowledged, with apparent approbation, that referring to racism had a certain shock effect. Shock effect is precisely what we wanted. The United States' complacent support for everything Israel does will not be altered without shock.

When a powerful state kills hundreds of civilians from another ethnic group; confiscates their land; builds vast housing complexes on that land for the exclusive use of its own nationals; builds roads on that land for the exclusive use of its own nationals; prevents expansion of the other people's neighborhoods and towns; demolishes on a massive scale houses belonging to the other people, in order either to prevent that people's population growth, to induce them "voluntarily" to leave their land altogether, or to provide "security" for its own nationals; imprisons the other people in their own land behind checkpoints, roadblocks, ditches, razor wire, electronic fences, and concrete walls; squeezes the other people into ever smaller, disconnected segments of land; cripples the productive capability of the other people by destroying or separating them from their agricultural land, destroying or confiscating their wells, preventing their industrial expansion, and destroying their businesses; imprisons the leadership of the other people and threatens to expel or assassinate that leadership; destroys the security forces and the governing infrastructure of the other people; destroys an entire population's census records, land registry records, and school records; vandalizes the cultural headquarters and the houses of worship of the other people by urinating, defecating, and drawing graffiti on cultural and religious artifacts and symbols ­ when one people does these things to another, a logical person can draw only one conclusion: the powerful state is attempting to destroy the other people, to push them into the sea, to ethnically cleanse them.

These kinds of atrocities, and particularly the scale of the repression, did not spring full-blown out of some terrorist provocations by Palestinians. These atrocities grew out of a political philosophy that says whatever advances the interests of Jews is acceptable as policy. This is a racist philosophy.

What Israel is doing to the Palestinians is not genocide, it is not a holocaust, but it is, unmistakably, ethnicide. It is, unmistakably, racism. Israel worries constantly, and its American friends worry, about the destruction of Israel. We are all made to think always about the existential threat to Israel, to the Jewish people. But the nation in imminent danger of elimination today is not Israel but the Palestinians. Such a policy of national destruction must not be allowed to stand.

-----

* Assuming, according to the scenario put forth by our Israeli-American friend, that Palestinians had accepted the UN-mandated establishment of a Jewish state in 1948, that no war had ensued, and that no Palestinians had left Palestine, Israel would today encompass only the 55 percent of Palestine allocated to it by the UN partition resolution, not the 78 percent it possessed after successfully prosecuting the 1948 war. It would have no sovereignty over Jerusalem, which was designated by the UN as a separate international entity not under the sovereignty of any nation. Its 5.4 million Jews (assuming the same magnitude of Jewish immigration and natural increase) would be sharing the state with approximately five million Palestinians (assuming the same nine-fold rate of growth among the 560,000 Palestinians who inhabited the area designated for the Jewish state as has occurred in the Palestinian population that actually remained in Israel in 1948). Needless to say, this small, severely overcrowded, binational state would not be the comfortable little Jewish democracy that our friend seems to have envisioned.

Bill Christison joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis, a 250-person unit.

Kathleen Christison also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

They are also contributors to CounterPunch's hot new book: The Politics of Anti-Semitism.

It was an accident. I thought it had been posted twice, and I reflexively hid it without checking. The original was an article on Counterpunch from a few years ago, and, I suspect that I recognized it and thought it was a double post.

I'm referring to the repost by Juan Santos.

* Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you’re a conservative radio host. Then it’s an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

* The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing U.N. resolutions against Iraq.

* Government should relax regulation of Big Business and Big Money but crack down on individuals who use marijuana to relieve the pain of illness.

* “Standing Tall for America” means firing your workers and moving their jobs to India.

* A woman can’t be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multi-national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.

* Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.

* The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans’ benefits and combat pay.

* Group sex and drug use are degenerate sins unless you someday run for governor of California as a Republican.

* If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won’t have sex.

* A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then demand their cooperation and money.

* HMOs and insurance companies have the interest of the public at heart.

* Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.

* Global warming and tobacco’s link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

* Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion.

* A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.

* Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.

* The public has a right to know about Hillary’s cattle trades, but George Bush’s driving record is none of our business.

* You support states’ rights, which means Attorney General John Ashcroft can tell states what local voter initiatives they have a right to adopt.

* What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the ’80s is irrelevant.

* Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.