posted December 11, 2006 01:59 PM              

Take a look at this:

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Other Western “revisionists” presented what they called new facts about the Holocaust at the conference, which also attracted attendees from some ultra-Orthodox Jews belonging to anti-Zioinst sects that reject the state of Israel. One participant wearing the traditional long black coat and hat of such groups wore a badge saying: “A Jew, not a Zionist.”

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Its an excerpt from an article about the conference questioning whether the Holocaust really did happen or not, that took place in Iran: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/11/world/middleeast/11cnd-iran.html?hp&ex=1165899600&en=89a54e1e0974643d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Of course its an outrage and insult to Jews, as the Irani Jewish spokesperson says at the end of the article. But it is an affront also by the 'ultra orthodox jews' mentioned beforehand which is pasted straight out of the article.

I really *hate* it when people say that Muslim mentality encourages this kind of thought. We need to stop bringing that word in here and realize that it is an extremist mentality which exists separate of Muslims and Islam. These people claim to be Muslim that is their biggest stronghold over the world. They are using religion to confuse people. If everyone stopped being confused and realized that people who say racist remarks do not follow their religions, there would be no resentment for each others' faiths, instead we could target the individuals who are spreadin these disgusting comments and separate them from the rest of the religious sects. If these crazy extremists say that all Jews must be wiped off, then they are trying to manipulate others by making themt hink that Muslims are denouncing Jews. Its NOT Muslims that are denouncing Jews its crazy people that are denouncing Jews and these crazy people share the same mentality with Nazis. Now where does Nazism fit into Islam? UM NOWHERE.

so can we please be logical? And BUD has said this herself millions of times.

posted December 11, 2006 02:14 PM              

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/20061211-0610-iran-holocaust-israeli.html

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'I am disappointed because I wanted to go to the conference and confront those who denied the Holocaust had taken place,' Mahameed, 44, told Reuters in a telephone interview.

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It mentions a Muslim arab who is shocked and appalled by the notion of holocaust denial. Whereas you also have ultra orthodox jews saying it might not have happened!!!

All I can say is it is a weird world we live in.

There is no bad religious denomination. Muslims are not out to get Jews and vice versa.

MAJORITY muslims respect Jews as members of the faith (ahl al kitab). If you are going off of a few crazy ones to reach the conclusion that thats what the Arab sentiment is, then youre making a big wrong assumption that is dangerous and classifying all Arabs as ignorant and racist.

posted December 11, 2006 05:47 PM            

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Well assuming that the poor lack the ability to withstand pressure from religious clerics is as much of an assumption as assuming that they hate the government to begin with--or that they are more religious than the elite

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Im basing this on wat i learned in islamic political thought class...not my personal assumption

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These vaderas can be benevolent and representative, or corrupt and dictatorial (they may advocate gang rape in some cases!).

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I DID hear of this.

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But on the other hand, in Saudi, religion is a game of the rich political elite, who change and morph it at their whim (modern day wahabism), whereas the poor bedouins know little to nothing about the current cleric rulings and really don't care. Same goes with Egypt.

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once again i agree with you hear but i read that sometimes even the royal family avoids confrontations with the self-righteous mutawas.

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And yes I will agree with you that many many Pakis do not like Musharraf myself included. Since when did a military dictator become a good form of government?

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Here i disagree. Turkey had a number of military coups and they have surved to benefit the nation. The generals were watching over corrupt politicians and once they were done overseeing the government they would return the power to democracy, so while military dictators are usually bad, they arent always so.

Like i said i agree its not inherently Jewish...but its also not inherently Palestinian. Its inherently no one's and thus everyone's.

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I think the expulsion of the Jews from Arab countries was a sad affair but in my mind the reason is not 100% clear. Many Jews left in order to gain prosperity in Israel which their host Arab nations did not enjoy; we must admit Israel provides several financial benefits to Jewish settlers such as cheapo or sometimes free land and utilities, versus the rising costs and inflation in the arab world.

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Perhaps you are right to an extend but only to an extend...Jewish immigrants from former Soviet Union face tremendous persecution in Israel right now and are usually treated like a second class minority because they are usually not as religious and do not know the language. They are also poorer. Jews in Arab nations tended to be wealthier as they actually had more opportunities.

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The Arab-Israeli wars are just that though--Arabs vs Israelis, not Muslims vs. Jews

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I thank you very much for admiting to this and actually stating that, i am MIGHTY tired of it being Muslims vs Jews.

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if you have read through the other pages on this form BUD sadly its true that jw calls everyone who he disagrees with either a socialist a communist or a terrorist sympathizer even if we are simply supporting the democrats or clinton and not even talking about arab natios or the middle east lol.

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Well then thats very wrong of him to do. I havnt seen it in person, im not denying its there. What i saw was DD say that wat he says is propoganda only to accuse him of the same. I wouldnt mind getting it because if i disagree then i disagree and Im sure we will disagree on some things. Our angles in this argument are clearly different but i agree with some things he says and I think he so far agrees with me. But then i also agree with much u say SGA, you are very knowledgeable and diplomatic (the whole Gem Scorp Lib thing )

Oh sorry Dulce Luna i was a bit mad in the morning, i appologize. I dont disagree that they were misplaced. Its just that many people claim that the nation of Palestine was destroyed and Israel rose in its place when that actually isnt the case. Such a nation never existed and that is a big deal when the claim is made to make one. A nation should have legitimacy.

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"It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem."

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That is in fact truee...

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IF someone of Jewish decent comes to the site to stand up for what they know if fact AND has been supported by historical facts, you will see those of an ethnic backround that is more in line with the Muslim religion coming out and attacking you

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Dear Pid i have been faced with this all the time since High School. Im actually starting to enjoy it, practice of good debate. Its also rather entertaining to watch people (no one specific so dont attack me) look at facts and explode with anger and start using personal attacks. Kinda funny actually...

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If I stand back and read objectively I notice that while you are trying to understand their position, you are basically being berated for your Jewish heritage.

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Quite true Pid, now wouldnt it be funny if i was Muslim and saying that? Most people wouldnt be able to deal with that and just call me a traitor, or worse...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wi
ki/Salah_Choud
hury

Like this poor guy...tsk tsk...God forbid someone actually tries to be a human being.

Hahah as for Ahmadinejad I dont think he actually believes the crap he spouts, perhaps he is just entertained to watch what happens when you give a bunch of mindless drones completely bizzare information and they run around believing it...he is a Scorpio Cappie after all...

Speaking of...this one b*** to whom i keep alluding to has proceeded to point out all over another forum how glad she is the Jews were gassed...cuz u know thats alright...

SGA is right I dont blame Islam or "Muslim mentality". Because in all honesty there really isnt (or more like shouldnt be) such a thing. It is in fact from the circumstances around (not israel/palestine) but just societal disillusionment that so called Muslim mentality is arising. But many Muslims will disagree with it and in fact it does not by any mean follow the Qu'ran or the Sunnah and thus isnt real Islam. But real Islam is used as an exuse.

I will agree with much of what SGA calls for. Logic we need to listen to each other and try to come up with best solutions. Nazism is actually contradictory to Islam because it is in fact National Socialism and while Islam could be derived to promote socialism it is certainly against nationalism.

posted December 11, 2006 07:16 PM            

In fact, it is almost expected to see 3-4 of the same people constantly berating others for asking questions (I do not put you into that category) about Muslims, calling such things as naming extremist terrorists as part of a death cult the same as using a derogatory racial slur.

I think this thread has done well, for the most part, in keeping to the spirit of LL and having a debate without getting ugly.

posted December 11, 2006 08:36 PM              

By Yehouda Shenhav
Haaretz
August 15, 2003

Yehouda Shenhav is a professor at Tel Aviv University and the editor of Theory Criticism, an Israeli journal in the area of critical theory and cultural studies.

Any analogy between Palestinian refugees and Jewish immigrants from Arab lands is folly in historical and political terms

Iraqi Jews arrive in Israel, 1949: "We are not refugees." An intensive campaign to secure official political and legal recognition of Jews from Arab lands as refugees has been going on for the past three years. This campaign has tried to create an analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi Jews, whose origins are in Middle Eastern countries – depicting both groups as victims of the 1948 War of Independence. The campaign's proponents hope their efforts will prevent conferral of what is called a "right of return" on Palestinians, and reduce the size of the compensation Israel is liable to be asked to pay in exchange for Palestinian property appropriated by the state guardian of "lost" assets.

The idea of drawing this analogy constitutes a mistaken reading of history, imprudent politics, and moral injustice.

Bill Clinton launched the campaign in July 2000 in an interview with Israel's Channel One, in which he disclosed that an agreement to recognize Jews from Arab lands as refugees materialized at the Camp David summit. Ehud Barak then stepped up and enthusiastically expounded on his "achievement" in an interview with Dan Margalit.

Past Israeli governments had refrained from issuing declarations of this sort. First, there has been concern that any such proclamation will underscore what Israel has tried to repress and forget: the Palestinians' demand for return. Second, there has been anxiety that such a declaration would encourage property claims submitted by Jews against Arab states and, in response, Palestinian counter-claims to lost property. Third, such declarations would require Israel to update its schoolbooks and history, and devise a new narrative by which the Mizrahi Jews journeyed to the country under duress, without being fueled by Zionist aspirations. That would be a post-Zionist narrative.

At Camp David, Ehud Barak decided that the right of return issue was not really on the agenda, so he thought he had the liberty to indulge the Mizrahi analogy rhetorically. Characteristically, rather than really dealing with issues as a leader, in a fashion that might lead to mutual reconciliation, Barak acted like a shopkeeper.

This hot potato was cooked up for Barak and Clinton by Bobby Brown, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's adviser for Diaspora affairs, and his colleagues, along with delegates from organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

WOJAC fails
A few months ago Dr. Avi Becker, secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress, and Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents, persuaded Prof. Irwin Cotler, a member of Canada's parliament and an expert on international law, to join their campaign. An article by Becker published a few weeks ago in the Hebrew edition of Haaretz (July 20), entitled "Respect for Jews from Arab lands," constituted one step in this public campaign. The article said little about respect for Mizrahi Jews. On the contrary – it trampled their dignity.

The campaign's results thus far are meager. Its umbrella organization, Justice for Jews From Arab Countries, has not inspired much enthusiasm in Israel, or among Jews overseas. It has yet to extract a single noteworthy declaration from any major Israeli politician. This comes as no surprise: The campaign has a forlorn history whose details are worth revisiting. Sometimes recounting history has a very practical effect.

The World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries (WOJAC) was founded in the 1970s. Yigal Allon, then foreign minister, worried that WOJAC would become a hotbed of what he called "ethnic mobilization." But WOJAC was not formed to assist Mizrahi Jews; it was invented as a deterrent to block claims harbored by the Palestinian national movement, particularly claims related to compensation and the right of return.

At first glance, the use of the term "refugees" for Mizrahi Jews was not unreasonable. After all, the word had occupied a central place in historical and international legal discourses after World War II. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 from 1967 referred to a just solution to "the problem of refugees in the Middle East." In the 1970s, Arab countries tried to fine-tune the resolution's language so that it would refer to "Arab refugees in the Middle East," but the U.S. government, under the direction of ambassador to the UN Arthur Goldberg, opposed this revision. A working paper prepared in 1977 by Cyrus Vance, then U.S. secretary of state, ahead of scheduled international meetings in Geneva, alluded to the search for a solution to the "problem of refugees," without specifying the identities of those refugees. Israel lobbied for this formulation. WOJAC, which tried to introduce use of the concept "Jewish refugees," failed.

The Arabs were not the only ones to object to the phrase. Many Zionist Jews from around the world opposed WOJAC's initiative. Organizers of the current campaign would be wise to study the history of WOJAC, an organization which transmogrified over its years of activity from a Zionist to a post-Zionist entity. It is a tale of unexpected results arising from political activity.

'We are not refugees'
The WOJAC figure who came up with the idea of "Jewish refugees" was Yaakov Meron, head of the Justice Ministry's Arab legal affairs department. Meron propounded the most radical thesis ever devised concerning the history of Jews in Arab lands. He claimed Jews were expelled from Arab countries under policies enacted in concert with Palestinian leaders – and he termed these policies "ethnic cleansing." Vehemently opposing the dramatic Zionist narrative, Meron claimed that Zionism had relied on romantic, borrowed phrases ("Magic Carpet," "Operation Ezra and Nehemiah") in the description of Mizrahi immigration waves to conceal the "fact" that Jewish migration was the result of "Arab expulsion policy." In a bid to complete the analogy drawn between Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews, WOJAC publicists claimed that the Mizrahi immigrants lived in refugee camps in Israel during the 1950s (i.e., ma'abarot or transit camps), just like the Palestinian refugees.

The organization's claims infuriated many Mizrahi Israelis who defined themselves as Zionists. As early as 1975, at the time of WOJAC's formation, Knesset speaker Yisrael Yeshayahu declared: "We are not refugees. [Some of us] came to this country before the state was born. We had messianic aspirations."

Shlomo Hillel, a government minister and an active Zionist in Iraq, adamantly opposed the analogy: "I don't regard the departure of Jews from Arab lands as that of refugees. They came here because they wanted to, as Zionists."

In a Knesset hearing, Ran Cohen stated emphatically: "I have this to say: I am not a refugee." He added: "I came at the behest of Zionism, due to the pull that this land exerts, and due to the idea of redemption. Nobody is going to define me as a refugee."

The opposition was so vociferous that Ora Schweitzer, chair of WOJAC's political department, asked the organization's secretariat to end its campaign. She reported that members of Strasburg's Jewish community were so offended that they threatened to boycott organization meetings should the topic of "Sephardi Jews as refugees" ever come up again. Such remonstration precisely predicted the failure of the current organization, Justice for Jews from Arab Countries to inspire enthusiasm for its efforts.

Also alarmed by WOJAC's stridency, the Foreign Ministry proposed that the organization bring its campaign to a halt on the grounds that the description of Mizrahi Jews as refugees was a double-edged sword. Israel, ministry officials pointed out, had always adopted a stance of ambiguity on the complex issue raised by WOJAC. In 1949, Israel even rejected a British-Iraqi proposal for population exchange – Iraqi Jews for Palestinian refugees – due to concerns that it would subsequently be asked to settle "surplus refugees" within its own borders.

The foreign minister deemed WOJAC a Phalangist, zealous group, and asked that it cease operating as a "state within a state." In the end, the ministry closed the tap on the modest flow of funds it had transferred to WOJAC. Then justice minister Yossi Beilin fired Yaakov Meron from the Arab legal affairs department. Today, no serious researcher in Israel or overseas embraces WOJAC's extreme claims.

Moreover, WOJAC, which intended to promote Zionist claims and assist Israel in its conflict with Palestinian nationalism, accomplished the opposite: It presented a confused Zionist position regarding the dispute with the Palestinians, and infuriated many Mizrahi Jews around the world by casting them as victims bereft of positive motivation to immigrate to Israel. WOJAC subordinated the interests of Mizrahi Jews (particularly with regard to Jewish property in Arab lands) to what it erroneously defined as Israeli national interests. The organization failed to grasp that defining Mizrahi Jews as refugees opens a Pandora's box and ultimately harms all parties to the dispute, Jews and Arabs alike.

Lessons not learned
The World Jewish Congress and other Jewish rganizations learned nothing from this woeful legacy. Hungry for a magic solution to the refugee question, they have adopted the refugee analogy and are lobbying for it all over the world. It would be interesting to hear the education minister's reaction to the historical narrative presented nowadays by these Jewish organizations. Should Limor Livnat establish a committee of ministry experts to revise school textbooks in accordance with this new post-Zionist genre?

Any reasonable person, Zionist or non-Zionist, must acknowledge that the analogy drawn between Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews is unfounded. Palestinian refugees did not want to leave Palestine. Many Palestinian communities were destroyed in 1948, and some 700,000 Palestinians were expelled, or fled, from the borders of historic Palestine. Those who left did not do so of their own volition.

In contrast, Jews from Arab lands came to this country under the initiative of the State of Israel and Jewish organizations. Some came of their own free will; others arrived against their will. Some lived comfortably and securely in Arab lands; others suffered from fear and oppression.

The history of the "Mizrahi aliyah" (immigration to Israel) is complex, and cannot be subsumed within a facile explanation. Many of the newcomers lost considerable property, and there can be no question that they should be allowed to submit individual property claims against Arab states (up to the present day, the State of Israel and WOJAC have blocked the submission of claims on this basis).

The unfounded, immoral analogy between Palestinian refugees and Mizrahi immigrants needlessly embroils members of these two groups in a dispute, degrades the dignity of many Mizrahi Jews, and harms prospects for genuine Jewish-Arab reconciliation.

Jewish anxieties about discussing the question of 1948 are understandable. But this question will be addressed in the future, and it is clear that any peace agreement will have to contain a solution to the refugee problem. It's reasonable to assume that as final status agreements between Israelis and Palestinians are reached, an international fund will be formed with the aim of compensating Palestinian refugees for the hardships caused them by the establishment of the State of Israel. Israel will surely be asked to contribute generously to such a fund.

In this connection, the idea of reducing compensation obligations by designating Mizrahi immigrants as refugees might become very tempting. But it is wrong to use scarecrows to chase away politically and morally valid claims advanced by Palestinians. The "creative accounting" manipulation concocted by the refugee analogy only adds insult to injury, and widens the psychological gap between Jews and Palestinians. Palestinians might abandon hopes of redeeming a right of return (as, for example, Palestinian pollster Dr. Khalil Shikai claims); but this is not a result to be adduced via creative accounting.

Any peace agreement must be validated by Israeli recognition of past wrongs and suffering, and the forging of a just solution. The creative accounts proposed by the refugee analogy turns Israel into a morally and politically spineless bookkeeper.

posted December 11, 2006 08:46 PM              

“Israeli propaganda has largely relinquished the claim that the Palestinian exodus of 1948 was ‘self-inspired’. Official circles implicitly concede that the Arab population fled as a result of Israeli action — whether directly, as in the case of Lydda and Ramleh, or indirectly, due to the panic that and similar actions (the Deir Yassin massacre) inspired in Arab population centers throughout Palestine. However, even though the historical record has been grudgingly set straight, the Israeli establishment still refused to accept moral or political responsibility for the refugee problem it — or its predecessors — actively created.” Peretz Kidron, quoted in “Blaming the Victims,” ed. Said and Hitchens.

Arab orders to evacuate non-existent

“The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) monitored all Middle Eastern broadcasts throughout 1948. The records, and companion ones by a United States monitoring unit, can be seen at the British Museum. There was not a single order or appeal, or suggestion about evacuation from Palestine, from any Arab radio station, inside or outside Palestine, in 1948. There is a repeated monitored record of Arab appeals, even flat orders, to the civilians of Palestine to stay put.” Erskine Childers, British researcher, quoted in Sami Hadawi, “Bitter Harvest.”

The deliberate destruction of Arab villages to prevent return of Palestinians

“During May [1948] ideas about how to consolidate and give permanence to the Palestinian exile began to crystallize, and the destruction of villages was immediately perceived as a primary means of achieving this aim...[Even earlier,] On 10 April, Haganah units took Abu Shusha... The village was destroyed that night... Khulda was leveled by Jewish bulldozers on 20 April... Abu Zureiq was completely demolished... Al Mansi and An Naghnaghiya, to the southeast, were also leveled. . .By mid-1949, the majority of [the 350 depopulated Arab villages] were either completely or partly in ruins and uninhabitable.” Benny Morris, “The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949.

Was the part of Palestine assigned to a Jewish state in mortal danger from the Arab armies?

“The Arab League hastily called for its member countries to send regular army troops into Palestine. They were ordered to secure only the sections of Palestine given to the Arabs under the partition plan. But these regular armies were ill equipped and lacked any central command to coordinate their efforts...[Jordan’s King Abdullah] promised [the Israelis and the British] that his troops, the Arab Legion, the only real fighting force among the Arab armies, would avoid fighting with Jewish settlements...Yet Western historians record this as the moment when the young state of Israel fought off “the overwhelming hordes’ of five Arab countries. In reality, the Israeli offensive against the Palestinians intensified.” “Our Roots Are Still Alive,” by the Peoples Press Palestine Book Project.

posted December 11, 2006 08:51 PM              

Published in The Orlando Sentinel on June 13, 1999.

Benny Morris is an Israeli-born-and-educated historian and one of several who have up-ended Israeli propaganda about the Palestinians. What follows are direct quotations published in Israel and translated by Israel Shahak, a professor of chemistry at Hebrew University and a Holocaust survivor.

Rami Tal interviewed Morris for the newspaper Yediot Ahronot in December 1994.

Tal: "What attracted you to the eviction of Palestinian Arabs during the War of Liberation?"

Morris: "Till then everyone in Israel spoke about Arabs who had just run away in 1948, but there existed no real historical research on it. There were two conflicting propaganda versions, one Arab and another Jewish. As one who received his education in Israel, I thought I knew that the Arabs had 'run away.' But I knew nothing else. The Jewish generations of 1948, however, knew the truth and deliberately misrepresented it. They knew there were plenty of mass deportations, massacres and rapes . . . . The soldiers and the officials knew, but they suppressed what they knew and were deliberately disseminating lies."

Previously secret, but now published, protocols of Israeli government meetings revealed that David Ben Gurion, prime minister and one of Israel's founders, actually used the word "cleanse" when referring to getting rid of Arabs.

In a published protocol, Ben Gurion was arguing for a wider war. At the time he was speaking, the Galilee area was still in Arab hands. Here is the quotation as published in Israel:

"Regarding the Galilee, Mr. [Moshe] Sharett already told you that about 100,000 Arabs still now live in the pocket of Galilee. Let us assume that a war breaks out. Then we will be able to cleanse the entire area of Central Galilee, including all its refugees, in one stroke. In this context let me mention some mediators who offered to give us the Galilee without war. What they meant was the populated Galilee. They didn't offer us the empty Galilee, which we could have only by means of a war. Therefore if a war is extended to cover the whole of Palestine, our greatest gain will be the Galilee. It is because without any special military effort which might imperil other fronts, only by using the troops already assigned for the task, we could accomplish our aim of cleansing the Galilee."

At another meeting, of which a record has been found, Ben Gurion stated, "We have decided to cleanse Ramla."

In an article in the Haaretz newspaper, Danny Rabinovitz wrote, "What happened to the Palestinians in 1948 is Israel's original sin. . . . Between the 1950s and 1976, the state systematically confiscated most of the land of its remaining Palestinian citizens."

Shahak stated in his article, "In this context let me mention the pioneering work of Erskin Childers [Irish journalist]. Childers was first to show that the Zionist claim that Arab propaganda had called on the Palestinians to run away from their homes was a gross lie. He inspected all broadcasts [the BBC recorded them and kept transcripts as did the American government] of the Arab radios of the time to find that no such call had ever been made."

Finally, this quote from the diary of Yitzhak Tabenkin, a charismatic leader of the kibbutz movement. In his diary, Tabenkin stated, "the ideals of Hitler which I like: ethnic homogeneity, the possibility of exchange of ethnic minorities; the transfers of ethnic groups for the sake of an international order which for me are a particularly valuable feature."

No wonder some people prefer myth to truth.

posted December 11, 2006 08:58 PM              

The expulsion of the Palestinians re-examined

Fifty years ago the UN decided to partition Palestine into two states, one Arab, one Jewish. The ensuing Arab-Israeli war ended with Israel expanding its share of the land by a third, while what remained to the Arabs was occupied by Egypt and Jordan. Several thousand Palestinians fled their homes, becoming the refugees at the heart of the conflict. Israel has always denied that they were expelled, either forcibly or as a matter of policy. Israel’s "new historians" have been re-examining that denial and have put an end to a number of myths.

By Dominique Vidal

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"Only a few acknowledged that the father’s story of return, redemption and liberation was also a story of conquest, displacement, oppression and death."
Yaron Ezrachi, "Rubber Bullets"

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Between the partition plan for Palestine adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 November 1947 and the 1949 ceasefire that ended the Arab-Israeli war, begun by the invasion of 15 May 1948, several hundred thousand Palestinians abandoned their homes in territory that ended up occupied by Israel (1).

Palestinian and Arab historians have always maintained that this was an expulsion. The vast majority of the refugees (estimated at between 700,000 and 900,000) were, they say, forced to leave, first, as a result of clashes between Israelis and Palestinians, and then by the Arab-Israeli war, in which a political-military strategy of expulsion had been marked by several massacres. This position was stated as far back as 1961, by Walid Khalidi, in his essay "Plan Dalet: Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine" (2) and has recently been restated by Elias Sanbar in "Palestine 1948. L’Expulsion" (3).

Mainstream Israeli historians, on the other hand, have always claimed that the refugees (numbering, in their estimation, 500,000 at most) mostly left voluntarily, responding to calls from their leaders assuring them of a prompt return after victory. They deny that the Jewish Agency (and subsequently the Israeli government) had planned the exodus. Furthermore, they maintain that the few (and regrettable) massacres that occurred - particularly the Deir Yassin massacre of 9 April 1948 - were the work of extremist soldiers associated with Menachem Begin’s Irgun and Yitzhak Shamir’s Lehi.

However, by the 1950s this version was already beginning to be contested by leading Israeli figures associated with the Communist Party and with elements of the Zionist left (notably Mapam). Later, in the mid-1980s, they were joined in their critique by a number of historians who described themselves as revisionist historians: Simha Flapan, Tom Segev, Avi Schlaim, Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris. It was Morris’s book, "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem", that first prompted public concern (4) . Leaving aside differences of subject, methodology and viewpoint, what unites these historians is that they are bent on unpicking Israel’s national myths (5). They have focused particularly on the myths of the first Arab-Israeli war, contributing (albeit partially, as we shall see), to establishing the truth about the Palestinian exodus. And in the process they have incurred the wrath of Israel’s orthodox historians (6).

This research activity was originally stimulated by two separate sets of events. First, the opening of Israeli archives, both state and private, covering the period in question. Here it is worth noting that the historians appear to have ignored almost entirely both the archives of the Arab countries (not that these are notable for their accessibility) and oral history potential among Palestinians themselves, where considerable work has been done by other historians. As the Palestinian historian, Nur Masalha, rightly says: "History and historiography ought not necessarily be written, exclusively or mainly, by the victors (7)".

Second, this delving into Israel’s archives would perhaps not have borne such fruit if the following ten years had not been marked by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and by the outbreak of the intifada in 1987. Both these events accentuated the split between the nationalist camp and the peace movement in Israel itself. As it turned out, the "new historians" were uncovering the origins of the Palestinian problem at precisely the moment that the whole question of Palestine was returning to centre stage.

In a recent article in the "Revue d’études palestiniennes" (8), Ilan Pappe, one of the pioneers of this "new historiography", has stressed the importance of the dialogue that was unfolding in that period between Israelis and Palestinians. It developed, he says, "basically among academics. Surprising as it may seem, it was thanks to this dialogue that most Israeli researchers who were working on their country’s history and who had no links to the radical political organisations, became aware of the version of history held by their Palestinian counterparts. They became aware of the fundamental contradiction between Zionist national ambitions and their enactment at the expense of the local population in Palestine."

To this we might add that the manipulation of history for political ends is not an exclusively Israeli domain: most often it goes hand in hand with nationalism.

What lessons have the revisionist historians drawn from their diligent working-through of the archives? As regards the broad picture of the balance of power between Jews and Arabs in both 1947 and 1948, their results contradict the generally-held picture of a weak and poorly armed Jewish community in Palestine threatened with extermination by a highly armed and united Arab world - David versus Goliath. Quite the contrary. The revisionists concur in pointing to the many advantages enjoyed by the nascent Jewish state over its enemies: the decomposition of Palestinian society; the divisions in the Arab world and the inferiority of their armed forces (in terms of numbers, training and weaponry, and hence impact); the strategic advantage enjoyed by Israel as a result of its agreement with King Abdullah of Transjordan (in exchange for the West Bank, he undertook not to attack the territory allocated to Israel by the UN); British support for this compromise, together with the joint support of the United States and the Soviet Union; the sympathy of world public opinion and so forth.

This all helps to explain the devastating effectiveness of the Jewish offensives of spring 1948. It also sheds new light on the context in which the mass departure of Palestinians took place. The exodus was divided into two broadly equal waves: one before and one after the decisive turning-point of the declaration of the State of Israel on 14 May 1948 and the intervention of the armies of the neighbouring Arab states on the following day. One can agree that the flight of thousands of well-to-do Palestinians during the first few weeks following the adoption of the UN partition plan - particularly from Haifa and Jaffa - was essentially voluntary. The question is what was the truth of the departures that happened subsequently?

In the opening pages of "The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem", Benny Morris offers the outlines of an overall answer: using a map that shows the 369 Arab towns and villages in Israel (within its 1949 borders), he lists, area by area, the reasons for the departure of the local population (9). In 45 cases he admits that he does not know. The inhabitants of the other 228 localities left under attack by Jewish troops, and in 41 cases they were expelled by military force. In 90 other localities, the Palestinians were in a state of panic following the fall of a neighbouring town or village, or for fear of an enemy attack, or because of rumours circulated by the Jewish army - particularly after the 9 April 1948 massacre of 250 inhabitants of Deir Yassin, where the news of the killings swept the country like wildfire.

By contrast, he found only six cases of departures at the instigation of local Arab authorities. "There is no evidence to show that the Arab states and the AHC wanted a mass exodus or issued blanket orders or appeals to the Palestinians to flee their homes (though in certain areas the inhabitants of specific villages were ordered by Arab commanders or the AHC to leave, mainly for strategic reasons)." ("The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem", p. 129). On the contrary, anyone who fled was actually threatened with "severe punishment". As for the broadcasts by Arab radio stations allegedly calling on people to flee, a detailed listening to recordings of their programmes of that period shows that the claims were invented for pure propaganda.

Military operations marked by atrocities
In "1948 and After" Benny Morris examines the first phase of the exodus and produces a detailed analysis of a source that he considers basically reliable: a report prepared by the intelligence services of the Israeli army, dated 30 June 1948 and entitled "The emigration of Palestinian Arabs in the period 1/12/1947-1/6/1948". This document sets at 391,000 the number of Palestinians who had already left the territory that was by then in the hands of Israel, and evaluates the various factors that had prompted their decisions to leave. "At least 55% of the total of the exodus was caused by our (Haganah/IDF) operations." To this figure, the report’s compilers add the operations of the Irgun and Lehi, which "directly (caused) some 15%... of the emigration". A further 2% was attributed to explicit expulsion orders issued by Israeli troops, and 1% to their psychological warfare. This leads to a figure of 73% for departures caused directly by the Israelis. In addition, the report attributes 22% of the departures to "fears" and "a crisis of confidence" affecting the Palestinian population. As for Arab calls for flight, these were reckoned to be significant in only 5% of cases...

In short, as Morris puts it, this report "undermines the traditional official Israeli ’explanation’ of a mass flight ordered or ’invited’ by the Arab leadership". Neither, as he points out, "does [the report] uphold the traditional Arab explanation of the exodus - that the Jews, with premeditation and in a centralised fashion, had systematically waged a campaign aimed at the wholesale expulsion of the native Palestinian population." However, he says that "the circumstances of the second half of the exodus" - which he estimates as having involved between 300,000 and 400,000 people - "are a different story."

One example of this second phase was the expulsion of Arabs living in Lydda (present-day Lod) and Ramleh. On 12 July 1948, within the framework of Operation Dani, a skirmish with Jordanian armoured forces served as a pretext for a violent backlash, with 250 killed, some of whom were unarmed prisoners. This was followed by a forced evacuation characterised by summary executions and looting and involving upwards of 70,000 Palestinian civilians - almost 10% of the total exodus of 1947- 49. Similar scenarios were enacted, as Morris shows, in central Galilee, Upper Galilee and the northern Negev, as well as in the post-war expulsion of the Palestinians of Al Majdal (Ashkelon). Most of these operations (with the exception of the latter) were marked by atrocities - a fact which led Aharon Zisling, the minister of agriculture, to tell the Israeli cabinet on 17 November 1948: "I couldn’t sleep all night. I felt that things that were going on were hurting my soul, the soul of my family and all of us here (...) Now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being has been shaken (10)."

The Israeli government of the time pursued a policy of non- compromise, in order to prevent the return of the refugees "at any price" (as Ben Gurion himself put it), despite the fact that the UN General Assembly had been calling for this since 11 December 1948. Their villages were either destroyed or occupied by Jewish immigrants, and their lands were shared out between the surrounding kibbutzim. The law on "abandoned properties" - which was designed to make possible the seizure of any land belonging to persons who were "absent" - "legalised" this project of general confiscation as of December 1948. Almost 400 Arab villages were thus either wiped off the map or Judaised, as were most of the Arab quarters in mixed towns. According to a report drawn up in 1952, Israel had thus succeeded in expropriating 73,000 rooms in abandoned houses, 7,800 shops, workshops and warehouses, 5 million Palestinian pounds in bank accounts, and - most important of all - 300,000 hectares of land (11).

In "1948 and After" (chapter 4), Benny Morris deals at greater length with the role played by Yosef Weitz, who was at the time director of the Jewish National Fund’s Lands Department. This man of noted Zionist convictions confided to his diary on 20 December 1940: "It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both people (...) the only solution is a Land of Israel, at least a western Land of Israel without Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. (...) There is no way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighbouring countries(...) Not one village must be left, not one (bedouin) tribe."

Seven years later, Weitz found himself in a position to put this radical programme into effect. Already, in January 1948, he was orchestrating the expulsion of Palestinians from various parts of the country. In April he proposed - and obtained - the creation of "a body which would direct the Yishuv’s war with the aim of evicting as many Arabs as possible". This body was unofficial at first, but was formalised at the end of August 1948 into the "Transfer Committee" which supervised the destruction of abandoned Arab villages and/or their repopulation with recent Jewish immigrants, in order to make any return of the refugees impossible. Its role was extended, in July, to take in the creation of Jewish settlements in the border areas.

Israel’s battle to bar the return of Palestinian exiles was also pursued on the diplomatic front. Here, as Henry Laurens noted in a review of the revisionist historians (12), "the opening- up, and the use, of the archives made it possible to revise a number of previously-held positions. Contrary to the widely held view, the Arab leaders were prepared for compromise." As soon as the war ended, the Arab leadership was trying, within the context of the Lausanne Conference, to arrive at a general settlement based on Arab acceptance of the UN partition plan (Ilan Pappe gives a detailed account of their efforts (13)), in exchange for Israeli acceptance of a right of return for the refugees. Despite international pressure - with the United States to the fore - this enterprise was to founder on the intransigence of the Israeli authorities, particularly once the Jewish state had been admitted to the United Nations.

Despite this extraordinary accumulation of evidence, Benny Morris concludes in his first book that "the Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab." ("The Birth...", p. 286) His second book offers a more considered approach, in which he recognises that the Palestinian exodus was "a cumulative process, there were interlocking causes, and there was a main precipitator, a coup de grace, in the form of Haganah, Irgun and IDF assault in each locality". ("1948...", p. 32). This shift of position does not, however, prevent him from continuing to resist any notion of a Jewish expulsion plan, and to exonerate David Ben Gurion, president of the Jewish Agency and subsequently prime minister and defence minister of the newly-created Israeli state.

As Norman G. Finkelstein has highlighted, in a textual study that is as brilliant as it is polemical (14), this twin denial by Benny Morris seems at first sight to contradict what Morris says himself. After all, he himself tells us that "the essence of the [Dalet] plan was the clearing of hostile and potentially hostile forces out of the interior of the prospective territory of the Jewish State, establishing territorial continuity between the major concentrations of Jewish population and securing the Jewish State’s future borders before, and in anticipation of, the Arab invasion." ("The Birth...", p. 62) And he also recognises that Plan D, while it did not give carte blanche for an expulsion of civilians, was nevertheless "a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders" for whom it provided "post facto a formal persuasive covering note to explain their actions" (p. 63). Benny Morris contrives to make two seemingly contradictory statements within two pages of each other, namely that "Plan D was not a political blueprint for the expulsion of Palestine’s Arabs" and that "from the beginning of April, there are clear traces of an expulsion policy on both national and local levels". ("The Birth...", pp. 62 and 64)

The same is true as regards the responsibility or otherwise of David Ben Gurion. Morris makes clear that the prime minister was the originator of the Dalet Plan. In July 1948 we find Ben Gurion again, giving the order for the operations in Lydda and Ramleh: "Expel them!" he told Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin - a section censored out of Rabin’s memoirs, but published thirty years later in the "New York Times" (15). This order, Morris tells us, had not been debated within the Israeli government. In fact, some days previously the Mapam, partner of the ruling Mapai, had obtained from the prime minister an instruction explicitly forbidding the military to carry out expulsion measures... Ben Gurion later attacked the hypocrisy of this Marxist Zionist party for condemning "activities" in which its own militants, Palmah troops and kibbutzniks alike, had also taken part.

In Nazareth, General Chaim Laskov decided to take the official instruction literally. One story has Ben Gurion arriving there, discovering the local population still in situ, and declaring angrily "What are they doing here?" (16) Also in July, but this time in Haifa, we have Ben Gurion as the man behind the scenes in the operation for the "de-localisation" of the 3,500 Arabs still remaining in the town, followed by the partial destruction of the former Arab quarter.

In short, as Morris himself points out, power at that period of Israel’s history resided with Ben Gurion and with him alone. All issues, whether military or civilian, were decided with him, often without the slightest consultation with the government, let alone with the parties that comprised it. In such a situation, the absence from the archives of any formal parliamentary or governmental decision to expel the Palestinians proves nothing. As Morris himself admits, "Ben Gurion always refrained from issuing clear or written expulsion orders; he preferred that his generals ’understand’ what he wanted done. He wished to avoid going down in history as the ’great expeller’" ("The Birth...", pp. 292-3).

The fact that the founder of the State of Israel took advantage of the impressive extent of his powers and worked towards the maximum enlargement of the territory allocated to the Jewish state by the United Nations, and towards reducing its Arab population to a minimum, is a matter of historical fact. Morris devoted an important article (17) to Ben Gurion’s long-term support for the transfer project. As he writes in his preface to "1948 and After...", "Already from 1937 we find Ben Gurion (and most of the other Zionist leaders) supporting a ’transfer’ solution to the ’Arab problem’ (...) Come 1948, and the confusions and deplacement of war, and we see Ben Gurion quickly grasp the opportunity for ’Judaising’ the emergent Jewish State" ("1948 and After..., p. 33).

Prior to this, he tells us that "the tendency of military commanders to ’nudge’ Palestinians’ flight increased as the war went on. Jewish atrocities - far more widespread than the old histories have let on (there were massacres of Arabs at Ad Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Safsaf, Majd al Kurum, Hule (in Lebanon), Saliha and Sasa, besides Deir Yassin and Lydda and other places) - also contributed significantly to the exodus" ("1948...", p. 22).

The "original sin"
Ilan Pappe, a professor at the University of Haifa, devotes two chapters of his book "The Making of the Arab- Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951" to these issues. Eschewing the caution of Morris’s position, he concludes that "Plan D can be regarded in many respects as a master plan for expulsion. The plan was not conceived out of the blue - expulsion was considered as one of many means for retaliation against Arab attacks on Jewish convoys and settlements; nevertheless, it was also regarded as one of the best means of ensuring the domination of the Jews in the areas captured by the Israeli army" ("The Making...", p. 98).

Furthermore, the actual text of Plan D leaves very little doubt as to the intentions of Ben Gurion and his friends. It spoke of "operations against enemy population centres located inside or near our defensive system in order to prevent them from being used as bases by an active armed force. These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris), and especially of those population centres which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village, conducting a search inside it. In case of resistance, the armed force must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state" ("The Making...", p. 92).

For their achievements, and despite their limitations, we should applaud the courage of Israel’s new historians. This is not just any old page of history on which they have worked to shed light. What they have opened to public view is the "original sin" of the state of Israel. Is it acceptable for the survivors of Hitler’s genocide to have the right to live in a state of their own, and for this right to exclude the right of the sons and daughters of Palestine to live similarly at peace in their own country? Fifty years after the event, the time is long overdue to bring an end to this logic that has generated so much war, and to find a way for the two peoples to coexist. At the same time, we should not draw a veil over the historical origins of the tragedy.

posted December 11, 2006 09:17 PM              

Many Jews had a lucky escape during the Holocaust - when Arabs risked their own lives to rescue them. Deirdre Fernand reports

The Sunday Times December 03, 2006
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-2469952_1,00.html

Anny Boukris was just a child when the soldiers came knocking at the door. The year was 1942, and German troops were occupying her town and her homeland of Tunisia. Boukris lived with her parents, Jacob and Odette, in the seaside town of Mahdia, along its eastern shore. She and her brothers and sisters wanted for nothing. Jacob, a Jewish businessman, was doing well; they could even afford a maid.

All that changed with the fist at the door. Since the arrival of German troops that year, the family had suspected something would happen. They had stocked up on food, packed their family heirlooms into a boxroom and placed a bookcase in front of the door.

All to no avail. The soldiers inspected the house, found the hiding place and took all their precious belongings. Anny minded her stamp collection being confiscated.

Their house was being requisitioned as a barracks, the soldiers said, and they had only an hour to leave. Anny’s father kept his wits about him. He quickly arranged for his family to find refuge in an old factory nearby. Aunts and uncles joined them, and although the living conditions were far from satisfactory for everyone, they all felt safe enough.

A few weeks later came another knock at the door. This time the caller was no German but a local man, the son of a wealthy landowner. “You are all at great risk,” he told them. “You must leave straight away.” In the middle of the night he drove them to his farm, about 20 miles away. There they stayed hidden for four months, until the Germans had been driven out of the country and they could return home. It was only then that Anny came to understand the significance of the rescuer in the night.

The man was 32-year-old Khaled Abdelwahhab, a prominent and well-connected Arab from Mahdia, who made it his business to fraternise with German officers so he knew what was going on. Handsome, sophisticated and educated in the West, he made an agreeable companion and would sit drinking with them into the early hours. He knew, for instance, which brothels they frequented, which females they lusted after. He had also heard tales of local girls, many of them Jewish, being abducted for sex and never being seen again.

One night, one of the soldiers confided to him that he had his eye on a beautiful Jewish woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, whom he was going to take away “for his own pleasure”. When Abdelwahhab realised that the blonde he intended to rape was Anny’s mother, Odette, he sprang into action. He plied the soldier with drink, and when he eventually fell into a stupor, Abdelwahhab drove directly to the farm and whisked everyone to safety. “We left like that,” Anny recalled. Abdelwahhab, who later married and had a daughter, became a lifelong friend of the Boukris family. Forever an honoured guest, he was always invited to celebrate the sabbath with them, sitting down to share chicken couscous and memories. There, around that table, they would talk of the war. Arab and Jew shared a special bond.

Abdelwahhab’s heroism in saving Odette from abduction and rape – and rescuing her entire family from persecution and possible death – would have been forgotten were it not for the efforts of one remarkable historian of the Middle East, Robert Satloff. A 44-year-old American of Jewish descent, he has devoted the past four years to searching out lost heroes of the Holocaust. Not just any heroes, but Arabs such as Abdelwahhab. “He could so easily have been killed if the German officer had found out that he had tricked him to save a Jewish woman,” he says. Executed swiftly, perhaps, or tortured to death in any of the 104 “punishment” camps then being built across the Sahara.

Satloff’s quest for good men took him not to Europe, where 6m perished under the Nazis and where virtuous men like Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg risked everything to save lives, but to the shores of North Africa, where France’s possessions of Morocco, Tunisia and Algiers – and its Jewish population – had fallen to the Germans.

“We all know the horrific stories of the Jews who died in Europe under the Nazis,” he says.

“I wanted to look at the long reaches of the Holocaust. Persecution was not just a European story. I wanted to investigate what happened to Jews living among Arabs when the Nazis arrived. Their stories have been overlooked for far too long.” He reminds us that had allied troops not driven the Germans from the African continent in 1943, then the 2,000-year-old Jewish communities of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and maybe Egypt and Palestine too, might have met the fate of their brothers in Europe.

The result of his detective work, which drew upon scores of interviews with witnesses and survivors of pogrom, is contained in his newly published book, Among the Righteous. “I set myself a simple goal,” he says. “To tell the story of one Arab who saved the life of one Jew.” He had in his mind a saying from the Koran: “Whoever saves one life, saves the entire world.” This passage echoes the Jewish exhortation: “If you save one life, it is as if you have saved the world.”

Satloff, who runs the influential think-tank the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, began to dig in wartime archives and libraries but could find little about the half-million Jews of North Africa. There were bare statistics – nearly 5,000 were killed in air raids or as a result of forced labour – but few details. Questions hung in the air. What became of the Jewish families in Casablanca and Algiers when the tanks rolled in and the jackboots marched? What happened when Vichy, the collaborationist government of Marshal Pétain, brought in anti-semitic laws?

As Sir Martin Gilbert, the respected historian of the Shoah, points out, the fate of Jews outside Europe has only recently emerged as a topic of interest. It was not until 1997 that Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial and library of remembrance, published its first volume on the wartime persecution of Jews in Libya and Tunisia. And it was only last year that three documentaries on the plight of North African Jews aired on Israeli television.

Then another, larger question began to bother Satloff. Could there ever have been an Arab Schindler? An Arab Wallenberg? As the world remembers, Oskar Schindler, whose story was told by Thomas Keneally in the award-winning Schindler’s Ark, was the German factory owner who defied the SS to rescue as many as 1,300 Jews. Wallenberg,
a Swedish diplomat working in wartime Budapest, is credited with saving as many as 100,000 Hungarian Jews.

In pursuit of his Arab Schindler, Satloff, who is fluent in Arabic, French and Hebrew, moved with his wife, an economist at the World Bank, and two young sons to Morocco in 2002 and began his research in earnest. He turned himself into a Simon Wiesenthal in reverse: where the legendary Nazi hunter, who died last year, sought criminals to bring them to justice, Satloff sought champions. Over steaming cups of sweet mint tea in houses and cafes, he listened to tales from the past. Some people were eager to speak of their wartime tribulations, as if they had been waiting all their lives to unburden themselves; others were more guarded. Acceptance and suspicion of him went hand in hand.

In the event, he found not one saviour but many. Wherever he went he collected stories about Arabs welcoming Jews into their homes, sharing their meagre rations, guarding their valuables so Germans could not confiscate them, and warning leaders about SS raids. Abdelwahhab, who died in 1997 aged 86, features prominently in his gallery of heroes, along with Si Ali Sakkat, a former mayor of Tunis who hid 60 Jewish workers who had fled a labour camp, and Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the rector of a Paris mosque, who helped 100 Jews evade persecution in 1940. Similarly, the Bey of Tunis, Tunisia’s wartime ruler under the Germans, is reported as having told members of his government: “The Jews… are under our patronage and we are responsible for their lives. If I find out that an Arab informer caused even one hair of a Jew to fall, this Arab will pay with his life.” As one old gentleman from a small town in Tunisia remarked, “The Arabs watched over the Jews.”

Satloff is prepared for such tales of Arab derring-do to stir controversy. Denial of the Holocaust in Arab lands is not uncommon. The leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, has declared to his supporters that Jews invented the “legend” of the Holocaust. Hamas’s official website has labelled the Nazi effort to exterminate Jews “an alleged and invented story with no basis”. And recently, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria told an interviewer he doesn’t “have any clue how [Jews] were killed or how many were killed”. So if the Shoah never happened, or has been exaggerated, how can Arabs such as Si Kaddour Benghabrit or the Bey of Tunis have played any part in it – noble or otherwise?

It was witnessing the 9/11 attacks that prompted Satloff to embark upon his book. Watching the twin towers collapse, an event he saw from the relative safety of a Midtown office building in Manhattan, he wondered what he, as a Jew, an American and an Islamic scholar, could do to bring together warring ideologies. In his mind, the plume of smoke rising from the towers conjured up the chimneys of the death camps. “I decided that the best thing I could do would be to combat Arab ignorance about the Holocaust,” he says. “And the most effective way of doing that was to tell a positive story. Any history that I wrote had to involve the Islamic world and its Arab heroes.” As he points out, in a fractured, fragmenting world, dialogue is both desirable and essential.

Today, Schindler and Wallenberg are perhaps the most famous men to have been officially recognised by Yad Vashem as “righteous among the nations”. They are just two of the 21,310 Gentiles honoured for risking their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Individuals come from Chile and Croatia, Lithuania and Latvia, but there is no representative on that list from Tunisia, Morocco or Algiers. “There are Turkish and Bosnian Muslims cited,” says Satloff, “but nearly 60 years after the war, no Arab has ever been officially recognised.”

Perhaps the testimonies of women like 71-year-old Anny Boukris, whose mother was rescued by Abdelwahhab, hold the clue. She spent years trying to tell people about her family and the debt they all owed to the dashing young Arab. But none of her neighbours wanted to know. Satloff, who checked her story with several sources, has his own explanation: “I came to the sad conclusion that there are two main reasons that no Arabs have been included among that righteous list. First, many Arabs (or their heirs) didn’t want to be found, and second, I think many Jews didn’t look too hard.”

Officials from Yad Vashem have expressed interest in Satloff’s work. Throughout his research he has been in contact with its Department of the Righteous, which scrutinises the credentials of candidates, and he will be making all his files available to them. The final decision to afford the honour is made by an independent public committee comprising Holocaust survivors, lawyers, historians and individuals, and is chaired by Supreme Court judges. “But Yad Vashem doesn’t act like a detective agency,” says Satloff. In practice, the process of recognition, a painstaking and laborious operation, is usually initiated by Holocaust survivors or their families – and that has not yet happened. “So far, the commission has yet to receive a request to recognise a person as ‘righteous among the nations’ from an Arab country,” says a spokesman.

Whatever the outcome, Satloff already has one victory under his belt. By providing documentary proof of their incarceration, he has helped dozens of survivors of 100 labour camps in Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia gain thousands of pounds’ compensation from the German government. And if he has his way, maybe Khaled Abdelwahhab, the elegant and good-looking man he calls “the Paul Newman of Tunisia”, will become the first righteous Arab. No wonder that after 25 years of writing about conflict in the Middle East, he calls this “the most hopeful story I’ve written”.

In order to understand the bravery of these Arab heroes, it is necessary to put their behaviour in context. As a remark by the philosopher Edmund Burke warns us, “It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.” There were plenty of men who did nothing.

From the beginning of the second world war, Nazi plans to persecute and eventually exterminate Jews extended throughout a great swathe of Arab lands. Though Germany and its allies controlled this region only briefly, they made substantial progress towards that goal. From June 1940 to May 1943, the Nazis, their Vichy French collaborators and their Italian fascist allies applied in Arab lands many of the precursors to the Final Solution. These included not only laws depriving Jews of property, education, livelihood, rights of residence and free movement, but also torture, slave labour, deportation and execution. Though there were no death camps, many thousands of Jews were consigned to more than 100 brutal labour camps. The very first concentration camps to be liberated by allied troops in late 1942 were in Algeria and Morocco. About 1% of North African Jews (4,000 to 5,000) died under Axis control, compared with more than 50% of European Jewry. As Satloff says, “These Jews were lucky to be in Africa, where the fighting ended relatively early and where boats – not just cattle trucks – would have been needed to take them to the ovens in Europe.”

In this world, Arabs were both willing participants and collaborators. They worked as interpreters, going house to house with SS officers pointing out where Jews lived, oversaw work gangs and guarded prisoners in labour camps. Without a compliant populace, the persecution of Jews would have been impossible.

Were Arabs merely following orders? An interviewer from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum once put that question to Harry Alexander, a Jew from Leipzig, Germany. After his father was taken to Sachsenhausen and his brother to Buchenwald, he managed to escape to France. There French authorities sent him to the notoriously harsh Vichy labour camp at Djelfa in the Algerian desert. “Nobody told them to beat us all the time,” he said. “Nobody told them to chain us together. Nobody told them to tie us naked to a post and beat us and to hang us by our arms and hose us down, to bury us in the sand… No, they took this into their own hands and they enjoyed what they did.”

Satloff tracked down another survivor of the camps, Morice Tondowski, a 92-year-old Polish-born Jew, to his retirement home in Ilford, Essex. He had joined the Foreign Legion in France but was stripped of his rifle under Vichy’s anti-semitic laws and sent to Berguent labour camp in Morocco. Tondowski told him about one of the worst kinds of punishment, the tombeau – French for tomb. Prisoners who were judged not to be working hard enough were forced to dig holes and lie in these faux graves for weeks on end, day and night. Surviving only on 175 grams of bread and one litre of water a day, they lay in their own waste. If they made the slightest movement they would be beaten. One of Tondowski’s best friends, a fellow Pole, died after weeks in the tombeau. “I think of him all the time,” the old man told him.

It is little wonder that Satloff prefers to dwell on the humanity of men like Si Ali Sakkat, another of his local heroes, who died in 1954. He was the Tunisian landowner who came from a noble Muslim family that could trace its lineage back to the Prophet Muhammad. After a career in public service, including a stint as mayor of Tunis, he retired to his splendid 740-acre farm outside the city with fields of grazing sheep and shady olive groves. Not far away from his land was an Axis labour camp. At a critical point of the battle for Tunisia, fighting broke out in a nearby valley. Amid the bombs and gunfire, a group of about 60 Jewish workers seized the opportunity to escape and found their way to Si Ali’s property.

“They were lucky to come to his door,” says Satloff, who struck up a friendship with Si Ali’s grandson. “He didn’t hesitate to offer each of them food and lodging. This was a man of ready and simple kindnesses.” Opening up his outbuildings and barns for them, the country squire sheltered them for weeks until allied troops, on their way to Tunis, could liberate them.

Just as remarkable are the actions of Si Kaddour Benghabrit. Perhaps the most influential Arab in Europe, he was the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris. Under the noses of German occupiers, he saved as many as 100 Jews by allowing his staff at the mosque to issue them with certificates of Muslim identity, with which they could evade arrest and deportation. Two months after the Germans took control of France, they caught up with the scam and ordered Benghabrit to stop. When Satloff visited the mosque to investigate this claim, he was shown a letter telling Benghabrit to desist. It read: “The occupation authorities suspect the personnel of the Mosque of Paris of fraudulently delivering to individuals of the Jewish race certificates attesting that the interested persons are of the Muslim confession.” For reasons that are unclear, or perhaps because the Germans lacked firm evidence, no action was taken against Benghabrit. He died in the 1960s and is buried in the same holy place that gave so many Jews a lifeline.

In recording these stories, Satloff’s work is far from finished. Now back living and working in Washington, a regular on the university-lecture circuit, he is still discovering more heroes. What next? A sequel? A film of the book? “I’ve only scratched the surface,” he says. “We know not all Arabs joined with the European-inspired campaign against the Jews. The few who risked their lives to save them provide inspiration beyond their numbers.”

In the final days of his last research trip, he came across the story of a group of Arab shepherds from western Tunisia, who hid fleeing Jews. “When the Germans came looking for Jews, the Arabs would say they are their cousins,” he was told. But the race against time is on. Those who lived through the war are dying out.

Just eight weeks after telling her story for the first time in 60 years in all its stirring detail – from the hammering on the door to the midnight flight – Anny Boukris breathed her last.

posted December 11, 2006 11:25 PM            

Nice try though.

Now, I tend to believe the reports I posted from the Arab League, believe the reports like those from the Iraqi Prime Minister of the period and believe the eye witnesses who were part of the Arab residents who were ordered out of the area by Arab leaders and military commanders, not to mention the reports in Arab newspapers of the time.

You're free to believe anything you wish just don't expect to get a pass when you post propaganda and trash from anti-Israeli sources.

Tel Aviv U's Red Professor
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 28, 2006

Israel's Tel Aviv University has long been a notorious outpost of "Post-Zionist" (i.e. anti-Israel) professors and openly communist faculty members. It would be hard to pinpoint the very worst and most outrageous of these professional radicals, but Yehouda Shenhav is surely a serious contender.

Shenhav is an Associate Professor and past department chairman of sociology at Tel Aviv University. Born Yehouda Shaharabani to Iraqi parents who had immigrated as refugees to Israel, he later changed his name to a less obviously Asian one. He teaches Marxism and anti-Zionism to Tel Aviv University students and he edits the pseudo-academic Israeli journal Theory and Criticism. Publishing anti-Israel propaganda and boilerplate Marxism, Theory and Criticism was founded in 1990 by a gaggle of Israeli communists, Arabs, and leftist anti-Zionists. Shenhav also sits on the board of another anti-Israel "journal" published by extremists at Israel's Ben-Gurion University.

Shenhav was a visiting faculty member at Columbia University when the radicals at the late Edward Said's campus were turning it into a hotbed of anti-Jewish sentiment. Unsurprisingly, Shenhav did not speak out against the rising campus anti-Semitism there nor did he denounce the academic ultras. Instead, Shenhav attended anti-war events throughout the region, starring Columbia faculty and others opposed to the American-led war against Iraqi Baathism and Islamist terrorism.

During his appearances, Shenhav compared the war in Iraq to "Israeli acts of aggression in the West Bank," which he saw as "acts of colonialism" led by "crude military men." (Notwithstanding his incessant complaints about the immorality of Israeli society and the intolerable colonialism of its government, Shehav has never refused his taxpayer-financed university salary.)

Shenhav is a "critical" part of the leftist clerisy that has taken over a once-serious Israeli think tank, the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem, turning it into a little taxpayer-supported arm of anti-Jewish propaganda and activism. He is one of the charter members of a far-leftist group of Asian Jews (those whose families immigrated to Israel from Islamic countries) calling itself the "Mizrahi Democratic Rainbow Coalition". While pretending to be a lobbying group for underprivileged Asian Jews in Israel, the "Rainbow Coalition" spends most of its time promoting the Communist Party's formula for ending "occupation" and bringing peace to a future Middle East that evidently will not contain a Jewish state. The "Rainbow" is one of the anti-Jewish Israeli groups celebrated by the Marxists at Z magazine, Noam Chomsky's favorite magazine. While having a picayune membership, the "Rainbow" nevertheless is awash in funds it gets from the radical New Israel Fund and similar foreign groups.

Shenhav is clearly the star of the "Rainbow Coalition" web site, which is crouded with pieces by anti-Israel writers, including pro-terror Stanford professor Joel Beinin, "Professor" Smadar Lavie, a feminist and anti-Zionist who is not a professor at all, and even an Israel-bashing article by UFO crackpot conspiracist Barry Chamish. The web site publishes articles endorsing the campaign by European anti-Semites to boycott Israeli universities.

Yehousa Shenhav is among the better-known of Israel's anti-Israel academics. He has signed many of those anti-Israel petitions, collected regularly by certain academics, including one endorsing the Jewish woman arrested for helping her Palestinian boyfriend plan terror bombings, and another proposing international intervention to end Israeli sovereignty. Shenhav's main "academic thesis" has long been the claim that Asian/Sephardic Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries are in fact Arabs of the Jewish faith. He insists that their national identity is determined, like throughout the West, by language, whereas anyone with the slightest familiarity with the Middle East knows that nationality groups there are defined primarily by religious identity. (That is why secular Jews who do not practice Judaism are still Jews.) In trying to stake out a niche as an academic exponent of "multiculturalism," Shenhav in fact shows that he is a victim of his own Western provinciality, lacking any understanding of so basic a fact of life.

For Shenhav, the "Jewish Arabs thesis" is a purposeful and egregious misapplication of the modern European Jewish liberal posturing. It is designed to make Jews more accepted by claiming to be Germans (or Hungarians, or whatever) of the Jewish religion, and then tendentiously applies the same idea to Jews from Arab countries. Arabic-speaking Jews are Jews, and not Arabs, just as Hebrew-speaking Arabs are still Arabs. Shenhav might be able to find Sephardic Jews who agree with his "Jewish Arabs thesis," and who hold that they are Arabs of the Jewish religion, but there is no validity to the claim. Shenhav has promoted his view that Asian Jews are Arabs in numerous articles and his recent book, The Arab Jews: Nationality, Religion and Ethnicity, won rave reviews from Arab extremists and from PLO front groups.

Shenhav considers Zionism to be a form of colonialism. Indeed, Shenhav has long argued that Asian Jews and Palestinians need to unite to fight Zionism, that old "common cause" of the communist party in "Palestine" from the 1920s onward. Asian Jews and Palestinians are, in his view, two wings of the same struggle in absolutely everything--except that Shehav has staunchly opposed the idea of compensation for Asian Jews from Arabs.

Though a child of immigrants to Israel from Iraq, Shenhav wants his own family and those of all other Jewish refugees from Arab countries to be denied their due rights to compensation for property stolen from them. At the same time, he endorses unlimited rights to "compensation" for Palestinians and even their "right of return" to Israeli territory after a Palestinian state is created. This is all the moral equivalent of someone insisting that Germans have the right to compensation for losses during World War II while neither Jews nor Czechs do. Unsurprisingly, Shenhav has been denounced by Justice for Jews from Arab Countries and similar pro-Sephardic groups.

While a prominent Tel Aviv University professor, Shenhav has a long track record of promoting crackpot theories about a variety of matters. He has promoted the long-discredited conspiracy holding that Yemenite Jewish children from families who came to Israel in its early years were "kidnapped" and surreptitiously handed over for adoption to European Jews. Not a shred of evidence that any such "kidnappings" took place has ever surfaced, including via DNA tests.

Shenhav's latest cause célčbre is the struggle against "neo-liberalism". Those living in the real world--meaning outside of campuses--might be confused by that terminology. But back in the 19th century liberalism used to mean free markets, democracy, and the right to pursue equal opportunity. By the 1960s, American "liberalism" had come to mean the very opposite of traditional liberalism, while the banners of 19th-century liberalism had been adopted by American conservatives. The far Left in recent years adopted "neo-liberalism" as its favorite nonsense term, and its main political crusade today is directed toward attacking what it calls, interchangeably and erroneously, "neo-liberalism" and "neo-conservatism". To paraphrase George Orwell, some ideas are so stupid that one can only learn about them from professors.

Shenhav is one of those professors. What he and his ilk really mean by "neo-liberalism" is economic freedom. They may not understand first-year economics but certainly they know that economic freedom is evil and must be suppressed at all costs. Writing in Haaretz on March 22, 2006, Shenhav declares that "neo-liberalism" is a "destructive" form of "religious-like fundamentalism," a "new form of global imperialism controlled by multinational corporations," which develop "anti-democratic styles of management, laws, justice and morality," all designed to oppress the poor workers. He has said, "Patriotism and national solidarity are eroded from below by social injustice, and from above by globalization."

Shenhav pontificates about how he thinks markets operate, recites long-discredited Marxist "theories," all the while singing sycophantic praises of the recent book A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey. Harvey is far-Left professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

For Shenhav and the cadre of Marxists in the sociology and political science departments at Tel Aviv University, the solution to "neoliberalism" is more of the “progressive” policies that have failed to such disastrous effect in the last century. That makes him but the latest example of the pampered academic whose political fervor is inversely proportional to his expertise.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=21798

posted December 11, 2006 11:50 PM              

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FrontPageMag.com is a neo-conservative magazine founded by ex-Marxist (Trokskyite) turned neo-conservative activist David Horowitz. FrontPage's output ranges from old-fashioned red-baiting and neocon punditry, to pushing pro-Likud zionist propaganda.

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posted December 11, 2006 11:59 PM              

David Horowitz's Corrosive Projects

Undermining Civil Society

by Paul de Rooij
Counterpunch
April 11, 2005

London, England

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"A smear is among the simplest of propaganda techniques. It can take the form of repeated, unapologetic, systematic name-calling, or otherwise implying or asserting that opponents are bad, evil, stupid, untrustworthy, guilty of reprehensible acts, or part of some undesirable category.

A smear might be conducted subtly or vaguely so the target cannot seek legal action against a slander or libel, which must be specific and believable to be legally actionable. False implications can be masked by otherwise truthful statements."[1]

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In a democratic and civil society, one expects a free exchange of ideas, respect for the opinion of others, and it is taken for granted that all members of society are able to air their views without fear. It is also assumed that most members of the society have the potential to remain well informed [2]. Without this basis, the notion that a society can make the least-worst collective decisions or retain a modicum of civility will be undermined.

Although the United States used to trumpet the glory of its democracy and the related freedoms, it is disconcerting to find many developments that are hostile to the aforementioned assumptions. All of the following are detrimental to a civil society: truculent right-wing radio-talk shows, the sensationalist Springer-type talk shows, Fox News, , and David Horowitz's projects. This article examines the pernicious nature of some of Horowitz's projects, and it attempts to explain what role they may play in the United States today. An evaluation of these projects should also put into context Horowitz's campaign for an "academic bill of rights".

An overview

Horowitz, a self-declared former Marxist, is now engaged in a variety of projects ranging from promoting an "academic bill of rights", writing books [3], a database on "leftists" and "jihadists", and the FrontPage "magazine" [4]. FrontPage (FP) is primarily a platform for extreme Zionists to smear leftists, to attack academics who may be critical of Israel or the current US imperial proclivities, and to hurl ritual abuse against "jihadists" ­ in reality, a thinly-veiled racist attack on Muslims or Arab people. Denigrating and insulting labels are flung around in FP, and its writers often brand anyone near the left with such labels as "racist", "jihadist", "anti-semite", etc. The American progressive broadcaster Al Franken's photo appears with a "racist" label juxtaposed; Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old ISM volunteer who was killed by the Israeli army, is portrayed as "matron martyr saint for the pro-terrorism Left, the Joan of Arc of Palestinian terrorism" FrontPage also loves to denigrate: Prof. Juan Cole, Prof. Ward Churchill, Prof. Noam Chomsky Simply put, civility and integrity are in short supply at FP.

A new Horowitz "project" is the DiscoverTheNetwork database that monitors "leftists"; it applies the same McCarthyite Campus-Watch formula to a wider group of activists. It draws on the "research" of the articles that have appeared in FP, Campus-Watch, and liberally insults and denigrates those it has chosen to track. There is no place in a democratic society for such corrosive databases like DiscoverTheNetwork ­ these amount to databases of libel [5].

With friends like these

One of FrontPages's most pernicious writers is Steven Plaut, a man who "could be thought of as Israel's Daniel Pipes" (Pipes is the instigator of Campus-Watch), and is someone who "launched an Internet site on which he publishes articles that typically espouse far-right positions" [6]. Given that Plaut was born and raised in the US, educated at top US universities, one would have hoped that he had learned the finer points of living in a democracy; however, he now lives in Israel, and this may have dulled his sensibilities.

For an insight into Plaut's integrity and civility the following incidents should warn anyone about the character of this person:

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" a young political philosopher and human rights campaigner from Ben Gurion University, Dr. Neve Gordon, was accused by an extreme right-wing polemicist from Haifa University, Dr. Ste[v]en Plaut, of being a supporter of Norman Finkelstein, whose book, The Holocaust Industry, led many on the Right to associate him with Holocaust deniers. When Gordon decided to sue him for libel, Plaut subsequently disseminated articles attacking Gordon on the Internet, including on some extreme right-wing Kahanist sites. Morton Klein, the head of the Zionist Organization in America, also weighed in against Gordon by writing to the President and the Rector of Ben Gurion University questioning the continued employment of Gordon and protesting his libel case which, Klein argued, was an intervention in the civil liberties of Plaut because it denied Plaut's right to freedom of expression! [...] Writing under assumed names, Plaut has a long history of attacking, labeling, and targeting left-wing scholars in Israel. One anonymous article appeared under the name of Socrates in the Middle East Review of 2001. " [7] (emphasis added)

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Here is a recent example where Plaut savages Jonathan Cook, an important free-lance journalist who frequently writes on Palestine and the Middle East. Plaut easily brandishes the "anti-semite" slur and here he demonstrates hyperbolic tendencies:

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Cook is a self-proclaimed "freelance journalist". He is in fact a vicious anti-Semite openly endorsing Palestinian mass murder of Jews. The very fact that he has never been deported nor jailed by Israel speaks volumes about the extent to which the Israeli government is really willing to defend the country and Israelis. Cook writes anti-Israel propaganda for the Egyptian anti-Semitic daily al-Ahram the anti-Semitic British daily The Guardian, al-Jazaara [sic], and just about any other anti-Semitic outfit you can think of.[8]

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In 2004, Plaut lifted the email list of an electronic discussion forum based at the Univ. of Haifa [9]. Then, using this list, a co-conspirator called "Rocky" proceeded to send hateful emails to the forum posing as someone called Yusuf, a "Zionist Palestinian", who also was "your token Arab who adores Israel". "Rocky" then made the mistake of using CC instead of BCC to forward one of his diatribes. The ensuing email exchange between "Rocky" and Plaut discussing the faux pas was revealed when "Rocky" repeated the mistake by sending it to the entire distribution list! It would make amusing reading were it not for such a sordid attempt at deception, the smearing of others, and interfering in a discussion of Israeli academics on how to obtain a modicum of justice for the Palestinians [10]. Furthermore, one could well imagine the furor if a Palestinian academic were to pose as a malevolent prankster in a Zionist website posing as Moshe "your token Jew who adores Palestine." Plaut's activities demonstrate a lack of integrity and honesty. Perhaps one would expect higher standards from a Princeton educated professor, but maybe in Israel, in a business school, this is considered par for the course. These facts notwithstanding, he is a regular contributor to FrontPage!

And another dubious operator

A book review is a critical assessment of a book and a means of highlighting its importance to a wider audience. However, there is another type of book "reviewer" who uses the medium to denigrate books they don't agree with, or to praise books they agree with; book reviews become a means to propagate their ideological stance. The Amazon book review sections have given rise to a breed of reviewers who use this resource for ideological ends. Alyssa A. Lappen, another FrontPage and Campus-Watch "journalist", is a prolific Amazon book "reviewer". Her reviews tend to have the following defining characteristics: if the book is favorable to Israel it is generally issued glowing remarks, if the book is critical of Israeli policies it is denigrated, and books that present the Palestinian narrative are similarly savaged. Books like Joan Peter's From Time Immemorial are issued such glowing praise as "This monumental and fascinating book." Note that Prof. Norman G. Finkelstein and Prof. Yehoshua Porath have demonstrated that this book is a "threadbare hoax", a product of the shoddiest "scholarship", and a book written for propaganda purposes [11]. Lappen issued glowing reviews of dubious texts published by Encounter Books, an enterprise run by Peter Collier, Horowitz's longtime buddy [12]. Lappen's activities undermine what could be a valuable resource of bona fide book reviews; instead her propaganda imperatives transforms the book review section to just another ideologically debased space. Amazon may well want to implement a more stringent policy to avoid dragging its website further into the mud.

In her FrontPage articles, Lappen often demonstrates a similar lack of intellectual integrity to that found in her book "reviews". Some of her articles deal with the professors of Middle East Studies at Columbia Univ. (MEALAC), a current Zionist pet hate. Another favored target for smearing is the ISM, the non-violent volunteer group opposing the Israeli occupation. To smear the ISM she quotes Walid Shoebat, a dubious "Zionist Palestinian" who broadcasts from a settler radio station and wears a kippa [13]. To score cheap propaganda points, Zionist organizations have put Shoebat on tour around the US, and Lappen quotes him extensively. Her technique amounts to the journalistic equivalent of quoting the village idiot. Shoebat often talks about the hateful nature of "jihad theology", and Lappen uses this to smear the ISM and its founders:

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"Not surprisingly, Beit Sahour is also home to Ghasson [sic] Andoni and George Rishmawi, are the co-founders of the Rapprochement Center. They also co-founded the International Solidarity Movement with Huwaida Arraf and Adam Shapiro. Both organizations appear to be driven by the malevolent jihad ideology that Walid Shoebat describes."

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Now, even a group advocating non-violent resistance and dialog with the Israelis is smeared with Lappen's favorite term of abuse. Never mind that most of the leading Palestinian activists of the ISM are Christians and that roughly a third of the overall ISM membership is Jewish (including one of the co-founders, Adam Shapiro) -- they still deserve Lappen's "jihadist" scurrilous smear. It is too much for Zionists to acknowledge that there are sensible and courageous Palestinians seeking to defend their rights using non-violent means. Lappen and her FrontPage ilk smear Palestinians in the ISM and all other Palestinians with wide brushstrokes, and in the process demonize and dehumanize all Palestinians.

Interpreting Horowitz's various projects

Several foundations pour millions ($13.7m through 2003) into the Horowitz projects, and these range from ultra-right-wing The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, to the notorious extreme-right-wing Scaife Foundations [14]. Why would these foundations support Horowitz's hateful and corrosive operations? There is one clue in the funding list where one finds the John M. Olin Foundation contributing $15,000 to "support a public opinion study directed by Frank Luntz." Now, Frank Luntz is a pollster and propagandist for the Republican Party and Fortune 100 companies, but in addition, one of his main preoccupations is defending Israel's image abroad. Luntz is a proponent of what Zionists call hasbara, i.e., an aggressive propaganda campaign to whitewash Israel's image in the US [15]. So, from the funding sources we can surmise that pro-Israeli propaganda is one of the purposes of Horowitz's projects. Furthermore, given the nature of the right-wing funding groups behind his projects one can theorize about the projects' purposes, and these can be categorized as: (1) pushing the envelope and narrowing the political spectrum; (2) an echo chamber effect; (3) smearing critics of the US imperial role and Israel; (4) a ratcheting of smears, and (5) "mirror flak".

i. Pushing the envelope and narrowing the spectrum

Some right-wingers want to transform the political scene by narrowing the political spectrum, and undermining their opponents on the "left". In order to accomplish this "radical" right-wing dream, projects are promoted to push the political discourse envelope. Twenty years ago, the American public would have had no stomach for Bill O'Reilly or similar corrosive talk show hosts [16]. In the meantime, an array of increasingly extreme rightwing propaganda and media were unleashed on the US public. These projects first appeared on the margins, and then moved towards the mainstream; the right-wing radio talk show format moved into the mainstream. This process continues today and explains the purpose of the various Horowitz endeavors, that is, to push the envelope, narrow the political spectrum, and move the entire political discourse to the right. FrontPage makes FoxNews look respectable, and thus serves to legitimize media like Fox. The implication is that if there are players to the right of Fox News, then Fox can't be all that bad.

ii. Echo chamber effect

A message is amplified and legitimized when several players repeat it. If Campus-Watch was alone railing against critical academics, then Daniel Pipes' frothing could easily be dismissed as deranged diatribes. When several players repeat the message, then one propagandist lends legitimacy to the other; the more players, the stronger the legitimizing effect [17]. This seems to be the reason that a Campus-Watch-type clone has emerged ­ these organizations even share personnel!

iii. Smearing of critics

The Hasbara Manual, a 131-page propaganda manual, was distributed to US-zionist campus organizations; it lists many techniques to whitewash Israel, and to defuse the message of its critics [18]. Two of its key recommendations are to: (1) "attack the messenger and not the message", and (2) to "gain points" with the public targets by "manipulating," and diverting them from "rationality," "real examination," and "thinking critically". Well now, this is a splendid explanation for the role FrontPage and Campus-Watch play in the US today. Much of what these organizations do is smearing and undermining rational discussion of a range of issues.
Both FrontPage and Campus-Watch have targeted Prof. Juan Cole, and they seem to be particularly incensed by Prof. Cole's Informed Comment, a popular and important news analysis blog [19]. Prof. Cole is critical of the US war in Iraq, of US policy in the region in general and of US-foreign-policy subservience to Israel in particular. FrontPage devotes copious resources to smearing Cole in an attempt to discredit Informed Comment. Prof. Cole has on occasion lambasted the FP libelous attacks on him, but of more interest is his explanation for some of these activities. Cole suggests that one of the purposes behind the repeated smearing operations is to obtain what he called a "Google Smear". This is Cole's explanation:

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"It seems to me that David Horowitz and some far rightwing friends of his have hit upon a new way of discrediting a political opponent, which is the GoogleSmear. It is an easy maneuver for someone like Horowitz, who has extremely wealthy backers, to set up a web magazine that has a high profile and is indexed in google news. Then he just commissions persons to write up lies about people like me (leavened with innuendo and out-of-context quotes). Anyone googling me will likely come upon the smear profiles, and they can be passed around to journalists and politicians as though they were actual information "[20].

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iv. Ratcheting of Smears

It is instructive to read Prof. Joseph Massad's statement to the Columbia Univ. ad hoc committee examining the complaints against him [21]. Massad describes in detail the ordeal he has been through and the attacks seeking to destroy his academic career. In his description, it is clear that the smears ratchet in virulence; they build on one another. The right-wing New York Sun may produce a smear that is then regurgitated with further elaborations in other newspapers and so on. If all the defamations appeared in one article or in a few accusations, then it would be easy for Prof. Massad to obtain legal redress. However, how can one sue for libel if the accusations ratchet over time and are attributable to various sources? FrontPage, Campus-Watch, and New York Sun just regurgitate smears, elaborate them and compound what amounts to libel. Prof. Massad documents one case where the New York Sun misquoted him, and while he asked for a correction at the Sun, Jonathan Calt Harris (associated with Campus-Watch) wrote an article amplifying the offending smear [22]. Steven Plaut quotes Calt Harris and the pernicious cycle continues. When nefarious organizations work in tandem, it is difficult for anyone who has been libeled or smeared to defend themselves. FrontPage contributes to undermining one of the key assumptions of a civil society, the basic respect for the opinion of others.

v. Mirror flak

Sporadically one finds leftist critiques of different news media, human right groups, NGOs and so forth. For example, one often finds critical studies of the BBC or CNN output issued by leftist groups, and this author has written several critical articles about Amnesty International (AI) [23]. Right-wing groups aim to counter or neutralize these critiques by what one could refer to as "mirror flak". While I have repeatedly criticized AI for its dubious record on reporting human rights abuses in Israel-Palestine, one suddenly encounters an article by the notorious Steven Plaut claiming the opposite [24]. That is, Plaut claims that AI is biased against Israel. So, by attacking AI, or any organization that has been criticized by the left, the effect of the original critique is neutralized. AI can claim that it is being attacked by both "left" and "right", and thus must be doing something right. The same thing happens with the critical studies of the BBC or CNN. On a regular basis, various groups will produce mirror flak, thus helping these organizations avoid having to confront accusations about their biased stance. Several articles in FrontPage fall into this category.

Horowitz and his "Academic bill of rights"

creative writing course at the Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, assigns some New York Times articles as part of its readings, but there are students who object to this, and assigning reading materials is a constant struggle [25]. Their objection has nothing to do with the dubious nature of the NYT, but with its "liberal bias"! Horowitz's "academic bill of rights" would "protect" students from having to read materials that weren't compatible with their ideological outlook [26]. While purporting to be a "bill of rights", in reality, it aims at politicizing and introducing ideological monitoring into academia. Prof. Massad's experience with disruptive students makes salutary reading to determine what this would imply [27].

Perhaps Prof. Rashid Khalidi indicates a basic objection to Horowitz's bill of rights:

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"If students were coming to be told ideas that they arrived at university with they would be getting nothing of value here. If they were not to be challenged, if there were not to be forced to rethink the things that they come here as 18 year olds [...] with, what on heavens sake would be the point of a university, what would in heavens name be the point of teaching. We would just arrive with monolithic conventional ideas, and we would leave with monolithic conventional ideas. This is why academic freedom is absolutely vital." [28]

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And who does Horowitz think he is to have the stature to call for an "academic bill of rights"? Perhaps this intellectual and moral pipsqueak should first crawl out of the sewer before pontificating about this topic. Horowitz's dubious projects, his shady past, and his far-right-wing connections suggest that what he is proposing is a frontal assault on academic freedom. His call for this bill is a bit like a pyromaniac urging safe usage of fireworks.

Caveat Lector

We are supposed to be living in a democracy, and therefore, by all means, read FrontPage magazine. However, while enjoying the benefits of democratic rights and civil society one should be aware of the nature of FrontPage and related projects ­ these aim to undermine these very rights that we may be taking for granted. This article has just sought to raise awareness about the nature of our contested ideological space and urge a vigorous defense of real participatory democracy, academic freedom and civil society. It is not enough to shrug at yet more right-wing invective, because much of this poisons our society and must be rejected and uprooted. Civility in our societies is not an on or off precondition for democracy ­ it can be poisoned and severely degraded unless it is defended.

FrontPage is not merely a contributor to the "marketplace of ideas," it is a wrecking operation comparable with the book-burners of yesteryear. It is also a mistaken conception to think that we just encounter a "marketplace of ideas", but a more accurate understanding of our society is that we are confronted with a "battleground of ideas", and here there is no room for complacency and neutrality.

What would Illich have made of this

Ivan Illich, the radical philosopher and social thinker, once described his childhood years when he was living in Brac, a small island off the Dalmatian coast [29]. Illich lamented the arrival in 1926 of a loudspeaker that upset harmonious and horizontal relationship, and stated that: "up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices". After the loudspeaker was installed, there was a scramble to control the microphone and the communication emerged with a distinct vertical bias; many were silenced. One wonders what Illich would have made of the wonders of the internet. Certainly, he would have regarded projects like Horowitz's FrontPage rag as the equivalent of the village idiot gaining control of the megaphone.

posted December 12, 2006 12:31 AM            

Horowitz was in the 60's a leftist activist, Marxist and he knows them all very well...along with your little Marxist twit professor, Yehouda Shenhav.

The difference between Horowitz and De Rooij, an intellectual wannabe and Yehouda Shenhav who could never be is that Horowitz is a real intellectual. The proof is that Horowitz dropped the Marxist movement cold. All it took was a short march back in time to see the murder, mayhem, destroyed economies and destroyed populations and nations to convince Horowitz Marxism belonged on the dung heap of history.

Rooij and Shenhav are far too stupid to get the message. Ditto Noam Chomski, Ward Churchill and the rest of the Marxist professors.

Marxism
mailing list archive
[Marxism] Forwarded from Paul De Rooij

To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Marxism] Forwarded from Paul De Rooij
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 15 Apr 2004 15:20:54 -0400
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0

Thanks for spreading the word Louis.

Kind rgds
Paulo
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/marxism/2004w15/msg00109.htm

posted December 13, 2006 09:52 AM            

WASHINGTON: Because Jimmy Carter orchestrated peace between Egypt and Israel in 1979, many extol him as an honest broker. Others offer praise for his work as a human rights activist. Whether he can maintain his image after publishing his latest book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, is uncertain.

The idea that Israel, the Middle East's lone democracy, practices apartheid is nonsense. South Africa practiced institutionalized discrimination against its citizens on the basis of skin color. The South African government denied the majority black citizens a vote. The white minority established "homelands" to disenfranchise millions of black citizens. Racism prevailed.

To suggest Israel does the same is to distort reality. All Israeli citizens, regardless of their religion or ethnic origin, are equal under the law. Critics may label Israel's "Law of Return," granting any Jew the right to Israeli citizenship, as racist. Under this definition, many European countries are also racist, for they allow the diaspora expedited citizenship as well. The Israeli government often extends its welcome to Muslims and Christians seeking refuge - one example being its 1999 airlift of Muslim refugees from war-torn Kosovo to Israel.

Nor does Israel's treatment of its 1 million Arab citizens resemble apartheid. Israeli Arabs enjoy parliamentary representation and serve in government posts. Israel's Supreme Court prohibits "the state from distinguishing between its citizens on the basis of religion or nationality." No wonder that, according to Fadal Tahabub, a member of the Palestinian National Council, 70 percent of the 200,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem prefer to remain under Israeli sovereignty. Prejudice remains, but it is not endorsed by the state. Contrast this with a closed society like Saudi Arabia, whose law requires that citizens be Muslim.

If racism is not the issue, what is? Mr. Carter argues that the problem is Israeli "imperialism." He endorses the conspiratorial idea that Jerusalem seeks to build a "Greater Israel" incorporating, at a minimum, the West Bank and Gaza. If this were the case, even hawks like former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would not have unilaterally withdrawn from such territory. His successor Ehud Olmert's West Bank realignment plan further demolishes Mr. Carter's thesis. Rather than applaud Israel's decision to withdraw from disputed territories, Mr. Carter vilifies it. He blames Israel for the resulting chaos. Yet, it is the Palestinians who have embraced violence rather than demonstrated they aim to build a peaceful state.

What about the wall Israel is building in and around the West Bank? Mr. Carter portrays it as a "land grab." It may create hardships, but so too does terrorism. Although the fence juts into 7 percent of the West Bank, it has reduced terrorism by 75 percent. And, although condemned by Mr. Carter, it has precedent. India built a separation barrier on disputed land to stop Pakistan-based terrorists. Saudi Arabia built a wall on disputed land with Yemen to deter weapons smugglers. And, in Cyprus, the United Nations constructed a wall to preserve a cease-fire between Muslims and Christians.

posted December 14, 2006 04:57 AM            

BUD

posted December 14, 2006 11:30 AM              

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In fact, it is almost expected to see 3-4 of the same people constantly berating others for asking questions (I do not put you into that category) about Muslims, calling such things as naming extremist terrorists as part of a death cult the same as using a derogatory racial slur.

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Hello Pidaua. Glad you do not consider my to be like this because I dont consider myself to be like that either--I love questions more than answers. Nobody has all the answers, but if we all pitch it maybe we could get thousands and thousands of pieces to a 'jigsaw puzzle' and try to piece them together in our own way.

I like people asking questions as long as it is in the spirit of questioning. I know sometimes people have gotten angry at lioneye for asking questions, I dont know who else you may be referring to. But personally I dont dislike lioneyes questioning, although I may disagree with her underlying assumptions when she poses the questions. Which is why I try to post an answer that will undermine those assumptions with a more holistic picture of what I think is really happening.

posted December 14, 2006 10:04 PM              

By Leila Farsakh

BISHOP DESMOND TUTU, the South African Nobel Prize winner, described how he saw on his visit to Israel "much like what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about" (1). Comparisons between apartheid South Africa and Israel/Palestine have often been made, but not always clearly explained. Many factors have made the comparison attractive.

The first, perhaps most important, is the historical colonialist foundation of the two conflicts. White settlers in South Africa, like Zionist pioneers, colonised a land already inhabited. As in South Africa, the settlers in Palestine expelled the indigenous population, some two-thirds of the Palestinians in the land that became Israel in 1948, took possession of their properties and legally segregated those who remained.

However, admitting that Israel’s foundation was colonialist does not mean that it is compar able to apartheid South Africa. As Gershon Shafir, a leading Israeli sociologist, has noted, while both conflicts were about control of the land, they took place in different historical and economic conditions that had an impact on their evolution and their relation to the natives (2).

White South Africans and Israelis dealt differently with the indigenous demographic reality. In Palestine the Zionist project wanted to negate the idea of a native non-Jewish population, coining the phrase "people without a land for a land without a people" (3). It sought to establish Jewish demographic dominance by expelling Palestin ians and preventing structural dependence on the Palestinian economy, particularly on its labour. Before 1948 fewer than a third of the workers in the Jewish sector were Palestinian (4). From 1948-67, the remaining Palestinian Arabs supplied no more than 15% of the labour force (5).

South Africa was different. The white settlers sought to dominate, rather than expel, the native population by incorporating them as inferior citizens in a polity under exclusively white control. The indigenous population was in the majority, more than 75% of the total labour force since 1913, when the first segregation laws were passed. The white minority imposed apartheid in 1948, institutionalising legal, economic and residential discrimination. Fundamental to this was the construction of territorial segregation, through the labour reserves; the white-designated distinct geographic spaces - 13% of the land - on which blacks had to live.

Between 1951 and 1970 four major Acts (6) turned these reserves into bantustans. Those in these polities were given "self-government" rights and responsibilities, could define their own economic policies and run civilian and functional affairs. However, they had to coordinate with settler authorities on security matters, and could not have independent foreign policies. In 1974 bantustan citizenship was created and between 1976 and 1981 four of the 10 bantustans were granted independence, so their people were no longer South African citizens.

In Israel/Palestine no such territorial structure of segregation was created, though from 1948-66 the military governments controlled Israeli Arabs’ movements, curfewed them, controlled where they lived and confiscated their land to favour Jewish occupation. South African apartheid wanted the land and the people, albeit with segregation; the Israeli leadership tried to take the land without the people, a policy seriously challenged by the 1967 war, which altered the demographic reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nearly a million Palestinians remained in the occupied territories in 1967, equal to a third of the Jewish population on the total land controlled by Israel. Although Israel continued to pursue a transfer policy, more voluntary than forced (7), most of the Palestinian population remained. Examining Israel’s response to this, we begin to understand the similarities that have emerged between Israel and apartheid South Africa, despite their initial historical differences.

After the 1967 war Israel consolidated its claims to the occupied land. The rightwing government elected in 1977 developed an elaborate policy of territorial integration and demographic separation. The military government in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (WGBS) expropriated and enclosed Palestinian land and allowed the transfer of Israeli settlers to the occupied territories: they continued to be governed by Israeli laws. The government also enacted different military laws and decrees to regulate the civilian, economic and legal affairs of Palestinian inhabitants. These strangled the Palestinian economy and increased its dependence and integration into Israel. From 1967-90 the borders between Israel and the occupied territories were kept open. More than a third of the Palestinian labour force was employed in Israel and generated over a quarter of the territories’ GDP.

Israel had constructed more than 145 settlements by 1993 and moved in 196,000 settlers; half lived in 10 settlements around East Jerusalem (8). The settlements’ exponential growth and scattered distribution over the occupied areas began the structural-territorial fragmentation of the WBGS; they were intended to challenge the Palestinian demographic in the WBGS. Many view these Israeli policies of territorial inte gration and societal separation as apartheid, even if they were never given such a name (9).

The applicability of the South Africa model to Israeli-Palestinian relations is problematic. The first issue is the geographical delineation of Israeli "apartheid": does it cover all of Israel or only the WBGS? Palestinians living beyond the Green Line are Israeli citizens, while Palestinians in the WBGS are not. The former are not confined to specific geographic areas out of which they cannot move, nor are they excluded from the Israeli political process - they vote and can be elected, though they are discriminated against. The latter are an occupied population awaiting a political solution.

THE second point of contention is the role of territorial partition as a solution to the conflict. The African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, the main political voice of the indigenous peoples, rejected the Afrikaners’ separatist position and called for the end of apartheid and the creation of a democratic South Africa for all citizens. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) had accepted by 1974 the idea of partition as the way to fulfil Palestinian rights to self-determination. Although it took 19 years more, and the Oslo process, for Israel to recognise the PLO as the only negotiating party, Israel accepted the idea of partitioning land with the Palestinians. The question was the definition of the boundaries and the political content of this partition.

The third difference between Israel-Palestine and apartheid South Africa is the position of the international community over the resolution of the conflicts. The international community never accepted apartheid or the idea of separate nationhood in South Africa. In 1976, when the South African government tried to get Transkei, one of the 10 bantustans, admitted to the United Nations as an independent state, the UN refused (10). In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the UN endorsed separate nation states as the model for conflict resolution. The UN Security Council resolution 181 in 1947 clearly set up the idea of land-for-peace as the guiding principle for solving the conflict. UN Security Council resolution 242 in 1967 reaffirmed that principle. While not specific about the boundaries of the land that Israel occupied or about Palestinian national rights, reso lution 242 affirmed that the way to peace in the Middle East had to be through returning land and recognising all states. The Oslo process was based on resolution 242.

Despite these important differences between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and South African apartheid, the past decade has brought them closer together. By institutionalising the societal separation and territorial integration that Israel created between 1967 and 1993, the Oslo process has prepared for the bantustanisation of the WBGS, transforming the Palestinian territories into fragmented population reserves, neither sustainable economically nor sovereign politically.

Oslo led to the territorial fragmentation of the WBGS. Although the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was supposed to control most of the West Bank by 1996, it only had jurisdiction over 19%, or less, of the West Bank by July 2000 (area A) (11). It can be argued that political opposition to Oslo - manifested in suicide bombings and their repercussions in the Israeli political establishment (the murder of Yitzhak Rabin and the election of Binjamin Netanyahu) - was a reason for the failure to ensure adequate Israeli redeployment. But the Palestinian jurisdiction before the al-Aqsa intifada was fragmented and excluded 59% of the West Bank (other than East Jerusalem) and 30% of the Gaza Strip.

Settlements were the key to the territorial fragmentation of the WBGS and to the bantustan isation of the Palestinian territories. Area C divided the West Bank into three parts that were further subdivided into smaller population reserves by the road bypass system and four major settlement blocs (Jerusalem, Ariel/Shomron, Gush Etzion, Binjamin/Jordan valley). Between 1993 and 2000 the settler population (including East Jerusalem) doubled to 410,000, around 15% of the terri tories’ total population. Israel built more than 400km of bypass roads and 72 settlement outposts (12).

The Oslo process made the Palestinian situation legally similar to South Africa’s bantustans. The Oslo accords did not make the native electorate the only source of authority for the Palestinian entity (as in the South African bantustans). Although the accords established a democratically elected Palestinian National Council and presidency, the jurisdiction of these elected institutions did not stem solely from the national electorate. The Israeli military government, which was not dismantled, continued to delegate to the newly elected Palestinian Council its civilian and legal jurisdictions. The elected Palestinian Council and the PNA were given mainly civilian, or functional, jurisdiction over 93% of the Palestinian population, but provisional territorial jurisdiction over 19%, or less, of the West Bank.

Oslo did not affirm the superiority of international law over Israeli law. It did not end the occupation and it did not mention the Fourth Geneva Convention, or UN resolution 181, which provides international legitimacy for an Arab state in historic Palestine. The accords referred only to UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 336, but these were vague about Palestinian rights to statehood and the size and boundaries of the occupied territories.

The Oslo agreements focused on establishing an infrastructure of close cooperation between the Israeli and Palestinian sides, rather than on separation. Joint Israeli-Palestinian committees were created in every field, especially in security, which remained under Israeli supreme control. This was the kind of security cooperation there had been in South African bantustans.

The way that Oslo dealt with the Palestinian demographic presence contributed to bantustan isation. By institutionalising the permit and closure system, introduced in 1990, Oslo imposed on Palestinians similar conditions to those faced by blacks under the pass laws. Although the pass system in South Africa was created to ensure the control and supply of cheap labour, while in the WBGS it was introduced for security reasons, the consequences were the same. Like the pass laws, the permit system controlled population movement according to the settlers’ unilaterally defined considerations. The permit system, the pattern of Israel’s territorial control and the continuing Palestinian demographic presence, transformed the WBGS into fragmented, unsustainable population reserves.

The Israelis’ response to the al-Aqsa intifada was to develop the permit system and fragment the WBGS territorially. In April 2002 Israel declared that the WBGS would be cut into eight main areas, outside which Palestinians could not live without a permit (13). Settlement expansion went on unabated; more than 2,500 houses and 52 settlement outposts were constructed between September 2000 and January 2003 (14). The construction of the wall between Israel and the West Bank, expected to be at least 360km long, is establishing a unilaterally defined Israeli border that encroaches on the 1967 boundaries and cuts Palestinian areas off from each another (15).

The United States’ proposed "road map" is no different from Oslo; it insists on positive perform ance in security cooperation and Palestinian institution building, affirming Israel’s right to intervene in Palestinian affairs. It envisages the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders by 2005, but it does not specify how such a state can be independent and sovereign while having only provisional borders. It remains vague about three other issues central to the establishment of a viable Palestinian state: settlements, Jerusalem and refugees.

THE road map does provide a role for the international community that was absent in Oslo. It makes the Quartet (the UN, the European Union and Russia) guardian of the agreement with the US responsible for monitoring cooperation between the sides. However, the Quartet is given no power to impose arbitration and monitoring. The road map is an international endorsement of the bantustanisation of the WBGS; the international community accepted the establishment of a Palestinian state with provisional borders while settlements are not dismantled and the 1967 borders continue to be redefined by Israel.

Despite their initial differences, apartheid South Africa and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have become similar since 1993. Will these similarities prove lasting? The Palestinian bantustans are neither as clearly defined nor as large as those of South Africa. Israel has less need of the Palestinian labour force, replaced more than a decade ago by 250,000 workers from Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. If the current situation continues, the two-states solution is in peril. The disappearance of that option would condemn Israel to being an apartheid and binational state, unless it were to embark on a massive programme of population transfer. Palestinians and their supporters abroad would do well to take the South African resistance movement into account when rethinking their political vision and resistance strategy.

posted December 14, 2006 10:11 PM              

Audio

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If you want to understand israeli policies in the Gaza strip, israeli policies in Lebanon, and in the West Bank, you have to understand that these are motivated by an ideology of ethnic cleansing, by creating an exclusive Jewish ethnic state in Palestine.

This is something which has to be said openly – without any reservations because it calls upon the international community not to allow these policies and these ideologies to continue to take place . . . this is the precondition for peace for both Jews and Palestinians[.]”

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“Calling a spade a spade, in this respect, is the precondition for solving the conflict.”

--Ilan Pape, israeli historian

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posted December 14, 2006 10:40 PM              

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If I stand back and read objectively I notice that while you are trying to understand their position, you are basically being berated for your Jewish heritage.

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And then this...

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Jwhop supplied TONS of facts and historical data that backs up the points you have made. Has anyone that came out to berate you or question you actually read it? Nah, because like the pyscho wingnut that leads Iran, many a turning against the fact that specific atrocities had been committed against the Jewish people.

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I read jwhops posts, and alot of them are very one-sided far-right wing propaganda...things you agree with without question. How can one think objectively if they are in line with a one dimensional view of the world? Too bad people are air heads - how on Earth could anyone deny the Holocaust and how on Earth could people take Ahmedejan seriously? He's doing this for political purposes...He knows Israel/US have Iran next on their list of countries to destroy like has been done in Iraq...remember they've been on the axis of evil for a while, well before Ahmedijan and talk of nuclear ambitions came into the picture.

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While I do find fault with both groups fighting for land and killing each other, I think that both sides need to bear an open mind as to what got you all there and why. Simply blaming someone else is pointless.

TINK said it all - no one is going to win. We can't change anyone's mind because it is born so deep inside

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Ok...thats an objective side I dont see much of from you.

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In my opinion, I see a small country like Israel fighting against a large conglomeration of Arabs that would like nothing more than to blast the Jewish people off the planet.

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This is not religious...it does not have to do with Jews and Judaism. The problem is political, and political people trying to make it a religious one.

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How many times do we have to see Muslim clerics or people like the wingnut in Iran making those sickening comments about the Holocaust and ousting Jewish people from various countries.

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Funny Ive never heard you say anything against wingnuts that want to hang and bomb Muslims.

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I wonder how those of Muslim decent would feel here if our President said the world would be better off without Muslims or that we needed to expel those that follow Islam from the US?

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It's quite evident that's Bush's agenda...He's actually wiping Muslims off the map by creating wars and killing off of the Afghanis, Iraqis and up next Syrians and Iranians. Like Duh?!!?

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It seems to be okay when one side does it- yet it seems to be that same side that has no tolerance for anyone else.

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