BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm

Subject: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Amos
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 01:25 PM

I have no way indication where this is posted on the web, if it is, so I am taking the liberty of posting it here since it offers a new reasoning on certain assumptions about the whole Middle Eastern region.

Enjoy.

A

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Professor HAIM HARARI, a theoretical physicist, is the Chair, Davidson
Institute of Science Education, and Former President, from 1988 to
2001, of the Weizmann Institute of Science.

During his years as President of the Institute, it entered numerous
new scientific fields and projects, built 47 new buildings, raised one
Billion Dollars in philanthropic money, hired more than half of its
current tenured Professors and became one of the highest
royalty-earning academic organizations in the world.

Throughout all his adult life, he has made major contributions to
three different fields: Particle Physics Research on the international
scene, Science Education in the Israeli school system and Science
Administration and Policy Making.


A View from the Eye of the Storm Talk delivered by Haim Harari at a
meeting of the International Advisory Board of a large multi-national
corporation, April, 2004

As you know, I usually provide the scientific and technological
"entertainment" in our meetings, but, on this occasion, our Chairman
suggested that I present my own personal view on events in the part of
the world from which I come. I have never been and I will never be a
Government official and I have no privileged information. My
perspective is entirely based on what I see, on what I read and on the
fact that my family has lived in this region for almost 200 years. You
may regard my views as those of the proverbial taxi driver, which you
are supposed to question, when you visit a country.

I could have shared with you some fascinating facts and some personal
thoughts about the Israeli-Arab conflict. However, I will touch upon it
only in passing. I prefer to devote most of my remarks to the broader
picture of the region and its place in world events. I refer to the
entire area between Pakistan and Morocco, which is predominantly Arab,
predominantly Moslem, but includes many non-Arab and also significant
non-Moslem minorities.

Why do I put aside Israel and its own immediate neighborhood? Because
Israel and any problems related to it, in spite of what you might read
or hear in the world media, is not the central issue, and has never
been the central issue in the upheaval in the region. Yes, there is a
100 year-old Israeli-Arab conflict, but it is not where the main show
is. The millions who died in the Iran-Iraq war had nothing to do with
Israel. The mass murder happening right now in Sudan, where the Arab
Moslem regime is massacring its black Christian citizens, has nothing
to do with Israel. The frequent reports from Algeria about the murders
of hundreds of civilian in one village or another by other Algerians
have nothing to do with Israel. Saddam Hussein did not invade Kuwait,
endangered Saudi Arabia and butchered his own people because of Israel.
Egypt did not use poison gas against Yemen in the 60's because of
Israel. Assad the Father did not kill tens of thousands of his own
citizens in one week in El Hamma in Syria because of Israel. The
Taliban control of Afghanistan and the civil war there had nothing to
do with Israel. The Libyan blowing up of the Pan-Am flight had nothing
to do with Israel, and I could go on and on and on.

The root of the trouble is that this entire Moslem region is totally
dysfunctional, by any standard of the word, and would have been so even
if Israel would have joined the Arab league and an independent
Palestine would have existed for 100 years. The 22 member countries of
the Arab league, from Mauritania to the Gulf States, have a total
population of 300 millions, larger than the US and almost as large as
the EU before its expansion. They have a land area larger than either
the US or all of Europe. These 22 countries, with all their oil and
natural resources, have a combined GDP smaller than that of Netherlands
plus Belgium and equal to half of the GDP of California alone. Within
this meager GDP, the gaps between rich and poor are beyond belief and
too many of the rich made their money not by succeeding in business,
but by being corrupt rulers. The social status of women is far below
what it was in the Western World 150 years ago. Human rights are below
any reasonable standard, in spite of the grotesque fact that Libya was
elected Chair of the UN Human Rights commission. According to a report
prepared by a committee of Arab intellectuals and published under the
auspices of the U.N., the number of books translated by the entire Arab
world is much smaller than what little Greece alone translates. The
total number of scientific publications of 300 million Arabs is less
than that of 6 million Israelis. Birth rates in the region are very
high, increasing the poverty, the social gaps and the cultural decline.
And all of this is happening in a region, which only 30 years ago, was
believed to be the next wealthy part of the world, and in a Moslem
area, which developed, at some point in history, one of the most
advanced cultures in the world.

It is fair to say that this creates an unprecedented breeding ground
for cruel dictators, terror networks, fanaticism, incitement, suicide
murders and general decline. It is also a fact that almost everybody in
the region blames this situation on the United States, on Israel, on
Western Civilization, on Judaism and Christianity, on anyone and
anything, except themselves.

Do I say all of this with the satisfaction of someone discussing the
failings of his enemies? On the contrary, I firmly believe that the
world would have been a much better place and my own neighborhood would
have been much more pleasant and peaceful, if things were different.

I should also say a word about the millions of decent, honest, good
people who are either devout Moslems or are not very religious but grew
up in Moslem families. They are double victims of an outside world,
which now develops Islamophobia and of their own environment, which
breaks their heart by being totally dysfunctional. The problem is that
the vast silent majority of these Moslems are not part of the terror
and of the incitement but they also do not stand up against it. They
become accomplices, by omission, and this applies to political leaders,
intellectuals, business people and many others. Many of them can
certainly tell right from wrong, but are afraid to express their views.

The events of the last few years have amplified four issues, which
have always existed, but have never been as rampant as in the present
upheaval in the region. These are the four main pillars of the current
World Conflict, or perhaps we should already refer to it as "the
undeclared World War III". I have no better name for the present
situation. A few more years may pass before everybody acknowledges that
it is a World War, but we are already well into it.

The first element is the suicide murder. Suicide murders are not a new
invention but they have been made popular, if I may use this
expression, only lately. Even after September 11, it seems that most of
the Western World does not yet understand this weapon. It is a very
potent psychological weapon. Its real direct impact is relatively
minor. The total number of casualties from hundreds of suicide murders
within Israel in the last three years is much smaller than those due to
car accidents. September 11 was quantitatively much less lethal than
many earthquakes. More people die from AIDS in one day in Africa than
all the Russians who died in the hands of Chechnya-based Moslem suicide
murderers since that conflict started. Saddam killed every month more
people than all those who died from suicide murders since the Coalition
occupation of Iraq.

So what is all the fuss about suicide killings? It creates headlines.
It is spectacular. It is frightening. It is a very cruel death with
bodies dismembered and horrible severe lifelong injuries to many of the
wounded. It is always shown on television in great detail. One such
murder, with the help of hysterical media coverage, can destroy the
tourism industry of a country for quite a while, as it did in Bali and
in Turkey.

But the real fear comes from the undisputed fact that no defense and
no preventive measures can succeed against a determined suicide
murderer. This has not yet penetrated the thinking of the Western
World. The U.S. and Europe are constantly improving their defense
against the last murder, not the next one. We may arrange for the best
airport security in the world.. But if you want to murder by suicide,
you do not have to board a plane in order to explode yourself and kill
many people. Who could stop a suicide murder in the midst of the
crowded line waiting to be checked by the airport metal detector? How
about the lines to the check-in counters in a busy travel period? Put a
metal detector in front of every train station in Spain and the
terrorists will get the buses. Protect the buses and they will explode
in movie theaters, concert halls, supermarkets, shopping malls, schools
and hospitals. Put guards in front of every concert hall and there will
always be a line of people to be checked by the guards and this line
will be the target, not to speak of killing the guards themselves. You
can somewhat reduce your vulnerability by preventive and defensive
measures and by strict border controls but not eliminate it and
definitely not win the war in a defensive way. And it is a war!

What is behind the suicide murders? Money, power and cold-blooded
murderous incitement, nothing else. It has nothing to do with true
fanatic religious beliefs. No Moslem preacher has ever blown himself
up. No son of an Arab politician or religious leader has ever blown
himself. No relative of anyone influential has done it. Wouldn't you
expect some of the religious leaders to do it themselves, or to talk
their sons into doing it, if this is truly a supreme act of religious
fervor? Aren't they interested in the benefits of going to Heaven?
Instead, they send outcast women, naïve children, retarded people and
young incited hotheads. They promise them the delights, mostly sexual,
of the next world, and pay their families handsomely after the supreme
act is performed and enough innocent people are dead.

Suicide murders also have nothing to do with poverty and despair. The
poorest region in the world, by far, is Africa. It never happens there.
There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different
cultures, countries and continents. Desperation does not provide anyone
with explosives, reconnaissance and transportation. There was certainly
more despair in Saddam's Iraq then in Paul Bremmer's Iraq, and no one
exploded himself. A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon
of cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to
human life, including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with
very high regard to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for
power.

The only way to fight this new "popular" weapon is identical to the
only way in which you fight organized crime or pirates on the high
seas: the offensive way. Like in the case of organized crime, it is
crucial that the forces on the offensive be united and it is crucial to
reach the top of the crime pyramid. You cannot eliminate organized
crime by arresting the little drug dealer in the street corner. You
must go after the head of the "Family".

If part of the public supports it, others tolerate it, many are afraid
of it and some try to explain it away by poverty or by a miserable
childhood, organized crime will thrive and so will terrorism. The
United States understands this now, after September 11. Russia is
beginning to understand it. Turkey understands it well. I am very much
afraid that most of Europe still does not understand it. Unfortunately,
it seems that Europe will understand it only after suicide murders will
arrive in Europe in a big way. In my humble opinion, this will
definitely happen. The Spanish trains and the Istanbul bombings are
only the beginning. The unity of the Civilized World in fighting this
horror is absolutely indispensable. Until Europe wakes up, this unity
will not be achieved.

The second ingredient is words, more precisely lies. Words can be
lethal. They kill people. It is often said that politicians, diplomats
and perhaps also lawyers and business people must sometimes lie, as
part of their professional life. But the norms of politics and
diplomacy are childish, in comparison with the level of incitement and
total absolute deliberate fabrications, which have reached new heights
in the region we are talking about. An incredible number of people in
the Arab world believe that September 11 never happened, or was an
American provocation or, even better, a Jewish plot.

You all remember the Iraqi Minister of Information, Mr. Mouhamad Said
al-Sahaf and his press conferences when the US forces were already
inside Baghdad. Disinformation at time of war is an accepted tactic.
But to stand, day after day, and to make such preposterous statements,
known to everybody to be lies, without even being ridiculed in your own
milieu, can only happen in this region. Mr. Sahaf eventually became a
popular icon as a court jester, but this did not stop some allegedly
respectable newspapers from giving him equal time. It also does not
prevent the Western press from giving credence, every day, even now, to
similar liars. After all, if you want to be an antisemite, there are
subtle ways of doing it. You do not have to claim that the holocaust
never happened and that the Jewish temple in Jerusalem never existed.
But millions of Moslems are told by their leaders that this is the
case. When these same leaders make other statements, the Western media
report them as if they could be true.

It is a daily occurrence that the same people, who finance, arm and
dispatch suicide murderers, condemn the act in English in front of
western TV cameras, talking to a world audience, which even partly
believes them. It is a daily routine to hear the same leader making
opposite statements in Arabic to his people and in English to the rest
of the world. Incitement by Arab TV, accompanied by horror pictures of
mutilated bodies, has become a powerful weapon of those who lie,
distort and want to destroy everything. Little children are raised on
deep hatred and on admiration of so-called martyrs, and the Western
World does not notice it because its own TV sets are mostly tuned to
soap operas and game shows. I recommend to you, even though most of you
do not understand Arabic, to watch Al Jazeera, from time to time. You
will not believe your own eyes.

But words also work in other ways, more subtle. A demonstration in
Berlin, carrying banners supporting Saddam's regime and featuring
three-year old babies dressed as suicide murderers, is defined by the
press and by political leaders as a "peace demonstration". You may
support or oppose the Iraq war, but to refer to fans of Saddam, Arafat
or Bin Laden as peace activists is a bit too much. A woman walks into
an Israeli restaurant in mid-day, eats, observes families with old
people and children eating their lunch in the adjacent tables and pays
the bill. She then blows herself up, killing 20 people, including many
children, with heads and arms rolling around in the restaurant. She is
called "martyr" by several Arab leaders and "activist" by the European
press. Dignitaries condemn the act but visit her bereaved family and
the money flows.

There is a new game in town: The actual murderer is called "the
military wing", the one who pays him, equips him and sends him is now
called "the political wing" and the head of the operation is called the
"spiritual leader". There are numerous other examples of such Orwellian
nomenclature, used every day not only by terror chiefs but also by
Western media. These words are much more dangerous than many people
realize. They provide an emotional infrastructure for atrocities. It
was Joseph Goebels who said that if you repeat a lie often enough,
people will believe it. He is now being outperformed by his successors.

The third aspect is money. Huge amounts of money, which could have
solved many social problems in this dysfunctional part of the world,
are channeled into three concentric spheres supporting death and
murder. In the inner circle are the terrorists themselves. The money
funds their travel, explosives, hideouts and permanent search for soft
vulnerable targets. They are surrounded by a second wider circle of
direct supporters, planners, commanders, preachers, all of whom make a
living, usually a very comfortable living, by serving as terror
infrastructure. Finally, we find the third circle of so-called
religious, educational and welfare organizations, which actually do
some good, feed the hungry and provide some schooling, but brainwash a
new generation with hatred, lies and ignorance. This circle operates
mostly through mosques, madrasas and other religious establishments but
also through inciting electronic and printed media. It is this circle
that makes sure that women remain inferior, that democracy is
unthinkable and that exposure to the outside world is minimal. It is
also that circle that leads the way in blaming everybody outside the
Moslem world, for the miseries of the region.

Figuratively speaking, this outer circle is the guardian, which makes
sure that the people look and listen inwards to the inner circle of
terror and incitement, rather than to the world outside. Some parts of
this same outer circle actually operate as a result of fear from, or
blackmail by, the inner circles. The horrifying added factor is the
high birth rate. Half of the population of the Arab world is under the
age of 20, the most receptive age to incitement, guaranteeing two more
generations of blind hatred.

Of the three circles described above, the inner circles are primarily
financed by terrorist states like Iran and Syria, until recently also
by Iraq and Libya and earlier also by some of the Communist regimes.
These states, as well as the Palestinian Authority, are the safe havens
of the wholesale murder vendors. The outer circle is largely financed
by Saudi Arabia, but also by donations from certain Moslem communities
in the United States and Europe and, to a smaller extent, by donations
of European Governments to various NGO's and by certain United Nations
organizations, whose goals may be noble, but they are infested and
exploited by agents of the outer circle. The Saudi regime, of course,
will be the next victim of major terror, when the inner circle will
explode into the outer circle. The Saudis are beginning to understand
it, but they fight the inner circles, while still financing the
infrastructure at the outer circle.?

Some of the leaders of these various circles live very comfortably on
their loot. You meet their children in the best private schools in
Europe, not in the training camps of suicide murderers. The Jihad
"soldiers" join packaged death tours to Iraq and other hotspots, while
some of their leaders ski in Switzerland. Mrs. Arafat, who lives in
Paris with her daughter, receives tens of thousands Dollars per month
from the allegedly bankrupt Palestinian Authority while a typical local
ringleader of the Al-Aksa brigade, reporting to Arafat, receives only a
cash payment of a couple of hundred dollars, for performing murders at
the retail level.?

The fourth element of the current world conflict is the total breaking
of all laws. The civilized world believes in democracy, the rule of
law, including international law, human rights, free speech and free
press, among other liberties. There are naïve old-fashioned habits such
as respecting religious sites and symbols, not using ambulances and
hospitals for acts of war, avoiding the mutilation of dead bodies and
not using children as human shields or human bombs. Never in history,
not even in the Nazi period, was there such total disregard of all of
the above as we observe now. Every student of political science debates
how you prevent an anti-democratic force from winning a democratic
election and abolishing democracy. Other aspects of a civilized society
must also have limitations. Can a policeman open fire on someone trying
to kill him? Can a government listen to phone conversations of
terrorists and drug dealers? Does free speech protects you when you
shout "fire" in a crowded theater? Should there be death penalty, for
deliberate multiple murders? These are the old-fashioned dilemmas. But
now we have an entire new set.

Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage?
Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital? Do you storm a
church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages? Do you
search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use ambulances to
reach their targets? Do you strip every woman because one pretended to
be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly? Do you shoot back
at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately behind a group of
children? Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden in a mental
hospital? Do you shoot an arch-murderer who deliberately moves from one
location to another, always surrounded by children? All of these happen
daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas. What do you do? Well, you
do not want to face the dilemma. But it cannot be avoided.

Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay in
a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and
financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in
France, killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting responsibility
for the crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do more of the
same, while the Government of Iran issues public condemnations of his
acts but continues to host him, invite him to official functions and
treat him as a great dignitary. I leave it to you as homework to figure
out what Spain or France would have done, in such a situation.

The problem is that the civilized world is still having illusions
about the rule of law in a totally lawless environment. It is trying to
play ice hockey by sending a ballerina ice-skater into the rink or to
knock out a heavyweight boxer by a chess player. In the same way that
no country has a law against cannibals eating its prime minister,
because such an act is unthinkable, international law does not address
killers shooting from hospitals, mosques and ambulances, while being
protected by their Government or society. International law does not
know how to handle someone who sends children to throw stones, stands
behind them and shoots with immunity and cannot be arrested because he
is sheltered by a Government. International law does not know how to
deal with a leader of murderers who is royally and comfortably hosted
by a country, which pretends to condemn his acts or just claims to be
too weak to arrest him. The amazing thing is that all of these crooks
demand protection under international law and define all those who
attack them as war criminals, with some Western media repeating the
allegations. The good news is that all of this is temporary, because
the evolution of international law has always adapted itself to
reality. The punishment for suicide murder should be death or arrest
before the murder, not during and not after. After every world war, the
rules of international law have changed and the same will happen after
the present one. But during the twilight zone, a lot of harm can be
done.

The picture I described here is not pretty. What can we do about it?
In the short run, only fight and win. In the long run ? only educate
the next generation and open it to the world. The inner circles can and
must be destroyed by force. The outer circle cannot be eliminated by
force. Here we need financial starvation of the organizing elite, more
power to women, more education, counter propaganda, boycott whenever
feasible and access to Western media, internet and the international
scene. Above all, we need a total absolute unity and determination of
the civilized world against all three circles of evil.

Allow me, for a moment, to depart from my alleged role as a taxi
driver and return to science. When you have a malignant tumor, you may
remove the tumor itself surgically. You may also starve it by
preventing new blood from reaching it from other parts of the body,
thereby preventing new "supplies" from expanding the tumor. If you want
to be sure, it is best to do both.

But before you fight and win, by force or otherwise, you have to
realize that you are in a war, and this may take Europe a few more
years. In order to win, it is necessary to first eliminate the
terrorist regimes, so that no Government in the world will serve as a
safe haven for these people. I do not want to comment here on whether
the American-led attack on Iraq was justified from the point of view of
weapons of mass destruction or any other pre-war argument, but I can
look at the post-war map of Western Asia. Now that Afghanistan, Iraq
and Libya are out, two and a half terrorist states remain: Iran, Syria
and Lebanon, the latter being a Syrian colony. Perhaps Sudan should be
added to the list. As a result of the conquest of Afghanistan and Iraq,
both Iran and Syria are now totally surrounded by territories
unfriendly to them. Iran is encircled by Afghanistan, by the Gulf
States, Iraq and the Moslem republics of the former Soviet Union. Syria
is surrounded by Turkey, Iraq, Jordan and Israel. This is a significant
strategic change and it applies strong pressure on the terrorist
countries. It is not surprising that Iran is so active in trying to
incite a Shiite uprising in Iraq. I do not know if the American plan
was actually to encircle both Iran and Syria, but that is the resulting
situation.???

In my humble opinion, the number one danger to the world today is Iran
and its regime. It definitely has ambitions to rule vast areas and to
expand in all directions. It has an ideology, which claims supremacy
over Western culture. It is ruthless. It has proven that it can execute
elaborate terrorist acts without leaving too many traces, using Iranian
Embassies.. It is clearly trying to develop Nuclear Weapons. Its
so-called moderates and conservatives play their own virtuoso version
of the "good-cop versus bad-cop" game. Iran sponsors Syrian terrorism,
it is certainly behind much of the action in Iraq, it is fully funding
the Hizbulla and, through it, the Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad,
it performed acts of terror at least in Europe and in South America and
probably also in Uzbekhistan and Saudi Arabia and it truly leads a
multi-national terror consortium, which includes, as minor players,
Syria, Lebanon and certain Shiite elements in Iraq. Nevertheless, most
European countries still trade with Iran, try to appease it and refuse
to read the clear signals.

In order to win the war it is also necessary to dry the financial
resources of the terror conglomerate. It is pointless to try to
understand the subtle differences between the Sunni terror of Al Qaida
and Hamas and the Shiite terror of Hizbulla, Sadr and other Iranian
inspired enterprises. When it serves their business needs, all of them
collaborate beautifully.

It is crucial to stop Saudi and other financial support of the outer
circle, which is the fertile breeding ground of terror. It is important
to monitor all donations from the Western World to Islamic
organizations, to monitor the finances of international relief
organizations and to react with forceful economic measures to any small
sign of financial aid to any of the three circles of terrorism. It is
also important to act decisively against the campaign of lies and
fabrications and to monitor those Western media who collaborate with it
out of naivety, financial interests or ignorance.

Above all, never surrender to terror. No one will ever know whether
the recent elections in Spain would have yielded a different result, if
not for the train bombings a few days earlier. But it really does not
matter. What matters is that the terrorists believe that they caused
the result and that they won by driving Spain out of Iraq. The Spanish
story will surely end up being extremely costly to other European
countries, including France, who is now expelling inciting preachers
and forbidding veils and including others who sent troops to Iraq. In
the long run, Spain itself will pay even more.

Is the solution a democratic Arab world? If by democracy we mean free
elections but also free press, free speech, a functioning judicial
system, civil liberties, equality to women, free international travel,
exposure to international media and ideas, laws against racial
incitement and against defamation, and avoidance of lawless behavior
regarding hospitals, places of worship and children, then yes,
democracy is the solution. If democracy is just free elections, it is
likely that the most fanatic regime will be elected, the one whose
incitement and fabrications are the most inflammatory. We have seen it
already in Algeria and, to a certain extent, in Turkey. It will happen
again, if the ground is not prepared very carefully. On the other hand,
a certain transition democracy, as in Jordan, may be a better temporary
solution, paving the way for the real thing, perhaps in the same way
that an immediate sudden democracy did not work in Russia and would not
have worked in China.

I have no doubt that the civilized world will prevail. But the longer
it takes us to understand the new landscape of this war, the more
costly and painful the victory will be. Europe, more than any other
region, is the key. Its understandable recoil from wars, following the
horrors of World War II, may cost thousands of additional innocent
lives, before the tide will turn.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: SINSULL
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 01:34 PM

http://www.worldthreats.com/middle_east/Haim%20Harari.htm

it appears in numerous links on GOOGLE. Here's one.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 04:17 PM

Looks like it'll be Iran in the crosshairs next then. I guess Syria will have to wait until after we take care of Iran.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Peace
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 04:34 PM

Maybe it's time the terrorists were in the crosshairs.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 04:39 PM

Which ones, the state-sponsored ones, or the non state-sponsored ones?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Peace
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 04:48 PM

All of 'em.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 04:57 PM

Oh my. Don't let the US government hear you say that or they'll call you a terrorist and put you in Guantanamo.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Peace
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 05:03 PM

Would I get to keep the orange suit?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 05:05 PM

For the rest or your life probably. Along with your Guantanamo cell number and address.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Peace
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 05:19 PM

All that and ambiance, too. Wow!

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 07:39 PM

That is a speech is bigoted hate inducing unsupported diatribe. The man claims to know the all the problems of an area from Morrocco to Pakistan because he lives in Israel even though he says Israel is not a cause of the problem. The solution is for the whole world to band together on Israel's side and fight World War three on their behalf?

If you want to get rid of the Suicide Murderers then we need to stop the Bulldozer Terrorists. Why are we sticking our nose in to get bloodied? Its time for us to tell Likud to behave or to tell it to fight its own battles. Israel is the worst bully in a pretty uncivilized part of the world. It is no better than any other radical theocracy in that neighbourhood.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 07:46 PM

Eye of the Storm is a funny title though. I think the view from ground zero would be more accurate.

This is the second such thing I've seen today the other one was "lets" nuke those Muslims and teach them a lesson.

Are the Bushites trying to scare us with more of their scaremongering?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Rabbi-Sol
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 07:52 PM

Is Israel to blame for ALL of the world's problems ? If I remember correctly George W. Bush was elected by a 5 to 4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court; not by the Likud party. SOL ZELLER

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 08:00 PM

Jack the Sailor: Your second note is surely to the point---the title. That said, I, for one, surely would hate to see our dear W begin conflicts, as he has, for spurious reasons. But, referring to your other note---these were fights for self interest of the U S (In W's eyes---and his oil eyes) surely not to help Israel.
                   Frankly, your other comment---bulldozing terrorists--is quite polemical and biased. Let us ask the chicken and egg question.   My last recollection is that Israel has a duly elected government, has lost lives to suicide bombers, and is defending itself until a solution (which to this point Arafat and Co. have rejected) is found. True, Sharon is not a saint---but he is also not the sinner as your polemic makes out in the term "bulldozer terrorists".
                How many of the "democratic" Arab states have duly elected governments, have welcomed their Palestinian brethren (think Jordan now---the artificial kingdom), and have been willing to negotiate and settle with Israel. Egypt comes to mind-=--but Sadat has been murdered. Enough said.

By the way---Egypt is the largest recipient of U S dollars in aid---when do we finally go broke with all this?

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 08:22 PM

Bill I disagree. Sharon is a sinner. He used terror as a weapon long before Arrafat did and he still uses it when it is expedient. Israeli hawks and Hamas and their ilk have been partners in a deadly dance for a long time trading atrocities to keep the moderates on both sides from acheiving compromise.

Rabbi-Sol

No Israel is not to blame for all the World's problems, But in the past 60 years Israeli expansionists have been responsable for far more than their share.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 08:31 PM

The premise of that speech is that Israel has done nothing wrong, Its all the Muslims fault and we oughta go kick their asses. I'd prefer that we address the problems one at a time, starting at the worst ones first. The worst problems are the relations between Israel and her neighbors.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Rabbi-Sol
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 08:33 PM

Where was the expansion prior to 1967 ? In 1948, all they did was come into existance by UN mandate vote on the partition. Are you implying that simply because they came in to existance, that in of itself constitues expansion ? SOL ZELLER

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Peace
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 08:35 PM

So, it's Israel again, isn't it.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 08:43 PM

Here's a map of Israel according to the UN partition plan, the Arab territories captured by Israel beyond the UN partition borders, and the remaining Arab territories in Palestine, according to this site from Stanford University, apparantly their history department:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/history187b/ismap.htm

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 08:46 PM

I should mention that it appears that what the map is refering to as "remaining Arab territories in Palestine" is what is now known as the West Bank, and Gaza.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Rabbi-Sol
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 08:50 PM

Discounting Gaza & the West Bank, the other territories captured in 1948 were as a result of a war that Israel did not start, but fought to repel the invading Arab armies that were out to push them into the sea. Is that what is being considered expansion ? SOL ZELLER

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST,C-Watch
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 09:08 PM

The points that Professor Harari makes in his speech are accurate. He does not have the anti-Moslem bigotry of which Jack the Sailor accuses him.

Israel does not claim to be sin-free. Howver, when one looks at the region broadly, as Professor Harari does, it becomes obvious that Israel plays a very minor role. It is also obvious that the attention paid to Israel is much greater than to any of the other countries in the region and that the one Jewish country is being held to a much higher standard than any other in the world. When the one Jewish country is singled out in that manner, the line into anti-Semitism is crossed. Jack the Sailor crosses the line.

Israel has now started the process of extricating itself from Gaza. And what is happening there? A Palestinian civil war seems to be developing. Carol C has demanded that Israel get out of all the occupied terrtitories. Given the events of the past several days in Gaza, if Israel did as CarolC demands, it would appear that a full scale civil war would erupt among the Palestinians.

I know the day will come when Israel and the Palestinians will finally come to peace and the Palestinians will have their state. A decade ago, it looked like that day was at hand. Unfortunately, Arafat was not the Moses or Sadat or Ghandi or Mandela figure that was prepared to lead his people to that conclusion. Despite what CarolC says, rather than continue to work toward peace, Arafat unleashed the Intifada that has brought us to the current situation.

The peace will come after Arafat and Sharon are gone. It will take visionary leaders on both sides. I know that those leaders are waiting in the wings in Israel. I hope they are also there on the Palestinian side.

I have been to Israel many times. Before the Intifada, I spent much time on the West Bank and had many interactions with Palestinians there. The so-called leadership that Arafat has provided to his people is tragic.

On Wednesday, I leave for Israel and will be teaching there for the next year. I doubt that I will have the time to check into this forum very often. These discussions, then, will carry on without me.

To CarolC and Jack the Sailor: I hope that you never have to worry that the person in line behind you at fast food restaurant, or beside you on a bus, is waering a belt of explosives packed tight with thousands of nails. I hope that you never have to go to a funeral of a nine year old daughter of one of your colleagues who was blown up as she ate a piece of pizza. I hope you have a nice life. Shalom and goodbye.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 09:21 PM

Bruce,

The Speaker is saying that Israel has no blame at all. Do you believe that. Does any one who has paid any attention to the conflict believe that?

Rabbi-Sol

The UN created Israel by displacing ordinary people and giving away their land. I think that particular expansionism is in the past and can be kept in the past. The current expansionism, the settlers, the occupation, the fence, the fact that a foreign power can send in gunships, helicopters and bulldozers and terrorize at will those are perpetuating and expanding the current situation. That is not a path to peace.

There are Palestinians who want to push Israel into the sea. There are Israelis who want to displace all of the non Jews in the West Bank and Gaza so that Israel can return to its current borders. Both are committing atrocities, both are committing murder. Both are using terror. Both are well represented in the Israeli and Palestinian governments.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 09:33 PM

GUEST,C-watch, as a woman, I know that everywhere I go, there are people who want to rape and/or kill me just because I am a woman. I understand what it feels like to be terrorised by people in my every-day environment. I've been lucky in that I haven't lost anyone to terrorism or even war (except my uncle who died fighting the Nazis, but I never met him).

I do fear for my safety. But this fear comes as much from the right-wing nut jobs who are running the show in Israel and the US as anything else.

Gaza would not be experiencing anywhere near this much trouble right now if Israel hadn't bombed most of the PA's civil infrastructure into oblivion. The Palestinians predicted that this would be the outcome of that, and it appears they were right. There is only one reason for destroying the civil infrastructure of the PA, and that is to make independance for the Palestinians an impossibliity.

Amos, why the hell did you start this thread? I thought you were smarter and a lot less racist than that.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 09:39 PM

Carol, if you think you're in danger in America because you're a woman, you should definitely stay away from Palestine and most other places in the Middle east. Were you a virgin, when you got married? If not, your father, or your brother, or your husband would be able to kill you with complete and total impugnity.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 09:40 PM

So GUEST, what is your solution? Kill them all?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 09:43 PM

C-Watch, there won't be peace while the Israeli government continues to sponsor the theft of Palestinian land one settlement at a time. I remember when the intafada started the usual Israeli response to an attack was to bomb the police stations then scream that Arrafat could not keep order. I agree with you about Sharon and Arrafat. I admire the fact that you have put them on the same level. I share your hope for a Palestinian state and for a peaceful solution.

C-Watch I admire courage in going over there and subjecting yourself to the threat od those explosives and those thousands of nails. Since HAIM HARARI says that there is more danger in auto accidents and AIDS, let me bless you and your family by saying that I hope none of those things afflict you.

HAIM HARARI has made some good points, but lets not be gullible. Perhaps Israel as the country with the duly elected government should take a leadership role in promoting peace rather that staying in the gutter and trading atrocities with the terrorists. I hope the government I'm living in develops the sense to strike out those who actually attack us and to to respond to terrorism by expanding the conflict. So far George Bush has failed that test, he's responded to terror with an attack on a third party as an excuse to expand and exploit. Will Osama and Bush dance like Sharon and Arrafat until the US has troops standing on every oilfield in the Muslim world. Will this really be World War Three? I hope Mr. Bush won't keep fighting til he brings this fight to my doorstep. I hope Kerry does better.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 09:47 PM

Typos above, corrected version

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor - PM
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 09:43 PM

C-Watch, there won't be peace while the Israeli government continues to sponsor the theft of Palestinian land one settlement at a time. I remember when the intafada started the usual Israeli response to an attack was to bomb the police stations then scream that Arrafat could not keep order. I agree with you about Sharon and Arrafat. I admire the fact that you have put them on the same level. I share your hope for a Palestinian state and for a peaceful solution.

C-Watch I admire courage in going over there and subjecting yourself to the threat od those explosives and those thousands of nails. Since HAIM HARARI says that there is more danger in auto accidents and AIDS, let me bless you and your family by saying that I hope none of those things afflict you either.

HAIM HARARI has made some good points, but lets not be gullible. Perhaps Israel as the country with the duly elected government should take a leadership role in promoting peace rather than staying in the gutter and trading atrocities with the terrorists. I hope the government where I'm living develops the sense to strike out those who actually attack us and not to respond to terrorism by expanding the conflict. So far George Bush has failed that test, he, like Sharon, responded to terror with an attack on a third party as an excuse to expand and exploit. Will Osama and Bush dance like Sharon and Arrafat until the US has troops standing on every oilfield in the Muslim world. Will this really be World War Three? I hope Mr. Bush won't keep fighting til he brings this fight to my doorstep. I hope Kerry does better.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Little Brother
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 10:16 PM

Jack the Sailor, just tell me one thing. How should the Israelis respond next time 50 of their citizens are blown up by a Palastinian suicide bomber?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 11:20 PM

Should they go and kill a hundred Palestinians who weren't involved with the bombing? That's been a common response. I think they should get rid of Sharon.

What do you think a young Palestinian should do the next time a Bulldozer crushes his sister? Should he blame Arrafat or the man who sent the Bulldozer to his home?

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Rabbi-Sol
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 11:38 PM

Jack & Carol: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement ?

"The State Of Israel shall have the right to exist within safe and secure borders."

SOL ZELLER

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bobert
Date: 18 Jul 04 - 11:42 PM

Well, what a friggin' crock of crap tirade by the good professor Harari of the Weismann Institute of Science, whatever that is...

It is filled will screwy thinking.

Fir instance, he says more people die of AIDS in Africa every day than died on 9/11, 'er whatever he was trying to say. This makes this ol' hillbilly really mad to hear this crap.

(But, Bobert, them Aficans f**k like rabbits. The'll f**k anything that moves. They're just a bunch of bone through the nose savages...)

Well, there's one of the largest lies being told. Make Bush's lies seem like little white lies. Actually, in spite of professor Harari's not-so-extensive research is that not only do most Africans **not** "f**k like rabbits, but that they test positive for AIDS because they are grossly malnourished from the abject poverty, lack of food, clean water and health care... Like does the good professor klnow that medically a malnourished individual can test positive for AIDS? Heck no, he doesn't, because he isn't too informed or enlightened...

Now he says that the Unitede States gets the War on Terrorism? Yeah, right, Doc, and this way to the table to sign up to buy a bridge of yer choice. I mean, the United States does not have a clue. Where I agree with Harari that the so called terrorists should be treated as criminals, I don't see the logic with his support for pre-emptiveness unless yer danged sure that you are in emminent danger...

What can work, however, is bringing those countries that the United States feel harbor criminals (terrorists) closer to us so that we won't be complaining that we had bad intellegence. It's a lot easier to get good intellegence when you are close to your enemy than when you are keeping him at arms length.

Now that leads me to bring up the same old stuff. We don't need to be planning a military assault on Iran; we need to bring them close to us!

We need to call a Middle East Peace Summit...

We need to find ways to redistribute resources in the US and abroad...

We need a Department of Peace to us PR around the world to get folks thinking differently...

We need to rid the US of Bush/Cheney thinking that puts personal profits above the betterment of mankind...

We need to tell Professor Harari that his brand of bigotry is not part of the solution...

We need to tell Sharon in no uncertain terms that as much as Isreal has a right to exist, so do the Palestians that he sees as spendable...

And, lastly, when the right wing neo-cons fill the empty-headed sheep with crap that we take the time to bring up the back of the flock with confrontaion, information and an expectation that these folks are not lost, just lazily misinformed...

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 12:11 AM

"The State Of Israel shall have the right to exist within safe and secure borders."

How do you like these?

"Israel has no right attacking people beyond its borders."
"Israeli settlers have no right stealing other people's land."

I don't begrudge Israel safe and secure borders. But I think the Palestinians have as much right to safe and secure borders as the Israelis do. The two groups don't seem capable of sharing. Pehaps they need supervision.

You are probably not going to like this, but I'm not in love of the idea of there being a "Jewish" state. It seems to be a formula for turmoil. Especially when so many people, Jews, Christians and Muslims have a claim on that area. Maybe the world would be better off if the US went in there like they have in Iraq and forced the Christians Jews and Palestinians to work out their differences as they are trying to do with the Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq.

Maybe the UN should say, Israel, we tried the Jewish State experiment, it hasn't worked. Time to try something else.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 12:47 AM

The Jewish Divide on Israel

by Esther Kaplan

For a glimpse of how Israel plays out in an American election year, recall the day in September when then-Democratic presidential frontrunner Howard Dean told reporters he would like to see the United States take an "even-handed" approach to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Thirty-four Congressional Democrats responded by sending Dean a harsh letter questioning whether he shared their "unequivocal support for Israel's right to exist," and anonymous e-mails inundated Jewish listservs, accusing him of abandoning Israel. Dean promptly appeared on CNN to defend Israel's assassinations of Palestinian militants.

Or consider the day in February when John Kerry sat down in New York to discuss issues with a group of Jewish leaders hand-selected by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Hannah Rosenthal, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and one of the few liberals invited, said she had her hand in the air, ready to ask questions about civil rights, poverty and the erosion of the church/state divide, but she was avoided by the facilitators, and the meeting shaped up as a single-agenda affair. "The central issue, no matter how they came at it, was, 'Are you going to be there for Israel in these difficult times?'" Rosenthal recalls. "It was, 'We're putting you on notice that this is our number-one concern.'" Kerry took his cue. During the meeting, he backed off from earlier statements that he'd send Jimmy Carter (seen by the right as pro-Palestinian) to the region to jump-start negotiations, and six weeks later, when George W. Bush, in an agreement with Ariel Sharon, accepted Jewish settlements as permanent and renounced Palestinian refugees' right of return, Kerry immediately endorsed it.

Or consider May 18, when the hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) held its annual conference in Washington. House majority leader Tom DeLay showed up to speak, along with two assistant secretaries of state, an assistant secretary of defense and the President himself. Bush's speech was regularly interrupted by cheering and chants of "Four more years!" The meeting of the Jewish community's most prominent voice on Capitol Hill may as well have been a Republican political rally.

These events reveal a stubborn political fact: that AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents, along with their powerful fellow travelers, Christian Zionists, have forged a bipartisan consensus in Washington that Middle East policy must privilege the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel. In practice, this solid consensus means putting Israeli security before peace; supporting even such extreme Israeli measures as the separation wall and assassinations; and delegitimizing the Palestinian leadership. In AIPAC's view, even Bush's unambitious Middle East "road map" conceded too much to the Palestinians. Until the late 1980s, when the PLO publicly affirmed Israel's right to exist, such positions may truly have represented the vast majority of American Jews. But ever since the 1993 Oslo Accord proved that negotiations were possible, surveys have consistently found that 50 to 60 percent of American Jews favor ending the occupation and dismantling settlements in return for peace.

The trouble is, AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents never fully embraced the Oslo thaw, and once peace talks failed in 2000, they snapped back to their hard-line stance. The combination of Palestinian suicide bombings, the election of Sharon, the ultimate hawk, as prime minister and Bush's with-us-or-against-us "war on terror" allowed the AIPAC consensus to harden throughout the Jewish establishment. After 9/11, United Jewish Communities, the joint Jewish charity, decided to direct funds to Jewish settlers for the first time. And 2002 was a banner year: At a pro-Israel rally in Washington that April, busloads of demonstrators from Jewish social-service agencies and Hillels (the network of Jewish campus organizations) booed Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz for speaking about Palestinian suffering, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other groups published manuals on how to discredit "anti-Israel propaganda" on campuses. "Arafat had a chance to move toward peace and he rejected it," says Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the leader of the 1.5 million-strong Reform Jewish movement, and one of mainstream Jewry's most outspoken voices against settlement expansion. "We rallied to Israel's side out of the sense that it was the right thing to do, and out of real anger toward the Palestinians." The joke used to be two rabbis, three congregations; over the past two or three years it's become 6 million American Jews, one official opinion.
But tens of thousands of American Jews have had a very different response to the failed talks and the new Palestinian uprising. They began to ask heretical questions about whether former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, or Oslo, had really offered Palestinians a viable state, and whether the harsh occupation was to blame for rising Palestinian anger. Most American Jewish peace organizations had closed up shop during the hopeful Oslo years, so these marginalized doves started almost from scratch, launching dozens of local and national organizations dedicated to ending the occupation. "Since the intifada began, the mantra in the American Jewish community was that Israel's existence was being threatened and we had to stand by the government of Israel no matter what it did. This idea, brilliantly manipulated by the Israeli government, became sacrosanct," says Marcia Freedman, a former Knesset member who co-founded one of these new groups, the Chicago-based Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, in 2002. "There just happens to be a very right-wing government in Israel that does not support a two-state solution, so this lockstep solidarity gave that government carte blanche support." The new grassroots efforts are determined to revoke that carte blanche. Brit Tzedek already has chapters in twenty-seven cities; Michael Lerner's Berkeley-based Tikkun Community and the Oakland-based Jewish Voice for Peace, which just went national in May, have joined the few remaining older peace outfits like Americans for Peace Now (APN) and Arthur Waskow's Philadelphia-based Shalom Center to create an incipient counterforce, which exists almost entirely outside official Jewish channels.

Some of the new groups, like Brit Tzedek and Tikkun, consider themselves to be strongly pro-Israel but seek to radically redefine the term. ("So the definition of being pro-Israel is to be pro-Sharon?" asks Tikkun's Deborah Kory. "Well, maybe assassinating a guy in a wheelchair is not the best thing for Israel.") Others, like New York City's Jews Against the Occupation, define themselves as pro-Jewish and pro-Palestinian, and are open to the idea of a single, binational state. Most of the new organizations are explicitly Jewish, but American Jewish activists have also been central players in the founding of multiethnic organizations like the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which sends international observers, about a fifth of whom are American Jews, into the occupied territories, and the Washington, DC-based US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, which advocates divestment from Israel bonds. And they are becoming increasingly visible. In March one older peace group, Rabbis for Human Rights of North America, sent an open letter to Sharon protesting Israel's house-demolition policy, which was signed by 400 rabbis, including leaders of some of the largest congregations in the country; in April Brit Tzedek organized 10,000 US Jews to sign another open letter, this one calling on Israel and the United States to fund the relocation of Jewish settlers from the occupied territories to Israel.

Over the past three years, these organizations have lobbied Congress, picketed Israeli consulates, initiated campus divestment campaigns, set up informational listservs and held hundreds of vigils and teach-ins. Though they lack support from major Jewish donors or Jewish foundations, their numbers are fast approaching AIPAC's 65,000 members (APN has some 25,000 supporters, Brit Tzedek another 17,000 and so on), and polls show that there is tremendous room for growth. When former Israeli and Palestinian officials crafted the Geneva Accord last year as a model peace agreement, an APN survey found that five times more American Jews supported the plan than opposed it. AIPAC, on the other hand, dismissed Geneva as irrelevant and used its political muscle to block a mild Congressional resolution applauding the "courage and vision" of those who fashioned it. It turns out that far from being more unified than ever in support of Israeli policies, American Jews are as polarized on Israel as Americans as a whole are polarized about George W. Bush.

The divide is not only political but existential. AIPAC, the ADL and the Conference of Presidents see Palestinian suicide bombs as part of a global attack on Jews that includes everything from the murder of Daniel Pearl to the spike in anti-Jewish attacks in France; in their view, Palestinian attacks on Israelis are fueled by hatred of Jews. The peace groups believe that Israel, with one of the world's most powerful militaries, can't claim its existence is at risk, and they see in Israel's occupation, separation wall and collective punishment a moral challenge to the Jewish soul. News and commentary circulated by the two camps, even regarding the same events, bear almost no relation to each other. In late May, as the Israeli army's Operation Rainbow crested in Gaza, ISM e-mails included an eyewitness account of Israeli soldiers shooting tear gas at children and a graphic description of tanks firing shells into a peaceful demonstration in Rafah. E-mails from the Conference of Presidents, on the other hand, told of tunnels used by Palestinians to smuggle weapons and a Jewish settler whose wife and four daughters were killed by terrorists. In the eyes of peaceniks, such as Anita Altman, a Jewish communal professional in New York City, mainstream Jewish institutions are concerned so exclusively with Israeli security that "we've lost the capacity to recognize the other and to acknowledge Palestinans' humanity." In the eyes of establishment Jewish leaders, such as Ernest Weiner, director of the American Jewish Committee's San Francisco chapter, the doves, by concerning themselves primarily with the rights of Palestinians under occupation, have become "nothing more than a mouthpiece of the Arabs." One of these camps has positioned itself as the legitimate voice of American Jews, and has the ear of both parties in Washington; the other, the anti-occupation majority, is being quashed.

Charney Bromberg, executive director of the peace and civil rights organization Meretz USA, an affiliate of Israel's left-wing Meretz Party, calls this phenomenon "the Israeli disease," in which a handful of far-right ideologues dictate policy for the moderate masses; he warns that it has now taken root in American Jewish politics. Palestinian suicide bombers and the war on terror, he argues, have increased the right's leverage. "You get this sense in the Jewish community that we're under siege and anyone who challenges the consensus is a traitor who has to be purged," Bromberg says. "The right has the capacity to instantly inflate any expression of civil discourse, doubt or questioning into an act of disloyalty." Historian Michael Staub, author of Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America, says this split in the Jewish community between an institutional mainstream and a liberal/left alternative dates to the early 1970s, when young Jews, who disproportionately populated the New Left, challenged the major Jewish organizations over Vietnam, urban poverty and assimilation. The difference, says Staub, is that then, when dissidents picketed a synagogue or stormed a meeting of the Jewish Federation, the mainstream leadership scrambled to set up meetings. Now, with dissent centered around Israel, mainstream communal leaders attack anti-occupation protesters as self-hating Jews or take steps to shut them out of the debate entirely. "There is a silencing going on at the local level by American Jewish institutions that is very unhealthy," says Brit Tzedek's Freedman.

New to Jewish religious practice and even newer to Israel/Palestine politics, University of Richmond junior Jilian Redford, 20, quickly discovered the Jewish establishment's line in the sand. The elected president of her campus Hillel, she tried to pull together a balanced panel discussion on the conflict, but soon butted heads with her supervisor at the local Jewish Community Center, Lisa Looney. Looney proposed a particular professor as a speaker, and Redford declined, calling the professor "racist" for private comments she'd made that Palestinians, unlike Jews, have an inherent capacity to kill people in cold blood. "Lisa was extremely taken aback by me using such a strong word," Redford recalls. Redford's second strike--there wouldn't be a third--was her angry response in February to several e-mails she had received from the Israeli Embassy: "Could you please stop sending me email after email about radical Zionist propaganda?" she wrote, adding that it was wrong to "encourage us to hate our Palestinian neighbors in Israel." Three weeks later, after a hostile meeting where Looney insisted that Redford apologize to the embassy, Looney dismissed Redford from her post. "I felt that all of my hard work had been completely overlooked because of my political views on Israel," Redford says. "It was like I revealed that I was from some other planet."

Redford's experience follows a familiar pattern. Liz Harr, an activist with Jewish Students for Palestinian Rights at the University of Texas, was denied space at her campus Hillel in spring 2002 when she sought to organize a study group on the history of the conflict. Hillel program directors at UC Santa Cruz and Ithaca College resigned in frustration after being reprimanded for publishing articles supporting Israeli and Palestinian activism against the occupation. "We think the campus is a great place for there to be very open and contentious debate," says Wayne Firestone, director of Hillel International's Center for Israel Affairs. "But that doesn't give people unconditional rights to attack Israel in any manner or any fashion." In fact, Hillel distributes materials that offer "reactive strategies" for responding to "anti-Israel" events, such as a report from GOP pollster Frank Luntz that details how to better market the "pro-Israel" message to Jewish youth.

Hillel is hardly the only enforcer of a narrow "pro-Israel" orthodoxy. After a four-year battle to gain entry, two dovish organizations, Meretz USA and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, were rejected for membership in the Conference of Presidents in December 2002. Some of the conference's most significant organizations, including the Reform movement, supported Meretz's application, but on the Conference of Presidents, it's one organization, one vote, and executive vice president Malcolm Hoenlein (who likes to refer to the West Bank as "Judea and Samaria") had stacked the committee with right-wing groups. When Jewish Voice for Peace applied for a booth at the Bay Area's biggest Jewish community event of the year, Israel in the Ballpark, its application was rejected; the local Jewish Community Relations Council told JVP's program director, Liat Weingart, that JVP didn't sufficiently support Israel. When Drorah Setel, a Seattle rabbi affiliated with the local Jewish organization Pursue the Peace, showed up at a local pro-Israel rally in April 2002 carrying a sign supportive of both Palestinians and Israelis, a representative of the ADL, one of the rally organizers, insisted to police that she was a counterdemonstrator who should be removed; she ended up under arrest. Michael Bernstein, who led the young-adult program at the American Jewish Committee's San Francisco chapter, was dismissed from his voluntary post after he organized a panel discussion on the prospects for peace in Israel/Palestine in which two out of three speakers reflected a left perspective; according to Bernstein, chapter director Ernest Weiner charged up to him at the event and accused him, in profane terms, of bias (Weiner insists that Bernstein left of his own accord).

The consensus is manufactured in more subtle ways as well. For that right-wing pro-Israel rally in Washington, buses at many Jewish federations and Hillels were free, memos about it went out on organizational letterhead and attendance counted as a workday. Employees of such organizations report being strongly discouraged, on the other hand, from sending out notices about peace vigils from work e-mail accounts. "We hear from people constantly, staffers at mainstream Jewish institutions, reporters at Jewish papers and rabbis who say in hushed tones, 'I agree with you, but I can't say anything,'" says Cecilie Surasky, a spokesperson for JVP. "A rabbi will say, 'I totally support you, but my congregation is too conservative'; then a synagogue member will say, 'I can't say anything because my rabbi is too conservative.' There's an incredible amount of fear." Marcia Freedman of Brit Tzedek says that when she speaks to Jewish audiences, the room is typically split between supporters of the Sharon government and supporters of a negotiated peace, "but the pro-Israeli-government half has no idea about the other half."

Rosenthal of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the lobbying arm of local Jewish federations across the country, says that "the issue of how big is our tent and how civil is our dissent is the question of our time." At JCPA's annual conference in February, several hundred people packed a forum on dialogue and dissent over Israel. "We heard most poignantly from students, who said, 'I want to be able to ask questions and not be called an anti-Semite,'" Rosenthal recalls. The divide has become so pronounced that both sides have begun to address it as a crisis in its own right. Brit Tzedek has launched a Listening Project, and Jews Against the Occupation held a national Day of Debate on June 6; both entail small group encounters where the full range of views on Israel/Palestine can be heard. "We want to create a space where support for Palestinian rights is not seen as traitorous or self-hating," says JATO's Lorne Lieb, "but rather as something people can think about and talk to each other about." Hillel will roll out a similar campaign timed for the fall holiday of Sukkot, which will feature intimate conversations where, Wayne Firestone says, "students on the right will have to listen respectfully to students on the left and vice versa."

But such tentative efforts to pry open space for Jewish debate is unlikely to tear down the artificial AIPAC consensus anytime soon. When the Tikkun Community brought some 350 activists to Capitol Hill in April to lobby members of Congress to support a return to negotiations, recalls co-chair Michael Lerner, "there was an astonishing openness--behind closed doors." But most members said AIPAC's presence, both on the Hill and in their home districts, was overwhelming, especially in tandem with Israel hawks on the Christian right. "One member of Congress said it even feels dangerous to meet with us, because they have such good radar screens that they find out almost immediately," Lerner says.

His finger to the wind, John Kerry has uncritically endorsed Bush's enthusiasm for Sharon; while he once spoke somewhat critically of the wall Sharon is erecting deep inside the West Bank, Kerry now wholeheartedly endorses it as a necessary security measure. "The unwritten rule," says APN president Debrah DeLee, "is don't let anyone get to the right of you on Israel." The math is simple: Jews on the right will vote on the single issue of Israel, but liberal Jews vote on a range of issues. So for political candidates, tacking to the right is all gain, no pain.

Over and over, activists like Freedman have been told by sympathetic elected officials, "We support your positions, but we need the telephone calls, the faxes, the letters to the editor, the visits to our office in the home districts." Jewish anti-occupation forces are slowly getting the message. In July Brit Tzedek will post an open letter to the next President asking for an aggressive commitment to push for a final-status Israeli-Palestinian agreement; the organization is now collecting signatures from American Jews. The US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation has just published a first-ever dovish voter guide, in which members of Congress who support the occupation get a negative score; and Tikkun is working on a private letter to Kerry from peace activists across the country.

At the very least, their presence has exposed the lack of unanimous US Jewish support for Sharon, and that may itself have salutary effects. Cecilie Surasky of JVP says her organization's Jewish presence in alliances for Palestinian rights has opened up the space for other dissenters, mentioning that, with JVP's support, Catholic investors in Caterpillar felt emboldened to introduce a shareholder resolution against the military use of its bulldozers in the occupied territories. "For Americans to be persuaded [to support the Palestinian cause]," says Hany Khalil, organizing coordinator for United for Peace and Justice, a national antiwar organization that opposes the Israeli occupation, "we have to build support across all sectors of the United States, and that will never happen without a significant and visible split within the Jewish community."

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: MAG
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 01:09 AM

On this one, Sol, I have to broadly agree with Jack and Carol, and ignore anything posted by any anonymous guest (THEY mostly seem to want to cloud the thinking on this and other threads).

there is yet any hard evidence to link Arafat (note the one R, people) to Hamas. He has consistently opposed them. It is only the likes of the Likud Party who insist he could stop things over which he clearly has NO control. Hamas is a RIVAL for power in the region, and every time Arafat has gotten absolutely nowhere in negotiations his political opposition gains. Isreal has systematically ignored opportunities for progess on the situation based on attacks they know will come, because Hamas knows their attacks will spike the peace process. Which unfortunately they do. Arafat does not want these gullible young Arabs to kill themselves and prolong the suffering.

I have been following this situation for 30 years, and every knowledgeable person I know on the Palestinian question has said, "Arafat is a moderate."

I remember Rabin crying Enough Blood. Enough Blood. It was not the Palestinians who murdered him, and the best chance for peace in my lifetime. It was the people now in power.

I for one am sending money to the refuseniks. I remain firm in supporting those who reach out across the gulf for a way out of this bloodbath.

The rhetoric of the Likud party toward Arabs, freely available in numerous NPR documentaries, can only be likened to -- and I know how strong this is -- to the final solution filth of the Nazional Sozialisten.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 01:34 AM

By the way my previous post calling for the dissolution of Israel was somewhat tongue in cheek. I was just trying to look at the issue from both sides.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: MAG
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 01:35 AM

Carol and I cross-posted.

Thank you Carol for more worthy Jewish organizations I can support.

I make no pretense of being Jewish. I was raised a WASP, from which I am in recovery.

I can not begin to comprehend the suffering of Jewish Holocaust survivors.

I do not want their finger on the big red button.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 05:41 AM

Bobert - I didn't realise there were any of those HIV doesn't cause AIDS people still around...

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Strollin' Johnny
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 08:44 AM

I'm gobsmacked. Is there a doctor in the Mudcat House who can confirm that hunger and/or dirty water causes AIDS? Not a concept I've ever heard of. Is it true? I've been taught that the HIV virus can only be transmitted via the mixing of certain body-fluids. I'd like to have the definitive answer to this one.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: GUEST
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 09:07 AM

There are a few lonely scientists out there who dont believe in the HIV AIDS link. They think thatAIDS in haemophiliacs is caused by repeated factor VIII use, in drug users is caused by the drugs, in africa is caused by malnutrition and in homosexuals is caused by the use of poppers (and other drug use) (poppers cause headaches, headaches lead to increased aspirin use which in conjuction with heavy alcohol use can cause some of the illnesses which are used as markers for AIDS - I kid you not, I just read this).

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 11:07 AM

Jack & Carol: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement ?

"The State Of Israel shall have the right to exist within safe and secure borders."

--Rabbi Sol

I agree that the State of Israel shall have and does have the right to exist within the Green Line. And that the State of Israel has the same exact rights to safe and secure borders as the Palestinians have on their side of the Green Line.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bobert
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 11:26 AM

GUEST and others,

Probably the largest body of reseach that malnourishment, poverty, bad water etc. can lead to false positiive for HIV/AIDS (not to say one necessarily leads to another...) testing has been accumulated and published by:

Dr. Gary Null

(www.garynull.com)

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 01:32 PM

By the way---Egypt is the largest recipient of U S dollars in aid---when do we finally go broke with all this?

--Bill H

Egypt is not the largest recipient of US dollars in aid, unles by largest you're talking about Egypt's larger physical size as compared to Israel. In terms of dollars, Israel is by far the largest recipient of US dollars in aid:

http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/resources/suspendaid.htm

"More U.S. aid goes to Israel than any other country, even though Israel's per capita income is as high as many European countries. In fiscal year 2003 Israel received a foreign military financing grant of $3.1 billion and a $600 million grant for economic security in addition to $11 billion in commercial loan guarantees. This total aid package of nearly $15 billion makes Israel by far the largest single recipient of U.S. aid. U.S. aid is a function of politics. According to a Time/CNN poll, released April 12, 2002, 60% of Americans favor cutting aid to Israel if Israel does not immediately withdraw its troops from Palestinian areas. Further, U.S. aid to other countries is often tied to various conditions, depending on what the U.S. wants the aid recipient to do. We are asking that aid to Israel be treated in the same manner."

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 05:35 PM

In answer to the statement "...treated in the same manner (re:aid)" one has to wonder why it is that in the UN (all these years after the organization ordained the state) it (Israel)is not treated "in the same manner".   Sanctions and censure abound. Where are the sanctions and censure for the other side?    Probably with the larger voting bloc of the Arab states.

One of the smarter things the founders came up with was the Security Council Veto---it assured a balance for the founding powers and the rotating members given that the make=-up of the organization is quite different now than at it inception.

I think that part of the problem with this discussion arises from the fact that history is an ongoing thing and you cannot single out this year or this day or this event as the precipitating factor for these things.   You can, however, look back and see that Israel defended itself ---and agreed to the original map. (By the way they had purchased much of the land through the JNF years back--and in --I think 1929---they were violently attacked by the Arabs (Palestinians) That they were attacked--who is to blame for that?   In 1967 once again---who is to blame for that? 1973---and so on. Israel has even negotiated (or is negotiating) for the return of the Golan---and that can surely be a dangerous precedent.

I highly recommend a book by an author I interviewed on my radio program a while back---Michael Oren. Six Days of War and the Making of the Modern Middle East.   The author--an American expatriate living in Jerusalem (and a professor)writes an even handed history. In conversation he told me that his son is in the army (drafted) he is in the reserve(mandatory) and his youngest calls from school each day to say he has arrived safely since his bus route has been bombed many a time. Great way to live.   How DO you respond to that--I mean such attacks?

I doubt his wife has as much fear of rape as Carol does---more of bombing and maiming. Seriously---if you live here (U S) rape is not all that prevalent---unless you watch the schlock news programs or read the Supermarket Tabloids. Sure way of becoming paranoid.


Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 06:28 PM

Easy for you to say, Bill H. You're not a woman. I know enough women who have been raped to have a healthy respect for the possibility in my own life. And I've had a couple of pretty close calls myself.

And as we've seen in previous threads, your representation of the "historical facts" of the region bear no resemblance what really happened. You can repeat the same fabrications as often as you want, but that won't make them true.

http://www.spectacle.org/0601/israel.html

80 Theses--Draft for a New Peace Camp

By the Israeli Peace Bloc [e-mail]

The following document was published (in Hebrew) today April 13 as a whole page ad in Ha'aaretz. You may have seen it already but we want to make sure that you don't miss it. It can be downloaded in Hebrew (also English) from the Gush Shalom website http:www.gush-shalom.org

We think time has come to take certain discussions out of the closet, to campaign widely for a revision of the myths of Zionist history and publicly facing the truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"...The Root of the Conflict

12.The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the continuation of the historical clash between the Zionist Movement and the Palestinian Arab people, a clash that began at the end of the 19th century and has yet to end.

13.The Zionist Movement was, essentially, a Jewish reaction to the emergence of the national movements in Europe, all of which were hostile to Jews. Having been rejected by the European nations, some of the Jews decided to establish themselves as a separate nation and, following the new European model, to set up their own national State where they could be masters of their own fate. The principle of separation, which formed the basis of the Zionist idea, had far- reaching consequences later on. The basic Zionist tenet, that a minority cannot exist in a national-homogenous state according to the European model, let later to the practical exclusion of the national minority in the Zionist state that came into being after 50 years.

14.Traditional and religious motives drew the Zionist Movement to Palestine (Eretz Israel in Hebrew) and the decision was made to establish the Jewish State in this land. The maxim was "a land without a people for a people without a land". This maxim was not only created out of ignorance, but also out of the general arrogance towards non-European peoples that prevailed in Europe at that time.

15.Palestine was not empty--not at the end of the 19th century nor at any other period. At that time, there were half a million people living in Palestine, 90% of them Arabs. This population objected, of course, to the incursion of another nation into their land.

16.The Arab National Movement emerged almost simultaneously with the Zionist Movement, initially to fight the Ottoman Empire and later to fight the colonial regimes created upon its destruction at the end of World War I. A separate Arab-Palestinian national movement developed in the country after the British created a separate State called "Palestine", and in course of the struggle against the Zionist infiltration.

17.Since the end of World War I, there has been an ongoing struggle between two nationalist movements, the Jewish-Zionist and the Palestinian-Arab, both of which aspired to accomplish their goals -- which entirely negate each other -- within the same territory. This situation remains unchanged to this day.

18.As Jewish persecution in Europe intensified, and as the countries of the world closed their gates to the Jews attempting to flee the inferno, so the Zionist Movement gained strength. The Holocaust, which took the lives of six million Jews, gave moral and political power to the Zionist claim that led to the establishment of the State of Israel.

19.The Palestinian People, witnessing the growth of the Jewish population in their land, could not comprehend why they were required to pay the price for crimes committed against the Jews by Europeans. They violently objected to further Jewish immigration and to the acquisition of lands by the Jews.

20.The complete oblivion of each of the two peoples to the national existence of the other inevitably led to false and distorted perceptions that took root deep in the collective consciousness of both. These perceptions affect their attitude towards each other to this day.

21.The Arabs believed that the Jews had been implanted in the country by Western Imperialism, in order to subjugate the Arab world and take control of its treasures. This conviction was strengthened by the fact that the Zionist movement, from the outset, strove for an alliance with at least one Western power (Germany, Great Britain, France, the U.S.A.) to overcome the Arab resistance. The results were a practical cooperation and a community of interests between the Zionist enterprise and imperialist and colonialist forces, directed against the Arab national movement.

22.The Jews, on the other hand, were convinced that the Arab resistance to the Zionist enterprise -- intended to save the Jews from the flames of Europe -- was the consequence of the murderous nature of the Arabs and of Islam. In their eyes, Arab fighters were "gangs", and the uprisings of the time were called "riots". (Actually, in the 1920's, the most extreme Zionist leader, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, was almost alone to recognize that the Arab resistance to the Zionist settlement was an inevitable, natural and from this point of view just reaction of a "native" people defending their country against foreign invaders. Jabotinsky also recognized the fact that the Arabs in the country were a separate national entity and derided attempts made to bribe the leaders of other Arab countries to put an end to the Palestinian Arab resistance. However, Jabotinsky's conclusion was to erect a "wall of steel" against the Arabs and to crush their resistance by force.)

23.This total contradiction in the perception of the facts affects every aspect of the conflict. For example, the Jews interpreted their struggle for "Jewish Labor" as a progressive social effort to transform a nation of merchants and speculators into one of workers and farmers. The Arabs, on the other hand, saw it as a criminal attempt by the Zionists to dispossess them, to evict them from the labor market and to create, on their land, an Arab-free, separatist Jewish economy.

24.The Zionists were proud of their "Redemption of the Land". They had purchased it for full value with money collected from Jews around the world. "Olim" (new immigrants, literally pilgrims) who had been intellectuals and merchants in their former life, now earned their living with the sweat of their brow. They believed that they had achieved all this by peaceful means and without dispossessing a single Arab. For the Arabs this was a cruel narrative of dispossession and expulsion: The Jews acquired lands from rich absentee Arab landowners and then forcibly evicted the fellahin who had, for generations, been living on and earning their living from these lands. To help them in this effort, the Zionists engaged the Turkish and, later, the British police. The Arabs looked on, despairingly, as their land was taken from them.

25.Against the Zionist claim of having successfully "turned the desert into a garden", the Arabs cited the testimonies of European travelers who spoke of a Palestine that, for several centuries, had described Palestine as a populated and flourishing land, the equal of any of its regional neighbors.

Independence and Disaster

26.The contrast between the two national versions peaked in the war of 1948, a war called "the War of Independence" or even "the War of Liberation" by the Jews, and "El Naqba", the disaster, by the Arabs.

27.As the conflict intensified in the region, and with the resounding impact of the Holocaust, the United Nations decided to divide the country into two States, Jewish and Arab. Jerusalem and its environs were supposed to remain a separate unit, under international jurisdiction. The Jews were allotted 55% of the land including the unpopulated Negev.

28.The Zionist Movement accepted the partition plan, convinced that the crucial issue was to establish a firm foundation for Jewish sovereignty. In closed meetings, David Ben-Gurion never concealed his intention to expand, at the first opportunity, the territory given to the Jews. That is why Israel's Declaration of Independence did not define the country's borders and the country has remained without definite borders to this day.

29.The Arab world did not accept the partition plan and regarded it a vile attempt of the United Nations, which essentially was at the time a club of Western and Communist nations, to divide a country that did not belong to it. Handing over most of the country to the Jewish minority, which represented a mere third of the population, made it all the more unforgivable in their eyes.

30.The war initiated by the Arabs after the partition plan was, inescapably, an "ethnic" war; a kind of war in which each side seeks to conquer as much land as possible and evict the population of the other side. Such a campaign (which later came to be called "ethnic cleansing") always involves expulsion and atrocities.

31.The war of 1948 was a direct extension of the Zionist-Arab conflict in which each side sought to fulfill its aims. The Jews wanted to establish a homogenous, national State that would be as large as possible. The Arabs wanted to eradicate the Zionist Jewish entity that had been established in Palestine.

32.Both sides practiced ethnic cleansing as an integral part of the fighting. There were not many Arabs remaining in territories captured by the Jews and no Jews remained in territories captured by the Arabs. However, as the territories captured by the Jews were by far larger than those captured by the Arabs, the result was unbalanced. (The ideas of "population exchange" and "transfer" were raised in Zionist organizations as early as in the 1930's. Effectively this meant the expulsion of the Arab population from the country. On the other side, many among the Arabs believed that the Zionists should go back to wherever they came from.)

33.The myth of "the few against the many" was cultivated by the Jews to describe the stand of the Jewish community of 650,000 against the entire Arab world of over a hundred million. The Jewish community lost 1% of its people in the war. The Arabs painted a completely different picture: A fragmented Arab population with no national leadership to speak of, with no unified command over its meager forces, with poor, few and mostly obsolete weapons, confronting an extremely well organized Jewish community that was highly trained in the use of its weapons. The neighboring Arab countries betrayed the Palestinians and, when they finally did send their armies, they primarily operated in competition with each other, with no coordination and no common plan. From the social and military point of view, the fighting capabilities of the Israeli side were far superior to those of the Arab states, which had hardly emerged from the colonial era.

34.According to the United Nations plan, the Jewish State was supposed to include an Arab population amounting to about 40%. During the war the Jewish State expanded its borders and ended up with 78% of the area of the land. This area was nearly devoid of Arabs. The Arab populations of Nazareth and a few villages in the Galilee remained almost incidentally; the villages in the Triangle had been given to Israel as part of a deal by King Abdullah and, therefore, could not be evacuated.

35.In the war a total of 750,000 Palestinians were uprooted. Some of them fled out of fear of the battle, as civilian populations do in every war. Some were driven away by acts of terror such as the Dir-Yassin Massacre. Others were systematically evicted in the course of the ethnic cleansing.

36.No less important than the expulsion is the fact that the refugees were not allowed to return to their homes when the battles were over, as is the practice after a conventional war. Quite to the contrary, the new Israel saw the removal of the Arabs very much as a blessing and proceeded to totally demolish 450 Arab villages. New Jewish villages were built on the ruins, and new Hebrew names were given to them. The abandoned houses in the cities were repopulated with new immigrants.

"A Jewish State"

37.The signing of the cease-fire agreements at the end of the war of 1948 did not bring an end to the historical conflict. That was, in fact, raised to new and more intensive levels.

38.The new State of Israel dedicated its early years to the consolidation of its homogenous national character as a "Jewish State". Large sections of land were expropriated from the "absentees" (the refugees), from those officially designed as "present absentees" (Arabs who physically remained in Israel but were not allowed to become citizens) and even from the Arab citizens of Israel, most of whose lands were taken over. On these lands a dense network of Jewish communities was created. Jewish "Immigrants" were invited and even coaxed to come in masses. This great effort fortified the State's power several times over in but a few years.

39.At the same time the State vigorously conducted a policy to obliterate the Palestinian entity as a national entity. With Israeli help, the Trans-Jordan monarch, Abdullah, took control over the West Bank and since then there is, in effect, an Israeli military guarantee for the existence of the Kingdom of Jordan.

40.The main rationale of the treaty between Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom, which has been in effect for three generations, was to prevent the establishment of an independent Arab-Palestinian State, which was considered "then and now" as an obstacle to the realization of the Zionist objective.

41.A historical change occurred at the end of the 1950's on the Palestinian side when Yasser Arafat and his associates founded the Fatah Movement designed to free the Palestinian liberation movement from the custody of the Arab governments. It was no accident that this movement emerged after the failure of the great Pan-Arab concept whose most renowned representative was Gamal Abd-el- Nasser. Up to this point many Palestinians had hoped to be absorbed into a united All-Arab Nation. When this hope faded, the separate National Palestinian identity re-emerged.

42.The Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) was created by Gamal Abd-el- Nasser to prevent autonomous Palestinian action that might involve him in an undesired war with Israel. The organization was intended to impose Egyptian authority over the Palestinians. However, after the Arab defeat in the June 1967 war, Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat, took control over the PLO and has been the sole representative of the Palestinian people ever since.

"The Six Day War"

43.The June 1967 war is seen in a very different light by the two sides, as has every incident in the last 120 years. According to the Israeli myth, this was a desperate war of defense, which miraculously placed a lot of land in Israel's hands. According to the Palestinian myth, the leaders of Egypt, Syria and Jordan fell into a trap set by Israel in order to capture whatever was left of Palestine.

44.Many Israelis believe that "the Six Day War" was the root of all evil and it was only then that the peace-loving and progressive Israel turned into a conqueror and an occupier. This conviction allows them to maintain the absolute purity of Zionism and the State of Israel up to that point in history and preserve their old myths. There is no truth to this legend.

45.The war of 1967 was yet another phase of the old struggle between the two national movements. It did not change the essence; it only changed the circumstances. The essential objectives of the Zionist Movement-- a Jewish State, expansion, and settlement-- were making great strides. The particular circumstances made extensive ethnic cleansing impossible in this war, but several hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were nevertheless expelled.

46.Israel was allotted 55% of the land (Palestine) by the 1947 partition plan, an additional 23% were captured in the 1948 war and now the remaining 22%, across the "Green Line: (the pre-1967 armistice line), were also captured. In 1967 Israel inadvertently united the Palestinian people (including some of the refugees) under its rule.

47.As soon as the war ended, the Settlement Movement began. Almost every political faction in the country participated in this movement --from the messianic-nationalistic "Gush Emunim" to the "leftist" United Kibbutz Movement. The first settlers received broad support from most politicians, left and right, from Yigal Alon (the Jewish settlement in Hebron) to Shimon Peres (the Kdumim settlement).

48.The fact that all governments of Israel cultivated and advanced the settlements, albeit to differing extents, proves that the settlement aspiration was restricted to no specific ideological camp and extended to the entire Zionist Movement. The impression that has been created of a small minority driving the Settlement Movement is illusionary. Only a consolidated effort on the part of all Government Agencies since 1967 and till today could have produced the legislative, the strategic and the budgetary infrastructure required for such a long-lasting and expensive endeavor.

49.The legislative infrastructure incorporates the misleading assumption that the Occupation Authority is the owner of "government-owned lands", although these are the essential land reserves of the Palestinian population. It is self- evident that the Settlement Movement contravenes International Law.

50.The dispute between the proponents of the "Greater Israel" and those of "Territorial Compromise" is essentially a dispute about the way to achieve the basic Zionist aspiration: a homogenous Jewish State in as large a territory as possible. The proponents of""compromise" emphasize the demographic issue and want to prevent the inclusion of the Palestinian population in the State. The "Greater Israel" adherents place the emphasis on the geographic issue and believe (privately or publicly) that it is possible to expel the non-Jewish population from the country (code name: "Transfer").

51.The General Staff of the Israeli army played an important role in the planning and building of the Settlements. It created the map of the settlements (identified with Ariel Sharon): blocs of settlements and bypass roads, lateral and longitudinal, so that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are chopped up into pieces and the Palestinians are imprisoned in isolated enclaves, each of which is surrounded by settlements and the occupation forces.

52.The Palestinians employed several methods of resistance, mainly raids across the Jordanian and Lebanese borders and attacks inside Israel and everywhere in the world. These acts are called "terrorist" by the Israelis while the Palestinians see them as the legitimate resistance of an occupied nation. The PLO leadership, headed by Yasser Arafat, had long been considered a terrorist leadership by the Israelis but has gradually come to be internationally recognized as the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people.

53.When the Palestinians realized that these actions do not put an end to the settlement momentum, which gradually pulled the land from under their feet, at the end of 1987 they launched the Intifadah -- a grassroots uprising of all sectors of the population. In this Intifidah, 1500 Palestinians were killed, among them hundreds of children, several times over the number of Israeli losses.

The Peace Process

54.The October 1973 war, which commenced with the surprise victory of the Egyptian and Syrian forces and culminated with their defeat, convinced Yasser Arafat and his close associates that there is no military way to achieve the national Palestinian objectives. He decided to embark upon a political path to reach agreement with Israel and to allow, at least, a partial achievement of the national goals through negotiation.

55.To prepare the ground for this, Arafat created contact for the first time with Israeli personalities who could make an impact on public opinion and on government policy in Israel. His emissaries (Said Hamami and Issam Sartawi) met with Israeli public figures, the peace pioneers who in 1975 established the "Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace".

56.These contacts as well as the growing fatigue felt by the Israelis of the Intifadah, the Jordanian withdrawal from the West Bank, changing international conditions (the collapse of the Communist Bloc, the Gulf War) led to the Madrid Conference and, later, to the Oslo Agreement.

The Oslo Agreement

57.The Oslo Agreement had positive and negative qualities.

58.On the positive side, this agreement brought Israel to its first official recognition of the Palestinian People and its national leadership and brought the National Palestinian Movement to its recognition of the existence of Israel. In this respect the agreement (and the exchange of letters that preceded it) were of paramount historical significance.

59.In effect, the agreement gave the National Palestinian Movement a territorial base on Palestinian land, the structure of a "state in the making" and armed forces-- facts that would play an important role in the ongoing Palestinian struggle. For the Israelis, the agreement opened the gates to the Arab world and put an end to Palestinian attacks --as long as the agreement was effective.

60.The most substantive flaw in the agreement was that both sides hoped to achieve entirely different objectives. The Palestinians saw it as a temporary agreement paving the way to the end of the occupation, the establishment of a Palestinian State in all the occupied territories. On the other hand, the respective Israeli governments regarded it as a way to maintain the occupation in large sections of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the Palestinian self-government filling the role of an auxiliary security agency protecting Israel and the settlements.

61.Therefore, Oslo did not represent the beginning of the process to end the conflict but, rather, another new phase of the conflict.

62.Because the expectations of both sides were so divergent and each remained entirely bound to its own national "narrative", every section of the agreement was interpreted differently. Ultimately, many parts of the agreement were not carried out, mainly by Israel (the third withdrawal, the four safe passages, and others).

63.Throughout the period of the "Oslo Process" Israel continued its vigorous expansion of the settlements, primarily by creating new ones under various guises, expanding existing ones, building an elaborate network of "bypass" roads, expropriating land, demolishing houses and uprooting plantations etc. The Palestinians, on their part, used the time to build their strength, both within the framework of the agreement and without it. In fact, the historical confrontation continued unabated under the guise of negotiations and the "Peace Process", which became a proxy for actual peace.

64.In contradistinction to his image, which became more pronounced after his assassination, Yitzhak Rabin kept the conflict alive "in the field", while simultaneously managing the political process to achieve peace, on Israeli terms. As he was a disciple of the Zionist "narrative" and accepted its mythology, he suffered from cognitive dissonance when his hopes for peace clashed with his conceptual world. It appears that he began to internalize some parts of the Palestinian historical narrative only at the very end of his life.

65.The case of Shimon Peres is much more severe. He created for himself an international image of a peacemaker and even designed his language to reflect this image ("the New Middle East") while remaining essentially a traditional Zionist hawk. This became clear in the short and violent period that he served as Prime Minister after the assassination of Rabin and, again, in his current acceptance of the role of spokesman and apologist for Sharon.

66.The clearest expression of the Israeli dilemma was provided by Ehud Barak who came to power completely convinced of his ability to cut the Gordian knot of the historical conflict in one dramatic stroke, in the fashion of Alexander the Great. Barak approached the issue in total ignorance of the Palestinian narrative and with disrespect to its importance. He presented his proposals as ultimatums and was appalled and enraged by their rejection.

67.In the eyes of himself and the Israeli side at large, Barak "turned every stone" and made the Palestinians "more generous offers than any previous Prime Minister". In exchange, he wanted the Palestinians to sign off on "an end to the conflict". The Palestinians considered this a preposterous pretension since Barak was effectively asking them to relinquish their basic national aspiration, such as the Right of Return and sovereignty in East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Moreover, while Barak presented the claims for the annexation of territories as matter of negligible percentages ("Settlement Blocs"), according to Palestinian calculations this amounted to an actual annexation of 20% of the land beyond the Green Line.

68.In the Palestinian view, they had already made the decisive compromise by agreeing to establish their State within the Green Line, in merely 22% of their historical homeland. Therefore, they could only accept minor border changes in the context of territorial swaps. The traditional Israeli position is that the achievements of the war of 1948 are established facts that cannot be disputed and the compromise required must focus on the remaining 22%.

69.As with most terms and concepts, the word "concession" has different meanings for both sides. The Palestinians believe that they have already "conceded" 78% of their land when they agreed to accept 22% of it. The Israelis believe that they are "conceding" when they agree to "give" the Palestinians parts of those same 22% (the West Bank and the Gaza Strip).

70.The Camp David Summit in the summer of 2000, which was imposed on Arafat against his will, was premature and brought things to a climax. Barak's demands, presented at the summit as Clinton's, were that the Palestinians agree to end the conflict by conceding the Right of Return and the Return itself; to accept complicated arrangements for East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount without achieving sovereignty over them; to agree to large territorial annexations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and to an Israeli military presence in other large areas and to Israeli control over the borders separating the Palestinian State from the rest of the world. No Palestinian leader would ever sign such an agreement and thus the summit ended in deadlock and the termination of the careers of Clinton and Barak.

The El-Aqsa Intifadah

71.The breakdown of the summit, the elimination of any hope for an agreement between the two sides and the unconditional pro-Israeli stance of the Americans, inevitably led to another round of violent confrontations, which earned the title of the El-Aqsa Intifadah. For the Palestinians, this is a justified national uprising against the protracted occupation, which has no end in sight and allows continual and daily pulling of their land from under their feet. For the Israelis, this is an outburst of murderous terrorism. The performers of these acts appear to the Palestinians as national heroes and to the Israelis as merciless criminals who must be liquidated.

72.The official media in Israel no longer mention settlers but speak of "residents" upon whom any attack is a crime against civilians. The Palestinians consider the settlers the forefront of a dangerous enemy force whose intention is to dispossess them of their land and who must be defeated.

73.A great part of the Israeli "Peace Camp" collapsed during the al-Aqsa Intifadah and it turns out that many of its convictions had feet of clay. Especially after Barak had "turned every stone" and made "more generous offers than any previous Prime Minister", the Palestinian behavior was incomprehensible to this part of the "Peace Camp", since it had never performed a thorough revision of the Zionist "narrative" and did not internalize the fact that there is a Palestinian "narrative" too. The only remaining explanation was that the Palestinians had deceived the Israeli Peace Camp, that they had never intended to make peace and that their true purpose is to throw the Jews into the sea, as the Zionist right has always claimed.

74.As a result, the dividing line between the Zionist "right" and "left" disappeared. The leaders of the Labor Party joined the Sharon Government and became his most effective apologists (Shimon Peres) and even the formal leftist opposition (Yossi Sarid) took part. This again proves that the Zionist narrative is the decisive factor unifying all facets of the political system in Israel, making the distinctions between Rehavam Zeevi and Avraham Burg, Yitzhak Levi and Yossi Sarid insignificant.

75.There is a notable decline in the Palestinian willingness to reopen a dialogue with the Israeli peace forces, a consequence of the utter disappointment from the "leftist government" which had inspired so much hope after the Netanyahu years, as well as a consequence of the fact that apart from the small radical peace groups no Israeli outrage at the brutal reactions of the occupation forces has been heard. The tendency to tighten ranks, typical to any nation in a war of liberation, makes it possible for the extreme nationalistic and religious forces on the Palestinian side to veto any attempt at Israeli-Palestinian cooperation.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Bill Hahn//\\
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 07:01 PM

As I said---history is ongoing. Shall we go back some few thousand years now and find who was displaced?

That is why I made the comment we cannot place a single incident and/or movement on what is now happening

Bill Hahn

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 07:40 PM

If we go far enough back, Bill H, we can find Jews committing genocide upon the people who were already living in the land that according to the Old Testament, was promised to the Jews by G*d.

And this is, I guess, what I am trying to say, and what I have been trying to say all along. None of us (members of the human race) can claim that the history of our ancestors is unstained by atrocities committed against other human beings or groups of human beings. Not my ancestors, and not yours either.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 07:46 PM

Bill I agree with you. Here is another point.

Another thing about history is that it is generally only told from one side and one perspective at a time. I'm sure Prof Oren has good points to make. I find it hard to believe that he is unbiased.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 07:49 PM

How DO you respond to that--I mean such attacks?

End the occupation.

Subject: RE: BS: Mideast: View From the Eye of the Storm
From: CarolC
Date: 19 Jul 04 - 07:54 PM

It's interesting that you mentioned Michael Oren's book, Bill H. I was just reading this review about it earlier today along with reviews of a few other books on the subject:

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040531&s=beinin

"First there was Michael Oren's Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, chronicling the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Though widely acclaimed by mainstream reviewers as a definitive account of the war, Oren's book was aptly described by the tireless Norman Finkelstein as "Abba Eban with Footnotes"--a reference to Eban's eloquent but factually challenged speech at the UN General Assembly justifying Israel's pre-emptive strike of June 1967. While Oren's book is a serious work of scholarship, it essentially restates the traditional Israeli account of the war as a defensive strike waged against belligerent Arab states seeking to "throw Israel into the sea." Oren does not adequately address three arguments that challenge this view. First, according to interviews with former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan conducted in 1976 and 1977, which were kept secret for many years but published well before Oren's book, Israel had been intentionally provoking Syria since 1948 in order to establish sovereignty over the demilitarized zones on their common border. Second, according to the evaluation of several different intelligence agencies and the Israeli general staff, Israel did not face an existential danger in 1967 and could expect an easy victory. Third, Israel chose war because, as Shimon Peres wrote in the pro- Labor Party daily, Davar, its leaders did not want to negotiate over Israel's borders or the question of Palestinian refugees. The second of these matters remains off the table as far as Israel is concerned."