If I were Jimmy Carter…

143 thoughts on “If I were Jimmy Carter…”

1. This is typical of Carter; he doesn’t fully acknowledge the evils of policies of the U.S. or its allies. His administration gave the Shah a human rights award, for example.
   Perhaps this is partly a political strategy on his part to try to break through the censorship on this topic; still, I don’t think Meersheimer & Walt pulled many punches in their controversial paper, for example.

2. Helena
   How does one answer this blog?
   http://www.contemplating-from-gaza.blogspot.com/
   Heba is a friend of Laila.
   Somehow, leaving children to die of cold at Christmas seems grotesque.

3. Hello Helena,
   Can you please provide the full text of your post in the RSS feed of your blog. Thanks!

4. Be patient, everyone.
   Rest assured that even as we speak JES, Vadim and Joshua are clutching at their brow with one hand and groping for their wood with the other, prepatory to foozling their tee shots.
   Of infinitely more moment, of course, is Paul Craig Roberts’ (he’s the former Assistant Secretary of Treasury in the Reagan administration) report, citing Insight magazine, that former Secretary of State James Baker has proposed a Middle East peace conference without Israeli participation.
   Here’s the money shot: “according to an official quoted by Insight magazine, ‘As Baker sees this, the conference would provide a unique opportunity for the United States to strike a deal without Jewish pressure. This has become the hottest proposal examined by the foreign policy people over the last month.’
   “According to Insight, ‘officials said the Baker proposal to exclude Israel garnered support in the wake of Vice President Dick Cheney’s visit to Saudi Arabia on Nov. 25. They said Mr. Cheney spent most of his meetings listening to Saudi warnings that Israel, rather than Iran, is the leading cause of instability in the Middle East.’ The official told Insight that the administration ‘has fallen in line,’ but that ‘Bush is not in the daily loop. He is shocked by the elections and he’s hoping for a miracle on Iraq.'”

5. Make that “preparatory”

6. Good for Jimmy Carter. Personally, I think he generally gives America and Israel too much credit for their ridiculous claims to “morality” and such, but someone had to get that word “Apartheid” out of the AIPAC censor’s closet and into the American conversation. Like Darwin’s “The Origin of Species,” or Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” to take only two examples, the reactionaries and zionists (pardon the redundancy) will probably not acquaint themselves with the work before demanding its suppression. Former President Carter may have realized that the book cover title would get the only reading these people would give him and so he had to keep the message as rudimentary as possible.
   As for Jim Baker and his “Arabist” leanings, we should not forget his colorful dismissal of the Israeli Lobby during the elder George Bush’s term of office: “F*** ’em! They didn’t vote for us.”
   We should gladly accept either or both of these American namesakes as a counterweight (however insignificant) to the oppressive Israeli browbeating of American politicians; since our Congress, as Eric Margolis of the Toronto Sun says, pretty much succumbs to their AIPAC training like a troup of “trained, barking seals.”

7. Not sure if you had my last comment. Anyway, can you please Helena allow the full text of your post in your RSS feed. Thanks !

8. Rest assured that even as we speak JES, Vadim and Joshua are clutching at their brow with one hand and groping for their wood with the other, prepatory to foozling their tee shots.
   Since none of us has uttered a single word in defense of settlements, I for one will decline your invitation to miniature golf.

9. And while you’re at it, make that “fevered”, as in “fevered brow”.

10. Prize of the week to Michael Murry for putting Origin of the Species and “Farenheit 9/11” on the same intellectual plane.

11. I hope this doesn’t constitute “foozling” (whatever that is), but I just have two issues regarding the actual post:
    Helena, exactly which hospitals “exist in the occupied West Bank– for Jews alone”?
    Secondly, your assetion that “…there are many clear instances of outright discrimination– based not on skin color as such (ever since the Israelis a while ago imported a bunch of black-complected Jews from Ethiopia to defuse that accusation),” [emphasis added] appears to imply that Israel “imported” Ethiopian Jews to neutralize charges of “racism”. This is simply libelous.

12. Okay, JES, I haven’t found a full-blown hospital in the ‘medical’ part of this onlinedirectory for Maale Adumim settlement, but they have at least seven no doubt beautifully equipped health centers there.
    JES, previously you’ve written that you would support a full Israeli pullout from the occupied territories, and I applaud that position. But since there has not been any serious pullout from the West Bank– or from Golan, since the tiny pullback of 1974– how would you describe the social-political order that has grown up and become more entrenched in those territories, as between fully rights-endowed, voting Jews and voteless Palestinians? WDon’t you think the term “apartheid” could just about cover it?
    Basically, though, it doesn’t matter that what you (or I) call it. What matters is that we both see it as a highly abusive situation and vow to end it. Right?

13. Also, Emmanuel– I’m not sure whether I’d want to do as you ask and I am sure I wouldn’t know how to do it if I did so decide.
    What would the advantages and disadvantages of doing this be? I see as a disadvantage that it could deliver very lengthy screeds into people’s RSS feeders… (My posts tend to lengthiness.)

14. Coincidentally, I’m reading a reviewer’s copy of an incredible collection of Hannah Arendt’s “Jewish Writings,” so I can’t help but remember that the last few years of her life were ruined by her having dared to subtitle _Eichmann in Jerusalem_ “On the banality of evil.” Similar to this book, all people saw was the word “banality,” which they took as somehow “demeaning” to Holocaust survivors. And that was the early 1960s — waz AIPAC even in existence back then? Carter has tremendous courage, but I’m afraid that this time he’s going to be marginalized — if not worse — for the remainder of his life.

15. Hello Helena,
    I don’t use Movable Type, so its hard for me to tell you how to do so. But I’m sure that there is an option to have the full article in your RSS feed.
    More and more people use a RSS agregator to read their news. It might even be possible to offer a feed with excerpts and another one with the full text.
    Cheers
    -Emmanuel

16. Wow, so Helena takes what is perhaps the most inspirational rescue of an oppressed and poor community and tries to paint it as being done to counter her political barbs. How pathetic.
    Of course, this is the same woman who told lies about Peruvian converts being “instantly” converted simply to fill up west bank settlements.
    So if Helena were Jimmy Carter, she would lie and tell half-truths as well. But we already knew that about you Helena.
    On another point, I must admit that I am surprised that commenters here would approve of a) holding a middle-east conference that EXCLUDES Israel from negotiations and b) supporting a leader who’s money quote is “F*ck the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.”
    I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, given the very low level of “courtesy” Helena requires from anyone who hates Israel as much as she does. And I shouldn’t be surprised, since just the other day Helena allowed Holocaust deniers to post comments on her site.
    But I’m surprised nonetheless, I really didn’t think the Palestine-Uber-Alles crowd would continue to stoop so low.

17. At the risk of further foozling the situation, I will point out what I see as another flaw in the apartheid analogy:
    It’s all “justified” of course, on the basis of “security”– the security of just one of those groups, that is… Just as in apartheid South Africa.
    Well, yes and no. In the South African case, the apartheid policies predated the onset of armed resistance by decades, and were part of a long-term ideological program with defined goals of racial subjugation. The “security” justification was largely a post hoc development of the 1960s-80s and even then was secondary. In the West Bank, the policies most commonly associated with apartheid – e.g., bypass roads and cantonization – developed after and as a response to armed resistance, and were often instituted haphazardly without a great deal of forethought. In the 1970s and even the 1990s, Palestinians and Israeli settlers used the same roads.
    Gidon Remba has written another perspective on the Carter book and, while I don’t agree with everything he says, he makes the important point that it’s often possible to reach the same conclusion for different reasons. Remba argues, for instance, that Carter’s preferred settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – a fair two-state solution along Geneva or Taba lines – is the same one preferred by many center-left Zionists, but that they and Carter reached that conclusion through very different sets of assumptions and attitudes. It’s also possible to get to bantustans from more than one place, and with more than one goal in mind, and the fact that the West Bank occupation bears some functional similarities to apartheid (which it does) isn’t reason enough to conclude that the heavy ideological and historical connotations of the term “apartheid” are also appropriate.
    Am I saying this to defend the occupation? Of course not. Like you, I see it as a highly abusive situation and vow to end it. I’d argue, though, that this is all the more reason not to use facile terms that convey an incorrect apprehension of the root causes of the conflict. It’s always necessary to keep the point of origin in mind, because any peace settlement will have to address the root causes both procedurally and substantively, and a solution directed at the wrong causes won’t solve the problem. For instance, if the I-P conflict is viewed purely through a racial lens, as the term “apartheid” would encourage, then cession of the Triangle to the PNA might seem like a reasonable part of a border adjustment package, never mind that the Arabs who live there tend to view their citizenship as more valuable than their racial connections. Likewise, the term encourages a misreading of both Zionist and Palestinian nationalist ideologies (note the plural) and the role such ideologies play in driving the conflict.
    To take just one example of the type of misunderstanding I’m talking about, consider your statement that Israeli infrastructure in the West Bank is for Jews alone. This isn’t true. The infrastructure is in fact for Israelis alone. Several hundred Palestinian citizens of Israel live in the dorms at Ariel College, and are effectively part-time residents of that settlement. Several hundred others commute daily to the college over the bypass roads. Still others work in, or are treated by, the hospitals and health clinics you cite. Does this make the system less abusive? Of course not. The fact that a certain system isn’t apartheid doesn’t mean it can’t be just as bad as, or in some cases even worse than, apartheid was. But does it point up the manner in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one involving national sovereignty and self-determination rather than racial subjugation? I’d say that it does, and that when a peace process is formulated, this distinction is much more than sophistry.
    The funny thing is that, toward the end of his book, Carter acknowledges that the I-P conflict is about clashing claims of national sovereignty rather than an ideology of racial subjugation. This is entirely correct and, I’d guess, is one of the key reasons why he comes down in favor of a two-state solution despite his (sometimes factually erroneous) views on Israeli policies. But the word “apartheid” splashed across the title page, like any facile and inappropriate use of a loaded term, will only obscure this point.

18. Interesting points, Jonathan. I had heard that some Palestinian-Israeli students studied at the college in Ariel. But can they buy (or even live in) houses there when they graduate?
    I guess one of the points I was trying to make in my post is that apartheid wasn’t only about racial oppression (which many Americans, who look at the world through their own race-obsessed lens, seem to think) but was equally about the grabbing of the land and resources of an indigenous people by a community made up of colonial settlers. It was a ‘modernized’ form of the centuries-old game of settler colonialism in southern Africa. That was what South Africans call “grand apartheid”, while the system of smaller-scale race-based discriminations– separate and highly unequal facilities (if any)– was what they called petty apartheid. And of course, the settler-colonial land-grab is exactly what we see underway in the West Bank (including E. Jerusalem), and in Golan.

19. Well Helena, you might just want to check next time before you make inflamatory and inaccurate statements. You might also want to check and see how many Palestinians receive excellent medical attention at Hadassa, Meir, Beilinson, and Ichilov hospitals in Israel. You might also do well to think about the fact that Ethiopian Jews are human beings and not cargo that’s “imported”.
    Frankly, I think that your (and Carter’s) comparison is based on superficial similarities and of little merit.
    And yes, I think that the occupation is bad for both peoples.
    Of course, you do agree with me that Kassandra’s Holocaust denial (on which you have ignored)is asinine, that the idea of a Middle East peace conference without Israel is plain stupid. Right?

20. Also inaccurate is Helena’s claim that Israeli Jews are “colonial settlers” as compared to “indigenous people.”

21. JES, I know that a number of Palestinians get good medical attention in some Israeli hospitals. The same thing happened in several of the best hospitals in SA.
    I haven’t seen Kassandra’s Holocaust denial. Of course a Middle East peace conference needs Israel. An Iraq peace conference does not. I have no clue what all these distractions are even doing in this discussion.
    Of course the Ethiopian Jews rushed to Israel in those airlifts are people. So were the millions of Ethiopian non-Jews who were equally starving and in dire human need of having their lives saved at that time; and Israel turned them away from their planes based solely on their non-Jewishness.
    I find your references to Jimmy Carter completely offensive and shall delete that post. I can’t imagine where your hostility to him comes from.

22. It seems to me that it is simply throwing up sand to object to Carter’s use of “apartheid” because the Israeli colonization of the occupied territories is not based on race. Whatever term is used to describe it, the Israeli occupation and colonization is unjust, and arguing around the margins about the relevance of “apartheid” to the occupied territories (not, as Carter has stressed, to Israel itself) serves mainly to perpetuate that injustice.
    Quite apart from whether using such an inflammatory term (which means “apartness” in Africaans and Dutch and has been applied to many injustices) will ultimately help or hinder a just settlement, Carter seems so far to have achieved his explicit objective of breaking through the limits in the US on wide-spread discussion of the Israeli occupation in a way that Walt and Mearsheimer have not.
    If the term “apartheid” manges to penetrate the average American’s ignorance and engenders a more robust discussion of some of the unjust results of our uncritical support for Israel, then Carter has achieved his purpose and the US, Israel, and the Palestinians will be the beneficiaries. Of course if the discussion continues to revolve around the appropriateness of “apartheid,” then we are all the losers.

23. This is funny and reminds me of the debate around Iraq. Instead of Americans focusing on their unjust occupation of another country, they have semantic quibbles over whether Iraq is in a civil war or not. Likewise here, Americans are arguing that it is absurd to use the term “Apartheid” because the occupation and oppression is not primarily based on race. It’s all just trying to sideline the real moral dilemma, namely that of occupation.

24. “I have no clue what all these distractions are even doing in this discussion.”
    Sure you do, Helena. We all do. ;o}

25. “You might also want to check and see how many Palestinians receive excellent medical attention at Hadassa, Meir, Beilinson, and Ichilov hospitals in Israel.”
    Sure thing, JES, and then YOU might want to compare that with the number of Palestinians who are actively or passively denied even the most basic medical care as a result of Israel’s occupation.

26. Helena,
    I’d like to use your post as the review text for the book, in the book review part of this year’s Koufax Awards site. May I use your text, with attribution, and a link?
    Eric

27. Eric, I’d be honored. Please use it.
    But heck, now I I’ll have to go back and clean up the punctuation there.

28. I’m curious as to what category Carter’s book is nominated for a Koufax in?
    Best misatrributed, plagiarized, rant by an ex-president?
    Best counter-factual screed?
    Best placed hypocritical blame for the mistakes of policies promoted by the author himself?

29. Joshua, by what you just wrote it seems to me that you approve of our giving billions of dollars to a nation that is promoting nuclear proliferation, which makes a mockery of our international obligations and responsibilities. You’re saying you have no problem with our giving billions of dollars and weapons to a country that then bombs civilians needlessly in Lebanon, and occupies the land of others? Well, buddy, America was once considered an honest broker in the Middle East. If we are going to retain the tiniest shred of credibility in the ME, we need to pressure the Israelis to change tack.
    Anyway, if you really had any concern for the long-term security of Israel, you would be glad that Carter is highlighting the oppression facing the Palestinians, so public attitudes can shift. Or are you happy with the status quo here, as when the US did nothing to call for a ceasefire on Israel’s bombing of Lebanon?

30. Helena, Jes:
    “Helena, exactly which hospitals “exist in the occupied West Bank– for Jews alone”?”
    “Okay, JES, I haven’t found a full-blown hospital in the ‘medical’ part of this onlinedirectory for Maale Adumim settlement, but they have at least seven no doubt beautifully equipped health centers there.”
    In reality, the hospital does not exactly have to be “in” the West Bank. Doesn’t a hospital 30 miles or less away in “Israel proper”, along with an exclusive open highway and one of the most sophisticated ambulance/EMT systems in the world that have record delivery times, do the job? Since the ambulances are actually stationed “in” the settlements, the median dispatch time (‘call to hospital door time’) is practically halved, and in a recent study published in the BMJ it was between 15 and 20 minutes. Anyone who is familiar with the field will know that it is quite an amazing feat. In the average US urban area, it is 30-40 minutes. And rural areas are much longer.
    Meanwhile the Palestinian sick and dying, and their pregnant mothers in labor with fetus’ heart-rates dropping by the minute, languish and die at the checkpoints … Again, I recommend Joe Sacco’s “cartoon book” simply called Palestine.

31. Mike, to the extent that the U.S. can broker a lasting deal in the region, I’m all for it. But as I mentioned in a comment in a prior diary entry, given the way the Arab/Muslim world and Palestinians in particular have treated prior attempts, I doubt that any poltiician is going to risk credibility by expending any polical or other capital for the Palestinians.
    Clinton tried to do just that and was humiliated by Yasser Arafat, and the heroic peace efforts of that administration did not do anything to stabilize the situation. Even when Carter SUCCESSFULLY helped broker a deal between Israel and Egypt, that could not be said to have addressed the “root problem” in the Middle East. Because shortly thereafter, the theocratic-facists of Iran took over the country, and to this day are probably the most hateful and violent element in the region.
    That’s not to say that peace between Egypt and Israel is a bad thing (although the Egyptian government could do more to promote a message of tolerance rather than the hateful incitement all too prevelant in that once glorious society). But it does show that working for peace, or even bringing peace, between Israel and its neighbors does not lead to a reduction in terrorism.
    You also have some facts mixed up. The U.S. did, in fact, broker a cease fire in Lebanon. The war was just over a month, which is quite brief compared with conflicts just about everywhere else. It could have been ended sooner, except the Arab League objected to earlier cease-fire resolutions drafted by the U.S. and France. Unfortunately, this watered down the final cease fire agreement.
    In the meantime, as a lifelong Democrat and progressive, I am happy that our government has long had a bipartisan policy of supporting Israel in its efforts to defend itself against violent and racist neighbors.

32. “And yes, I think that the occupation is bad for both peoples. Of course, you do agree with me that Kassandra’s Holocaust denial (on which you have ignored)is asinine, that the idea of a Middle East peace conference without Israel is plain stupid. Right?”
    Jes,
    Do you think the occupation is simply “bad for both peoples”?! Doesn’t understatement qualify for some form of deception? How would it sound if I said “the Shoah was bad for both peoples”? I will tell: it would sound disgusting. The moral corruption of the oppressor and the torture of the oppressed are not similar or comparable.
    I do not know who Kassandra is, since I don’t read all the posts, but I assume she is a poster. Holocaust denial is abhorent, but are you just as disgusted by the denial of the sufferings of the “other”? Or the mere existence of the other, as Goldameir did? (“They did not exist.” [sic])
    You call the exclusion of Israel from a Mid-East peace conferenc stupid. I agree. Do you agree that the policy of excluding Palestinians, which has been the “unilateral enforcement” policy of the Israeli gov’t for the past several years is equally stupid and counter-productive? Do you buy the lame excuse of “there is no partner for peace on the Palestinian side”?

33. Joshua, let me preface my comments by saying that you are anything but “progressive”. Some facts to recount. The Iranian president offered in 2003 to broker a “grand bargain” with the US, and has offered repeatedly to help in Iraq given that the US changes its policy of “regime change”. The US has consistently refused, referring to nonexistent evidence that they are developing a nuclear weapons program.
    You’re saying “to the extent that the US can broker a peace deal in the ME,” a statement that ignores the reality that the US has NOT tried to broker a peace deal in the Middle East, and in fact is just allowing Israel to use its full deterrent force at the expense of fair relations with other nations.
    The bombing in Lebanon killed over 1000 civilians, hit many areas that had nothing to do with Hezbollah, massively destroyed infrastructure, and moreover was wrong simply because Israel’s own military commanders said they were bombing Southern Lebanon to decrease support for Hezbollah. This is immoral and more importantly does not work. So don’t be saying that this was just a “brief war,” as it wrecked Lebanon. There was a massive sense of urgency for Israel to stop the unproportionate bombing of Lebanon, but Condy Rice comes out and says these are the “birth pangs” of the Middle East. Do you not see the huge arrogance in tolerating another nation to be massively bombed and lose 1000+ lives, especially when we fund that nation and provide the very bombs they drop on the Lebanese?
    And you’re pretty good at applying labels to Iran. But don’t you think Iran would have less rhetorical and actual power, and would have less of a mouthpiece, if the very real historical problem of the oppression of the Palestinians was solved? I really don’t understand why you expect the US should keep allowing a policy of collective punishment on the Palestinians. It clearly hasn’t worked and will not work, just like massive walls do not work.

34. Jes,
    I apologize in advance for the length of this post. You may deny half of the quotes below. Yet, about the other half, are you willing to show disgust and moral revulsion, as you rightfully did toward Holocaust denial, to the overwhelming “dehumanization of the other” that is evident in all of them ? And as you can see, it is not from one person or party; it goes across the spectrum of the Israeli ruling class:
    “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment… Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, speaking of the Arabs of Palestine,Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry.
    “We must expel Arabs and take their places.” David Ben Gurion, future Prime Minister of Israel, 1937, Ben Gurion and the Palestine Arabs, Oxford University Press, 1985.
    ” The present map of Palestine was drawn by the British mandate. The Jewish people have another map which our youth and adults should strive to fulfill — From the Nile to the Euphrates.” Ben Gurion
    “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” Israel Koenig, “The Koenig Memorandum”
    “We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.” David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.
    “We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?’ Ben- Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘Drive them out’” Yitzhak Rabin, Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.
    “We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return. The old will die and the young will forget.” David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
    “Between ourselves it must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this small country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries – all of them. Not one village, not one tribe should be left.” Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department in 1940. From “A Solution to the Refugee Problem”
    “We will have to face the reality that Israel is neither innocent, nor redemptive. And that in its creation, and expansion; we as Jews, have caused what we historically have suffered; a refugee population in Diaspora.” Martin Buber, Jewish Philosopher, addressed Prime Minister Ben Gurion on the moral character of the state of Israel with reference to the Arab refugees in March 1949
    “A Christian state should be established [in Lebanon], with its southern border on the Litani river. We will make an alliance with it. When we smash the Arab Legion’s strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo… And in this fashion, we will end the war and settle our forefathers’ account with Egypt, Assyria, and Aram” David Ben-Gurion, 1948
    “There are some who believe that the non-Jewish population, even in a high percentage, within our borders will be more effectively under our surveillance; and there are some who believe the contrary, i.e., that it is easier to carry out surveillance over the activities of a neighbor than over those of a tenant. I tend to support the latter view and have an additional argument:…the need to sustain the character of the state which will henceforth be Jewish…with a non-Jewish minority limited to 15 percent. I had already reached this fundamental position as early as 1940 [and] it is entered in my diary.” Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Agency’s Colonization Department. From Israel: an Apartheid State by Uri Davis, p.5.
    ” It lies upon the people’s shoulders to prepare for the war, but it lies upon the Israeli army to carry out the fight with the ultimate object of erecting the Israeli Empire.” Moshe Dayan (Israel Defense and Foreign Minister), on February 12 1952. Radio “Israel.”
    “When we [followers of the prophetic Judaism] returned to Palestine…the majority of Jewish people preferred to learn from Hitler rather than from us.” Martin Buber, to a New York audience, Jewish Newsletter, June 2, 1958.
    Rabin’s description of the conquest of Lydda, after the completion of Plan Dalet. “We shall reduce the Arab population to a community of woodcutters and waiters” Uri Lubrani, PM Ben-Gurion’s special adviser on Arab Affairs, 1960. From “The Arabs in Israel” by Sabri Jiryas.
    “If the General Assembly were to vote by 121 votes to 1 in favor of “Israel” returning to the armistice lines– (pre June 1967 borders) “Israel” would refuse to comply with the decision.” Aba Eban (the Israeli Foreign Minister). New York Times June 19, 1967.
    “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” Moshe Dayan, address to the Technion, Haifa, reported in Haaretz, April 4, 1969.
    “It is the duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously, a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands.” Yoram Bar Porath, Yediot Aahronot, of 14 July 1972.
    “The only solution is Eretz Israel [Greater Israel], or at least Western Eretz Israel [all the land west of Jordan River], without Arabs. There is no room for compromise on this point … We must not leave a single village, not a single tribe.” Joseph Weitz, Director of the Jewish National Fund, the Zionist agency charged with acquiring Palestinian land, 1950. Machover Israca, January 5, 1973 p.2.
    “They [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.” Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the Beasts”. New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
    “We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves.” Chairman Heilbrun of the Committee for the Re-election of General Shlomo Lahat, the mayor of Tel Aviv, October 1983.
    “We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel… Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” Rafael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces – Gad Becker, Yediot Ahronot 13 April 1983, New York Times 14 April 1983.
    “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
    “The Palestinians” would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.” Isreali Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, speech to Jewish settlers, New York Times April 1, 1988
    “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstrations in China, when world attention focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the territories.” Benyamin Netanyahu, then Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, former Prime Minister of Israel, tells students at Bar Ilan University, from the Israeli Journal Hotam, November 24, 1989.
    “The past leaders of our movement left us a clear message to keep Eretz Israel from the Sea to the Jordan River for future generations, for the mass aliya [immigration], and for the Jewish people, all of whom will be gathered into this country.” Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declares at a Tel Aviv memorial service for former Likud leaders, November 1990. Jerusalem Domestic Radio Service.
    “Everybody has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.” Ariel Sharon, Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing the Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November 15, 1998.
    “The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more”…. Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time – August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post August 30, 2000
    “If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke, we would use much more force….” Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, quoted in Associated Press, November 16, 2000.
    “Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that . . . I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, October 3, 2001, to Shimon Peres, reported on Kol Yisrael radio.

35. Mike, I do not feel the need to respond to personal attacks, or provide a lie by lie refutation of your revisionist history. But I did want to focus on this.
    “But don’t you think Iran would have less rhetorical and actual power, and would have less of a mouthpiece, if the very real historical problem of the oppression of the Palestinians was solved?’
    I doubt it. Because the same Iranian regime CAME TO POWER at the time that the U.S. had engaged in its most aggressive and successful mideast diplomacy to date.
    Again, I think the Camp David accords were a great thing. But the rise of the Ayatollahs at that time is a pretty clear example to end the myth that pressuring Israel for peace is not the key to diffusing Islamic extremism.

36. The main point of all the discussion has missed here.
    First there is no doubt that Israelis to some degree apprehended towered Palestinians, you like or not, that not can change the minds and the reality on the ground.
    Yes Israel move forwards and the apprehended polices changed forwards less and less, but in other hand the Palestinians went from bad to worse in their life and socially we can say every things goes badly this due to many things but the majors:
    1- Israeli Policies and settlements here and there and the continuing of the occupations and grabbing lands.
    2- The suffering of Palestinians economy and social services this due two factors the Palestinians authority corruptions and Israel heavy handed of the restrictions and money handover to the Palestinians authority which make this authority unfunctional and powerless to meet their promises of hope to help and developed things on the ground.
    In other hand I don’t know why this book or this discussion have this rejections and objection by Israelis why not come forward and give your reactions your good things that prove what said is “not true” or is “not accurate” in stead of taking any discussion to start a personal attacks?
    Is it the discussion bad? No I think if more discussion take place openly will give opportunity to correct ourselves and move forward.
    In the end this matter not can be solved unless Israeli need to understand if they like to live in this region they should come down and negotiated for peace deal in good well and open minded and we can say Saudi King Abdullah peace offer will be a good start for the support that Arab state agrees upon and the recognition by few Israeli official of this offer just recent weeks “after TWO years when the offer made by Saudi King Abdullah).
    As for the Palestinians they need pomp up money for social service employment and education, and I believe the education should be first priority as will make the people more responsible and open minded for the future and the better of the society.
    In the End Israelis should understands and this also to the Americans in Iraq, respect others as you like to be respect by others

37. Salah,
    I have a question for you: Do you think the Saudi of Jordanian Abdullahs, or Mubarak, et al. will ever, ever do anything that would remotely benefit the Palestinians? Isn’t that like expecting the Bush family to take up the Palestinian cause?
    I know you don’t like the Iranians, and you think the Saudis and their mob are a counterweight to Iran, but I think in that haste, as the saying goes, you are trusting your chicks to the fox.

38. Salah,
    I am sorry that was supposed to read “Saudi or Jordanian Abdullahs”, referring the two puppets in Riyadh and Amman. Please excuse the typo.

39. Joshua, where did I ever make a personal attack on you? Me saying that you’re not progressive does not constitute an attack, sir. It’s more an objective observation. If you’re truly progressive, you will not support the status quo sustained by Bush and Olmert. The status quo involves occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land, and also if you read the news, you saw the Israeli high court approved assassinations of Palestinian fighters. Is this moral? No. Just as it’s immoral for the US to torture and remove habeas corpus from suspected terrorists, it’s also immoral for Israel to kill Palestinians to prevent violence. There is such a thing as proportionate responses, and imprisoning the entire Palestinian government is simply not fair and denies them any kind of representation.
    How am I being revisionist? I realize that Iran is making things harder by supporting Hamas and Hezbollah, for instance, and I obviously find their rhetoric and Holocaust conference deeply objectionable. But ultimately we need to judge countries and leaders by their actions, not just their deeds. I’ve said this many times. So we should be conscious of Iran’s sustaining of assymetric warfare, but at the same time we should judge the people who maintain the status quo and who have been deeply aggressive not just in rhetoric but in deed- the US and Israel. It’s not revisionist to find the invasion and occupation of Iraq or the wholescale bombing of Lebanon in response to the capturing of two soldiers to be deeply immoral.
    By the way, Clinton held secret talks with former Iranian reformist President Mohammed Khatami. Bush completely scrapped this and inserted Iran into the Axis of Evil. What could possibly be the result from this but the rise of a hardline reaction?

40. Has anyone actually read the book?

41. JES is going into throes to pin the ultimate sin of “holocaust denial” on me.
    I will paraphrase the HA’ARETZ article again.
    Sometime in May (I believe the occasion was the zionist entity’s celebration of the day the UN declared it a state) Angela Merkel landed in Tel Aviv bearing several volumes. These volumes contained the names of the 150 000 jews that were holocausted in Germany. The Ha’aretz article then went on to state that before the war 650 000 jews lived in Germany, and that MOST OF THEM SURVIVED.
    Now, if JES considers that “holocaust denial”, he should include Ha’aretz.
    The Ha’aretz article came into discussion only because I believe JES himself referred to the holocast.
    JES, you sound like a creationist. Everything in history should be open for examination and discussion, including the holocaust. Do you really believe that the jews’ sufferings were somehow more “special” than, let’s say, the ten million Ukranians that were starved to death by the Bolsheviks?

42. Has anyone actually read the book?
    Yes.

43. Helen,
    Thanks!

44. You call the exclusion of Israel from a Mid-East peace conferenc stupid. I agree. Do you agree that the policy of excluding Palestinians, which has been the “unilateral enforcement” policy of the Israeli gov’t for the past several years is equally stupid and counter-productive? Do you buy the lame excuse of “there is no partner for peace on the Palestinian side”?
    Did I say any of these things David? BTW, when did you and Helena stop beating your spouses.
    Helena,
    Here’s what Kassandra said, you tell me what this is:
    OK JES, let’s do numbers. Let’s say the 500 000 that lived in Germany before the war were all deported to Poland, where let’s say all were holocausted. Add 150 000 from Germany. Now, that leaves the rest of Europe. Were there
    5 350 000 jews in the rest of Europe that were available for holocausting???
    Posted by: kassandra at December 12, 2006 11:28 PM
    It’s on your blog (down there in the duscussion on Olmert & nukes), and I don’t know about you, but I certainly find that a lot more offensive than calling Jimmy Carter and “Idjit”. Maybe you’d like to go delete that too?
    Nobody likes a bully Helena!

45. The status quo involves occupation of Palestinian and Syrian land, and also if you read the news, you saw the Israeli high court approved assassinations of Palestinian fighters.
    And Mike, if you read the news a bit more carefully, you’d see that the High Court decision was not nearly as simplistic as you state it here. (BTW, where in international law is it illegal to kill combatants or, as you call them “fighters” who pose a threat either to soldiers or civilians?)

46. JES, I assumed it was illegal to kill fighters unless they’re actually engaged in combat. I’m not sure about the legal aspect- Helena, can you inform us? But from a moral perspective, it’s as wrong as the death penalty. If they have evidence Palestinian fighters are guilty of any real crime, let them put them before a court with evidence, not butcher them. As Helena reminds us, do we rape rapists? So why should we kill killers?
    Your subtlety here completely misses this moral dimension.

47. Mike,
    Again, go and read the reports and the decision itself before shooting from the hip:
    http://elyon1.court.gov.il/Files_ENG/02/690/007/a34/02007690.a34.pdf
    The High Court in no way provided any sort of blanket approval for “targetted assassinations”. The opposite is true.
    Re. my (or the court’s)subtlty, I think that the blinders that you are wearing cause you to completely miss the fact that these “fighters”, as you call them, are combatants and that they regularly attempt to kill Israeli civilians. (BTW, you may want to take a look at the number of Qassams fired into Israel since the ceasfire.)

48. “I assumed it was illegal to kill fighters unless they’re actually engaged in combat.”
    Think about it this way, Mike. Do you think JES et al. would say it is illegal when Palestinians kill Israeli soldiers who are not on duty, and just going about their business? And what would they say about the act if there were “collateral damage” – that is, these Palestinians killed innocent civilian bystanders while killing these off-duty soldiers? And what would they say about Palestinians killing Israeli political leaders?
    Now, let’s see what they say about the case when the shoe is on the other foot.

49. Hey Tupharsin, welcome back. You owe me a dinner, rememebr the bet. When can we talk about collecting?
    Best,
    Davis

50. I’m redacting my previous, deleted post because I think it is important.
    If find it interesting that posters here make ageist references about Baker and Hamilton, referring to them as “two old white guys”, when Jimmy Earl Carter is five years older than Baker and six years Hamilton’s senior, and the former president is certainly “white complected”.

51. I have redacted my previously censored and deleted post because I think it is instructive:
    I find it interesting that some people here have resorted to ageist depictions in referring to Baker and Hamilton as “two old white guys” when Jimmy Earl Carter is five years older than Baker and six years Hamilton’s senior, and he is certainly “white complected”.

52. Can Israeli policies get more ridiculous than this?
    http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/790933.html
    No more hitching in the W. Bank
    By Amira Hass
    “The OC Central Command, Yair Naveh, dropped a cluster bomb early this week. He signed an order barring Israeli citizens from taking Palestinian passengers in their Israeli vehicles within the West Bank. The order will take effect on January 19, 2007 and it exempts those who take Palestinians with permits to enter Israel and the settlements, or those who take their first-degree relatives with them.”
    Also, there is a very important article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle on how the US is training Palestinian security forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas and thus contributing to a possible civil war. It’s called “U.S. training Fatah in anti-terror tactics. Underlying motive is to counter strength of Hamas, analysts say. ”
    http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/12/14/MNGIPMV3N61.DTL

53. I had heard that some Palestinian-Israeli students studied at the college in Ariel. But can they buy (or even live in) houses there when they graduate?
    They are entitled to do so under Israeli law, which forbids housing discrimination. Of course, there’s a great deal of discrimination outside the law in Israel, as there is in other societies. I don’t know whether any Arab graduates of Ariel College have settled down there, or if any have even tried to do so. I once heard that a couple of Arab faculty members live in Ariel full time, but this information came secondhand and I have no proof of it. All I can tell you is that if a Palestinian-Israeli went to court to assert the right to live in Ariel, he would win.
    I guess one of the points I was trying to make in my post is that apartheid wasn’t only about racial oppression… but was equally about the grabbing of the land and resources of an indigenous people by a community made up of colonial settlers.
    Granted. But although apartheid is a form of settler colonialism, the reverse is not true: i.e., not all colonialism is apartheid. The trouble with using the term “apartheid” as a synonym for colonialism is that (1) the popular understanding of the term incorporates both grand and petty apartheid as well as their underlying ideology; and (2) the legal definition of the term (see art. 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute) requires the intent to maintain an “institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by [a] racial group.” Given these usages, it’s folly to think that the term “apartheid” would be understood as meaning simply “colonial settlement.”
    Note that I have no problem with the West Bank occupation being described as “colonial,” nor do I object to comparisons with other colonial conflicts such as the Algerian war. Had Carter’s book been titled “Peace Not Colonialism,” “Peace Not Occupation” or “Peace Not Land Grab,” we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
    Of course the Ethiopian Jews rushed to Israel in those airlifts are people. So were the millions of Ethiopian non-Jews who were equally starving and in dire human need of having their lives saved at that time
    Israel didn’t have the resources to save all the Ethiopians, and chose to rescue a historically oppressed group with which it had an affinity. The ethics of this decision, as with any decision on refugee policy (e.g., evacuating foreign nationals from Lebanon while leaving those without foreign passports to face the bombs), are open to debate. But your original assertion was not that the airlift of Ethiopian Jews was discriminatory, but that they were “imported” to deflect outside accusations of racism. I assume you are no longer advocating this position.

54. Thank you Jonathan. You have made the point much better than I.
    Have you read Aharon Barak’s decision, and, if so, do you have any comments?

55. Bob, you seem to be arguing that because the occupation is a problem, every negative description of Israel must simply be assumed to be true, and that anyone who disputes the accuracy of such terms is part of the problem. If that isn’t your argument, please correct me. If you are making that contention, then forgive me if I disagree with it. I’d argue that objective accuracy is always at issue even if it gets in the way of polemic.
    Suppose that instead of calling his book “Peace Not Apartheid,” Carter had titled it “Peace Not Genocide,” and that he had used the terms “genocide” and “holocaust” liberally throughout the book before acknowledging that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was really a colonial war rather than a genocidal campaign. Would you still think this was an appropriate method of “breaking through the limits” (which, given the amount of public criticism to which Israel is currently subjected, exist largely in fantasy) and stimulating debate, or would you think that it might carry the demonization of Israel a little too far?
    I have no problem with criticizing Israel or with advocating a fair solution for the Palestinians, and I’ve done both of these, in public, on many prior occasions. At the same time, I don’t think this means that Israel should be required to accept any slander with silence in the interest of “breaking through the limits.” Everyone benefits most when the situation is described as it actually is, and terms that unfairly delegitimize a particular party do more harm than good in curing the underlying problem.
    Think about it this way: if someone is on trial for theft, would calling him a murderer help the jury reach a fair verdict, and would he be out of line to object if the prosecutor described him as one on summation?

56. Salah, you are a poet and a scholar. I don’t always agree with you, but this time I agree not merely 100 but 110 percent.
    JES, I’ve read the judgment, and my analysis of it is here. Shirin, you might be interested to know that one of my criticisms of the ruling is precisely that it lacks reciprocity, although I view many other parts of it as legally sound.

57. John Dugard is a South African law professor teaching in the Netherlands. He is currently Special Rapporteur (reporter) on Palestine to the United Nations Human Rights Council., he writes his thoughts about Carter book its worth reading his thoughts specially when said:
    In principle, the purpose of military occupation is different from that of apartheid. It is not designed as a long-term oppressive regime but as an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement. But this is not the nature of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. Since 1967 Israel has imposed its control over the Palestinian territories in the manner of a colonizing power, under the guise of occupation. It has permanently seized the territories’ most desirable parts — the holy sites in East Jerusalem, Hebron and Bethlehem and the fertile agricultural lands along the western border and in the Jordan Valley — and settled its own Jewish “colonists” throughout the land.
    David,
    I don’t like to be drifted to other topic from the main, but what I can say the Saudi King Abdullah peace offer is agreed and approved by Arab League and this is the first time ever that Arab state agrees on a peace talk with Israel and approved by their acceptance with the Arab league meeting.
    I think this a big step & opportunity to take this offer forward and it’s now for Israel to show the good well to get involved to resolve this long saga, although Israelis rejected the offer proposed early this month Franc and Spain for peace proposal which Israel rejected before knowing what the details are!
    Also Israeli refused the call made from EU for international summit to start peace talk for ME conflicts.

58. The Saudi Peace Initiative: What Is And Isn’t New
    “ Since it was first broached in an interview between Saudi Crown Prince ‘Abdullah and The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman in the Times on February 17, a great deal of attention has been paid to the peace initiative proposed by the Crown Prince, which has been characterized as a Saudi “peace plan” under which the Arab world would offer full normalization with Israel in exchange for a full withdrawal to the 1967 borders. The suggestion, according to ‘Abdullah, would be made in a speech to the forthcoming Arab League Summit in Beirut.”
    While it was unremarkable that Arab countries engaged in the peace process such as Egypt and Jordan promptly supported the proposal, Syria too quickly joined in support. The European Union began actively promoting the idea, and the US, somewhat reluctant at first (characterizing the proposal as positive but without much enthusiasm) also seemed to be exploring whether the plan could offer a formula for breaking the present bloody impasse (See the Related Story on Page One).
    The Israeli response was more measured of course. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon indicated that he would be willing to engage in direct negotiations with the Saudis, which missed the point that the Saudi proposal was for an Arab League initiative; “

59. John Dugard… writes… military occupation… is not designed as a long-term oppressive regime but as an interim measure that maintains law and order in a territory following an armed conflict and pending a peace settlement.
    Bollocks. Some of the post-WW1 occupations (Rhineland, for instance) lasted up to 12 years and could be described as “long-term oppressive regimes,” and both they and the post-WW2 occupations were much in mind when the Fourth Geneva Convention was drafted. Occupation is control of territory by a hostile military force, for however long and whatever purpose the control is exercised.

60. Thank you Jonathan. Your referenced commentary was very interesting, and I found myself agreeing with much of what you said.
    Re. the Dugard statement, it appears to me that this is a good example of the Carter sleight of hand you pointed out earlier. First he contrasts military occupation with apartheid. He then tries to disqualify what, I think, we all call here “the occupation” as a military occupation, leaving the reader to assume that: If military occupation is not apartheid, and Israel’s presence in the West Bank is not military occupation, then it is, somehow, apartheid. He therefore offers us the spurious equation without ever needing to examine what aphartheid is (and isn’t) or how the specific case in the West Bank might be different from what existed in South Africa.

61. Reported in Ha’aretz (January 18, 2005):
    Some 63 percent of the Palestinians support the proposal that after the establishment of the
    state of Palestine and a solution to all the outstanding issues – including the refugees and
    Jerusalem – a declaration will be issued recognizing the state of Israel as the state of the
    Jewish people and the Palestinian state as the state of the Palestinian people…On the Israeli
    side, 70 percent supported the proposal for mutual recognition
    Ze’ev Maoz, in an article entitled “Israel’s Nonstrategy of Peace,” argues that
    Israel has a well-developed security doctrine [but] does not have a peace policy…Israel’s
    history of peacemaking has been largely reactive, demonstrating a pattern of hesitancy,
    risk-avoidance, and gradualism that stands in stark contrast to its proactive, audacious, and
    trigger-happy strategic doctrine…The military is essentially the only government
    organization that offers policy options – typically military plans – at times of crisis. Israel’s
    foreign ministry and diplomatic community are reduced to public relations functions,
    explaining why Israel is using force instead of diplomacy to deal with crisis situations
    (Tikkun 21(5), September 2006: 49-50).
    THE PROBLEM WITH ISRAEL
    By Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
    Jonathan Edelstein, Thank you.

62. My apology for the above broken link, this the link
    THE PROBLEM WITH ISRAEL

63. “The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens—and honor its own previous commitments— by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel’s right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories. It will be a tragedy—for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world—if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail.”
    Copyright © 2006 by Jimmy Carter
    http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6543594

64. Jonathan,
    Thank you for the link to the Rome Statute. I am no legal scholar, but I read it differently. The article you referred to says: ‘(h) “The crime of apartheid” means inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime;’ And of the crimes referred to in paragraph 1, several of them easily apply, including but not limited to “Deportation or forcible transfer of population” and “Imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law” and “Torture” and “Persecution against any identifiable group or collectivity on political, racial, national, ethnic, cultural, religious, gender as defined in paragraph …” and “Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”
    Now all of this sounds awefully familiar to anyone who has seen the condition in the West Bank and Gaza.
    I assume you will argue that it is not “systematic oppression and domination by one racial group” since theoretically Arab Israelis can also partake in the “oppression and domination”. I don’t really find that plausible. That is like saying that the slavery of the black race in the US did not qualify for racial slavery because a few affluent and free blacks could also own black slaves. The reality of the matter is that there is no such thing as an Arab settler phenomenon, and I don’t imagine that any significant number of the Israeli Arabs would support the “oppression and domination” of their brethren. Even if we find a few Arabs who happened to join the rampage, I think the fact that 95%+ of the settlers are of one race, and 95%+ of the oppressed and dominated are of another race makes it fairly clear that the “system” is really oppression and domination by one race against another.
    And while I have your attention, I really enjoy your blog. I have learned a lot about African geopolitics and more.

65. Salah,
    I am not sure this is “drifting to another topic”. The corrupt and colonial-puppet nature of the Arab leaders, especially the Jordanian and Saudi puppet monarchies, lies at the heart of the Palestinian disaster. The history of the 1948-9 war is replete with deceptions and treachery to the Palestinians by Malek Abdullah. Ben Gurion’s memoirs are full of grateful references of how consistently acted against the Palestinians. And this is a pattern that has only become worse with Malek Hussein and now with this midget creature. And the Saudis being puppets on strings from their initial inception is no secret. How do you imagine that a plan that is proposed and enacted by these traitors and tyrants could save the Palestinians?

66. David,
    “Deportation or forcible transfer of population”
    How exactly does this apply?
    Further, I think that all of the crimes you cited from the Rome Statute are the logical outcome of Hamas policy as stated in the organization’s convention.

67. David,
    How do you imagine that a plan that is proposed and enacted by these traitors and tyrants could save the Palestinians?
    David ,with all due respect of your thoughts, I don’t like to say again I am Iraqi I spent 40 years in Iraq I left Iraq 10-Oct-1994, My father’s stories about Othman and WWII, WWII still in my ears , the stories of 1948 war its deep in my heart and my mind, the Voices the aggression and insult of Israeli/Franc/UK war in 1956 in my head, the war in 1976 I lived those days second by second and more stores came from those Iraqi heroes who defended Plastein “Ask the Israeli will tell you about them and their bravery”, the sounds of war 1973 same on top of the above when Arabs showed the Israeli who they are.
    Finally my turn Iraq/Iran war 4 years and 8months, Kuwait invasion war 1 year…. so do you need more what I have been….my history tells me about the Babylonians and their ultimate achievements which I am very proud of been born in Babylon what else city can be.
    So Please for give me if I say I knew and I lived what you wrote I knew more what you stated but the time change those “The corrupt and colonial-puppet nature of the Arab leaders” we livening with them and hopping that we achieving some good things from them after many experiences with Britt’s in 1900 in Iraq and ME, France in North Africa, Italy in Libya when millions of Arabs slaughtered and massacres, lastly US occupation in Iraq what a perfect example that telling our “The corrupt and colonial-puppet nature of the Arab leaders” more human and more friendly than you indeed.

68. Further, I think that all of the crimes you cited from the Rome Statute are the logical outcome of Hamas policy as stated in the organization’s convention.
    The implication being that Hamas, which was founded in 1987, is responsible for the crimes of the occupation?
    Spin, baby, spin.

69. JES,
    >>”Deportation or forcible transfer of population” How exactly does this apply?
    Hmmm … just looking at Gaza, wouldn’t it apply to the 12,000 men, women & children Israel stuck in those secret prisons in Sinai in 1971, prisons the Israeli League for Human & Civil Rights correctly described as “concentration camps.” Or to the other 13,000 Gazans Sharon uprooted that same year, as he set about “thinning out” refugee camps in the Strip.
    And this would be over 15 before the founding of Hamas.

70. There is saying in Arabic/Iraqi about those who play like “the metal Mercury you can’t hold it because it is like liquid” or they really sloppy and spin all the time and arguing unarguable matters like JES,
    The saying translates, “He is like a cat any way you throw her she fall on her feets!!”
    So let keep in mind when we discuss things here with some commentators here

71. Now all of this sounds awfully familiar to anyone who has seen the condition in the West Bank and Gaza.
    Like most penal laws, though, the Rome Statute definition of apartheid requires a specific state of mind as well as specific acts. In order to prove “the crime of apartheid,” it isn’t enough to show that oppressive policies exist; it’s also necessary to demonstrate that the purpose of those policies is to perpetuate a system of racial subjugation. This actually dovetails pretty well with the common definition of apartheid, which incorporates the underlying ideology.
    If the WB occupation policies most often associated with apartheid (e.g., the movement controls and bypass roads) had existed prior to the intifadas and were part of an overall plan to colonize the territory, then a prosecutor might have a case. Given that the events happened in the reverse order and that they were primarily a response (albeit a haphazard and often disproportionate and oppressive one) to the violence, it would be hard to make out the intent element in a court of law. If anything, the occupation has tended to move away from the apartheid model over time and more toward a straightforward conflict between nations – for instance, the Palestinians are no longer used as a pool of cheap labor as they were in the 1970s-80s.
    I guess what I’m driving at is that, given that “apartheid” is one of the few things that the world has seen fit to define as a crime against humanity (and therefore irredeemable), accusations of apartheid shouldn’t be tossed around casually. To do so is not only to unfairly demonize the accused but to devalue the term. I’ve seen “apartheid” used recently for everything from the Kyoto treaty to EU refugee policy, and it would be a shame if it came to mean nothing more than “any unequal relationship with vaguely racial overtones.” That would make it about as meaningful a word as “liberal” or “neocon.”
    And while I have your attention, I really enjoy your blog. I have learned a lot about African geopolitics and more.
    Thanks. To show how weird I am, I first learned of Naomi Chazan as an Africanist rather than a member of Knesset.
    Anyway, it’s a busy day and it’s looking like a busy weekend, so I’ll bow out here. Feel free to visit and comment at my place.

72. Jonathan Edelstein,
    In order to prove “the crime of apartheid,”
    Although your approach is understandable and accurate, but in case of State of Israel, I don’t think we need Baker-Hamilton Study Group to prove there are polices gathered with ” demonstrate that the purpose of those policies is to perpetuate a system of racial subjugation” or we would like to see a study like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt to agree upon to give approve of Israeli behaviours or crimes.
    I think the simple sources are UN and UN Agenises with their on going reports about the suffering and inhuman disastrous live the Palestinians had and having from 1948 till now.

73. Jonathan Edelstein: “Bob, you seem to be arguing that because the occupation is a problem, every negative description of Israel must simply be assumed to be true, and that anyone who disputes the accuracy of such terms is part of the problem. If that isn’t your argument, please correct me. If you are making that contention, then forgive me if I disagree with it. I’d argue that objective accuracy is always at issue even if it gets in the way of polemic.”
    Jonathan, I assume I am the one you are asking to respond. First, though, I thank and commend you for adhering to Helena’s request for “comments that are courteous, fresh, helpful, and to the point.” I imagine that is not always easy where one has very strong feelings. I will try to do you the same courtesy, and I sincerely invite you to let me know if you think I have failed that standard.
    However, your characterization of my comment misses the mark entirely. My point was two fold: 1) that the focus on the appropriateness of Carter’s use of “apartheid” diverts our attention from the elephant in the room — the unjust Israeli occupation; and 2) if Carter’s use of “apartheid” — even if technically inaccurate in this instance – succeeds in engendering a more robust and realistic debate over the implications of the uncritical US support of the occupation, then that far outweighs Carter’s failure (if it is in fact a failure) to provide the most accurate title for his book.
    Your characterization of my argument also gives me an opportunity to make a further point about what is one of the most debilitating aspects of the discussion in the US of the Israeli occupation: the immediate leap from hearing a specific criticism of an Israeli government policy to the assertion that the criticism means “every negative description of Israel must simply be assumed to be true.”
    From the evidence of your other posts, Jonathan, that’s a leap that’s unworthy of you, and it illustrates Carter’s point that, tragically, real dialog in this country has been avoided, especially in the past 6 years.
    Shutting down discussion with the rhetorical equivalent of “massive retaliation” surely doesn’t benefit the Israelis – who appear to have a much more vigorous and open discussion of their government’s policies than we in the US have had in my lifetime (and I first became aware of the “Palestinian Problem” in 1961 in discussion with a fellow student who had spent time on a kibbutz).
    I am quite willing to stipulate – as I believe Carter is also – that there is injustice on both sides. Now, what can we usefully say that might bring about justice for both sides?
    Sadly, tragically, few discussions ever get that far in the US, especially at the level of those who make or finance US policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. You apparently listen to the American public discourse and hear mostly harsh criticism of Israel, but I see politicians running to embrace Israel and disavow criticism (as when the chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the incoming Speaker of the House rush to disassociate the Democratic Party from a book which they probably haven’t read and declare, as Pelosi did, that “We stand with Israel now and we stand with Israel forever”). I’m sure there is harsh criticism in some quarters, but in the one place where it really counts – the formulation and funding of American policy – Israel appears to me to be getting a fairly smooth ride. So I say my government is perpetuating injustice and we need to talk about changing that.
    I see in Newsweek that 2,00 people waited in line at a Tempe Arizona bookstore for Carter to sign his book for them. I hope you can also see this as a hopeful sign that average Americans may be beginning to engage in a real discussion that might eventually lead to renewed US support for a just settlement for both Israel and the Palestinians.
    So you can better understand my position in this matter, this is literally the first time I have ever written anything anywhere about Israel and the Palestinians. My criticism – from letters to arrests and jail — of unjust government policies have for over 40 years been directed solely at my own government. So, in keeping with that approach, I think that the best way for Americans to truly support Israel is by pressuring our own government to end its support for any Israeli government policy which fails to meet the test of justice for both sides.

74. Paul Woodward’s comments on the American reaction to the apartheid controversy are worth reading, as usual.

75. Jonathan Edelstein – would you care to comment on this article by Jonathan Cook? This is the dilemma, is it not?

76. Salah,
    I agree with you. Although Jonathan is skillful at making legal-sounding arguments, and he no doubt contributes to the breadth of discussions at JWN (as well as to the keen understanding of Africa on his own webblog) I always find his attempts to run cover for Israel regarding its responsibility for the miserable situation of the Palestinians unconvincing.
    Jonathan,
    You typically build your analysis on counter-arguments to another’s point previously made, and then work from the assumption that the counter-argument you build provides a complete 100% refutation of this other’s original point. As usual though your counter-arguments are incomplete, and you leave gaping holes through which one may drive a Mack truck.
    Today a majority of Americans see through the lawyerly spin of Middle East issues that you and other proponents of the Israeli case are accustomed to make. When a long line of media talking heads (Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Glenn Beck, the crew at Faux News, etc) go on the air to bash former president Jimmy Carter and his book, Americans understand this is a hit job. It is media spin that arised from a sense of desperation and loss of control. And one senses the same in your counter-arguments above.
    Jimmy Carter in plain-speaking terms is correct when he says that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands and the creation of separate Bantustans with ID cards and military check points are not exactly the same as South Africa’s former apartheid system, but the situation is close enough to call it by the same name. Of course it is true: Israel operates an apartheid system in the Palestinian territories. One has to be an idiot, or brainwashed by CNN and the other AMerican broadcast media, not to realize that this is Apartheid. Even South African Desmond Tutu calls it apartheid.
    Your argument is that Israel established the main characteristics of its colonial occupation in Palestinian lands after the outbreak of Palestinian violence in the 1980s and then especially after 2000. True, but so what? Does this mean that the Israeli occupation forces treated the Palestinians who were under occupation in the late 1960s and 1970s as if they were not under an apartheid system. There are degrees of severity under which an apartheid system is enforced, but it may still be called apartheid.
    For those of us who have been following these issues from the beginning, and witnessed first hand the conditions in the Palestinian occupied territories prior to the first intifada in 1987, we can recall that the Palestinians spoke of apartheid-like conditions, with discrimination and denial of rights. Are you suggesting that Israel opened its arms to the Palestinian people prior to the first intifada? Why do you think the intifada started? The fact that Israel responded to the first and then the second Palestinian intifada by developing more obvious outward forms of apartheid does not exclude the possibility that there were less obvious form or concealed forms of apartheid prior to the intifada.
    Again, these points are rather obvious to anyone familiar with the development of Israel’s occupation. Pres. Carter is familiar, and more Americans are becoming familiar. The fact that Israel’s apartheid system has become so obvious to any reasonable person is what compelled Carter to use the word in the title of his book. As Helena points out, Carter should have gone much further in laying out the apartheid argument in the body of his book. Today it is required that people speak out against Israeli apartheid, and Carter is helping to make this happen. The American people are gradually becoming more bold in speaking the truth about the consequences of Israeli policies.
    The root of Israel’s apartheid system, as you well know Jonathan, goes beyond the occupation of territories in 1967. And this is what makes the parallel to apartheid stand out. You well know that the formation of Israel from the beginning, as expressed by the Zionist leadership, was to create a Jewish majority on land that could be claimed for a Jewish state. The deepest root of Israeli apartheid is surely this demographic calculus. No one wants to speak about it, no one wants to call attention to the fact, but it was the Jewish exclusivist nature of the Zionist project that first created the apartheid problem.
    Sure there were some Zionist settlers who had universalist intentions toward the non-Jewish Arab people living on the land, but the driving force in elite circles was racially exclusivist. As Helena points out racism or racialism is not just a matter of skin color (thus in my mind the issue of the Falasha is unimportant). It concerns any issues involving heritage and descent. Thus statist Zionism was inherently like apartheid because it sought control of land for the benefit of a new to-be-created Jewish majority, the Jewish colonizing settlers. Again, for anyone with eyes to see, this was obviously a racialist enterprise to establish the state of Israel, and it derived precisely from 19th century European conceptions of ethno-nationalism mixed with religious millennialism.
    When one understands these roots of Israel’s apartheid system, it is easy to see how the exlcusion and separation of Palestinians living on the land occurred. It actually began as long ago as the 1910s and 1920s when the Jewish Agency began buying larger tracts of agricultural land and replacing the Palestinian sharecroppers with kibbutzim. The kibbutz movement carried within it the first seeds of apartheid, and Palestinians began to rebel and resist as early as those years because they saw what was coming, despite the denials of the Zionist leadership. I am sure you know this history, and are aware of the first Palestinian intifada, 1936-1939.
    After the UN decision on partition in 1947 and even before the formal declaration of ISraeli statehood in 1948, Zionist militias began clearing Palestinians from the land designated for the Jewish state. Of course the UN’s plans stated that the non-Jewish people on Israeli territory should have full rights as citizens of the new state, but this did not stop Israel’s militias and armies from ethnically cleansing the land of most non-Jewish residents, destroying Palestinian villages, and preventing the exiled refugees from returning home. Israel always denied that these were willful acts of its leadership, but we have eyes to see. These factual events in history derive from the original Zionist intention to create an exclusivist Jewish state.
    Jimmy Carter and the American people are not idiots, so there is no point for ISraeli apologists like yourself to keep denying reality. Of course there is a racialist element to Israeli state policy. Of course the outcome of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land in 1967 was the creation of apartheid bantustans. All of this is as plain as the sun in the sky on a clear day. Ask any Palestinian living in the occupied territories, and they can explain it in plain language. Most Palestinians who supposedly live as equal citizens in Israel could also explain it in plain language. They or their parents remember living under discriminatory martial law for decades after 1948, despite possessing officially egalitarian citizenship as Israelis.
    This is the problem Jonathan when you use your lawyerly mind to argue these things as if it boils down to point and counter-point. You miss the obvious sun in the sky. And again I will say, this is why ol’ Bill of English Fame wrote, “first thing, let’s kill all the lawyers!”

77. You rock, Sd!
    I always thought it was said after the storming of the Bastille, first thing let’s kill the lawyers, but why quibble. You got everything else right.
    As far as the oft-repeated bleating of the Israeli apologists that we are being unfair in piling on, some of our complaints aren’t quite accurate, I say to them I really could care less. Clean up your act, Israel, and the world will love you again. The world will love you even for good acts which you haven’t done — it cuts both ways don’t you see? That’s what a reputation is all about. When someone has a bad reputation others are quite willing to believe any bad thing about that person.
    As far as Kassandra’s so-called “holocaust denial” — one of the very worst sins committed since human beings walked the earth — I have this to say.
    When I first heard this term, it applied to a small group of people who had worked out a theory that there were no gas chambers and no attempted genocides in WW2. Then the term became more encompassing — it applied to a larger group of people, more knowledgeable about WW2 events.
    I was surprised to find myself named as a “holocaust denier” not because I minimized the number of dead, as Kassandra did, but because I expanded it. I claimed a number of 20-25 million non-combatants killed as a consequence of WW2 war crimes — on both sides. 70 million dead from war crimes during the 20th century. Attempted genocide of both Jews and Roma/Gypsies during WW2. Attempted genocide of Ukranians by Stalin in the 1930’s. A total of 11 million dead in Nazi concentration camps. Putting the 6 million dead Jews into some kind of context in order that the State of Israel would not get away with using Jewish suffering and death to inflict more suffering and death.
    It seems like holocaust denial is now anything that doesn’t conform with the Israeli version. Anything that does not give the State of Israel carte blanche in dealing with Arabs, for the sake of the 6 million dead in Europe 60 years ago. American presidents in extremis will “wrap themselves in the flag”, and Old Glory has been used to excuse some pretty terrible policies. But for a State to wrap itself in “The Holocaust” in order to accomplish the ethnic cleansing of yet another wretched population — now there’s something that I would say is definately beyond the Pale.

78. Can some of you come down and stope this argument of numbers.
    Whatever number of innocent killed in Germany for no reason just because of their believe it’s a crim not be forgiven at all.
    If the killing of 10 people or 10 millions people still it’s a crime what make the Holocaust different is the Nazism determinations and planning to do it before that.
    This is very offal tragedy that some sick people planning for killing millions just because they hate them.
    However as for Muslims and Islamic world I don’t see why this conference and talk from time to time about the tragic event with all historic evidences and footages taken by different military tropes showing the instruments of death that those sick people invented to kill human being in a worst way any human can imagined.
    I don’t see what Muslims /Islamic world will win in regard of the denial if the massacres of innocent people the only thing I can say those who try playing in the history like Ahmadinajd is just sick alike those they done the crimes 60 years ago,

79. Sd: “this did not stop Israel’s militias and armies from ethnically cleansing the land of most non-Jewish residents, destroying Palestinian villages, and preventing the exiled refugees from returning home. Israel always denied that these were willful acts of its leadership, but we have eyes to see.”
    I agree with most of what you have to say, and especially “agree with your feeling” [I know that is not said in English, but it makes sense in at least 2 other languages].
    But IMHO you are mistaken about the above line. The Israeli propaganda machine denied many things for the first 30-40 years. But gradually the truth trickled out. Now, it is well established by the new generation of Zionist historians that many of the Zionists’ founding myths were absolute fabrications (perhaps the most famous being the age-old myth of “the Arab broadcasts”). Now, the most well-known of these new generation Israeli historians, Benny Morris, mentions rape, pillage, villages burnt to the ground, etc. as a matter of fact occurrence that needed to happen in order to facilitate the creation of the new state. [His notorious line being that you have break quite a few eggs to make a good omelet.] And with uncensored versions of the memoirs of Ben Gurion and many others coming out, and the same facts being reiterated in memoirs of contemporary leaders (such as Shlomo Ben Ami, foreign minister up to 2000) I don’t think it is a secret that a systematic and brutal policy of ethnic cleansing was carried out. [Please see a short list of some quotes I have posted above.]
    It is actually quite ironic. There is no shortage of quotes from leading Zionists and Israeli gov’t leaders calling Palestinians vermin, cockroaches, beasts, crocodiles, grasshoppers creatures crawling on all fours, … recorded by Israeli sources, but if you or Carter or anyone else puts a few of them side by side and draws a conclusion about a certain pattern of thought and behavior, you will automatically be called an anti-Semite who is reading off the Protocols of the Elders of Zion! Plagiarizing your metaphor, it is your fault that you see the sun. Good grief!

80. Well David,I think that you need to take those blinders off.
    About breaking eggs to make an omelet – that’s not Benny Morris; it’s Vladimir Ilych Lennin. Also, I’d like to see our quotes from “Zionists and Iraeli gov’t leders calling Palestinians vermin, cockroaches, beast, crocodiles grasshoppers creatures crawling on all fours”. (Of course, I could counter with a variety of contemporary quotes of Palestinian and Muslim leaders referring to Jews as the “sons of pigs and apes.)
    Now you talk about ethnic cleansing. Fact of the matter is, even Benny Morris is hard put to show a “systematic policy” of ethnic cleansing, and I think that Efraim Karsh and Anita Shapira, among others, have done a good job to show where Morris, Pappe and others are – shall we say – in error about their assertions and their use of quotations.
    There was, no doubt, some “ethnic cleansing” on the part of Israel during 1947-48. I think most Israelis, today, admit this and, no one really tries to hide what happened in, say Lod-Ramle in 1948.
    But, by the same token, the Palestinians under the Mufti carried out a wide range of ethnic cleansings both before and during the 1947-48 war. I might remind you of the ethnic cleansing of Hebron and Kfar Silwan in 1929, and I would point out that neither of these communities were “Zionist” in nature (the former was a centuries old community, and the latter a community of “inigenes” from Yemen). I would also remind you that every Jewish community that fell to Arab forces during the 1947-48 war was ethnically cleansed of Jews. (The same cannot be said for Arab communities captured by Israelis.)
    And finally you resort to the ultimate unsubstantiated claim: that anyone questioning Israeli claims or quoting Morris and others “will automatically be called an anti-Semite who is reading off the Protocols of the Elders of Zion!” What rubbish! Who here has called your or Jimma anti-semitic? The only charges of “reading off the Protocols of the Elders of Zion” that I have seen here refer to Hamas whose Convenant does in fact “read off the Protocols” quite explicitly.
    So, go ahead and make your arguments without fear of being labeled an anti-semite, but please try to be accurate and, if possible, to look beyond only those sources that support your case.

81. Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach into Arab Lands
    By Robert Satloff
    Was there an “Arab Schindler”? An “Arab Wallenberg”? Holocaust memorial institutions, like Israel’s Yad Vashem, have honored more than 20,000 people for saving Jews during World War II—but not a single Arab is listed among them. Seeking a hopeful response to the plague of Holocaust denial sweeping across the Arab and Muslim worlds, Robert Satloff set off on a quest to find an Arab hero whose story would change the way Arabs view Jews, themselves, and their own history. In this book—a mix of history, travelogue, and memoir—Satloff tells the story of finding much more.

82. Again I would agree with Salah, there needs to be an understanding that all “people” (defined by lines of descent) are capable of and responsible for good and bad deeds. There is no point claiming the privilege of virtue or laying the blame of sin on one “people” alone. Rather we must focus on the good or bad deeds that people commit.
    I also agree with Salah that this foucs on numbers and statistics is foolish: the massacre of one hundred, one thousand, or one million people is a horrific deed. And the fact that one “people” suffered a larger massacre than another does not privilege them any more than any other. The whole idea of privilege arising from suffering is inhumane.
    Brenda, you are the princess of rock! Go girl, but I find funny your association of Shakespeare’s line with the Reign of Terror on the streets of Paris, and then (especially) your link to the Holocaust. To paraphrase David, I know where your “feeling” comes from, and I am aware of the demagogic risks of radical speech and historic concerns that populist political appeals may lead to mob rule, but “kill all the lawyers” is a classic phrase in literature intended only for mockery. When Shakespeare originally wrote the line in the 16th century, he meant it as a kind of “lawyer joke” … hardly different from the ones we use today.
    A joke: “…coming round a steep mountain curve, a driver of a 5-ton timber truck saw two objects in the road, one of which he knew he would have to hit because if he swerved too far to one side he would crash. One object was large and in human form, while the other was small and looked like a skunk. As he approached closer he realized the human form was a lawyer, so he decided to hit the skunk because he knew the smell in his cab would not be as bad had he chosen to hit the lawyer…”
    When Shakespeare used the line in his play Henry VI, he meant for his audience to have a good laugh about the absurdity of political demagoguery. But he also intended to give expression to the popular sense of frustration with the workings of the law. Even in those days “the law” was Kafkaesque. What is so funny today, particularly in discussions of politics (and this is especially true about the politics of Israel-Palestine), is that any attempt to disclose reality, uncover the truth, acknowledge the sun in the sky is equated with “yelling fire in a film hall.” Shakespeare would not be able to write plays today, even under a pseudonym, and have them produced on stage.
    In my last post I did not raise any issue about the Holocaust, and yet the tenor of what I wrote becomes associated with “Holocaust denial.” I know this is not your point. In fact you are making the opposite point. Yet this is the climate in which Israel-Palestine politics play out today. It is deadly serious, not permitting the comic jab. Thus Shakespeare could not perform about today’s Israel-Palestine politics. Shakespeare could not tell a “lawyer joke” when lawyerese is used (inadequately) to understand the roots of Israel-Palestine violence. There is little room for the “humane” sentiments that Shakespeare saw in comic-tragedy because this issue is so serious in the popular imagination. And yet our humane sentiments are necessary if we are to see through today’s political crises, and find reconciliation.
    Finally, I confirm JES’s point about multiple sourcing, when he recommends “look(ing) beyond only those sources that support your case.” This is one of the problems in the comment sections of today’s blogosphere. There are too many people who tune in only to their “favorite” sources of information, and then adopt a position of “know-it-all.” What we have lost is the framework for humane discourse. One can see this replicating itself across cultures and “peoples.” What I would note about this issue of seeking “multiple sources” as it pertains to Israel-Palestine historiography is the following:
    Palestinian narratives about the clash with Zionism never sought to create a “cover” for their politics. Going back to the 1920s and 1930s, Palestinians were continuously saying “look the Zionists have come to push us off our land, and we must resist this process even if it means using force.” This sort of sentiment can be found in Palestinian newspapers and pamphlets of that time. Moreover the record of this Palestinian history has never been denied by the Palestinians; instead it is embraced as part of their heroic struggle. At the same time though this open and acknowledged history is used against the Palestinians when Israelis will say “look at the violence committed by the Palestinians, they acted in horrific ways against Zionist settlers.”
    This is important because it illustrates an important difference between Palestinian and Israeli historiography. It also highlights why it is necessary for people like Carter to point out uncomfortable truths about the ISraeli side of this history. In other words, JES should understand that there is a difference when it comes to consulting with different sources of information across the Israel-Palestine divide. I do not agree with his idea that Israel has officially come to terms with its own history, or that the Israelis are completely honest today when it comes to recording events as they happen. For the student of the Israel-Palestine conflict, there is a difference when it comes to interpreting Israeli and Palestinian historiography because the two processes of recording history served different purposes. In some sense the Israeli and Palestinian historiographies served rival and competing purposes.
    What is different about the Zionist or Israeli side of this common history is that the Zionists came into the land (necessarily for the sake of their political project) with a political cover… a cover for their motives. For instance from the 1900s to the 1930s Zionists would say in public “we are not coming to set up a Jewish state; we seek only a refuge or a homeland.” The reason for this is that it was too politically controversial to announce statehood at that time. And yet it was widely known that Herzl the founder of Zionism wrote a book called “The Jewish State,” and Zionist activists intended to gain political control over the land because they did not recognize the legitimacy of anyone else’s claim to the land. Most of the Zionist leadership looked at the mass of Palestinian Muslims and Christians as any 18th and 19th century European colonzers looked at other Asian or African peoples. They were “pre-modern” backward people who needed an enlightened updating.
    This example from the pre-1930s period is not the only example of Zionists using “political cover” for their actions. One can point to any number of instances across history where Zionists used a political cover for what were their true motives or intentions, and this “cover” distorts the way historical events have been interpreted and understood. Even recently during the years of Oslo, Israeli leaders committed themselves to a land for peace negotiation with the Palestinians, and yet there are massive amounts of evidence compiled by B’tselem and logged in the chronology kept by JPS, that this was political cover for a blatant “land grab.” Now the popular historical record of these years in the official US media says the Isrsaeli leadership intended to “give the Palestinians everything they wanted, or everything they needed for a unified, viable, contiguous, and independent state.” It is even said that Barak offered the same at Camp David, and yet we know this is not true.
    President Carter knows this is not true about Camp David II. Even Pres. Clinton knows this is not true; and he admitted as much when he said he felt the need to help Barak get reelected in late 2000, so he heaped praise on what Barak did at Camp David II. Meanwhile Dennis Ross wrote a book that provides the necessary political cover for Israel at Camp David II, but Clayton Swisher, Robert Malley, Hussein Agha, Susan Sontag, and others effectively undermined what Dennis Ross wrote. In other words, throughout the Israel-Palestine conflict, going back more than 100 years, there has been a willful attempt to distort the historical record on the Israeli side because it serves Israel’s politically controversial purposes.
    Here’s the importance of this issue. When one tries to make sense of the Israel-Palestine issue, and seek out multiple sides of argument, it is necessary to keep in mind that the Israeli side is willfully distorted to conceal its controversial elements. On the other side of the conflict, the Palestinians came late to this use of concealment. They engage in it today to some extent, but not nearly as effectively as the Israeli side. Look at Prime Minister Hanniyeh and others in the Hamas government who openly express their contempt for the state of Israel, and openly declare their desire for Israel to disappear off the map.
    I can remember the days back in the 1970s and 1980s, when the rare Palestinian activist or advocate was invited to attend televised discussions of the Middle East. Within the American framework of acceptable ISrael-Palestine discourse in those years, it was very difficult for a Palestinian to remain calm when expressing his views and inevitably he would become angry and outraged for all the television cameras to see. The broadcast of such an emotional explosion would be seen by the American television viewer as confirmation that the Palestinian people are violent and their violence is what drives the conflict with Israel. Until the 1990s the Palestinians failed to “conceal” their inner emotions because they usually felt empowered expressing them in front of the cameras. I would say one would probably find the same to be true if one studies Palestinian historiography, or studies the way Palestinians tell their own history. Contrary to Israeli historiography, the Palestinians is a raw and open history.
    During the last decade Palestinian officials have become more adept at the game of American public relations and media spin. After the eruption of the seccond intifada in late 2000, watching the Palestinian Authority’s spokesman perform on US television was to witness PR at some of its most professional, skillful moments. I forget the name of this spokesman, but he was the most soft-spoken and calm, rational person one can imagine. At times he flopped or mispoke, but for the most part he was a skillful match for the Israeli lobby’s PR machine.
    Sorry to be so long-winded, but the last two weeks I have been occupied with grading and giving final exams, so this is my first chance to post comments in a long time.

83. Salah, with reference to your earlier post:
    The numbers do matter, very much so. The distilling and shaping of the vast multi-national destruction of WW2 into “The Holocaust” is the very essence of Israeli Gov’t propoganda directed towards influencing the US. That is what is at the foundation of US support for Israeli policies in the Middle East.
    Placing the Jewish losses of WW2 into the context of the overall civilian losses of that war is an important piece in the dismantling of a propoganda system which keeps the war system going.
    It is not a matter of “forgiveness” of the massive Jewish losses in WW2, it is a matter of not allowing those Jewish losses to justify war in the Middle East today.
    Another important piece of the propoganda, in fact probably the only other piece, is the suppression of knowledge about Zionist leadership collaboration with the German Occupation in order to achieve their own peculiar goals. Read Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: the Banality of Evil” 1963 ed. pp125-199

84. Salah, with reference to your earlier post:
    The numbers do matter, very much so. The distilling and shaping of the vast multi-national destruction of WW2 into “The Holocaust” is the very essence of Israeli Gov’t propoganda directed towards influencing the US. That is what is at the foundation of US support for Israeli policies in the Middle East.
    Placing the Jewish losses of WW2 into the context of the overall civilian losses of that war is an important piece in the dismantling of a propoganda system which keeps the war system going.
    It is not a matter of “forgiveness” of the massive Jewish losses in WW2, it is a matter of not allowing those Jewish losses to justify war in the Middle East today.
    Another important piece of the propoganda, in fact probably the only other piece, is the suppression of knowledge about Zionist leadership collaboration with the German Occupation in order to achieve their own peculiar goals. Read Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: the Banality of Evil” 1963 ed. pp125-199

85. Salah, with reference to your earlier post:
    The numbers do matter, very much so. The distilling and shaping of the vast multi-national destruction of WW2 into “The Holocaust” is the very essence of Israeli Gov’t propoganda directed towards influencing the US. That is what is at the foundation of US support for Israeli policies in the Middle East.
    Placing the Jewish losses of WW2 into the context of the overall civilian losses of that war is an important piece in the dismantling of a propoganda system which keeps the war system going.
    It is not a matter of “forgiveness” of the massive Jewish losses in WW2, it is a matter of not allowing those Jewish losses to justify war in the Middle East today.
    Another important piece of the propoganda, in fact probably the only other piece, is the suppression of knowledge about Zionist leadership collaboration with the German Occupation in order to achieve their own peculiar goals. Read Hannah Arendt, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: the Banality of Evil” 1963 ed. pp125-199

86. I apologize for the triple posting. I tried posting this comment this morning and it didn’t go through. I tried again this afternoon and it went through 3 times.

87. brenda
    It is not a matter of “forgiveness” of the massive Jewish losses in WW2, it is a matter of not allowing those Jewish losses to justify war in the Middle East today.
    With all due respect of your view, forgive me to say I disagree! Why:
    1- The War in ME is not because of Jews people problem at all, let go back to before 1900 when the crusaders for 400yeras (correct me if wrong) continue their wars toward ME its not a Jews problem let us call it the Christianity, isn’t?
    2- The west have had enjoying their freedom and democracy, they living in a free societies which is a fruit after very hardship years and the sacrifices of millions of lives along the history, then they reached to this elevated social pyramid which deserve all respects and appreciations from all of us, I don’t see what the Jew here will be the factor to diluted these free societies and democracies to behave like they 1000 years back.
    3- With the support of the west and most of the people in the west ME have severally suffered and sufferng from the west interfering, the west using Israel as affront feet to conquered the ME, not the other way, here you need to understand without the support to Israel by the west and the western people Israeli can not go further than 1948 project.
    4- Sadly the war in Iraq prove to me “ME People” that those free societies and democracies the pople there have failed miserably to voice loud and to gain control of the war running horses which in the end we saw the disastrous war, uncivilized war in Iraq.
    Whatever we argue here in this space I believe you “Westerns” failed to take the control of good well which ended with a disastrous war killing hundreds of thousands of human for no reason.

88. Thank you, SD! You do, indeed, rock!
    “…it was very difficult for a Palestinian to remain calm when expressing his views and inevitably he would become angry and outraged for all the television cameras to see.”
    And their Zionist interlocutors knew this, and one of their many dishonest debate techniques was to try to provoke this reaction. They still do.

89. No, no.
    I insist … Salah is the King of Rock.
    In fact I have a suspicion that Salah is the King of Rock n’ Roll who faked his own death.
    Salah is Elvis!!
    Elvis lives!

90. “Salah is Elvis!!”
    No, Salah is a warrior-poet. More like the reincarnation of Ibn Shaddad.

91. Elvis ibn ‘Antara ibn Shadad.
    But we know him as Salah, the valiant rocker who shakes, rattles, and rolls every tyrant and each illegal foreign occupation force.
    His verse in English is not always comprehensible, but you feel the meaning.

92. Jes,
    ‘About breaking eggs to make an omelet – that’s not Benny Morris; it’s Vladimir Ilych Lennin. Also, I’d like to see our quotes from “Zionists and Iraeli gov’t leders calling Palestinians vermin, cockroaches, beast, crocodiles grasshoppers creatures crawling on all fours”.’
    Sorry for the delayed response; was away for a couple of days.
    About the Benny Morris quote, the original could have come from Chengiz Khan or a Mayan emperor! That’s irrelevant; the point is that Morris and others have used that line to justify the ethnic cleansing as an inevitable necessity.
    The zoological quotes you have asked for have all been attached above. They are frm Begin, Barak, Sharon, Eitan, et a. See my post above dated Dec. 14. Take a quick gander. Enjoy

93. David,
    Well, the majority of the quotations that you’ve provided are either misquotes, grossly taken out of context so as to alter their meaning, or out-and-out fabrications. I had tried to post links that show exactly where the errors, sleights of hand and lies are, but the “user-friendly” comment filter has held them up. If they don’t show up by tomorrow, I’ll try to post them individually.
    In the meantime, before proliferating such trash, I suggest you carefully check your sources.

94. http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/2006/11/18/hebron-day-06/

95. http://www.counterpunch.com/tilley12152006.html

96. David,
    Thank you for those two links.
    I am shocked, absolutely shocked to find out that the 500 or so Jewish settlers in Hebron are thugs! Shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
    I have been anxiously waiting for a Hamas lobbyist to make that ridiculous argument, and gun moll Virginia Tilley came in right on cue and true to form, blaming Israel for the cold-blooded murder of three children by (apparently) Hamas gunmen and for the emerging civil war in Gaza.
    Gee Virginia, do you ya think that the large number of weapons supplied by the various factions (with money that could have, and should have, been used for food and medicine) might have something to do with it? Gun control anyone?
    Do you think that the Palestinian people are capable of human reason, without Israeli plotting in the background to pull their strings?
    Wouldn’t it be novel if someone actually credited the Palestinian people with having some ability to take responsibility for their own actions?

97. Jes,
    If you are indeed shocked by the terrible and racist acts of the Kahanist settlers in Hebron and elsewhere, we share this point. If that was a joke, sorry but I don’t really find it funny.
    About Virginia Tilley’s article, I am not sure if you don’t really get it, or as Salah once beautifully said, you are trying to land on all four no matter what. Assuming the former (i.e. the honest) option, I will crack the nut for you. Tilley’s point is that when you commit urbicide in a society for three generations, and destroy and disrupt all elements of social life and human livelihood, life will fall apart and people will act less than civil. You cannot demolish all livelihood of a people and subject their souls to lifetime torture, yet expect them to act as if they have a home and 2 SUVs and three kids going to college, and … The point she makes about comparison to the impact of the unbearable hardships on the behavior of some of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust inside the camps is a good example. There was a great article in the New Left Review in 2003 with title “Urbicide in Palestine”, showing how systematic and well-planned it has all been. [I tried to post the link here but it won’t work because it needs a subscription since it is more than 24 months in the archive. If you have a subscription go to their site and search with the author’s name, Stephen Graham. I would email you the pdf if I could. It is very good and informative.] Also, see Kimmerling’s “Politicide: The Real Legacy of Ariel Sharon”. It is not as concise and to the point as the article though, but it gives a good idea of how the historic planning came about to not only deprive the Palestinians of land, but of any chance of having the mental and societal infrastructure for self-determination.
    So no, I don’t think Tilley is apologizing for Hamas or Fatah, or absolving anyone of their responsibility. And if I dare speak for her, I don’t think she believes that Palestinians are less than human, or incapable of human reason. Yet she also is not in denial of the effects of 3 generations of occupation, mental and physical torture and loss of loved ones, and systematic urbicide.

98. Actually David, for most of those three generations Palestinian social and economic life pretty much flourished (at least in comparison to pre-1967 and post September 2000). I have previously posted here statistics cited by Efraim Karsh that document this. To make up a term “urbicide” does not change these facts concerning phenomenal growth in GDP, the establishment of more than a half dozen institutions of higher education, increased health care and longevity and a dramatic growth in population.
    Tilley’s facile and, frankly, inapt comparison with the death camps does not change anything. Unfortunately, the inmates at Auschwitz did not have the choice between spending hundreds of millions in aid money on building their economy and society and using those funds to wage an “armed struggle”.
    Re. the thugs in Hebron: that’s exactly what they are and I neither support them, nor do I condone their actions. Further, the legitimate owners of the properties where they reside – the decendants of the Jewish community ethnically cleansed in 1929 stand, for the most part, in open opposition to the settlers in Hebron.

99. Jes,
    I am very glad to hear your view about the people you call “the thugs in Hebron”. Regarding the Palestinian urbicide, this is not a recently “made up” term. It is a term often used in sociopolitical history. It has been used to discuss many of Stalin’s destructive plans, among others.
    About how the Palestinians’ life “flourished” under Israeli occupation, I wonder if Dr. Karsh or yourself would have his family “flourish” in Gaza or Qalqalieh from 1967 to 2006. I know I would not. I would be grateful to see the statistics, but it is hard to un-see things that I have seen several times, literally with the eyes on my face. And it sure as hell didn’t look like flourishing to me.
    Dr. Karsh is a whole other topic. I recently finished his “Islamic Imperialism”. It was a tough 300 pages, and it is really, really distorted (IMHO). One of the paradigms he sets out to prove is that Mohammad ==> Saladin ==> Bin Laden. And much more along the same lines. It interested me in this guy, so I went and read his “refutations” of Israel’s new historians, and the back and forth nasty letters with Morris and Avi Shlaim. I find him and his logic quite twisted. I would not believe anything he says unless I recheck it thrice.
    And regarding money for “armed struggle” vs. food/medicine, I wish it were that simple. Yes unfortunately the inmates at the death camps did not have the opportunity to fight back and were slaughtered. But those in the Warsaw and Lodz Ghettos sure did, and did a great job of it, and their names are recorded in history as heroes. Most of humanity, and the UN Charter, recognize the “right to armed struggle” against an occupying army. I wonder if they were redrafting the Charter now, if Bolton et al. would veto that clause. It has certainly caused them a lot of trouble since its inception.

100. I might say the same about Kimmerling, for example, that you say about Karsh. The statistics are not hard to come by, and they can be compared with those from prior to 1967. They are hardly indicative of a society going through what, for example, the Jews under Nazi rule (including those in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettos) experienced.
     I believe that what you saw with your own eyes in Qalqilya was not a picture of a wealthy or particularly affluent society. But I saw with my own eyes the transformation of East Jerusalem between the late 1960s and 2000, and it was impressive.
     I would be interested in exactly what fault you found with Karsh’s analyses of Morris’ and Shlaim’s work. You might also want to take a look at what Anita Shapira had to say on the subjece. She is certainly far less combative than Karsh, but she makes many of the same points as he.
     You want to recheck things “thrice”? I suggest you begin with the quotes you provided earlier. As my other links got held up by the censors, you may want to start with this one:
     http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=22&x_article=1019

101. And here’s a second link:
     http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=73&x_article=766

102. And a third…
     http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=21&x_article=775

103. Well David, I have read Graham’s piece. I would beg to differ with your appraisal that it “show[s] how systematic and well-planned it has all been.” He does nothing of the kind. He simply sites the opinions of others and then asserts planning and systematic action.
     In reality, there are several points that need further examination (and some evidence) before one can reasonably accept Graham’s assertions.
     First, there is the issue of the bypass roads. As I recall, these were initiated under Oslo with the express purpose of avoiding friction between the populations by allowing Israelis to avoid Palestinian population centers – areas that were given autonomy under the PA. The fact that, due to violence initiated by the PA, these roads came under closer military scrutiny is a secondary, and separate, issue.
     Second, is the issue of the fence. Graham seems to ignore the fact that the idea of a separation fence was anathema to both Sharon and the “Greater Israel” right, as it very graphically (and concretely – no pun intended) separated the West Bank from Israel. In fact, the Sharon government only agreed to build the fence as a result of overwhelming public pressure to do something to stop the suicide bombings. Hardly an indication of a strategic plan for “urbicide”.
     Third, is the issue of what Graham labels as a “systematic” destruction of infrastructure, including offices, airports and government offices. This is all well and good, if one totally ignores the period of over one and a half years, under both Barak and Sharon, during which Israel scrupulously avoided major attacks against population centers in response to highly violent acts – many carried out by PA “security personnel” – by attacking these empty structures and symbols of power.
     But beyond these, lies the highly questionable central thesis of Graham’s screed: That Israeli strategy is to somehow prevent the Palestinians from achieving urbanized modernity. Not only does Graham fail to provide one shred of evidence in support of this assertion; it is also, on its face, a ridiculous argument. The purpose of the land swap proposed by Barak at Camp David was precisely for the creation of an urban center. It is the Palestinian refugees themselves, not Israelis, who characterize their return primarily to the villages and intensive (and impoverished) agriculture that they fled in 1948. And even if we are to ignore all this, how does the lack of modernized urbanization affect the phenomenal population growth that Graham cites as one of the key reasons that Israel apparently carries out “urbicide”?
     Frankly, I don’t see how any of this points out a plan to prevent the Palestinian people from having “the mental and societal infrastructure for self-determination”. What they need for state building is not a “mental and societal infrastructure”, but rather a physical and economic infrastructure that will allow them to support themselves and build urban centers, while encouraging them to finally abandon the “armed struggle” to achieve their goals.

104. a physical and economic infrastructure that will allow them to support themselves and build urban centers,
     Two points JES
     1- The money flow controlled by the Israeli occupations
     2- Most the land consents and authority controlled by occupation Israeli force and you know the rest I don’t need to go further.

105. David, if you’re interested in the statistics of GDP growth in WBG, you can find them on page 3 of this report (which is worth reading in its entirety anyway):
     http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=363320
     you’ll notice that GDP growth was strongly positive over most of the 32 years between 1968 and 2000.

106. Jes,
     East Jerusalem has always looked different from all other post-1967 territories, since Israel sees it as the “inseparable” part of its ancient capital. So I honestly believe Qalqaliyah or Rafah are better examples of life under occupation that the sanitized neighborhoods of E.J.
     I have not read Anita Shapira, but reading Karsh’s book and a few of his papers really was jaw dropping. I will look at Shapira’s work. I assume you are recommending her book “Israeli Historical Revisionism”?
     I quickly browsed through the links that you had posted; I will read them more carefully soon. Of the three web-pages of refutations of some of the quotes by the website camera, some were convincing to me. But unfortunately, the premise of “dehumanizing the enemy in ones own mind to facilitate his/her mistreatment” remains. Herzl’s quote, while it may have been said about wherever the Zionist project may have been carried out and not necessarily Arabs, clearly reeks of superiority and treating the other as less than human. I don’t really care if the other would have been an Andean native. Or Eitan’s reference to the Palestinians as “drugged cockroaches in a bottle”, even if it was the only time he ever said so in his life (much more possibly, the only time he was caught on record saying so, because we all know such things don’t just pop out of your head), underscores a certain view of the other. Would you talk or even think of anyone like that? I am pretty sure the answer is no. Would Himmler? Yes. Yes, Begin may have been chocking on his tears when he called the Palestinian guerillas “two-legged beasts”; but is it possible that the people who perpetrated the Sabra and Shatila massacre in September of 1982 had heard Begin’s address in June, and though the ones being gunned down were merely two-legged beasts, not worthy of human treatment or dignity? Or could they possibly have shared that view, without having heard him? IMHO all injustices start with dehumanization of “the other”, and this should be avoided, without any excuses accepted.
     Regarding your take on Graham’s and Kimmerling’s works on Palestinian urbicide/politicide, I respect your view. It is again a matter of “intent”. The fact that a hell of a lot of destruction happened is not contested. The issues in question are, (1) was it primary, or secondary to the “security situation”? and (2) what was the “intent”. This again, I guess, goes back to where we each start our thought process, and I am not sure there is much room for argument and counter-arguments here. What is clear to me though is that despite cause-effect and intent discussions, military occupation (with its inherent need and urgency for armed struggle), constant humiliation by a foreign and racially/religiously/culturally different dominant people, along with the many economic and other consequences that ensue, are not particularly conducive to the formation of any infrastructure, be it mental and societal, or physical and economic.

107. Vadim,
     I read the abstract; I downloaded the full text and will read it soon.
     With all due respect, statistics aside, I have a hypothetical question: If I guaranteed your life and limb, would you be willing to live in Rafah with your family for the next 3 year? 3 months? 3 weeks? Do you know of anyone who would?
     P.S. Although there is clearly much more to the story than economic indices, yet even in this realm:
     “…But other authors rather suggest that the opened access of the Israeli labor market to a large and cheap Palestinian labor force was the main driving force explaining the observed convergence in per capita incomes since 1968.” … “GDP growth is … rather spurred by the demand for non-tradable goods, fuelled by workers’ remittances.”
     “The observation of growth patterns for the period 1968-2000 suggests that growth was mainly fuelled by factor accumulation. Conversely, productivity growth hardly contributed to GDP growth, and Oslo agreements did not radically changed the situation.”
     “… the decomposition of income convergence patterns with Israel suggests a rather unusual phenomenon of divergence in productivity.”
     “…Palestinian growth under occupation was transitional rather than sustainable, as mostly driven by factor accumulation. On the other hand, technological transfers from Israel, economies of adaptation and innovation, and economies of scale that could have been encouraged by a larger potential export market remained extremely scarce all over the period of occupation.”
     “Therefore, lifting the restrictions on the movement of Palestinian people and goods between WBG and Israel – while certainly helpful and necessary to restore minimum incomes levels – is probably not sufficient to foster domestic growth in a sustainable manner.”
     Basically, this is the classic textbook definition of a colonial slave economy: the colonized people are used for cheap labor and the observable “growth” that they experience is non-sustainable as it is due to factor accumulation i.e. money sent back from workers to buy food and necessary products. There is hardly any productivity growth in the colony. The productivity patterns of the two societies show divergence, i.e. the colonial power increases productivity while the colony declines. No infrastructure is put down, and there is no transfer of technology to the colony that could lead to self-sufficient and sustainable means of production. Economic adaptation and innovation happen in the colonial power but not in the colony. And in this case it is further worsened by the security clampdown, yet even if it is raised, that is “probably not sufficient to foster domestic growth in a sustainable manner.”

108. “Herzl’s quote, while it may have been said about wherever the Zionist project may have been carried out and not necessarily Arabs…”
     I have never understood why any reasonably intelligent, rational person believes it makes one iota of difference whether Herzl was talking about Arabs, Africans, or Argentinian Indios. The point is he was talking about removing the existing population from whatever land was to become the Jewish state. And yes, it contains the assumption that the (European) Jews who would take over the land were superior and had superior rights. THAT is the point, not whether Herzl was talking about Arabs or not.
     As for Ephraim Karsh, twisted logic is putting it kindly.

109. Shirin,
     If you read the next line of my post, I have not disagreed with you.

110. “Herzl’s quote, while it may have been said about wherever the Zionist project may have been carried out and not necessarily Arabs…”
     I have never understood why any reasonably intelligent, rational person believes it makes one iota of difference whether Herzl was talking about Arabs, Africans, or Argentinian Indios. The point is he was talking about removing the existing population from whatever land was to become the Jewish state. And yes, it contains the assumption that the (European) Jews who would take over the land were superior and had superior rights. THAT is the point, not whether Herzl was talking about Arabs or not.
     As for Ephraim Karsh, twisted logic is putting it kindly.

111. David, I know you were not disagreeing with me – on the contrary. I was just putting in my two cents’ worth of agreement with you. :o}

112. Would you be willing to live in Rafah with your family for the next 3 year?
     Of course Rafah is an impoverished and underdeveloped part of the world, but according to most measures it was significantly poorer in 1967, before Israel’s occupation. It’s economy has also worsened since the 2000 intifada initiated by the Palestinians. Would I pull up my family and move there for three years? No, nor would I move to uncolonized Egypt.
     I’d agree that the study shows an undesireable dependence of Palestinians upon the Israeli economy. I’d disagree that this makes the Palestinians “slaves” of the Israelis, especially insofar as both their per capita income and actual population multiplied many times during the time you claimed their livelihoods were being demolished & their cities systematically destroyed. As far as textbook colonialism goes, most colonies have obtained “self-sufficient and sustainable means of production” and technology from their colonizer, otherwise their economies could never thrive independently. colonies also don’t traditionally depend on their metropolitans for essential services like power and water, or their inhabitants commute to the metropolitan for work. Given further the OPTs paucity of natural resources i’d say there’s nothing ‘textbook’ about it.
     No one is denying the Palestinian economy needs more independence from the Israeli economy. But ‘enabling conditions of dependence’ is a very far cry from ‘urbicide’ much less ‘genocide’ — another actual slur we see tossed around wrt the OPTs.

113. As for Ephraim Karsh, twisted logic is putting it kindly.
     Oh yeah? How so? How about substantiating your claim with an actual argument instead of spouting vapid ad hominems?

114. Vadim,
     Are you sure you are not proving my point? You are basically saying that Palestinians are doing worse under the occupation than the average colony after years of colonialism, including no effective transfer of technology or means of productivity, no infrastructure, etc. The British Mandate reports, quoted by Benny Morris and others, state that present day Israel/Palestine was much better off than the rest of Transjordan in the 20s-30s. And see how they are doing now. Yes, it is true that they are far worse off than the average colony. And this goes back to the fact that the average colonial power does not practice systematic urbicide the way Israel has. Genocide is another story, with many ends, one of which passes through certain refugee camps in Beirut, and a certain Arik and Yitzak Kahan ,,, but we are talking economy now so lets not go there.
     I am not sure that you have actually read the study. It proves much more than “undesirable dependence”. And by the way, a slave economy does not mean that the Palestinians are slaves. It denotes a situation when labor is used and discarded at will, and the laborer has no control over the means of labor; you pay me for a day’s work, and throw me on the street when you are done, and I have nothing but the pay in my hands. And people’s standard of living are not judged by per capita income, even by neoliberal WB/IMF standards. And that is why they conclude that even if all security measures were lifted, most of them could not make “minimum income” today. It is much more systematic than they would like to admit. Take a look at Joe Sacco’s “cartoon” book Palestine; it was done long before the Intifada. You will see great evidence of GDP there !
     And about the other poster’s comment on Karsh, you are wrong again. Ad hominem by definition means attacking the other sides personal status. Saying that the logic of their argument is twisted is not ad hominem. And vapid !!? Thesaurus again?

115. David,
     Actually, I was thinking of her essay in The New Republic, “The Past is Not a Foreign Country”. You can find it here:
     http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/courses01/rrtw/Shapira.htm
     I was more concerned with your cutting and pasting, apparently quite uncritically, of quotes that have been either badly redacted to modify their meaning, or those that are just patently made up. A particularly egregious example is the last “quote” you cite, which borders on libel.
     Re. Herzl’s diary entry, the issue was not whether or not he advocated “spiriting” the inhabitants out of the country, but rather the editing out of the means he advocated in doing this: by paying them inflated prices for the land and by securing employment for them. Not that I necessarily agree, but for the sake of accuracy. Further, to use Herzl’s diary entry as “proof” of some sort of policy is quite misleading. Herzl was a visionary; he did not create Zionist policy (and was, on quite a few occasions, on the losing end of significant policy decisions).
     I agree that during the periods of the first and second aliyas, the methods of dealing with Arab tenants was not the wisest or most humane. But actual policy, as developed later by the yishuv, was much different and included, not only inflated payments to land owners, but also payment to untitled tenants, purchase of alternative lands, as well as plans for assistance in implementing modern agricultural techniques to improve harvests. For a well documented look at this, you may want to read Arieh Avneri’s well documented The Claim of Disposession: Jewish Land Settlement and the Arabs, 1878-1948.
     I think that your gratuitous comparisons with Himmler are out of place. But then, what do I know, seeing as PA sponsored religious leaders and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad have already determined that I am the son of “pigs and apes”.

116. Saying that the logic of their argument is twisted is not ad hominem.
     You are correct. However, making such a statement with out substantiation is simply a meaningless assertion.

117. Are you sure you are not proving my point?
     That ‘urbicide’ equates to dramatic increases in population, earnings and standard of living ? That ‘colonialism’ applies to any economic imbalance we don’t like?
     you pay me for a day’s work, and throw me on the street when you are done, and I have nothing but the pay in my hands
     How awful! And I expected a proposal of marriage.
     I am not sure that you have actually read the study.
     Anyone with ten minutes to spare can read the 16-page paper himself and decide whether Sebastien Dessus considers the Palestinians victims of ‘urbicide’ as our friend David asserts. I’m sure that if Dessus’ bloodless econometric prose made for sexier cut-and-pastes, we’d have seen something along those lines already.

118. Ad hominem by definition means attacking the other sides personal status
     Yes, and calling someone “[personally] twisted,” chronic liar whose statistical data need rechecking not once, not twice, but thrice! on this basis is patently ad hominem. eg:
     I find him and his logic quite twisted.
     Was that you and not Shirin? Whoops, my bad.

119. Jes,
     Thanks. I downloaded Shapira’s book review from the New Republic and will read it soon. I will put Arieh Avneri’s book on my waiting list. But is he not the strong proponent of the “Arab broadcasts” myth and many other later debunked stories? I am not sure; I may be mistaking him for a similar name. I think your “not the wisest or most humane” is quite an understatement. And I fail to see Herzl as the pure (and sometimes innocent) visionary that some make him to be; the fact that he ended up at the losing end of certain policy decisions is irrelevant.
     I am not sure why it would offend you that I put you and Himmler at the two opposite ends of the human spectrum. It is unfortunate that Eitan used one of his catchphrases. I have nothing to do with Mr. Ahmaijejad (that I know of!), and do not stoop to the level of using such trash-talk about fellow humans. I have not seen this quote from him, but if indeed he has said so, more shame than before. About my finding Karsh’s logic and thought process quite twisted, I did give an example. I didn’t know you expected a book review. He quite remarkably equates Mohammad with Saladdin with Bin Laden [He doesn’t say that they are one and the same, but he leaves you with that impression]. I don’t have a religious bone in me, but to me that is like … I’d rather not even say that.
     Vadim,
     It is amazing how you pick and chose your facts, and the way you respond to one out of three lines, since the other two disprove your point. It is actually quite amusing. And yes, thank you for the chuckle. I am not sure you will get it for the third time, but I will try: urbicide does not have much to do with population or absolute GDP levels, especially when those GDP levels remain below “minimum incomes levels”. Your assertions are so preposterous, that they make for good jokes to tell over cocktails. Thank you again.
     And you must also be in the 200+ super-genius IQ range too. I work with two PhD-level statisticians, and it took the three of us quite a bit to decipher that paper’s statistical analysis. He does not use standard measures. If you did the whole 16 pages in 10 minutes and came up with all those brilliant conclusions, well no wonder you know so much. You could do very well on certain editorial boards.

120. One more thing David. In your 4:29 post you stated the following:
     And that is why they conclude that even if all security measures were lifted, most of them could not make “minimum income” today.
     A serious misrepresentation. Dessus actually says lifting restrictions are “necessary to restore minimum income levels” (adding that they’re insufficient to foster sustainable domestic growth which no one least of all myself would contest.) I think an unwholesome diet of comic books & regurgitated blood libels may have affected your critical reading ability.

121. the other two disprove your point.
     They don’t disprove anything. You said the occupation was a textbook example of “colonial slave economy” then define the term for us as
     you pay me for a day’s work, and throw me on the street when you are done, and I have nothing but the pay in my hands
     which characterizes just about every economy in the world including the US economy.
     especially when those GDP levels remain below “minimum incomes levels”.
     Maybe it’s the cocktails and not the comic books! Re-read my post above.
     I work with two PhD-level statisticians, and it took the three of us quite a bit to decipher that paper’s statistical analysis.
     Yet after all that work not a smidgen of statistical content in your ‘rebuttal!’ Go figure. All that work down the tubes.

122. It is amazing how…
     It is actually quite amusing…
     I am not sure you will get it for the third time…
     Is it talk like a robot day? Are you allergic to contractions or paid by the word? 🙂
     A joke! relax.

123. “And by the way, a slave economy does not mean that the Palestinians are slaves. It denotes a situation when labor is used and discarded at will, and the laborer has no control over the means of labor; you pay me for a day’s work, and throw me on the street when you are done, and I have nothing but the …”
     It may be tough Vadim, but try to read. This is the definition of a slave economy. The definitions of a colonial economy have been stated before and I will not bother again as it seems to be a wasted effort. And the difference between this and “just about every economy in the world including the US economy” is the complete lack of safegaurds, pensions, healthcare, rights to work and job-security against harrasment and undue firing, … I think this may be going all over your head again. Again, you are quite a hoot in the way you can’t even read properly and respond to the voices in your head. What are they saying now?

124. David I accept your gracious retraction of
     even if all security measures were lifted, most of them could not make “minimum income” today.
     which is not how the paper reads, and reiterate that many of us are “slaves” under the definition you put forward (which actually makes WBG migrant workers seem no worse off than Wal-Mart employees.)

125. How do you live with yourself? Must be tough.

126. David,
     Regarding Ephraim Karsh, one should add that in addition to his logic being twisted (and often completely non-existent), he is – to put it as nicely as possible – very selective, and often extremely footloose and fancy free with facts and reality.

127. How do you live with yourself? Must be tough.
     Boy, confronted with his embarrassing misreading of Dessus’ paper, all of a sudden the moods gone rather somber. No longer is David clinking martini glasses with his PhD chums and having a chuckle about minimum income levels. Now he’s agonizing over my well being.
     David, I’m just fine. Even though I’m an at-will employee with no job security, even though at the end of each day my boss kicks me out on the street clutching my meager pay check, I still harbor no desire to bomb him, or kick him out of the country. I certainly don’t consider him the offspring of pigs and apes. but thanks very much for your concern.

128. David,
     Regarding Ephraim Karsh, one should add that in addition to his logic being twisted (and often completely non-existent), he is – to put it as nicely as possible – very selective, and often extremely footloose and fancy free with facts and reality.

129. Helena, what’s the most comments you ever got on a thread?

130. David,
     I think that you are the last person who should be talking about use of “selective facts”.
     As for Karsh’s recent book, I also read that a few months ago. I don’t think he is trying to “equate” Muhammed, Salah ad-Din and bin-Laden (how’s the transliteration, Shirin?). Rather he is trying to show that these individuals share a common, aggressive and imperialist goal. Frankly, I think that if you asked bin-Laden – or for that matter the thousands who danced in the streets on 9/11 – if he were continuing in the path of Muhammed and Salah, they would probably answer in the affirmative.
     Your observations about Herzl are interesting. Maybe you should read some Zionist history to understand why use of Herzl’s diary as evidence for policy (or actually a plot) is kind of irrelevant. Also, you might want to look at the Avneri, and other books for the information they provide, rather than the polemics you expect to find.
     You know damn well what was gratuitous in your bringing in Himmler as well as your allusions to Sabra and Shatila as genocide. But you may want to go back and read again where this whole dance started. It had to do with you cutting and pasting quotes, a good number of which are out-and-out falsifications, and then dismissing other people by implying that their facts were wrong.
     As for GDP and other measures and your heuristic use of terms such as “slave economy” and “colonialism”, I would suggest some economics rather than the Marxist variety. You can label things whatever you like, but that doesn’t change the range of common measures that are accepted for guaging economic growth and, yes, standard of living. Further, most development economists would probably agree that sustainable and productive infrastructure is more often the result of saving and investment in that infrastructure than it is of largesse.
     Now, as to the specific case, you state (or imply, it’s really hard to tell) in falsely characterizing Israel as having operated a slave economy vis-a-vis the Palestinians, that there was a
     complete lack of safegaurds, pensions, healthcare, rights to work and job-security against harrasment and undue firing…
     Hogwash! Any Palestinian working legally within the Israeli economy who was not avoiding paying taxes was protected under the National Insurance Institute and by labor courts.

131. Here is Karsh’s summary of the economic and social data on the West Bank and Gaza. If someone wants to suggest otehr measures of economic development, then please do.
     “During the 1970’s, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world-ahead of such “wonders” as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself. Although GNP per capita grew somewhat more slowly, the rate was still high by international standards, with per-capita GNP expanding tenfold between 1968 and 1991 from $165 to $1,715 (compared with Jordan’s $1,050, Egypt’s $600, Turkey’s $1,630, and Tunisia’s $1,440). By 1999, Palestinian per-capita income was nearly double Syria’s, more than four times Yemen’s, and 10 percent higher than Jordan’s (one of the better off Arab states). Only the oil-rich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.
     “Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made vast progress in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22). And under a systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles were eradicated.
     “No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians’ standard of living. By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16 percent in 1967; 83.5 percent had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4 percent in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions, and cars.”
     “Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980’s, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990’s, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria.”

132. If apologists for the Occupation expended a fraction of the effort they apply to attempting to defend the indefensible to trying to actually end the bloody thing we would all be better off for it.
     Their intellectual contortions come across as nothing so much as sops to what one can only hope are troubled consciences.

133. Assisi,
     With all due respect, who here is trying to defend or continue the occupation? There is a difference between questioning an ubsubstantiated charge of “systematic urbicide” and defending or supporting the occupation. Perhaps if you spent more time trying to understand this distinction rather than searching for “Zionist plots” and calling people “sops”, you would be better able to make your case.
     One other thing I should mention is that the occupation has had very negative economic effects on Israel. This is particularly true in terms of large investments in non-productive infrastructure in the settlements to the detrement of productive infrastructure investments within Israel. This was a key plank, by the way, in the platform upon which Yitzhak Rabin was elected in 1992, and is one of the reasons that I have consistently opposed the occupation and settlements for years.

134. Assisi,
     With all due respect, who here is trying to defend or continue the occupation? There is a difference between questioning an ubsubstantiated charge of “systematic urbicide” and defending or supporting the occupation. Perhaps if you spent more time trying to understand this distinction rather than searching for “Zionist plots” and calling people “sops”, you would be better able to make your case.
     One other thing I should mention is that the occupation has had very negative economic effects on Israel. This is particularly true in terms of large investments in non-productive infrastructure in the settlements to the detrement of productive infrastructure investments within Israel. This was a key plank, by the way, in the platform upon which Yitzhak Rabin was elected in 1992, and is one of the reasons that I have consistently opposed the occupation and settlements for years.

135. JES,
     How else can citations such as
     “Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made vast progress in social welfare.”
     or
     “No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians’ standard of living.”
     be construed except as a defense of the magnanimous Occupation?
     I am heartened to learn that you have “consistently opposed the occupation and settlements for years” but the positions you have routinely taken on this blog have had rather more to do with hasbara spin than with how to go about dismantling the settlements and ending the Occupation. With Gaza to one side and the West Bank to the other it beggars belief that you and your fellow travelers choose to endlessly split hairs about abstractions such as definitions of urbicide or apartheid rather than face, much less admit the other variety of facts on the ground. It is little better than intellectual onanism. Meanwhile people continue to die.
     I don’t doubt that the Occupation has come at a considerable economic to cost to Israel (and the US). Some might say that the human cost of the Occupation is in and of itself sufficient reason to end it. In any case, perhaps we can agree that it would be in Israel’s enlightened self-interest to do what is necessary to cut the Gordian knot that is the Occupation without further delay.
     Please look up the word “sop” as in to a conscience. You misunderstood me.
     As to for “searching for Zionist plots”: whatever are you on about? The victim mentality is never far beneath the surface, is it?

136. Oh dear.
     Should read:
     “…much less admit any responsibility for”

137. Assisi,
     I suggest that you pay closer attention to the posts leading up to my latest ones in which David has made spurious references to “urbicide” and even to “genocide”.
     My citing of Karsh was for the information contained; not the way it was presented. If you will recall, David cited two pieces that claimed that there was a “systematic” plot or plan on the part of Israel to commit “urbicide” against the unwitting Palestinian population. I countered this with a number of exceptions, including the abovementioned evidence cited by Karsh (again, the important thing here are the accepted statistical measures and not Karsh’s specific wording).
     You can call it “hasbara spin”. I call it presenting information and countering a false argument.

138. It is little better than intellectual onanism.
     That from a master practitioner. (Pun intended. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

139. To Sd (and others):
     You seemed to find my last posts “beyond the Pale”, and incoherent to boot. Why on earth bring The Holocaust into the discussion? You may not have noticed the persistent interjections, earlier in this huge unwieldy thread, of Kassandra-criticism (way beyond the Pale) which was neatly linked to Ahmadinejad- criticism. (Way, way, way beyond the Pale, that one, we won’t consider that for even a nanosecond)
     Both of these criticisms went unchallenged. My point is that the final refuge of an Israeli apologist is The Holocaust. Israel has been dining out on it for 40 years or more. For that very reason, the Israeli construct “The Holocaust” (as differentiated from the less ambitious non-capitalized “shoah”) deserves close examination, but this never happens in polite society. That other useful construct, “holocaust denial” stops most people dead in their tracks — even people who have no affiliation with the WW2 oppression and extermination and who also have no particular feelings toward Jews, either positive or negative.
     Kassandra had a point. I happen not to agree with her minimization of Jewish losses in WW2 but she did grasp the basic idea that this ancient slaughter is being used in an unsavory way today.
     Ahmadinejad seems to have a tin ear. Why this foolhardy “alternative Holocaust Conference” in Tehran? Isn’t it bound to set the entire Western world against him? You may not have noticed the sabre-rattling against Iran this past year, very reminiscient of the lead-in to the war on Iraq.
     It is interesting to look at the Iranian Ministry for Research & Education “Call for Papers” and the agenda of that conference:
     http://www.ipis.ir/English/conference/_persian-gulf.htm
     There were items on that agenda which are never addressed, and never will be addressed, by the innumerable ‘legitimate’ Holocaust conferences held each year. And yes, David Duke and the no-gas-chambers crowd attended the conference, but so did a contingent of anti-Zionist Orthodox rabbis. British Rabbi Brian Ahron Cohen, quoted in Ha’aretz Dec.18: “We certainly say there was a Holocaust, we lived through the Holocaust. But in no way can it be used as a justification for perpetuating unjust acts against the Palestinians.”
     Ahmadinejad himself, in interview, said he didn’t know much about WW2 events, wanted to find out if the Holocaust happened the way the Israelis claim, “and more importantly, if it did happen what has this got to do with the Palestinians?”
     I do accept that it happened as per the Israeli claim — it’s just that they left out some important parts. The London stage play, “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” was suppressed in the original NYC production. It was closed down a few days before opening because the London producer would not accept the “contextualization” demanded by Israeli apologists. Would not accept that the play and the martyrdom of Rachel Corrie needed to be softened before being presented to American audiences.
     Rachel Corrie was an American activist for Palestinian civil rights. She was brutally murdered by an IDF military bulldozer. The murder was callously dismissed by both the Israeli and Americans governments. Most Americans have never heard of her. These events happened in 2003. If Israelis can demand the “contextualization” of an American martyr to this latest war, then I have no problem demanding contextualization of a 60-year-old war crime which I believe continues to drive the war system today.
     Solstice Greetings to everyone. The light begins to return starting today.

140. “but the positions you have routinely taken on this blog have had rather more to do with hasbara spin than with how to go about dismantling the settlements and ending the Occupation.”
     Maybe because the blog discussions are so often muddied with unfounded charges of genocide, anti-Zionist slurs and other challenges to Israel’s ontological status not its policy. Not to mention shilling for Israel’s (self-declared) mortal enemies. Did that ever occur to you, master debater?

141. Shorter Vadim
     People say unkind things about me because I beat my wife and I’m damn well going to keep on beating her until they show me some respect.

142. “systematic” plot or plan on the part of Israel to commit “urbicide” against the unwitting Palestinian population.
     The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
     by Ilan Pappe*
     http://www.badil.org/al-majdal/2006/Spring/article03.htm

143. Comparison of Water Allocation
     From: November-December 1998 Settlement Report
     Kiryat Arba (settlers) Hebron (Palestinians)
     Population in December 1997 5,800 119,230
     Household water supply in 1997 765,120 m3 3,170,952 m3
     Allocation in:
     February 1997 45,100 m3 254,660 m3
     July 1997 98,530 m3 216,230 m3
     Daily usage (per person):
     July 1997 547 liters/day 58 liters/day
     July 1998 NA 45 liters/day
     Source: Data on water is from the Palestinian Water Authority. Information appeared in Ha’aretz, July 31, 1998.

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