Israelis Risk Jail to Smuggle Palestinians 600 sign up for campaign of disobedience

(thanks to J. for pointing this story out to me - The Saker)

by Jonathan Cook for Global Research

Nearly 600 Israelis have signed up for a campaign of civil disobedience, vowing to risk jail to smuggle Palestinian women and children into Israel for a brief taste of life outside the occupied West Bank.

The Israelis say they have been inspired by the example of Ilana Hammerman, a writer who is threatened with prosecution after publishing an article in which she admitted breaking the law to bring three Palestinian teenagers into Israel for a day out.

Ms Hammerman said she wanted to give the young women, who had never left the West Bank, “some fun” and a chance to see the Mediterranean for the first time.

Her story has shocked many Israelis and led to a police investigation after right-wing groups called for her to be tried for security offences.

It is illegal to transport Palestinians through checkpoints into Israel without a permit, which few can obtain. If tried and found guilty, Ms Hammerman could be fined and face up to two years in jail.

But Israelis joining the campaign say they will not be put off by threats of imprisonment.

Last month, a group of 11 Israeli women joined Ms Hammerman in repeating her act of civil disobedience, driving a dozen Palestinian women and four children, including a baby, through a checkpoint into Israel.

The Israeli women say they are planning mass “smugglings” of Palestinians into Israel over the coming weeks.

“The Palestinians who join us are mainly looking to have a good time after years of confinement under the occupation, but for us what is most important is our act of defiance,” said Ofra Lyth, who helped establish an online forum of supporters after attending a speech by Ms Hammerman.

“We want to overturn this immoral law that gives rights to Jews to move freely around while keeping Palestinians imprisoned in their towns and villages,” she said, referring to regulations that bar most Palestinians in the occupied territories from entering Israel, and Israelis from assisting them. Exceptions are made for Palestinians with permits, sometimes issued for a medical emergency or to some labourers with security clearance.

For the Palestinian women, though, it is not about making a statement or defying an unjust law, said Ms Lyth.

“The Palestinian women tell us: ‘Go ahead and make your political point, but for us we’re breaking the law so that we can enjoy ourselves and remember how life was before the checkpoints and the wall.’ One woman told me: ‘I just want to be able to breathe again’.”

For Palestinians in the West Bank, it is not often easy to breathe. The territory is home to a growing population of 300,000 Jews in more than 100 settlements. The settlers are able to drive into Israel on roads that the army oversees with checkpoints.

It was through one such settler crossing, near Beitar Ilit, south of Jerusalem, that Ms Hammerman took the three Palestinian teenagers this year.

For their protection, she has not identifed the young women or the West Bank village where they live. She refers to the women as Aya, Lin and Yasmin. They, too, could face jail for breaking the law.

In Ms Hammerman’s article, published in the Haaretz newspaper in May, she admitted that she was aware her actions were illegal.

She told the women, who were 18 and 19, to take off their hijabs for the day and dress in western-style clothes to avoid attracting attention from soldiers at the checkpoint. She also taught them an easy Hebrew phrase -- Hakull beseder, or “Everything is okay” -- in case a soldier spoke to them.

She then took them on a tour of Tel Aviv, visiting the city’s university, a museum, a shopping mall and the beach, which she noted none of them had ever seen even though it is only about 40km from their village.

Gisha, an Israeli human rights group, said Israel introduced a permit system to limit Palestinian movement out of the West Bank in the early 1990s – about the time the young women were born.

Ms Hammerman wrote that the only dangerous moment during the trip was when a plain-clothes policeman stopped them and asked for the women’s identity cards. Ms Hammerman lied to the officer, telling him that the women were Palestinians from East Jerusalem and therefore entitled to enter Israel.

In June, Yehuda Weinstein, the attorney general, was reported to have approved a police investigation of Ms Hammerman after a settler organisation, the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, complained.

The ranks of Ms Hammerman’s supporters have swollen since the group placed an advertisement, titled “We refuse to obey”, in Haaretz this month. The ad said the group was “acting in the spirit of Martin Luther King”, the US civil rights leader, and demanded that Palestinians be treated as “human beings, not terrorists”.

Over the past week, the online forum has attracted more than 590 Israelis signing up to repeat Ms Hammerman’s act of civil disobedience.

“That has really surprised and encouraged me,” she said. “I did not realise there were so many other Israelis who have had enough of this outrageous law.”

Still, the coverage of Ms Hammerman and her supporters in the Israeli media has been largely hostile. During a television interview last week, she was accused of endangering Israelis with her trips. The show’s host, Yaron London, asked whether she had inspected the Palestinian women’s underclothes for explosives before allowing them into her car.

She will will not be deterred, though. She said the group had discussed future trips for Palestinians, including taking them to pray at al-Aqsa, the mosque in Jerusalem that has been inaccessible to most Palestinians for at least a decade, and visits to Palestinian relatives they cannot see in Jerusalem and Israel.

“We need to get Israelis meeting Palestinians again, having fun with them and seeing that they are human beings with the same rights as us.”

She said her immediate goal was to kick-start a discussion among Israelis about the legality and morality of Israel’s laws and challenge the public’s “blind obedience” to authority.

Ms Lyth added that the Palestinian women “who have gone on our trips are the heroes of their village. They and their families know they are taking a big risk in breaking the law, but harassment is part of their daily lives anyway”.

Till now the trips have been restricted to smuggling Palestinian women and children only, said Ms Hammerman. “It is harder to bring men in without being discovered and the authorities would be likely to treat Palestinian men much more harshly if they were caught.”

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

Israel's Big and Small Apartheids: Meaning of a Jewish State

By Jonathan Cook via Palestine Chronicle

Below is the text of a talk delivered to the fifth Bilin international conference for Palestinian popular resistance, held in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 21.

Israel’s apologists are very exercised about the idea that Israel has been singled out for special scrutiny and criticism. I wish to argue, however, that in most discussions of Israel it actually gets off extremely lightly: that many features of the Israeli polity would be considered exceptional or extraordinary in any other democratic state.

That is not surprising because, as I will argue, Israel is neither a liberal democracy nor even a “Jewish and democratic state”, as its supporters claim. It is an apartheid state, not only in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, but also inside Israel proper. Today, in the occupied territories, the apartheid nature of Israeli rule is irrefutable -- if little mentioned by Western politicians or the media. But inside Israel itself, it is largely veiled and hidden. My purpose today is to try to remove the veil a little.

I say “a little”, because I would need far more than the time allotted to me to do justice to this topic. There are, for example, some 30 laws that explicitly discriminate between Jews and non-Jews -- another way of referring to the fifth of the Israeli population who are Palestinian and supposedly enjoy full citizenship. There are also many other Israeli laws and administrative practices that lead to an outcome of ethnic-based segregation even if they do not make such discrimination explicit.

So instead of trying to rush through all these aspects of Israeli apartheid, let me concentrate instead on a few revealing features, issues I have reported on recently.

First, let us examine the nature of Israeli citizenship.

A few weeks ago I met Uzi Ornan, an 86-year-old professor from the Technion university in Haifa, who has one of the few ID cards in Israel stating a nationality of “Hebrew”. For most other Israelis, their cards and personal records state their nationality as “Jewish” or “Arab”. For immigrants whose Jewishness is accepted by the state but questioned by the rabbinical authorities, some 130 other classifications of nationality have been approved, mostly relating to a person’s religion or country of origin. The only nationality you will not find on the list is “Israeli”. That is precisely why Prof Ornan and two dozen others are fighting through the courts: they want to be registered as “Israelis”. It is a hugely important fight -- and for that reason alone they are certain to lose. Why?

Far more is at stake than an ethnic or national label. Israel excludes a nationality of “Israeli” to ensure that, in fulfilment of its self-definition as a “Jewish state”, it is able to assign superior rights of citizenship to the collective “nation” of Jews around the globe than to the body of actual citizens in its territory, which includes many Palestinians. In practice it does this by creating two main classes of citizenship: a Jewish citizenship for “Jewish nationals” and an Arab citizenship for “Arab nationals”. Both nationalities were effectively invented by Israel and have no meaning outside Israel.

This differentiation in citizenship is recognised in Israeli law: the Law of Return, for Jews, makes immigration all but automatic for any Jew around the world who wishes it; and the Citizenship Law, for non-Jews, determines on any entirely separate basis the rights of the country’s Palestinian minority to citizenship. Even more importantly, the latter law abolishes the rights of the Palestinian citizens’ relatives, who were expelled by force in 1948, to return to their homes and land. There are, in other words, two legal systems of citizenship in Israel, differentiating between the rights of citizens based on whether they are Jews or Palestinians.

That, in itself, meets the definition of apartheid, as set out by the United Nations in 1973: “Any legislative measures or other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups.” The clause includes the following rights: “the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression.”

Such separation of citizenship is absolutely essential to the maintenance of Israel as a Jewish state. Were all citizens to be defined uniformly as Israelis, were there to be only one law regarding citizenship, then very dramatic consequences would follow. The most significant would be that the Law of Return would either cease to apply to Jews or apply equally to Palestinian citizens, allowing them to bring their exiled relatives to Israel – the much-feared Right of Return. In either a longer or shorter period, Israel’s Jewish majority would be eroded and Israel would become a binational state, probably with a Palestinian majority.

There would be many other predictable consequences of equal citizenship. Would the Jewish settlers, for example, be able to maintain their privileged status in the West Bank if Palestinians in Jenin or Hebron had relatives inside Israel with the same rights as Jews? Would the Israeli army continue to be able to function as an occupation army in a properly democratic state? And would the courts in a state of equal citizens be able to continue turning a blind eye to the brutalities of the occupation? In all these cases, it seems extremely unlikely that the status quo could be maintained.

In other words, the whole edifice of Israel’s apartheid rule inside Israel supports and upholds its apartheid rule in the occupied territories. They stand or fall together.

Next, let us look at the matter of land control.

Last month I met an exceptional Israeli Jewish couple, the Zakais. They are exceptional chiefly because they have developed a deep friendship with a Palestinian couple inside Israel. Although I have reported on Israel and Palestine for many years, I cannot recall ever before meeting an Israeli Jew who had a Palestinian friend in quite the way the Zakais do.

True, there are many Israeli Jews who claim an “Arab” or “Palestinian” friend in the sense that they joke with the guy whose hummus shop they frequent or who fixes their car. There are also Israeli Jews -- and they are an extremely important group -- who stand with Palestinians in political battles such as those here in Bilin or in Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. At these places, Israelis and Palestinians have, against the odds, managed to forge genuine friendships that are vital if Israel’s apartheid rule is to be defeated.

But the Zakais’ relationship with their Bedouin friends, the Tarabins, is not that kind of friendship. It is not based on, or shaped by, a political struggle, one that is itself framed by Israel’s occupation; it is not a self-conscious friendship; and it has no larger goal than the relationship itself. It is a friendship -- or at least it appeared that way to me -- of genuine equals. A friendship of complete intimacy. When I visited the Zakais, I realised what an incredibly unusual sight that is in Israel.

The reason for the very separate cultural and emotional worlds of Jewish and Palestinian citizens in Israel is not difficult to fathom: they live in entirely separate physical worlds. They live apart in segregated communities, separated not through choice but by legally enforceable rules and procedures. Even in the so-called handful of mixed cities, Jews and Palestinians usually live apart, in distinct and clearly defined neighbourhoods. And so it was not entirely surprising that the very issue that brought me to the Zakais was the question of whether a Palestinian citizen is entitled to live in a Jewish community.

The Zakais want to rent to their friends, the Tarabins, their home in the agricultural village of Nevatim in the Negev -- currently an exclusively Jewish community. The Tarabins face a serious housing problem in their own neighbouring Bedouin community. But what the Zakais have discovered is that there are overwhelming social and legal obstacles to Palestinians moving out the ghettoes in which they are supposed to live. Not only is Nevatim’s elected leadership deeply opposed to the Bedouin family entering their community, but so also are the Israeli courts.

Nevatim is not exceptional. There are more than 700 similar rural communities -- mostly kibbutzim and moshavim -- that bar non-Jews from living there. They control most of the inhabitable territory of Israel, land that once belonged to Palestinians: either refugees from the 1948 war; or Palestinian citizens who have had their lands confiscated under special laws.

Today, after these confiscations, at least 93 per cent of Israel is nationalised -- that is, it is held in trust not for Israel’s citizens but for world Jewry. (Here, once again, we should note one of those important consequences of the differentiated citizenship we have just considered.)

Access to most of this nationalised land is controlled by vetting committees, overseen by quasi-governmental but entirely unaccountable Zionist organisations like the Jewish Agency and the Jewish National Fund. Their role is to ensure that such communities remain off-limits to Palestinian citizens, precisely as the Zakais and Tarabins have discovered in the case of Nevatim. The officials there have insisted that the Palestinian family has no right even to rent, let alone buy, property in a “Jewish community”. That position has been effectively upheld by Israel’s highest court, which has agreed that the family must submit to a vetting committee whose very purpose is to exclude them.

Again, the 1973 UN Convention on the “crime of apartheid” is instructive: it includes measures “designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups … [and] the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.”

If Jewish and Palestinian citizens have been kept apart so effectively -- and a separate education system and severe limits on interconfessional marriage reinforce this emotional and physical segregation -- how did the Zakais and Tarabins become such close friends?

Their case is an interesting example of serendipity, as I discovered when I met them. Weisman Zakai is the child of Iraqi Jewish parents who immigrated to the Jewish state in its early years. When he and Ahmed Tarabin met as boys in the 1960s, hanging out in the markets of the poor neighbouring city of Beersheva, far from the centre of the country, they found that what they had in common trumped the formal divisions that were supposed to keep them apart and fearful. Both speak fluent Arabic, both were raised in an Arab culture, both are excluded from Jewish Ashkenazi society, and both share a passion for cars.

In their case, Israel’s apartheid system failed in its job of keeping them physically and emotionally apart. It failed to make them afraid of, and hostile to, each other. But as the Zakais have learnt to their cost, in refusing to live according to the rules of Israel’s apartheid system, the system has rejected them. The Zakais are denied the chance to rent to their friends, and now live as pariahs in the community of Nevatim.

Finally, let us consider the concept of “security” inside Israel.

As I have said, the apartheid nature of relations between Jewish and Palestinian citizens is veiled in the legal, social and political spheres. It does not mirror the “petty apartheid” that was a feature of the South African brand: the separate toilets, park benches and buses. But in one instance it is explicit in this petty way -- and this is when Jews and Palestinians enter and leave the country through the border crossings and through Ben Gurion international airport. Here the façade is removed and the different status of citizenship enjoyed by Jews and Palestinians is fully on show.

That lesson was learnt by two middle-aged Palestinian brothers I interviewed this month. Residents of a village near Nazareth, they had been life-long supporters of the Labor party and proudly showed me a fading picture of them hosting a lunch for Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. But at our meeting they were angry and bitter, vowing they would never vote for a Zionist party again.

Their rude awakening had come three years ago when they travelled to the US on a business trip with a group of Jewish insurance agents. On the flight back, they arrived at New York’s JFK airport to see their Jewish colleagues pass through El Al’s security checks in minutes. They, meanwhile, spent two hours being interrogated and having their bags minutely inspected.

When they were finally let through, they were assigned a female guard whose job was to keep them under constant surveillance -- in front of hundreds of fellow passengers -- till they boarded the plane. When one brother went to the bathroom without first seeking permission, the guard berated him in public and her boss threatened to prevent him from boarding the plane unless he apologised. This month the court finally awarded the brothers $8,000 compensation for what it called their “abusive and unnecessary” treatment.

Two things about this case should be noted. The first is that the El Al security team admitted in court that neither brother was deemed a security risk of any sort. The only grounds for the special treatment they received was their national and ethnic belonging. It was transparently a case of racal profiling.

The second thing to note is that their experience is nothing out of the ordinary for Palestinian citizens travelling to and from Israel. Similar, and far worse, incidents occur every day during such security procedures. What was exceptional in this case was that the brothers pursued a time-consuming and costly legal action against El Al.

They did so, I suspect, because they felt so badly betrayed. They had made the mistake of believing the hasbara (propaganda) from Israeli politicians of all stripes who declare that Palestinian citizens can enjoy equal status with Jewish citizens if they are loyal to the state. They assumed that by being Zionists they could become first-class citizens. In accepting this conclusion, they had misunderstood the apartheid reality inherent in a Jewish state.

The most educated, respectable and wealthy Palestinian citizen will always fare worse at the airport security check than the most disreputable Jewish citizen, or the one who espouses extremist opinions or even the Jewish citizen with a criminal record.

Israel’s apartheid system is there to maintain Jewish privilege in a Jewish state. And at the point where that privilege is felt most viscerally by ordinary Jews to be vulnerable, in the life and death experience of flying thousands of feet above the ground, Palestinian citizens must be shown their status as outsider, as the enemy, whoever they are and whatever they have, or have not, done.

Apartheid rule, as I have argued, applies to Palestinians in both Israel and the occupied territories. But is not apartheid in the territories much worse than it is inside Israel? Should we not concern ourselves more with the big apartheid in the West Bank and Gaza than this weaker apartheid? Such an argument demonstrates a dangerous misconception about the indivisible nature of Israel’s apartheid towards Palestinians and about its goals.

Certainly, it is true that apartheid in the territories is much more aggressive than it is inside Israel. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the apartheid under occupation is much less closely supervised by the Israeli civilian courts than it is in Israel. You can, to put it bluntly, get away with much more here. The second, and more significant, reason, however, is that the Israeli system of apartheid in the occupied territories is forced to be more aggressive and cruel -- and that is because the battle is not yet won here. The fight of the occupying power to steal your resources -- your land, water and labour -- is in progress but the outcome is still to be decided. Israel is facing the considerable pressures of time and a fading international legitimacy as it works to take your possessions from you. Every day you resist makes that task a little harder.

In Israel, by contrast, apartheid rule is entrenched -- it achieved its victory decades ago. Palestinian citizens have third or fourth class citizenship; they have had almost all of their land taken from them; they are allowed to live only in their ghettoes; their education system is controlled by the security services; they can work in few jobs other than those Jews do not want; they have the vote but cannot participate in government or effect any political change; and so on.

Doubtless, a related fate is envisioned for you too. The veiled apartheid facing Palestinians inside Israel is the blueprint for a veiled -- and more legitimate -- kind of apartheid being planned for Palestinians in the occupied territories, at least those who are allowed to remain in their Bantustans. And for this very reason, exposing and defeating the apartheid inside Israel is vital to the success of resisting the apartheid that has taken root here.

That is why we must fight Israeli apartheid wherever it is found -- in Jaffa or Jerusalem, in Nazareth or Nablus, in Beersheva or Bilin. It is the only struggle that can bring justice to the Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Israel's dead end

(thanks to Mari for this interesting contribution)

Zionist dreams of clearing "Greater Israel" of all Palestinians continue to be played out via insidious and violent means, but they won't be realized, writes Jonathan Cook in Al-Ahram Weekly.

In 1895, Theodor Herzl, Zionism's chief prophet, confided in his diary that he did not favour sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to "try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."

He was proposing a programme of Palestinian emigration enforced through a policy of strict separation between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous population. In simple terms, he hoped that, once Zionist organisations had bought up large areas of Palestine and owned the main sectors of the economy, Palestinians could be made to leave by denying them rights to work the land or labour in the Jewish-run economy. His vision was one of transfer, or ethnic cleansing, through ethnic separation.

Herzl was suggesting that two possible Zionist solutions to the problem of a Palestinian majority living in Palestine -- separation and transfer -- were not necessarily alternatives but rather could be mutually reinforcing. Not only that: he believed, if they were used together, the process of ethnic cleansing could be made to appear voluntary, the choice of the victims. It may be that this was both his most enduring legacy and his major innovation to settler colonialism.

In recent years, with the Palestinian population under Israeli rule about to reach parity with the Jewish population, the threat of a Palestinian majority has loomed large again for the Zionists. Not surprisingly, debates about which of these two Zionist solutions to pursue, separation or transfer, have resurfaced.

Today these solutions are ostensibly promoted by two ideological camps loosely associated with Israel's centre-left (Labour and Kadima) and right (Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu). The modern political arguments between them turn on differing visions of the nature of a Jewish state originally put forward by Labour and Revisionist Zionists.

To make sense of current political debates, and events, taking place inside Israel and in the West Bank and Gaza, let us first examine the history of these two principles in Zionist thinking.

During the early waves of Jewish immigration to Palestine, the dominant Labour Zionist movement and its leader David Ben Gurion advanced policies much in line with Herzl's goal. In particular, they promoted the twin principles of "Redemption of the Land" and "Hebrew Labour", which took as their premise the idea that Jews needed to separate themselves from the native population in working the land and employing only other Jews. By being entirely self- reliant in Palestine, Jews could both "cure" themselves of their tainted Diaspora natures and deprive the Palestinians of the opportunity to subsist in their own homeland.

At the forefront of this drive was the Zionist trade union federation, the Histadrut, which denied membership to Palestinians and, for many years after the establishment of the Jewish state, even to the remnants of the Palestinian population who became Israeli citizens.

But if separation was the official policy of Labour Zionism, behind the scenes Ben Gurion and his officials increasingly appreciated that it would not be enough in itself to achieve their goal of a pure ethnic state. Land sales remained low, at about six per cent of the territory, and the Jewish-owned parts of the economy relied on cheap Palestinian labour.

Instead, the Labour Zionists secretly began working on a programme of ethnic cleansing. After 1937 and Britain's Peel Report proposing partition of Palestine, Ben Gurion was more open about transfer, recognising that a Jewish state would be impossible unless most of the indigenous population was cleared from within its borders.

Israel's new historians have acknowledged Ben Gurion's commitment to transfer. As Benny Morris notes, for example, Ben Gurion "understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst". The Israeli leadership therefore developed a plan for ethnic cleansing under cover of war, compiling detailed dossiers on the communities that needed to be driven out and then passing on the order, in Plan Dalet, to commanders in the field. During the 1948 war the new state of Israel was emptied of at least 80 per cent of its indigenous population.

In physically expelling the Palestinian population, Ben Gurion responded to the political opportunities of the day and recalibrated the Labour Zionism of Herzl. In particular he achieved the goal of displacement desired by Herzl while also largely persuading the world through a campaign of propaganda that the exodus of the refugees was mostly voluntary. In one of the most enduring Zionist myths, convincingly rebutted by modern historians, we are still told that the refugees left because they were told to do so by the Arab leadership.

The other camp, the Revisionists, had a far more ambivalent attitude to the native Palestinian population. Paradoxically, given their uncompromising claim to a Greater Israel embracing both banks of the Jordan River (thereby including not only Palestine but also the modern state of Jordan), they were more prepared than the Labour Zionists to allow natives to remain where they were.

Vladimir Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionism, observed in 1938 -- possibly in a rebuff to Ben Gurion's espousal of transfer -- that, "it must be hateful for any Jew to think that the rebirth of a Jewish state should ever be linked with such an odious suggestion as the removal of non-Jewish citizens". The Revisionists, it seems, were resigned to the fact that the enlarged territory they desired would inevitably include a majority of Arabs. They were therefore less concerned with removing the natives than finding a way to make them accept Jewish rule.

In 1923, Jabotinsky formulated his answer, one that implicitly included the notion of separation but not necessarily transfer: an "iron wall" of unremitting force to cow the natives into submission. In his words, the agreement of the Palestinians to their subjugation could be reached only "through the iron wall, that is to say, the establishment in Palestine of a force that will in no way be influenced by Arab pressure".

An enthusiast of British imperial rule, Jabotinsky envisioned the future Jewish state in simple colonial terms, as a European elite ruling over the native population.

Inside Revisionism, however, there was a shift from the idea of separation to transfer that mirrored developments inside Labour Zionism. This change was perhaps more opportunistic than ideological, and was particularly apparent as the Revisionists sensed Ben Gurion's success in forging a Jewish state through transfer.

One of Jabotinsky disciples, Menachem Begin, who would later become a Likud prime minister, was leader in 1948 of the Irgun militia that committed one of the worst atrocities of the war. He led his fighters into the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin where they massacred over 100 inhabitants, including women and children.

Savage enough though these events were, Begin and his followers consciously inflated the death toll to more than 250 through the pages of The New York Times. Their goal was to spread terror among the wider Palestinian population and encourage them to flee. He happily noted later: "Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of 'Irgun butchery', were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede."

Subsequently, other prominent figures on the right openly espoused ethnic cleansing, including the late General Rehavam Zeevi, whose Moledet Party campaigned in elections under the symbol of the Hebrew character "tet", for transfer. His successor, Benny Elon, a settler leader and rabbi, adopted a similar platform: "Only population transfer can bring peace".

The intensity of the separation versus transfer debate subsided after 1948 and the ethnic cleansing campaign that removed most of the native Palestinian population from the Jewish state. The Palestinian minority left behind -- a fifth of the population but a group, it was widely assumed, that would soon be swamped by Jewish immigration -- was seen as an irritation but not yet as a threat. It was placed under a military government for nearly two decades, a system designed to enforce separation between Palestinians and Jews inside Israel. Such separation -- in education, employment and residence -- exists to this day, even if in a less extreme form.

The separation-transfer debate was chiefly revived by Israel's war on the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. With Israel's erasure of the Green Line, and the effective erosion of the distinction between Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories, the problem of a Palestinian majority again loomed large for the Zionists.

Cabinet debates from 1967 show the quandary faced by the government. Almost alone, Moshe Dayan favoured annexation of both the newly captured territories and the Palestinian population there. Others believed that such a move would be seen as transparently colonialist and rapidly degenerate into an apartheid system of Jewish citizens and Palestinian non-citizens. In their minds, Jabotinsky's solution of an iron wall was no longer viable.

But equally, in a more media-saturated era, which at least paid lip-service to human rights, the government could see no way to expel the Palestinian population and annex the land, as Ben Gurion had done earlier. Also possibly, they could see no way of persuading the world that such expulsions should be characterised as voluntary.

Israel therefore declined to move decisively in either direction, neither fully carrying out a transfer programme nor enforcing strict separation. Instead it opted for an apartheid model that accommodated Dayan's suggestion of a "creeping annexation" of the occupied territories that he rightly believed would go largely unnoticed by the West.

The separation embodied in South African apartheid differed from Herzl's notion of separation in one important respect: in apartheid, the "other" population was a necessary, even if much abused, component of the political arrangement. As the exiled Palestinian thinker Azmi Bishara has noted, in South Africa "racial segregation was not absolute. It took place within a framework of political unity. The racist regime saw blacks as part of the system, an ingredient of the whole. The whites created a racist hierarchy within the unity."

In other words, the self-reliance, or unilateralism, implicit in Herzl's concept of separation was ignored for many years of Israel's occupation. The Palestinian labour force was exploited by Israel just as black workers were by South Africa. This view of the Palestinians was formalised in the Oslo Accords, which were predicated on the kind of separation needed to create a captive labour force.

However, Yitzhak Rabin's version of apartheid embodied by the Oslo process, and Binyamin Netanyahu's opposition in upholding Jabotinsky's vision of Greater Israel, both deviated from Herzl's model of transfer through separation. This is largely why both political currents have been subsumed within the recent but more powerful trend towards "unilateral separation".

Not surprisingly, the policy of "unilateral separation" emerged from among the Labour Zionists, advocated primarily by Ehud Barak. However, it was soon adopted by many members of Likud also. Ultimately its success derived from the conversion to its cause of Greater Israel's arch-exponent, Ariel Sharon. He realised the chief manifestations of unilateral separation, the West Bank wall and the Gaza disengagement, as well as breaking up Israel's right wing to create a new consensus party, Kadima.

In the new consensus, the transfer of Palestinians could be achieved through imposed and absolute separation -- just as Herzl had once hoped. After the Gaza disengagement, the next stage was promoted by Sharon's successor, Ehud Olmert. His plan for convergence, limited withdrawals from the West Bank in which most settlers would remain in place, has been dropped, though its infrastructure -- the annexation wall -- continues to be built.

But how will modern Zionists convert unilateral separation into transfer? How will Herzl's original vision of ethnic cleansing enforced through strict ethnic separation be realised in today's world?

The current siege of Gaza offers the template. After disengagement, Israel has been able to cut off at will Gazans' access to aid, food, fuel and humanitarian services. Normality has been further eroded by sonic booms, random Israeli air attacks, and repeated small-scale invasions that have inflicted a large toll of casualties, particularly among civilians.

Gaza's imprisonment has stopped being a metaphor and become a daily reality. In fact, Gaza's condition is far worse than imprisonment: prisoners, even of war, expect to have their humanity respected and to be properly sheltered, cared for, fed and clothed. Gazans can no longer rely on these staples of life.

The ultimate goal of this extreme form of separation is patently clear: transfer. By depriving Palestinians of the basic conditions of a normal life, it is assumed that they will eventually choose to leave in what can once again be sold to the world as a voluntary exodus. And if Palestinians choose to abandon their homeland, then in Zionist thinking they have forfeited their right to it -- just as earlier generations of Zionists believed the Palestinian refugees had done by supposedly fleeing during the 1948 and 1967 wars.

Is this process of transfer inevitable? I think not. The success of a modern policy of "transfer through separation" faces severe limitations.

First, it depends on continuing US global hegemony and blind support for Israel. Such support is likely to be undermined by current American misadventures in the Middle East, and a gradual shift in the balance of power to China, Russia and India.

Second, it requires a Zionist worldview that departs starkly not only from international law but also from the values upheld by most societies and ideologies. The nature of Zionist ambitions is likely to be ever harder to conceal, as is evident from the tide of opinion polls showing that Western publics, if not their governments, believe Israel to be one of the biggest threats to world peace.

And third, it assumes that the Palestinians will remain passive during their slow eradication. The historical evidence most certainly shows that they will not.

Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth. His latest book is Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East . The above text is taken from a talk delivered at the Conference for the Right of Return and the Secular Democratic State, held in Haifa 21 June.

The Meaning of Gaza’s ‘Shoah’: Israel Plots Another Palestinian Exodus

by Jonathan Cook in Nazareth for Counterpunch

Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai’s much publicized remark last week about Gaza facing a “shoah” -- the Hebrew word for the Holocaust -- was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army’s plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip.

More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli army’s longer-term strategy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories.

Vilnai, a former general, was interviewed by Army Radio as Israel was in the midst of unleashing a series of air and ground strikes on populated areas of Gaza that killed more than 100 Palestinians, at least half of whom were civilians and 25 of whom were children, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.

The interview also took place in the wake of a rocket fired from Gaza that killed a student in Sderot and other rockets that hit the centre of the southern city of Ashkelon. Vilnai stated: “The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians of Gaza] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”

His comment, picked up by the Reuters wire service, was soon making headlines around the world. Presumably uncomfortable with a senior public figure in Israel comparing his government’s policies to the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry, many news services referred to Vilnai’s clearly articulated threat as a “warning”, as though he was prophesying a cataclysmic natural event over which he and the Israeli army had no control.

Nonetheless, officials understood the damage that the translation from Hebrew of Vilnai’s remark could do to Israel’s image abroad. And sure enough, Palestinian leaders were soon exploiting the comparison, with both the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the exiled Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, stating that a “holocaust” was unfolding in Gaza.

Within hours the Israeli Foreign Ministry was launching a large “hasbara” (propaganda) campaign through its diplomats, as the Jerusalem Post reported. In a related move, a spokesman for Vilnai explained that the word “shoah” also meant “disaster”; this, rather than a holocaust, was what the minister had been referring to. Clarifications were issued by many media outlets.

However, no one in Israel was fooled. “Shoah” -- which literally means “burnt offering” -- was long ago reserved for the Holocaust, much as the Arabic word “nakba” (or “catastrophe”) is nowadays used only to refer to the Palestinians’ dispossession by Israel in 1948. Certainly, the Israeli media in English translated Vilnai’s use of “shoah” as “holocaust”.

But this is not the first time that Vilnai has expressed extreme views about Gaza’s future.

Last summer he began quietly preparing a plan on behalf of his boss, the Defence Minister Ehud Barak, to declare Gaza a “hostile entity” and dramatically reduce the essential services supplied by Israel -- as long-time occupier -- to its inhabitants, including electricity and fuel. The cuts were finally implemented late last year after the Israeli courts gave their blessing.

Vilnai and Barak, both former military men like so many other Israeli politicians, have been “selling” this policy -- of choking off basic services to Gaza -- to Western public opinion ever since.

Under international law, Israel as the occupying power has an obligation to guarantee the welfare of the civilian population in Gaza, a fact forgotten when the media reported Israel’s decision to declare Gaza a hostile entity. The pair have therefore claimed tendentiously that the humanitarian needs of Gazans are still being safeguarded by the limited supplies being allowed through, and that therefore the measures do not constitute collective punishment.

Last October, after a meeting of defense officials, Vilnai said of Gaza: "Because this is an entity that is hostile to us, there is no reason for us to supply them with electricity beyond the minimum required to prevent a crisis.”

Three months later Vilnai went further, arguing that Israel should cut off “all responsibility” for Gaza, though, in line with the advice of Israel’s attorney general, he has been careful not to suggest that this would punish ordinary Gazans excessively.

Instead he said disengagement should be taken to its logical conclusion: “We want to stop supplying electricity to them, stop supplying them with water and medicine, so that it would come from another place”. He suggested that Egypt might be forced to take over responsibility.

Vilnai’s various comments are a reflection of the new thinking inside the defense and political establishments about where next to move Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians.

After the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, a consensus in the Israeli military quickly emerged in favour of maintaining control through a colonial policy of divide and rule, by factionalizing the Palestinians and then keeping them feuding.

As long as the Palestinians were too divided to resist the occupation effectively, Israel could carry on with its settlement program and “creeping annexation” of the occupied territories, as the Defence Minister of the time, Moshe Dayan, called it.

Israel experimented with various methods of undermining the secular Palestinian nationalism of the PLO, which threatened to galvanize a general resistance to the occupation. In particular Israel established local anti-PLO militias known as the Village Leagues and later backed the Islamic fundamentalism of the Muslim Brotherhood, which would morph into Hamas.

Rivalry between Hamas and the PLO, controlled by Fatah, has been the backdrop to Palestinian politics in the occupied territories ever since, and has moved centre stage since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005. Growing antagonism fuelled by Israel and the US, as an article in Vanity Fair confirmed this week, [and as described by Kathleen Christison here http://www.counterpunch.org/christison07262007.html on July 26, 2007, Editors] culminated in the physical separation of a Fatah-run West Bank from a Hamas-ruled Gaza last summer.

The leaderships of Fatah and Hamas are now divided not only geographically but also by their diametrically opposed strategies for dealing with Israel’s occupation.

Fatah’s control of the West Bank is being shored up by Israel because its leaders, including President Mahmoud Abbas, have made it clear that they are prepared to cooperate with an interminable peace process that will give Israel the time it needs to annex yet more of the territory.

Hamas, on the other hand, is under no illusions about the peace process, having seen the Jewish settlers leave but Israel’s military control and its economic siege only tighten from arm’s length.

In charge of an open-air prison, Hamas has refused to surrender to Israeli diktats and has proven invulnerable to Israeli and US machinations to topple it. Instead it has begun advancing the only two feasible forms of resistance available: rocket attacks over the fence surrounding Gaza, and popular mass action.

And this is whence the concerns of Vilnai and others emanate. Both forms of resistance, if Hamas remains in charge of Gaza and improves its level of organization and the clarity of its vision, could over the long term unravel Israel’s plans to annex the occupied territories -- once their Palestinian inhabitants have been removed.

First, Hamas’ development of more sophisticated and longer-range rockets threatens to move Hamas’ resistance to a much larger canvas than the backwater of the small development town of Sderot. The rockets that landed last week in Ashkelon, one of the country’s largest cities, could be the harbingers of political change in Israel.

Hizbullah proved in the 2006 Lebanon war that Israeli domestic opinion quickly crumbled in the face of sustained rocket attacks. Hamas hopes to achieve the same outcome.

After the strikes on Ashkelon, the Israeli media was filled with reports of angry mobs taking to the city’s streets and burning tyres in protest at their government’s failure to protect them. That is their initial response. But in Sderot, where the attacks have been going on for years, the mayor, Eli Moyal, recently called for talks with Hamas. A poll published in the Haaretz daily showed that 64 per cent of Israelis now agree with him. That figure may increase further if the rocket threat grows.

The fear among Israel’s leaders is that “creeping annexation” of the occupied territories cannot be achieved if the Israeli public starts demanding that Hamas be brought to the negotiating table.

Second, Hamas’ mobilization last month of Gazans to break through the wall at Rafah and pour into Egypt has demonstrated to Israel’s politician-generals like Barak and Vilnai that the Islamic movement has the potential, as yet unrealized, to launch a focused mass peaceful protest against the military siege of Gaza.

Meron Benvenisti, a former deputy mayor of Jersualem, noted that this scenario “frightens the army more than a violent conflict with armed Palestinians”. Israel fears that the sight of unarmed women and children being executed for the crime of trying to free themselves from the prison Israel has built for them may give the lie to the idea that the disengagement ended the occupation.

When several thousand Palestinians held a demonstration a fortnight ago in which they created a human chain along part of Gaza’s fence with Israel, the Israeli army could hardly contain its panic. Heavy artillery batteries were brought to the perimeter and snipers were ordered to shoot protesters’ legs if they approached the fence.

As Amira Hass, Haaretz’s veteran reporter in the occupied territories, observed, Israel has so far managed to terrorize most ordinary Gazans into a paralysed inactivity on this front. In the main Palestinians have refused to take the “suicidal” course of directly challenging their imprisonment by Israel, even peacefully: “The Palestinians do not need warnings or reports to know the Israeli soldiers shoot the unarmed as well, and they also kill women and children.”

But that may change as the siege brings ever greater misery to Gaza.

As a result, Israel’s immediate priorities are: to provoke Hamas regularly into violence to deflect it from the path of organizing mass peaceful protest; to weaken the Hamas leadership through regular executions; and to ensure that an effective defense against the rockets is developed, including technology like Barak’s pet project, Iron Dome, to shield the country from attacks.

In line with these policies, Israel broke the latest period of “relative calm” in Gaza by initiating the executions of five Hamas members last Wednesday. Predictably, Hamas responded by firing into Israel a barrage of rockets that killed the student in Sderot, in turn justifying the bloodbath in Gaza.

But a longer-term strategy is also required, and is being devised by Vilnai and others. Aware both that the Gaza prison is tiny and its resources scarce and that the Palestinian population is growing at a rapid rate, Israel needs a more permanent solution. It must find a way to stop the growing threat posed by Hamas’ organized resistance, and the social explosion that will come sooner or later from the Strip’s overcrowding and inhuman conditions.

Vilnai’s remark hints at that solution, as do a series of comments from cabinet ministers over the past few weeks proposing war crimes to stop the rockets. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, for example, has said that Gazans cannot be allowed “to live normal lives”; Internal Security Minister, Avi Dichter, believes Israel should take action “irrespective of the cost to the Palestinians”; and the Interior Minister, Meir Sheetrit, suggests the Israeli army should “decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it” after each attack.

This week Barak revealed that his officials were working on the last idea, finding a way to make it lawful for the army to direct artillery fire and air strikes at civilian neighbourhoods of Gaza in response to rocket fire. They are already doing this covertly, of course, but now they want their hands freed by making it official policy, sanctioned by the international community.

At the same time Vilnai proposed a related idea, of declaring areas of Gaza “combat zones” in which the army would have free rein and from which residents would have little choice but to flee. In practice, this would allow Israel to expel civilians from wide areas of the Strip, herding them into ever smaller spaces, as has been happening in the West Bank for some time.

All these measures – from the intensification of the siege to prevent electricity, fuel and medicines from reaching Gaza to the concentration of the population into even more confined spaces, as well as new ways of stepping up the violence inflicted on the Strip – are thinly veiled excuses for targeting and punishing the civilian population. They necessarily preclude negotiation and dialogue with Gaza’s political leaders.

Until now, it had appeared, Israel’s plan was eventually to persuade Egypt to take over the policing of Gaza, a return to its status before the 1967 war. The view was that Cairo would be even more ruthless in cracking down on the Islamic militants than Israel. But increasingly Vilnai and Barak look set on a different course.

Their ultimate goal appears to be related to Vilnai’s “shoah” comment: Gaza’s depopulation, with the Strip squeezed on three sides until the pressure forces Palestinians to break out again into Egypt. This time, it may be assumed, there will be no chance of return.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His new book, “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”, is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

Why Did Israel Attack Syria? An Opening Shot for War on Iran?

by Jonathan Cook

Israel's air strike on northern Syria earlier this month should be understood in the context of events unfolding since its assault last summer on neighboring Lebanon.

From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace to drop munitions on a site close to the border with Turkey. We also know from the US media that the raid occurred in close coordination with the White House. But what was the purpose and significance of the attack?

It is worth recalling that, in the wake of Israel's month-long war against Lebanon a year ago, a prominent American neoconservative, Meyrav Wurmser, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney's recently departed Middle East adviser, explained that the war had dragged on because the White House delayed in imposing a ceasefire. The neocons, she said, wanted to give Israel the time and space to expand the attack to Damascus.

The reasoning was simple: before an attack on Iran could be countenanced, Hizbullah in Lebanon had to be destroyed and Syria at the very least cowed. The plan was to isolate Tehran on these two other hostile fronts before going in for the kill.

But faced with constant rocket fire from Hizbullah last summer, Israel's public and military nerves frayed at the first hurdle. Instead Israel and the US were forced to settle for a Security Council resolution rather than a decisive military victory.

The immediate fallout of the failed attack was an apparent waning of neocon influence. The group's program of "creative destruction" in the Middle East -- the encouragement of regional civil war and the partition of large states that threaten Israel -- was at risk of being shunted aside.

Instead the "pragmatists" in the Bush Administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, demanded a change of tack. The standoff reached a head in late 2006 when oilman James Baker and his Iraq Study Group began lobbying for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq -- presumably only after a dictator, this one more reliable, had again been installed in Baghdad. It looked as if the neocons' day in the sun had finally passed.

Israel's leadership understood the gravity of the moment. In January 2007 the Herzliya conference, an annual festival of strategy-making, invited no less than 40 Washington opinion-formers to join the usual throng of Israeli politicians, generals, journalists and academics. For a week the Israeli and American delegates spoke as one: Iran and its presumed proxy, Hizbullah, were bent on the genocidal destruction of Israel. Tehran's development of a nuclear program -- whether for civilian use, as Iran argues, or for military use, as the US and Israel claim -- had to be stopped at all costs.

While the White House turned uncharacteristically quiet all spring and summer about what it planned to do next, rumors that Israel was pondering a go-it-alone strike against Iran grew noisier by the day. Ex-Mossad officers warned of an inevitable third world war, Israeli military intelligence advised that Iran was only months away from the point of no return on developing a nuclear warhead, prominent leaks in sympathetic media revealed bombing runs to Gibraltar, and Israel started upping the pressure on several tens of thousands of Jews in Tehran to flee their homes and come to Israel.

While Western analysts opined that an attack on Iran was growing unlikely, Israel's neighbors watched nervously through the first half of the year as the vague impression of a regional war came ever more sharply into focus. In particular Syria, after witnessing the whirlwind of savagery unleashed against Lebanon last summer, feared it was next in line in the US-Israeli campaign to break Tehran's network of regional alliances. It deduced, probably correctly, that neither the US nor Israel would dare attack Iran without first clobbering Hizbullah and Damascus.

For some time Syria had been left in no doubt of the mood in Washington. It failed to end its pariah status in the post-9/11 period, despite helping the CIA with intelligence on al-Qaeda and secretly trying to make peace with Israel over the running sore of the occupied Golan Heights. It was rebuffed at every turn.

So as the clouds of war grew darker in the spring, Syria responded as might be expected. It went to the arms market in Moscow and bought up the displays of anti-aircraft missiles as well as anti-tank weapons of the kind Hizbullah demonstrated last summer were so effective at repelling Israel's planned ground invasion of south Lebanon.

As the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld reluctantly conceded earlier this year, US policy was forcing Damascus to remain within Iran's uncomfortable embrace: "Syrian President Bashar al-Assad finds himself more dependent on his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, than perhaps he would like."

Israel, never missing an opportunity to wilfully misrepresent the behavior of an enemy, called the Syrian military build-up proof of Damascus' appetite for war. Apparently fearful that Syria might initiate a war by mistaking the signals from Israel as evidence of aggressive intentions, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, urged Syria to avoid a "miscalculation". The Israeli public spent the summer braced for a far more dangerous repeat of last summer's war along the northern border.

It was at this point -- with tensions simmeringly hot -- that Israel launched its strike, sending several fighter planes into Syria on a lightning mission to hit a site near Dayr a-Zawr. As Syria itself broke the news of the attack, Israeli generals were shown on TV toasting in the Jewish new year but refusing to comment.

Details have remained thin on the ground ever since: Israel imposed a news blackout that has been strictly enforced by the country's military censor. Instead it has been left to the Western media to speculate on what occurred.

One point that none of the pundits and analysts have noted was that, in attacking Syria, Israel committed a blatant act of aggression against its northern neighbor of the kind denounced as the "supreme international crime" by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.

Also, no one pointed out the obvious double standard applied to Israel's attack on Syria compared to the far less significant violation of Israeli sovereignty by Hizbullah a year earlier, when the Shia militia captured two Israel soldiers at a border post and killed three more. Hizbullah's act was widely accepted as justification for the bombardment and destruction of much of Lebanon, even if a few sensitive souls agonized over whether Israel's response was "disproportionate". Would these commentators now approve of similar retaliation by Syria?

The question was doubtless considered unimportant because it was clear from Western coverage that no one -- including the Israeli leadership -- believed Syria was in a position to respond militarily to Israel's attack. Olmert's fear of a Syrian "miscalculation" evaporated the moment Israel did the maths for Damascus.

So what did Israel hope to achieve with its aerial strike?

The stories emerging from the less gagged American media suggest two scenarios. The first is that Israel targeted Iranian supplies passing through Syria on their way to Hizbullah; the second that Israel struck at a fledgling Syrian nuclear plant where materials from North Korea were being offloaded, possibly as part of a joint nuclear effort by Damascus and Tehran.

(Speculation that Israel was testing Syria's anti-aircraft defences in preparation for an attack on Iran ignores the fact that the Israeli air force would almost certainly choose a flightpath through friendlier Jordanian airspace.)

How credible are these two scenarios?

The nuclear claims against Damascus were discounted so quickly by experts of the region that Washington was soon downgrading the accusation to claims that Syria was only hiding the material on North Korea's behalf. But why would Syria, already hounded by Israel and the US, provide such a readymade pretext for still harsher treatment? Why, equally, would North Korea undermine its hard-won disarmament deal with the US? And why, if Syria were covertly engaging in nuclear mischief, did it alert the world to the fact by revealing the Israeli air strike?

The other justification for the attack was at least based in a more credible reality: Damascus, Hizbullah and Iran undoubtedly do share some military resources. But their alliance should be seen as the kind of defensive pact needed by vulnerable actors in a Sunni-dominated region where the US wants unlimited control of Gulf oil and supports only those repressive regimes that cooperate on its terms. All three are keenly aware that it is Israel's job to threaten and punish any regimes that fail to toe the line.

Contrary to the impression being created in the West, genocidal hatred of Israel and Jews, however often Ahmadinejad's speeches are mistranslated, is not the engine of these countries' alliance.

Nonetheless, the political significance of the justifications for the Israeli air strike is that both neatly tie together various strands of an argument needed by the neocons and Israel in making their case for an attack on Iran before Bush leaves office in early 2009. Each scenario suggests a Shia "axis of evil", coordinated by Iran, that is actively plotting Israel's destruction. And each story offers the pretext for an attack on Syria as a prelude to a pre-emptive strike against Tehran -- launched either by Washington or Tel Aviv -- to save Israel.

That these stories appear to have been planted in the American media by neocon fanatics like John Bolton is warning enough -- as is the admission that the only evidence for Syrian malfeasance is Israeli "intelligence", the basis of which cannot be questioned as Israel is not officially admitting the attack.

It should hardly need pointing out that we are again in a hall of mirrors, as we were during the period leading up to America's invasion of Iraq and have been during its subsequent occupation.

Bush's "war on terror" was originally justified with the convenient and manufactured links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as well as, of course, those WMDs that, it later turned out, had been destroyed years earlier. But ever since Tehran has invariably been the ultimate target of these improbable confections.

There were the forged documents proving both that Iraq had imported enriched uranium from Niger to manufacture nuclear warheads and that it was sharing its nuclear know-how with Iran. And as Iraq fell apart, neocon operatives like Michael Ledeen lost no time in spreading rumors that the missing nuclear arsenal could still be accounted for: Iranian agents had simply smuggled it out of Iraq during the chaos of the US invasion.

Since then our media have proved that they have no less of an appetite for such preposterous tales. If Iran's involvement in stirring up its fellow Shia in Iraq against the US occupation is at least possible, the same cannot be said of the regular White House claims that Tehran is behind the Sunni-led insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few months ago the news media served up "revelations" that Iran was secretly conspiring with al-Qaeda and Iraq's Sunni militias to oust the US occupiers.

So what purpose does the constant innuendo against Tehran serve?

The latest accusations should be seen as an example of Israel and the neocons "creating their own reality", as one Bush adviser famously observed of the neocon philosophy of power. The more that Hizbullah, Syria and Iran are menaced by Israel, the more they are forced to huddle together and behave in ways to protect themselves -- such as arming -- that can be portrayed as a "genocidal" threat to Israel and world order.

Van Creveld once observed that Tehran would be "crazy" not to develop nuclear weapons given the clear trajectory of Israeli and US machinations to overthrow the regime. So equally Syria cannot afford to jettison its alliance with Iran or its involvement with Hizbullah. In the current reality, these connections are the only power it has to deter an attack or force the US and Israel to negotiate.

But they are also the evidence needed by Israel and the neocons to convict Syria and Iran in the court of Washington opinion. The attack on Syria is part of a clever hustle, one designed to vanquish or bypass the doubters in the Bush Administration, both by proving Syria's culpability and by provoking it to respond.

Condoleezza Rice, it emerged at the weekend, wants to invite Syria to attend the regional peace conference that has been called by President Bush for November. There can be no doubt that such an act of détente is deeply opposed by both Israel and the neocons. It reverses their strategy of implicating Damascus in the "Shia arc of extremism" and of paving the way to an attack on the real target: Iran.

Syria, meanwhile, is fighting back, as it has been for some time, with the only means available: the diplomatic offensive. For two years Bashar al-Assad has been offering a generous peace deal to Israel on the Golan Heights that Tel Aviv has refused to consider. This week, Syria made a further gesture towards peace with an offer on another piece of territory occupied by Israel, the Shebaa Farms. Under the plan, the Farms -- which the United Nations now agrees belongs to Lebanon, but which Israel still claims is Syrian and cannot be returned until there is a deal on the Golan Heights -- would be transferred to UN custody until the dispute over its sovereignty can be resolved.

Were either of Damascus' initiatives to be pursued, the region might be looking forward to a period of relative calm and security. Which is reason enough why Israel and the neocons are so bitterly opposed. Instead they must establish a new reality -- one in which the forces of "creative destruction" so beloved of the neocons engulf yet more of the region. For the rest of us, a simpler vocabulary suffices. What is being sold is catastrophe.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

Israel’s Jewish problem in Tehran

So why hasn’t Iran started by wiping its own Jews off the map?

By Jonathan Cook

08/03/07 "ICH" -- - -- Iran is the new Nazi Germany and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Hitler. Or so Israeli officials have been declaring for months as they and their American allies try to persuade the doubters in Washington that an attack on Tehran is essential. And if the latest media reports are to be trusted, it looks like they may again be winning the battle for hearts and minds: Vice-President Dick Cheney is said to be diverting the White House back on track to launch a military strike.

Earlier this year Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s opposition leader and the man who appears to be styling himself scaremonger-in-chief, told us: “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.” Of Ahmadinejad, he said: “He is preparing another Holocaust for the Jewish state.”

A few weeks ago, as Israel’s military intelligence claimed -- as it has been doing regularly since the early 1990s -- that Iran is only a year or so away from the “point of no return” on developing a nuclear warhead, Netanyahu was at it again. “Iran could be the first undeterrable nuclear power,” he warned, adding: “This is a Jewish problem like Hitler was a Jewish problem … The future of the Jewish people depends on the future of Israel.”

But Netanyahu has been far from alone in making extravagant claims about a looming genocide from Iran. Israel’s new president, Shimon Peres, has compared an Iranian nuclear bomb to a “flying concentration camp.” And the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told a German newspaper last year: “[Ahmadinejad] speaks as Hitler did in his time of the extermination of the entire Jewish nation.”

There is an interesting problem with selling the “Iran as Nazi Germany” line. If Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit genocide against Israel’s Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000 Jews living peacefully in Iran and more than reluctant to leave despite repeated enticements from Israel and American Jews?

What is the basis for Israel’s dire forecasts -- the ideological scaffolding being erected, presumably, to justify an attack on Iran? Helpfully, as George Bush defended his Iraq policies last month, he reminded us yet again of the menace Iran supposedly poses: it is “threatening to wipe Israel off the map”.

This myth has been endlessly recycled since a translating error was made of a speech Ahmadinejad delivered nearly two years ago. Farsi experts have verified that the Iranian president, far from threatening to destroy Israel, was quoting from an earlier speech by the late Ayatollah Khomeini in which he reassured supporters of the Palestinians that “the Zionist regime in Jerusalem” would “vanish from the page of time”.

He was not threatening to exterminate Jews or even Israel. He was comparing Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians with other illegitimate systems of rule whose time had passed, including the Shahs who once ruled Iran, apartheid South Africa and the Soviet empire. Nonetheless, this erroneous translation has survived and prospered because Israel and her supporters have exploited it for their own crude propaganda purposes.

In the meantime, the 25,000-strong Iranian Jewish community is the largest in the Middle East outside Israel and traces its roots back 3,000 years. As one of several non-Muslim minorities in Iran, Jews there suffer discrimination, but they are certainly no worse off than the one million Palestinian citizens of Israel -- and far better off than Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

Iranian Jews have little influence on decision-making and are not allowed to hold senior posts in the army or bureaucracy. But they enjoy many freedoms. They have an elected representative in parliament, they practice their religion openly in synagogues, their charities are funded by the Jewish diaspora, and they can travel freely, including to Israel. In Tehran there are six kosher butchers and about 30 synagogues. Ahmadinejad’s office recently made a donation to a Jewish hospital in Tehran.

As Ciamak Moresadegh, an Iranian Jewish leader, observed: “If you think Judaism and Zionism are one, it is like thinking Islam and the Taliban are the same, and they are not.” Iran’s leaders denounce Zionism, which they blame for fueling discrimination against the Palestinians, but they have also repeatedly avowed that they have no problem with Jews, Judaism or even the state of Israel. Ahmadinejad, caricatured as a merchant of genocide, has in fact called for ‘regime change’ -- and then only in the sense that he believes a referendum should be held of all inhabitants of Israel and the occupied territories, including refugees from war, on the nature of the government.

Despite the absence of any threat to Iran’s Jews, the Israeli media recently reported that the Israeli government has been trying to find new ways to entice Iranian Jews to Israel. The Ma’ariv newspaper pointed out that previous schemes had found few takers. There was, noted the report, “a lack of desire on the part of thousands of Iranian Jews to leave”. According to the New York-based Forward newspaper, a campaign to convince Iranian Jews to emigrate to Israel caused only 152 out of these 25,000 Jews to leave Iran between October 2005 and September 2006, and most of them were said to have emigrated for economic reasons, not political ones.

To step up these efforts -- and presumably to avoid the embarrassing incongruence of claiming an imminent second Holocaust while thousands of Jews live happily in Tehran -- Israel is now backing a move by Jewish donors to guarantee every Iranian Jewish family $60,000 to settle in Israel, in addition to a host of existing financial incentives that are offered to Jewish immigrants, including loans and cheap mortgages.

The announcement was met with scorn by the Society of Iranian Jews, which issued a statement that their national identity was not for sale. “The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradeable for any amount of money. Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran’s Jews love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out the identity of Iranian Jews.”

However, this financial gesture may not only be unwelcome but self-fulfilling too, if past experience is the yardstick. Israel introduced a similar scheme a few years ago, when Argentina’s economy plunged into deep recession, broadcasting an offer of $20,000 to every Jew who settled in Israel. Months later the Israeli media reported a rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Argentina, only adding to the pressure on Jews there to leave. Of course, there was no mention of a possible causal connection between the attacks and Israel’s generous offer to Jews to abandon their homeland as other Argentinians sank into poverty.

But if financial enticements -- and a possible popular backlash -- fail to move Iranian Jews, there is good reason to fear that Israel may resort to other, more dubious ways of encouraging them to emigrate. That is certainly a path Israel has chosen before with other communities of Arab Jews, whom it has regarded either as a pool of potential spies and agents provocateurs to be used when needed or as “human dust”, in the words of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to be recruited to Israel’s “demographic battle” against the Palestinians.

In “Operation Susannah” of 1954, for example, Israel recklessly recruited a group of Egyptian Jews to stage a series of explosions in Egypt in a bid to discourage Britain from withdrawing from the Suez Canal zone. When the plot came to light, it naturally cast a shadow of disloyalty over Egypt’s wider Jewish community. Following Israel’s invasion and occupation of Sinai two years later, the government of Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled some 25,000 Egyptian Jews and, after others were imprisoned on suspicion of spying, the rest soon left.

Even more notoriously, Israel went to greater lengths to ensure the exit of the Arab world’s largest Jewish population, in Iraq. In 1950 a series of bombs targeted on Jews in Baghdad forced a rapid exodus of some 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel, convinced that Arab extremists were behind the attacks. Only later did it emerge that the bombs had been planted by members of the Zionist underground, supported by the Israeli government.

Now, Iran’s Jews may find themselves treated in much the same manner -- as simple human fodder. Stories are growing of Israel exploiting the free movement between Iran and Israel enjoyed by Iranian Jews and their Israeli relatives to carry out spying operations on Iran’s nuclear programme. Such reports have come from reliable sources such as the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, citing US government officials.

The fallout from such actions is not difficult to predict. Besieged by the US and the international community, Tehran is cracking down on dissent and minority groups, fearful that its own grip on power is shaky and that the well-publicised subversion being carried out by US and Israeli agents is likely only to be stepped up. So far most officials in Tehran have been careful to avoid suggesting that Iran’s Jews have double loyalties, as has the local Jewish community itself, both of them aware of Israel’s interests in provoking such a confrontation. But as the strains increase, and Israel’s need to prove Tehran’s genocidal intent grows ever stronger, that policy may end up being forfeited -- and with it the future of Iran’s Jews.

More important than the welfare of Iranian Jewish families, it seems, is the value of Iranian Jews as a propaganda tool in Israel’s battle to persuade the world that coexistence with the Muslim world is impossible. For those who want to engineer a clash of civilizations, the 3,000-year-old Jewish legacy in Iran is not something to be treasured, only another obstacle to war.

Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto Press). His website is www.jkcook.net

The Saker interviews Jonathan Cook from Nazareth

Today I am publishing the second interview in my new series "Saker interviews" (which began with the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery) with a Q&A email exchange with Jonathan Cook, a British journalist who lives in occupied Palestine and who recently wrote a book, entitled 'Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State', which was published by Pluto Press in Britain in April and in the United States in July 2006 (click here for more info on the book). Jonathan, a freelance journalist whose articles have been published in The Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, Counterpunch and many other media, is the only western reporter who chose to live amongst Palestinians and who covers the Palestinian struggle without being tied to the agenda and allegiances of the Western corporate media (for more information on Jonathan's amazing work, check out his excellent website).

Jonathan has just returned from the "Israel-Palestine: One Country, One State" conference organized by the Universidad Complutense de Madrid on the future of Palestine (which adopted a resolution-appeal whose text can be found here). Upon his return Jonathan kindly took some time off his schedule to thoroughly answer my questions for which I am greatly in his debt.

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First, I would like to turn to the conference which you just attended. What was its purpose, its importance, and what impact do you expect it to have?

I have no authority to speak for the group and so what I have to say should be read only as my personal impressions of the proceedings. In the coming weeks, I believe, we will issue something along the lines of a declaration of principles that will give the group a collective voice for the first time.

In early July, some 16 academics, journalists and activists met at a place called El Escorial, just outside Madrid, to think about ways to raise the profile of a one-state solution for Palestinians and Israelis. None of us is naïve about how likely we are to get a fair hearing for such a proposition at the moment. Israel, the US and the most of the international community have too much at stake to abandon paying lip service to the official solution: two states for two people. But nonetheless, we are all aware that someone has to point out that the cadaver of the two-state solution has long been cold, and that trying to breathe life into it is only wasting valuable time, time in which Palestinians are being killed and systematically cleansed from what little is left of their homeland.

The importance of the meeting, to the best of my knowledge, is that it was the first time, in modern times at least, that Israeli Jews and Palestinians have met in a public forum to discuss ways to share the land of historic Palestine. They were exploring together a new landscape of political possibilities, which was an exciting moment to witness. The timing was important too. It is clear that decades of US and Israeli machinations, and the failure of Palestinians to see anything tangible emerge after their long wait for a state, have started to undermine Palestinian unity. The fighting in Gaza is a clear indication of the loss of political direction among the leadership. The Palestinians need a new vision to replace the compromised and corrupted one offered by Fatah, and the limited and limiting one offered by Hamas. The argument for a single secular democratic state may offer Palestinians just such a unifying vision of their future, and in the longer term may persuade a growing number of Israelis that this is where their own future in the region lies too.

None of this is going to happen overnight, and the El Escorial meeting is intended as only the first of many to expand our understanding of the issues and widen our base of support. Like all movements, it will need time to articulate the core concerns in ways that will appeal to a larger audience. The hope must be that Palestinians will soon see that one state offers them a way out of the political dead-end into which they have been led by the international community, and that activists too will understand that it offers a just solution. In time, hopefully, more forward-thinking Israelis will see that one state is the only way to secure a fair and peaceful solution for both peoples. Then it becomes a matter of integrating the one-state debate into a larger campaign, possibly of boycotts and sanctions, to bring pressure on Israel.


What was the mood of the conference participants? What did they foresee as the likely future developments in Palestine?

I think the word would be sober -- though excited too to be moving the debate forward. We all appreciated the huge task ahead of us and the urgency with which progress needs to be made for the sake of both Palestinians and Israelis.

We were not there to make collective predictions about developments in Palestine beyond our own personal diagnoses. What was more significant, I think, was a recognition from the group that the main hurdle to finding a workable solution is Israel’s continuing definition of itself as a Jewish state. This fact is overlooked or misunderstood in most discussions of the conflict. Observers tend to assume Israel’s Jewishness is a good thing that needs to be protected. That’s a very strange approach not seen in the treatment of other recent ethnic states: can one imagine Germany being encouraged to foster an Aryan view of itself, or South Africa an Afrikaner one? And similarly can one imagine an Aryan Germany or a white South Africa being treated as a reasonable or fair negotiating partner for those it was seeking to exploit or eradicate? That, in essence, is the problem faced by the Palestinians.

The first thing to do in seeking a just solution is to factor in Israel’s bad faith in the negotiating process, a bad faith that derives from its need to protect its ethnic basis. That means in any possible division of the land promoted by Israel, whether negotiated or more likely imposed unilaterally, the chief criterion will be demographic: how to keep a maximum number of Jews inside the Jewish state, and keep a maximum number of non-Jews excluded. In theory at least that could entail a meaningful division of the land into two states (even if not a fair division for the Palestinians), but in practice that won’t happen for two reasons that are related to Israel’s need to protect its Jewishness.

First, in any division of the land, Israel will be faced with the very serious problem of what to do with the fifth of its population who are Palestinian, a community that is growing much faster than the Jewish one. Palestinians inside Israel have a very deprived form of Israeli citizenship (as opposed to those in the occupied territories who, of course, have no citizenship), but more significantly they lack a meaningful nationality in Israel. It is a little known fact that Israeli nationality -- which, unusually, Israel has separated from the idea of Israeli citizenship -- does not exist in a legal sense. Instead Israelis are classified according to more than 130 different nationalities, including “Jew” and “Arab”. This makes sense when one understands that Israel considers itself the state of the Jews, not Israelis. The only nationality that counts in Israel is Jewish nationality. In this way, all Jews wherever they live -- even non-citizens outside Israel -- are Israeli nationals by default because they are considered Jewish nationals, whereas Palestinian citizens lack meaningful nationality because they are not Jewish nationals.

These strange legal sleights of hand may seem abstract but they have very real consequences. They currently sanction state-sponsored racism but , in a two-state solution, they would pave the way for the ethnic cleansing of Israel’s Palestinian citizens. When the West encourages Israel in its ethnic project, it effectively gives its blessing to the dark side of the Jewish state.

And second, in any negotiation over dividing the land a powerful ethnic state confronts a weak Palestinian national liberation movement across the table. Israel holds all the cards but one: the morality of its cause. And for this reason alone it must act in bad faith.

Let us imagine a scenario in which Israel genuinely agreed to the creation of a viable Palestinian state. The result would be that a legitimate kind of state (a Palestinian one where nationality is based on citizenship and territory) would be living alongside an illegitimate kind of state (a Jewish one where nationality is extra-territorial and based on ethnic belonging). In Palestine, all those living inside the borders would be entitled to become citizens and nationals. In theory at least, those Jews who are currently settlers living in the occupied territories could become Palestinian nationals (if they wanted to), as could Jews who married or marry someone who is a Palestinian national. Depending on the terms of Palestine’s immigration policy, you or I could seek to immigrate there and after a period of time apply for Palestinian nationality. In other words, independent of the question of how well it is run, Palestine would be like most other states.

None of this would be true of Israel under a two-state solution, as long as it remained a Jewish state. It would continue seeking ways to exclude its non-Jewish citizens from inclusion in the state, it would continue playing legal tricks to make Israeli nationality indistinguishable from Jewish nationality, and it would bar all non-Jews from immigrating. It would also be opposed to its nationals intermarrying with non-Jews, as it is now, and on these grounds alone it would not want relations between its own people and those in a neighbouring Palestine.

In other words, in a peaceful solution in which a real Palestine was established alongside Israel as a Jewish state, it would quickly become clear that a Jewish state is not a normal or legitimate kind of state. Peace would shatter the myth of Israeli normalcy and democracy. Which is a good reason in itself why Israel has no interest in peace, or in developing a viable Palestinian state. In fact, it has every incentive to sabotage the secular Palestinian national movement and encourage Islamic extremism, as it has long been doing. If Palestine becomes an Islamic ghetto-state, it will mirror some of the “abnormalities” of the Jewish state. There can be no change in Israel’s position until its ethnic project is ended, and the only way to bring that about it is to campaign AGAINST Israel as a Jewish state and FOR a new single secular political entity that embraces Jews and Palestinians as equal citizens. In other words, the question of what to do about creating a Palestinian state is inextricably bound up with what to do about ending the Jewish state. There cannot be a Palestinian state as long as there is an ethnic Jewish state desiring the same territory.


Turning to Palestine now, could you describe the situation in the West Bank? What is the influence of Hamas and Fatah there? How much support is there, in your opinion, for Abbas?

In a word, disastrous. Israel has spent decades trying to engineer the outcome we are now seeing in the occupied territories, which should give us a sense of how dire these latest developments are. As I have already mentioned, Israel has always wanted to achieve two goals in the occupied territories: to encourage divisions within the Palestinian national movement to weaken it; and to encourage the rise of Islamic extremism so that the conflict can be recharacterised from what it is -- a colonial conflict in which the native people, the Palestinians, are fighting for the return of their land -- to a manifestation of a wider “clash of civilisations” in which Israel is on the side of civilisation and the Palestinians / Muslims on the side of barbarism.

Among many ordinary Palestinians, there is a quite sophisticated understanding of how things have gone wrong. Most are fully aware that the Fatah leadership essentially became coopted by Israel during the Oslo process, and that it has now abandoned the task of resistance to occupation. It is trying instead to negotiate over whatever scraps Israel and the US are willing to offer. Which explains the large swing in support for Hamas at the last election, in both Gaza and the West Bank. The international community has been surprised by Hamas’ tenacity since the economic blockade was imposed, but that is partly a reflection of how firm its support has remained among Palestinians. Many understand that resistance is more important than ever, and that Hamas is still a party of resistance and that Fatah no longer is.

The trap for Hamas is that its only available route to domestic legitimacy was through elections to lead the Palestinian Authority. But the PA is a creation of the Oslo process, and was designed to instrumentalise the Palestinian leadership’s collaboration with Israel and the US. The PA is the institutionalisation under the Oslo process of the Palestinian leadership’s new status as Israel’s security contractor. So when Palestinians voted for Hamas to lead the resistance, ironically they also placed it at the head of an institution, the PA, designed to impede its ability to resist. This is not only a contradiction for Hamas but for the Palestinian public who elected it. The immediate question facing both Hamas and its supporters is whether it can continue to live with the tension of both being a resistance movement and claiming its right to lead the PA. That issue has been settled by force in Gaza, but it is yet to play out fully in the West Bank.

Abbas is damaged goods in the view of many Palestinians, but he can benefit from several specific advantages he has in the West Bank:

1. He continues to have more support there than Gaza because things are still far easier in the West Bank than in Gaza. Some Palestinians in the West Bank, particularly those in the cities, may be persuaded that the Fatah route of collaboration is better for them -- at least in the short term. The full horrors of Gaza’s imprisonment have yet to be felt in cities like Ramallah, and some West Bankers may believe that the need for all-out resistance can be postponed a little longer. In addition, some West Bankers, again particularly in some of the cities, are concerned about the overtly Islamic programme of Hamas

2. The much larger area of the West Bank is harder to unify under a single Palestinian resistance. Compared to the single ghetto of Gaza, the West Bank is being turned into half a dozen ghettoes. Fatah’s grassroots support is more developed than Hamas’ in the West Bank and it has more privileges to organise across the length of the territory because of its proven willingness to collaborate with Israel. Remember, it is mostly Hamas MPs who are being arrested by Israel, not Fatah’s.

3. Israel will assist Abbas in any way it can to prevent Hamas taking over the West Bank as well as Gaza. That would unify the resistance under Hamas both ideologically and geographically, an outcome that cannot be allowed. An amnesty has been announced for Fatah militants, so that they can be coopted along with Abbas and so Israeli hit squads can concentrate on killing Hamas militants; official Fatah security forces will be trained and armed to take on Hamas; and exiled militias like the Bard Brigade may be allowed into the West Bank. In addition, Israel will make Abbas’ collaboration look productive, with prisoner releases and so on.

4. Life will be made hell in Gaza to warn West Bankers not to follow the same path.

How effective these policies will be in winning over West Bankers will not be clear for some time.


What have you observed is going on in the Israeli public opinion? Putting aside the settlers and their supporters, why is it that the Israeli public is not demanding a change in policies? Don't they see that the "beat the Arabs - they only understand force" theory has totally discredited itself?

The question assumes that there is room for a plurality of opinions in Israel, a marketplace of ideas in which the most plausible triumph. But that is not how public opinion works in Israel. As in other highly ideological societies, Israelis are educated to regard only a narrow range of views as acceptable. Also, as in other ethnic states, Israeli Jews are raised to believe both that they are a chosen people (even if for many of them that is interpreted in a secular sense) and that non-Jews will always want their destruction. There are examples of other ethnic groups thinking in these kinds of self-absorbed and destructive ways in modern times: the Japanese, the Germans, and the Afrikaners. But possibly uniquely, the ethnic chauvinism dominant in Israel and ideas of eternal Jewish victimhood are given sanction and encouraged by many other nations, particularly in the West’s obsession with exposing anti-Semitism at the expense of all other forms of racism and in its collaboration with Israel in placing it at the epicentre of a clash of civilisations.

In this claustrophobic ideological atmosphere, Israelis are not ready to listen to a counter-reality, to anything that shakes the foundations of their worldview or their sense of entitlement. Israeli politicians are well-used to fostering and exploiting such prejudices.

In addition, as in other societies, fear sells. Just as Americans are presented with the image of the black mugger, the black rapist and the black killer to keep mostly white politicians in power and the gun lobby rich, so Israelis are presented with the image of the genocidal Arab, filled with loathing of Jews, to secure the profits of the huge local defence industry and the mutually beneficial ties with American Jewry. It is difficult to see how Israelis can be dragged out of this world of illusion.


To what degree can Israeli actions be explained by Judaism and its teachings? Is racism towards the Arabs a determining factor here or not? Who are the forces behind Olmert and his government? Are the Haredim really influencing them?

I am not sure how comfortable I am with the idea that there is something inherent in Judaism that explains the development of modern Israel. I know that some dissident Israeli intellectuals claim that ideas of separation and chosenness in Judaism are at the root of Israeli policy -- a way of reinventing ghetto living for the industrialised era. But I prefer to seek explanations of Israeli political dogmas in the ethnic, rather than the religious, qualities of the Jewish state. In fact, I would argue that Israel is behaving in a fairly typical fashion for an ethnic state. Nazi Germany had its obsession with the “Volk” and “Lebensraum”, and the Afrikaners developed the idea of the Bantustan to deal with the demographic threat of the Other. Israel’s racism, its land thefts and its disengagements and wall-building can all be explained in these terms.


What do Israelis think about the US neocons, do they see them as true friends of Israel or not?

In a way, the neocons are driven by a very Israeli vision of the future. They apply Israel’s regional security paradigm to the global stage. Thus they seek world domination for the US, just as Israel’s strategists seek regional domination. Both have a casual disdain for the Arab and Muslim “mentality”, believing that it is essentially irrational and different from the enlightened Western mind. Both believe in “endless war”. And both believe that by creating chaos and instability around them they can manipulate and control their enemies. Given these similarities of thought, it may not be surprising that Israelis generally approve of neocon policy, and that neocons are by and large besotted with Israel. Certainly Israelis were enthusiastic about attacking Iraq, and have been keen to see the US repeat that disastrous policy with Iran. I have written extensively about the links between Israel and the neocons in my forthcoming book “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations”.


Lebanon: many in the region say that the war last summer was only a first round, and that this war will resume in the near future. Do you agree? If yes, what do you think the Israelis could reasonably hope to achieve by resuming this war? Do they seriously hope to "disarm Hezbollah"?

Almost certainly there will be another war. Israel has no interest in regional peace, which would damage its interests, so it must wage war. The problem is that peace would bring Israel simple anonymity: it would be just another small state in the Middle East, but without the oil of the Persian Gulf. Why would the US continue paying Israel billions of dollars in aid each year if Israel were a state at peace?

As long as there is war, or impending war, Israel is sitting pretty. It fulfils its primary function on behalf of the US, which is to keep the region’s other states nervous and unsure of what is coming next. This is a traditional policy of divide and rule: Israel decides who will be punished with attack, who will be isolated, who will be rewarded with a peace agreement and US munificence. Israel can also protect the US from the fallout when it attacks neighbouring states in line with larger US strategic goals. Those millions of cluster bombs dropped on south Lebanon, for example, were American-made and supplied, but the outrage is largely directed at Israel, not the US.

There are other benefits too. War is great for Israel’s massive defence industry. As Naomi Klein recently noted, business has been booming during the intifada as Israel develops new technologies for urban warfare, for crowd control and for imprisoning civilian populations. That is only possible as long as Israel is able to use the occupied territories as a giant open-air laboratory for performing human experiments. Were there peace, that laboratory would no longer exist and, with it, the Israeli defence industry’s profits would shrivel.

Those are the wider reasons why war is always pending for Israel. But there are three more specific reasons why Israel needs to wage another war against Lebanon and probably Syria too. The first is that the White House needed Hizbullah defanged, and Syria at the very least intimidated, before it could contemplate an attack on Iran. Israel’s failure last summer has left both Tel Aviv and Washington at a loss for how to move forward to achieve their goals. The second is a fear widely felt in Israel that in failing to crush Hizbullah the Israeli army has lost what is called here its “deterrence” value: that is, the Arabs have realised it is not invincible. Israelis are afraid that groups like Hamas and states like Syria will learn from this episode that the Israeli army can be beaten. And third, there is a widely expressed sense in Israel that, if the country’s army does not destroy Hizbullah, the US may one day start asking what value it is getting from subsidising one of the most powerful armies in the world if it cannot take on a militia of a few thousands part-time recruits. For all these reasons, Israel needs another chance to prove itself against either Hizbullah or Syria.


In your experience, what does the Jewish "street" say about a possible war between the US and Iran? Is a US attack on Iran seen as a real possibility and what do you expect the Palestinian response to such a situation would be?

The Israeli Jewish response is fairly predictable. Opinion polls show Israelis are pretty uniformly enthusiastic about a US attack on Iran, as they were about the invasion of Iraq. They are evenly split on the wisdom of Israel going it alone to attack Iran. That may in part reflect a sense of vulnerability after the humiliation in Lebanon last summer and in part a fear of breaking with their US patron. In addition, I think Israelis may fear that the moment for an attack on Iran has passed. Certainly there is lot of grumbling and tantrums from Israel’s rightwing pundits about Bush abandoning Israel by failing to strike Tehran, and Olmert is sounding ever more conciliatory. But it is always unwise to make firm predictions in this part of the world. Current Israeli indecision regarding Iran may be a sign of the army’s need to buy time as it rethinks its strategy following its failures in Lebanon. Certainly, as I’ve already argued, Israel is keen for more war in the future, and an attack on Lebanon or Syria always has the threat that it will expand to include other countries, particularly Iran.

By the Palestinian response, I take it that you mean the leadership. I think that makes the improbable assumption in the current circumstances that some kind of decipherable and unified Palestinian response is possible. Iran is a player, even if still a minor one, in the occupied territories. Iran, it can be reasonably assumed, is trying to finance and assist Hamas (just as it has done with Hizbullah) despite the sectarian differences between the two. Hamas needs all the help it can get to avert the combined opposition of Israel, the US and the Fatah leadership to its rule, so an alliance is a necessary move on its part. It has also been influenced by Hizbullah’s successes against Israel and will be learning the lessons, as are many other groups in the Middle East. One is the use of rockets to weaken Israeli resolve. Given the hostilities between Hamas and Fatah, one can probably guess that whatever is good for Hamas (a strong Iran) is bad for the Fatah leadership around Abbas.


Much is made of Hezbollah's popularity in Palestine. How popular are Iran and Khamenei or Hezbollah and Nasrallah in Palestine?

This is usually presented in the West in simplistic terms of Palestinians cheering on terrorists. That makes sense to many Westerners because they have been presented by the Western media and politicians with an image of Iran and Hizbullah as terrorists who yearn for Israel’s destruction. That view is not really credible outside the West because it simply does not fit the facts. If Hizbullah is a terrorist group, it is a very strange one: even the US Congress has struggled to identify the terrorist acts it is supposedly responsible for. Even the few terrorist acts that may have been committed by Hizbullah, though there is a lack of proof, date back nearly two decades.

Hizbullah was established as a Shia resistance movement to oust Israel from its illegal occupation of Lebanon, not to destroy it. That task it carried out with single-minded determination. Since then it has created a network of concealed bases across south Lebanon, built up a basic armoury with the help of Iran, and developed its own intelligence service that has penetrated Israel’s military secrets while largely preventing Israel from penetrating its own military structures -- all in the justified belief that Israel wants to meddle in Lebanon in ways that damage that country’s security and its interests and that Israel must therefore be repelled.

All of these achievements are reason enough why Hizbullah has earnt the enmity of Zionists everywhere. It is also why the powerful Israel lobby has been able to fashion the image of Hizbullah portrayed in the West. (Though it should be noted that senior US officials have quietly expressed their admiration of Nasrallah, including the former US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, who called him “the smartest guy in the Middle East”.) Palestinians, like most Arabs in the Middle East, do not read the Western media, so they have no reason to buy into these fictions. They understand that Nasrallah has proved himself a master tactician and strategist, both political and military, who has used his few thousand fighters to repeatedly humiliate the Israeli army, one of the most powerful in the world and one backed by the US. That is an achievement that has earnt him great respect among Palestinians, and which some of them hope to emulate in their own resistance to Israeli occupation.

But it runs even deeper than that, I think. It is particularly obvious among Palestinian citizens of Israel, who faced Hizbullah’s rocket attacks just like Israeli Jews -- in fact, they were killed in greater numbers proportionally by those attacks than Jewish citizens because their towns were not protected with bomb shelters and they were not given proper warnings of attacks. Most Palestinian citizens of Israel, including Christians, hold Nasrallah in almost unparalleled regard, despite their suffering at his hands. This is not some preverse form of masochism. They appreciate the clear distinctions he draws in his speeches between Israelis and Jews (not all Israelis are Jews, after all) and between Jews and Zionists (not all Jews are Zionists). He and his group, Hizbullah, are opposed to Zionism because they believe a self-declared ethnic state is a menace to itself, to the Palestinians and to its neighbours for many of the reasons I have given above. Palestinian citizens appreciate that he shares, even at a distance, their understanding of Israel’s ethnic nature and its bad faith, something that many Arab leaders -- often including the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories -- have failed to grasp. If someone has proved that the Arab world does not have to be permanently mired in fear of Israel, and manipulated by its divide and rule policies, it is Nasrallah. He gives Palestinians, and other Arabs, back some of their self-respect.

Feelings among Palestinians towards Iran, I suspect, are a little more complex. Certainly no one here believes the myths being spoonfed to Westerners about Iran planning to “wipe Israel off the map” (I am afraid I cannot bring myself to explain yet again the translation error that has been so readily abused by Israel, but there are plenty of Farsi experts who have done so and their articles can be easily found on the internet). Again, it is easy to mischaracterise Iran in the West as a terror state when the media acts as little more than a propaganda tool for the US and Israeli governments, and then misrepresent Palestinian support for Iran as support for terrorism. But nonetheless, feelings towards Iran are a little more mixed. Where Nasrallah appears devout and spiritual, the Iranian clerics seem purist and pious. Where Nasrallah is popular, Iran’s secular leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is merely populist. And whereas Hizbullah’s Shia are drawn from the Arab world, Iran’s Shia are Persian. But of course, Iran is the benefactor: Nasrallah’s talents are only on display because of Iranian money and support, so for Palestinians there is some reflected glory. And Hamas, of course, is equally in need of a patron in Iran, if it is to follow Hizbullah’s lead.