Great Moments in 'Judeo-Christianity'

It was good to see favourable reviews of Palestinian director Annemarie Jacir's latest film, Wajib, in both the Fairfax and Murdoch press recently. Just one sentence in Sandra Hall's review in the Sydney Morning Herald of 11/10/18, however, cries out for clarification:

"Because of a large concentration of Arab Christians, [Nazareth's] Palestinians were allowed to stay on after the Israeli takeover in 1948."

To begin with why is the genocidal onslaught undertaken against the Palestinians by Israeli forces at this time invariably glossed over with words such as, in this instance, "takeover," or 'displacement', or some other such euphemism? It's as though, despite the now decades of scholarly research on the horrors of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's majority Arab (Christian & Muslim) population by Israeli fire and sword in 1948, the mainstream media still hasn't absorbed the fact, or are playing it safe by taking their cue from some Israeli style guide. Maddening!

The other thing about that sentence is that it gives the general reader the false impression that Israel's genocidaires bypassed Nazareth out of respect for the largely Christian population. The Zionist movement had (and has) no more respect for Palestinian Christians that it had (and has) for Palestinian Muslims. Both are Arabs, and their only role in the Zionist scheme of things is to make way for 'the Jewish people'.

Nazareth, the childhood home of Jesus, was only spared to avoid bad PR. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains:

"Ben-Gurion did not wish the city of Nazareth to be depopulated for the simple reason that he knew the eyes of the Christian world were fixed on the city. But a senior general and the supreme commander of the operation [Operation Palm Tree], Moshe Karmil, ordered the total eviction of all the people who had stayed behind ('16,000', noted Ben-Gurion, '10,000 of whom were Christians'). Ben-Gurion now instructed Karmil to retract his oder and let the people stay. He agreed with Ben Donkelman, the military commander of the operations: 'Here the world is watching us,' which meant that Nazareth was luckier than any other city in Palestine. Today Nazareth is still the only Arab city in pre-1967 Israel." (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, pp 170-171)

Beware the Zionist Thought Police

"A prominent Jewish academic banned from delivering an address at a major conference because he boycotts against Israel has warned of a growing trend of censorship within the Jewish community. Peter Slezak, a philosopher at the University of NSW, had promised not to raise the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign [BDS] at the Limmud-Oz Festival of Jewish Ideas to be held in Sydney in June... He offered the organisers the chance to vet his proposed talk, on the German-American Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt... The Limmud organisers rejected the proposal, saying even though Professor Slezak might not mention BDS, the problem is he believes in it." (Jewish community 'censors' its own on BDS', Ean Higgins, The Australian, 5/5/15)

Peter Slezak is to be commended for speaking out against the activities of the Zionist thought police. Here's another recent example of their handiwork:

"Australia's B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation Commission [ADC] has welcomed the decision by the UN to conduct a review of any anti-Semitic and anti-Israel books..."

Note the conflation here!

"... offered at its official store in Geneva. Some of the texts to be reviewed include How I Stopped Being a Jew, Israel's War Against the Palestinians, and The Punishment of Gaza." (UN takes stock of its books, jwire.com.au, 4/5/15)

How I Stopped Being a Jew is by Israeli historian Shlomo Sand. I assume that the second item on the list is Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappe's Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians. The Punishment of Gaza is by Israel's top journalist, Gideon Levy.

Oh well, the Zionist thought police may be after him, but Peter Slezak can at least take comfort from the fact that he's in the very best of company.

Fiddler With No Roof

Q&A buffs out there may remember when Israeli historian Ilan Pappe was on the panel last September.

They may even remember this particular question from one, Marrianne Fraser:

"After all the pogroms throughout the centuries, with Jews never being able to own land in any country they lived in and being forced from their homes time and again as portrayed so well in my favourite musical Fiddler on the Roof, and after the Holocaust, isn't it just for Jews to have been given a place to call their own?"

Certainly, they'll remember Pappe's memorable reply:

"You know, this kind of question always reminds me of people setting off in search of a refuge for battered women and abused children. They find a home where another family lives, throw them off the balcony, and their home becomes the refuge." (The rest of that response and more may be found in my 22/9/12 post The Nakba Comes to Q&A.)

Well, Fiddler on the Roof's Tevye has made a welcome reappearance in a new Rabbis4 Human Rights production called Theodore Bikel: It hurts that the descendents of Anatevka expel Israeli Bedouin, just posted on YouTube.

Set against the backdrop of Israeli government bulldozers demolishing the Bedouin village of El-Araqib, and Israeli troops terrorising its inhabitants, apparently to make way for a Jewish National Fund project called 'The Ambassadors Forest', Tevye, in trademark cap, makes the following plea:

"My name is Theodore Bikel and I want to ask you to help prevent a terrible moral tragedy.

"I've spent much of my life playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. I see a parallel with what is happening today. 40,000 Bedouins in the Negev Desert are being told to get out of their homes.

"Remember the scene in Fiddler on the Roof when the Russians arrived and tell them they have 3 days to get out? Tevye says, Why should I get out? He says, Not just you, all of you! Tevye says, Why should we leave? He says, I don't know why. I have an order here. Tevye says, A piece of paper can get me out? What if we refuse to leave? He says, You know the consequences of refusal.

"It hurts me. But what hurts me even more is the fact that the very people who are telling them to get out are the descendents of the people of Anatevka - my people. I want to prevent that. I want to prevent an injustice. I want you to help and join me and join the Rabbis4 Human Rights."

Ilan Pappe: Israel is an Apartheid State

At Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House last Sunday, touring Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe, spoke to the topic, Israel is an apartheid state. The Concert Hall was virtually full, partly I imagine as a result of his hugely successful appearance on Q&A, and the audience was appreciative and receptive. Needless to say, Pappe was a breath of fresh air, speaking easily and wittily without notes, and was given a well-deserved standing ovation at the end.

For those of you not present, I thought it might be useful to summarise his speech and the q&a session which followed:

Pappe: Is this a dangerous idea? Many Israelis wouldn't think so. Nor South Africans. Nor many journalists and progressive folk in the West. Liberal Zionists though find it dangerous, and for many years have been trying to square the circle in an attempt to justify Israel's apartheid policies. Jewish communities, of course, are allergic to the very idea. No, it's not the recognition that Israel is an apartheid state that's dangerous, it's Israel itself that is dangerous; dangerous to Palestinians, dangerous to Jews in Israel and abroad, and dangerous to the world beyond.

Apartheid is a generic term for a legal, economic, social and political regime based on dispossession, discrimination and segregation on the basis of race, religion or nationality. The early Zionists, who were prolific diarists, described the Palestinians as dangerous aliens and usurpers. Their resistance to Zionist colonisation led the colonisers to develop apartheid policies of self-segregation and gated communities, which they forced on the native population once they'd become a ruling majority in 1948.

They institutionalised segregation, forcing on the Palestinian minority in Israel an invisible apartheid based on restricted living spaces, double standards in the courts and reduced access to state benefits. The Palestinian Israelis are confined to enclaves, with no new Arab towns being built since 1948. In contrast, hundreds of Jewish settlements have been constructed. In the West Bank, apartheid is starkly visible. Gaza of course is a world on its own, a large ghetto. How ironic that the people who most suffered from policies based on demography and population control in Europe should be dishing it out to others in Palestine.

Pappe then took questions from the audience:

The first questioner took exception to his reference to Palestine's indigenous Arab population. Jews too are indigenous to 'Palestine' she contended. Pappe responded that he was not indigenous to Palestine, but a 3rd generation settler-colonialist, and that, for good or ill, that's what most Israeli Jews, and Australians for that matter, were. Sorry about that.

The second bemoaned the US's propping up of Israel, seeing little progress so long as that pertained. Ever the optimist, Pappe reminded the audience that historically nothing is forever and cited such positives as America's 1919 King-Crane Commission and President Eisenhower's bringing the Israelis to heel in the wake of the 1956 Suez crisis. He further noted a fundamental change away from knee-jerk support for Israel in US universities, civil society and the trade union movement.

The third asserted that however hard poor little peace-seeking Israel looked, it simply couldn't fond a peace partner. Pappe, however, explained that the so-called peace process had essentially been a matter of USrael always dictating to the Palestinians.

The fourth asked Pappe if he saw evidence of a tipping point in the Middle East conflict, but I can't quite remember his answer. I think it was something along the lines of the light being often just around the corner of the darkest tunnel.

The fifth raised the issue of an academic boycott of Israel. Pappe was supportive of the idea, pointing  out the role of Israeli academics in squaring the Israeli circle and acting as a scholarly shield for Israeli oppression.

The sixth asserted that while there was only one Jewish state, African refugees were flocking there, so go figure, Pappe. Pappe argued that in fact Israel didn't really care where its immigrants came from so long as they boosted its numbers vis-a-vis the Palestinians, and noted that many of the so-called Russian Jews brought in in the 80s were actually Christians. He went on to say that, at the end of the day, only the Palestinians were in a position to give permission for people to live in Palestine.

And lo, the seventh turned out to be our friend from the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, Vic Alhadeff. Vic asserted that as an ex-South African he knew what apartheid was and had struggled against it (See my 23/10/10 post SuperVic?). Pappe, he charged, was too blinded by anti-Zionist ideology to be an objective historian. Isn't it funny, said Pappe, how only Zionist historians get to be objective? He went on to refer to South Africa's apartheid as petty apartheid in comparison with Israel's more hidden, veiled variety. A comic interlude then occurred following some confusion on the compere's part as to whether Vic's question had been fully addressed and he was invited for a second chomp of the cherry. Vic, having already resumed his seat, fairly leapt from it and sprinted to the microphone, evidence if one needed it, of the man's astonishing athleticism, if not of the relevance of his intellectual contribution to the debate, given that I was too cracked up to hear what he said second time around.

The eighth referred to a thesis on the Tantura massacre of 22-23 May, 1948 by one of Pappe's former students, Teddy Katz, suggesting that it had been discredited by the evidence of one of his interlocutors, an Abu Fihmi. The latter had died a long time ago, reflected Pappe, and the fact that Katz became the subject of a defamation case over his thesis is indicative of the depth of Nakba denial in Israel. (The Katz affair features prominently in Pappe's 2010 book Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel.)

If I got it right, the ninth asked if Pappe's politics were in conflict with his faith. Pappe said he'd heard just about every question and more during his 14 appearances in Australia but not that one. He replied beautifully that, as his Zionism receded, the more human and Jewish he felt.

The tenth was outraged at the fact that Zionist barrister Irving Wallach had sought to legitimise his support for Israel by citing the alleged statements of certain aboriginal clients. Pappe remarked on the phenomenon of the blind spot so common in certain Jewish intellectuals/activists, who evinced concern for every downtrodden people on the planet bar one. I can speak to an Israeli audience, he said, about Palestinian women forced to give birth at checkpoints, Palestinian kids suffering from cancer being refused entry to Israeli hospitals, the demolition of Palestinian homes, and the torture of Palestinian prisoners, and nothing moves them! - which is why we need a global BDS campaign.

A final comment - for the record. Pappe's appearance at the National Press Club last Wednesday was attended by not one representative of any ms media outlet. I have heard, in explanation, that the ms press don't bother attending NPC sessions when historical matters are on the agenda. If there is any truth in this, it surely constitutes a damning indictment of the press. And while on the subject of Pappe and the press, I imagine that efforts were made to interest at least its Fairfax half in taking an opinion piece from him, doing an interview with him or maybe even a feature. Whether that was the case or not, nothing whatever by or about Pappe ever appeared. Censorship? Self-censorship? Who knows? To look at it from another angle; if, here in Australia, we have a press that doesn't actively seek out an interview with a visitor of Pappe's stature, that's bad; but if we have a press that actually refuses an opportunity to interview him when offered one by those organising his tour, that's even worse.

The Nakba Comes to Q & A

Getting Israeli historian Ilan Pappe on Q&A on Monday night was quite a coup. In fact, I can't even remember any program ever on ABC television devoted, even if not in its entirety, to the issue of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. 

Q&A, September 17 2012, was memorable for many things.

First, there was an uncharacteristic silence from the ms media's most vociferous Zionist, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian. As he himself remarked at one point, "Haven't I been magnificently silent through all that debate? It is the longest debate on Israel ever held in Australia in which I haven't spoken, you know."

And better for him to have remained magnificently silent than to flaunt his abysmal ignorance thus:

"I comprehensively reject Ilan's narrative of Israel. I think it's wrong in every respect. I haven't had time to read all of Ilan's books but I read this week devastating critiques of them by historians, who are very critical of Israel, for their factual inaccuracy. Benny Morris and others who are very critical of Israel, not servants of the Israeli Government."

Who is he trying to fool? For one, Sheridan wouldn't know a book by Pappe if it hit him in the face. For another, portraying Morris as a trenchant critic of Israel simply means he hasn't read Morris either. Happily, apart from the above, this pompous windbag had little else to say other than to moan irrelevantly about Israel's so-called legitimacy coming under attack, crack this little funny - "There is no country in the Middle East which better observes the human rights of all its citizens than Israel" - and draw a false analogy between Arab Jewish immigrants to Israel and ethnically-cleansed Palestinians.

The only real attempt to land a few blows on Pappe came from Zionist barrister Irving Wallach. Of course, we'd heard Wallach's line a thousand times before: the Palestinians were the authors of their own misfortune. If only they'd accepted the 1947 UN partition plan! Then, presumably, Israeli forces would have advanced no further than a line on a map drawn by a UN committee and the Palestinians would now be partying in at least 44% of their ancestral homeland. One (just one!) of the problems with this little fantasy can be summed up by the rhetorical question: Since when have lines on a map ever been an obstacle to Zionist expansionism? Wallach then followed this with: If only the Palestinians hadn't been led by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini*, a man who'd spent the war years in Nazi Germany schmoozing with Adolf Hitler!

Despite Pappe's categorical dismissal of Wallach's 'if onlys' as "Israeli propaganda," credulous ringmaster Tony Jones was mightily impressed by the second at least:

Jones: OK. All right. Let's settle this issue of the Mufti of Jerusalem because I have seen those pictures. I have seen the history. He was connected to Hitler. [What exactly have you been reading, Tony?]

Wallach: Yeah, definitely. Absolutely.

Jones: There isn't any doubt about that.

They hadn't, however, reckoned on Pappe's succinct presentation of the bleeding obvious:

"Stupid behaviour by a Palestinian leader does not justify the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. A Palestinian refusal to accept the partition may or may not be justified. What is not justified is punishing the Palestinians by depopulating half of [Palestine]. We have to understand what happened in 1948. Imagine half the population of a country [being] forcibly expelled. Half the villages destroyed. Half the towns demolished. Is this the right kind of punishment for for a leader who made a stupid mistake in World War 2? This was not a tragedy. This was a crime against humanity."

The insularity and self-absorption of one elderly Zionist questioner (on video) was breathtaking. He wanted to know why Q&A "coincided with the holiest days of the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hashanah," thus "preventing observant Jews from being able to attend as members of the audience or even to watch the broadcast."

This provided an opening for another jab by Wallach, for whom defending Israel from a prominent critic obviously took precedence over Rosh Hashana: "Look, can I say this about Ilan's whole point of view, and that is: it is designed and intended to perpetuate a conflict model and narrative." There was, said Wallach, a war, but both sides have been moving towards a two-state solution. He went on portentously, "if you want to carry on in Ilan's fashion and throw around cliches and accusations then a couple of things follow. Firstly, you have to seriously consider surrendering your claim to be an objective historian. Secondly, you have to accept that what you want to do is encourage ongoing conflict and battles and death and destruction between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. If you want to go along the conflict road, then forget about peace. If you want to promote Israel as a pariah state for your own political and ideological agenda, go ahead. History will not thank you for it."

Wallach's little homily, which smeared Pappe as a promoter of violence while ignoring the fact that the root of all violence in Palestine/Israel stems solely from the Zionist movement's goal of imposing a sectarian 'Jewish' state on the indigenous non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, led to the following revealing exchange:

Pappe: Can I...?

Jones: Ilan, yes, you have to respond to that.

Pappe: Can I respond? First of all, I don't think Israel's seeking legitimacy [as such]. Israel is seeking legitimacy as a racist state within the community of civilised states.

Wallach (interrupting): Look, pardon me, can we stick to the facts?

Pappe (as if bone-weary of Zionist claptrap): No. No. Please no.

Wallach: Please stick to the facts.

Pappe: I didn't interrupt you. You taught me a lesson about being polite so try to apply it to yourself. Now, Israel wants to remain both a racist and a democratic state. This is an oxymoron... Secondly, the documentation for the ethnic cleansing of Palestine [and] for Israel's criminal policies since is there and most Israeli historians recognise that. So the debate in Israel is not over facts but morals. Whether it was right, as Benny Morris says, in self-defence, to ethnically cleanse another people, or whether it was immoral. I say it was immoral, not Jewish, inhuman and finally...

Jones: What's being challenged is the documentation.

Pappe: No. No.

Jones: Which, as a historian, you are relying on. [Jones, like Doogue, who knows little or nothing about the Palestinian Nakba is challenging Ilan Pappe? Is this chutzpah or what?]

Pappe: The documentation is not challenged. Nobody challenges it.

Wallach (taking advantage of Jones insufferable chutzpah): And Tony, if I might say so, what's also challenged...

Pappe (trying to close the door on this peddler of Zionist snake oil): No, let me finish.

Wallach (channelling Benny Morris):... is the slur of an ethnic cleansing as opposed to war followed by refugees. That's what's under challenge.

Pappe: Yes. Now...

Wallach: And in that regard Ilan is on his own...

Pappe: In that regard, you could look...

Wallach: Ilan is on his own as regards the historians. He's on his own.

Pappe: I am totally alone - with 5-6 million Palestinians and another 10 billion people in the world. Now, the point I'm making...

Sheridan (ever the smartarse heckler from Greg & Tony Do Monash): There are only 6 billion people in the world. [Actually its over 7 billion.]

Pappe: Six billion. That's right. I extended it to the universe. I'm sure even aliens understand that the Zionist version is wrong. Now, the...

Sheridan: I'm sure the aliens watch the ABC.

MULTIPLE SPEAKERS TALK AT ONCE

Jones (having allowed Wallach and Sheridan to interrupt Pappe repeatedly, now proceeds to cut him short in favour of the two panellists, Moore and Davidson, who know nothing about the issue): I'm going to get you to sum up because we haven't heard from at least two of our panellists for quite a while.

Pappe: I know but let me make a final, very important point. By the time the so-called war started on May 15, 1948, when the Arab armies entered Palestine, half of the Palestinians had already become refugees. This was [before] the war. And this was the plan, the unpleasant reality that Israelis have to come to terms with if Jews and Arabs are ever to have peace and reconciliation.

The idiocy of the decision to include Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore on the panel became apparent when she rambled vacuously: "Well, I just think that history's fine and I acknowledge that there have been terrible experiences of the Jewish people during particularly the Hitler era and for Palestinians as well but, you know,, I think we really should be talking about solutions here. I think of the families of the two communities and, you know, the bloodshed that continues, and I really think we should all be working very hard to try and find solutions."

You're kidding me! Pappe had to be cut short for that? History's fine, like, but hey, it's behind us. Now let's all shake hands and move on. Jeesus! Is it too much to expect people like Moore to say simply: Hey, I'm a whizz on the Sydney CBD but this Jew/Palestinian thingy? Forget it! And if Tony Jones asked her if she'd learnt anything from Ilan Pappe, all she had to do was ask, Alan who? But no, she not only blaahed the above but went on to rhubarb the following:

"You know, Europeans came to this country 200 years ago. The Aboriginal community had been here for 60,000 years. Now the Europeans dispossessed the Aboriginal people of their land and we're now working very hard on reconciliation and making amends and so I really think reconciliation and coexistence and solutions for the Palestinian and Israeli communities should be the goal of everyone involved in this issue."

Such is the 'quality' of Australia's political class (not sure if class is quite the right word here, know what I mean?).

Tony Jones asked if her if she was equating Aboriginal dispossession with Palestinian dispossession. It's "comparable," she replied, apparently in blissful ignorance (after all these years) of the fact that millions of Aboriginal people are not living in refugee camps in PNG and New Zealand.

For Wallach, however, any suggestion of comparability between indigenous Palestinians and indigenous Australians was to venture into dangerous territory. This mere inkling of a truth - that in fact both peoples were steamrolled by a belligerent, relentless, and unforgiving settler-colonial project - simply had to be scotched. Hence the following:

"[C]an I say this about this question of Aboriginal people: my first job as a solicitor was with the South Coast Aboriginal Legal Service... One of the things that surprised me was the number of my Koori clients coming up to me and saying, Mate, we appreciate what you're doing. We feel just like you and your people, the Jews. We went through exactly what you're going through." (There are two ways of looking at this. The less charitable is simply to dismiss it as poppycock. After all, unless Wallach wore a neon sign on his head saying Wandering, Suffering Jew, his Aboriginal clients would likely have perceived in him little more than another, albeit sympathetic and helpful, white man. The more charitable interpretation is to assume that Wallach did indeed talk to his clients about the fate of his relatives in Nazi-occupied Poland, in which case the word may well have got around, incurring the reaction he describes. What is certain, however, is that if his Aboriginal clients had heard the real story of the Palestinian Nakba, they'd have identified with the Palestinians, not the Zionist terror gangs of the Haganah, Irgun and Stern.)

I particularly enjoyed this delicious exchange between a member of the studio audience and Pappe: 

Marrianne Fraser: After all the pogroms throughout the centuries, with Jews never being able to own land in any country they lived in [???] and being forced from their homes time and again as portrayed so well in my favourite musical Fiddler on the Roof, and after the Holocaust, isn't it just for Jews to have been given a place to call their own?

Pappe: You know, this kind of question always reminds me of people setting off in search of a refuge for battered women and abused children. They find a home where another family lives, throw them off the balcony, and their home becomes the refuge. Of course Jews are entitled to a safe place, and in many ways the Palestinians were willing to give them a safe haven. What they were not willing to give them was the right to take over their homeland. I think there's a difference between giving people a refuge (which, for some reason, you Australians refuse to give these poor boat people) [and a group who come to take over your country]. Imagine if these boat people today were knocking on your door saying, Dear Australians, 2,000 years ago Australia used to be my homeland. You must give us half now and the rest later on. This would never be accepted by anyone in Australia and rightly so. 

Finally, who could forget this wonderful contribution from someone known only as 'audience member'?:

"We keep speaking about the history, 1948 and all that. I was privileged to have worked in Israel and Palestine for the last 18 months, and was even able to attend a meeting with the current mayor of Jerusalem. At the time he had just announced 5,000 more Jewish homes in East Jerusalem, but when we questioned him about that he just laughed and said, 'I've only announced 5,000 but there are 90,000 planned,' so the ethnic cleansing is still going on as far as I'm concerned."

[*Re Haj Amin, I'll be doing a post in the near future.]

Yes, Geraldine, the Palestinians Were Ethnically Cleansed 2

So what exactly, I'd like to know, led to Radio National's decision to follow Monday's interview with Israeli historian Ilan Pappe with a rant by fellow Israeli historian Benny Morris on Tuesday? Lobby pressure or a craven act of self-censorship?

And what a rant it was! Morris threw every vile epithet in the book at Pappe in what amounted essentially to a case of character assassination. Pure projection of course, but nothing in Geraldine's questions betrayed the slightest awareness that she was dealing with a deeply disturbed individual.

Morris' tirade reminded me of nothing so much as the excoriations of a cult leader directed at one who not only got away but is now blowing the whistle on the whole mad enterprise. Poor Geraldine, desperately seeking relief from the cognitive dissonance occasioned by her exposure to the bleeding obvious on Monday, got more than she bargained for with motor-mouth Morris, the Israeli establishment's go-to historian on the events of 1948. Once a colleague of Pappe's, Morris has, in the words of the former, "transformed to become a racist anti-Arab pundit and less of a professional historian." (Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel, 2010, p 20)

Here's my transcript with bracketed commentary:

Doogue: Well there are other 'new' historians who see Israel's history very differently [from Ilan Pappe]. One of those is Professor Benny Morris an Israeli professor of history at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He's a harsh critic of Ilan Pappe. Indeed, writing in The New Republic last year he said: "At best Ilan Pappe must be one of the world's sloppiest historians. At worst, one of the most dishonest. In truth, he probably merits a place somewhere between the two." Well Benny Morris now joins us from Beersheva. Professor welcome to Radio National Breakfast.

Morris: Thank you for having me.

Doogue: Ilan Pappe says if you go to the sources and look at the documentation from 1948 onwards, which you have done as well, then you form a very different opinion of what happened to the Palestinians compared with mainstream Israeli history. Now how far do you disagree with that?

Morris: Ilan Pappe's description is mendacious and politically motivated. He's an anti-Zionist and he wants to blacken Israel's image. Actually, I saw the documents long before and published long before Ilan Pappe [inaudible] actually what happened. The documentation gives us a complex picture. We have the Palestinian Arabs launching an attack on the Jewish community, followed by an attack by the Arab states during which, in self defence, Israelis occupied Arab towns and villages, some of which they expelled. Most of the people fled and there was no pre-planning, no systematic what he calls ethnic cleansing. There were cases where there were expulsions, cases where Arab leaders instructed or advised Arabs to leave and in most cases Arabs fled the wrath of war, the flame of war and not because of any systematic plan or intention by the Israelis.

[Shhh... don't mention Ben-Gurion's telling the Jewish Agency mere weeks before the UN partition plan that to prevent the Palestinians in the proposed Jewish state becoming a fifth column, "they can either be mass arrested or expelled: it is better to expel them." (2/11/47)*

Or the infamous Master Plan for getting rid of the Palestinians, Plan Dalet of March 1948: "These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their debris) and especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state." (10/3/48)]**

What is true is that the Israelis as policy did not allow the Palestinians to return to their towns and villages, arguing that these very Palestinians tried to destroy Israel and would constitute a fifth column were they to return.

[This, of course, is typical Zionist double-talk: one version for the Geraldines of this world, another for his fellow Israelis. Keeping in mind that the Palestinian Arabs had been smashed militarily by the British in the late 30s and were therefore no great military threat to the Zionists in 1948, what Morris only hints at here, the Palestinian demographic threat - the fact that the Palestinian Arabs were the majority population in Palestine in 1948 - becomes explicit in an interview he gave to Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit in 2004, Survival of the Fittest: "That is what Zionism faced [in 1948]. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them... I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy... But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice." (See my 11/5/08 post Benny Unhinged for a fuller account of this interview.)]

Doogue: So a central part of Ilan Pappe's thesis as I understand it anyway was that going right back to the end of 19th century through to the 30s and so on the planners, the people who were dreaming of the Jewish state did allow themselves to almost fantasise how good life would be if they had no Arabs around them at all and that this did amount to and led to a genuine plan to evict the Palestinians so they could have the land to themselves. Now you contest that, do you?

Morris: Again, it's a mixture of truth and fantasy. The world Zionist leaders, especially during the 1930s including Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Zionist community in Palestine, did talk about, think about the possibility of transferring Arabs out of Palestine but that was because the Arabs had revolted against British rule and were attacking the Zionist community in Palestine. The Jews in Europe were suffering from anti-Semitism and needed a safe haven and in order to supply them with one the Jews wanted a state in Palestine and they understood that as masses of Jews poured in they would be attacked by the Arabs who wanted to expel them. So part of the Zionist response was perhaps it would be best to transfer Arabs or some Arabs or all Arabs from Palestine but this was never [inaudible] and we see this in Ben-Gurion's diary. This was never adopted as policy. This was just an idea, one idea, among Zionist leaders how to deal with this problem of Arab belligerancy and expulsionism vis-a-vis the Jewish community. It was never adopted as policy by the Jewish Agency or the Israeli government subsequent to May 1948. It was never adopted by any major party as part of its platform. Without doubt though the feeling about transfer in the 30s in some way affected the actions of Israeli generals, officials and politicians in what happened in 1948. It affected them in not wanting the Arabs to return once they'd fled.

[Now compare the above antiseptic account of the 'transfer' idea with that in his 2004 book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited: "My feeling is that the transfer thinking and near-consensus that emerged in the 1930s and early 1940s was not tantamount to pre-planning and did not issue in the production of a policy or master-plan of expulsion; the Yishuv and its military forces did not enter the 1948 War which was initiated by the Arab side, with a policy or plan for expulsion. But transfer was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism - because it sought to transform a land which was 'Arab' into a 'Jewish' state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population; and because this aim automatically produced resistance among the Arabs which in turn persuaded the Yishuv's leaders that a hostile Arab majority or large minority could not remain in place if a Jewish state was to arise or safely endure. By 1948 transfer was in the air." (p 60) Just one idea among many, eh? If 'transfer' - expulsion - was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism maybe its publicity-conscious leaders not only didn't need to shout it from the rooftops but knew that to do so would be quite counter-productive under the circumstances. If Geraldine had had a clue, could she not have alluded to this?]

Doogue: It might be useful to listen to what he did say because he did say proof of the expulsion of the Palestinians, no matter what the exact plans were or how pre-meditated it was, is plain to see: "And the proof is there. Every Jewish settlement is built on the ruins of a Palestinian village. There are 5.5 million Palestinian refugees who are testimony to the fact that they were expelled. So actually the true story is there even without going to the archives but when you get to the archives you can see a very systematic planning, a realisation that is very sad for me, a realisation I don't agree with but that was how Zionist leaders saw it." So how far have your views... because you and Ilan Pappe if I'm right were pretty close. How far and why have you fallen out?

Morris: I don't think we've fallen out. Politically, we don't have the same agenda or beliefs and Pappe in my opinion is not a serious historian and invents things. There is no documentation for a plan or pre-plan or pre-determination for the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948, not before or during 1948. There was mass flight. In some cases there were expulsions. In some cases Arabs asked old people to leave their sites. The fact that there are 5 million refugees today - 700,000 of them in 1948 - is not proof of anything except that they left their homes. The question is why they left their homes and, as I said, they left mainly because of war. There is another fact which points in my view to the fact that there was no pre-plan or systematic expulsion and that is that at the end of the 1948 war 160,000 Arabs remained in place in the area that became the state of Israel alongside 700,000 Jews. IOW about a fifth of the population. The fact they remained there and were allowed to is proof that there was no systematic ethnic cleansing as he puts it. Had there been they would have been expelled as well.

[Of course, the only thing that the existence of an Arab minority in 'Israel' after 1948 proves is that ethnic cleansing isn't always 100% successful. In his 2004 Haaretz interview, Morris complained that Ben-Gurion "should have done a complete job" and "cleansed the whole country as far as the Jordan River." As for today's Palestinians (those still in Palestine that is), Israel's minority Palestinian Arab citizens, the descendants of those 160,000, and the Palestinians under Israeli military occupation in the Palestinian territories, here's what Morris told Haaretz in 2004: "In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic [to transfer and expel the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza, the Galilee and the Triangle]. The world would not allow it... But, in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in 5 or 10 years, I can see expulsions..."]

Doogue: What for you is the central problem with Pappe's approach, because he's going to be here in Australia with quite a few public appearances? How do you critique him?

Morris: The basic problem is he invents the documentation, mistranslates, invents whole sentences in the things he supposedly quotes. He is essentially a liar. Not one sentence in any of his books can be trusted, especially on this type of subject because he has a political axe to grind which is to blacken Israel's image to serve the Palestinian purpose. He wants no Jewish state, no Zionist state, just a Palestinian state which he says will contain Jews and Arabs, essentially a majority Arab state. That's his political agenda and he subordinates his history writings to this political end and this isn't the way historians are supposed to write history.

Doogue: Why would he do that though? Does he represent a real strand in Israeli society?

Morris: He represents a type of self-hating Jew. There have always been self-hating Jews and people who've been anti-Zionists within Israeli society. It goes beyond anti-Zionism in his case. It's something which only a psychiatrist could explain. There are such Israelis, academics who call for an international boycott of their own universities. But it's a very small number. Israel's a democracy. It allows them to flourish. Ilan Pappe no longer lives in Israel. He works in England. I'm not really sure he can be called an Israeli.

Doogue (who seems to have no problem whatever with Pappe being described as a psychiatric basket case who can hardly even be described as an Israeli anymore, still can't quite believe that Israeli Jews are Zionists) : He did claim in yesterday's interview that about 95% of Jews in Israel would be Zionist and that only a small percentage of Israelis would agree with his take on Israel's past. Does that misrepresent or correctly represent in your view the level at which the Palestinian issue is debated and contested among other Israelis?

Morris: No, there are gradations. It doesn't simply divide between Zionist and non-Zionist. He's actually quite correct that the number of anti-Zionist Jews living in Israel is very small. There are also a lot of ultra-Orthodox Jews who are also anti-Zionist but they're not involved in this kind of discussion. They care only about the Bible. There are also all sorts of gradations among the Zionists: more critical of the government, more critical of Israeli policies. It doesn't simply divide into yes-men and critics of the whole Zionist enterprise, which he of course is.

[He's right, of course, there are all sorts of Zionists: they range from those who want all Palestinians out (the hard-boiled) to those who just don't want them to become a majority again in their former homeland (the soft-boiled).]

There was a little more but I  weary, and anyway I think you've got the point.

[* Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, p 49; ** ibid, Chapter 4: Finalising the Master Plan.]

Yes, Geraldine, the Palestinians Were Ethnically Cleansed

How fascinating the interaction on Radio National's Breakfast program yesterday between Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, a bloke who knows what he's talking about because he's done his homework and more, and veteran ABC journalist Geraldine Doogue, who, despite having worked for the ABC for more decades than I can remember, seems utterly clueless when it comes to the basics of one of the planet's great unresolved colonial conflicts.

So clueless, in fact, that Ilan Pappe's account of what really happened when Israel sprang into being in 1948, seems actually to have shocked her. Nor was it just 1948. Pappe even had to explain at one point that the vast majority of Israelis are actually Zionists!

How to explain the bizarre phenomenon of someone at the very top of the journalism tree experiencing the kind of discombobulation suffered by young Virginia when doubt was first cast on the existence of her beloved Santa Claus?

Is this the legacy of years of Zionist pressure on the ABC over the issue of Palestine, and the culture of self-censorship that has developed there and elsewhere in the ms media in response to it? How else is one to account for this 60-something journalist and broadcaster being so comprehensively shielded from the awful truth of what really happened back in 1948, the year of Israel's birth?

Here's the transcript, with the odd annotation by yours truly:

Doogue: Well one of Israel's most controversial historians is visiting Australia. Ilan Pappe is speaking at a number of events, including the Festival of Dangerous Ideas next Sunday where he'll address the not uncontroversial topic, Is Israel an Apartheid State? Ilan is an Israeli born-and-bred author and academic but he's now based at the University of Exeter in the UK. As one of Israel's 'new' historians - it's a new category - he has challenged the accepted history of Israel's formation over the years, courting controversy with provocative books and articles that have enraged many within his homeland, including titles such as The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and The Bureaucracy of Evil: The Hidden History of the Israeli Occupation, and he's with us in our Sydney studios now. Ilan, welcome to Radio National Breakfast. 

Ilan Pappe: Thankyou. It's a great pleasure to be here.

Doogue: Why did your whole life as an historian and an Israeli seem to pivot really on seeing original documents from the start of Israel in 1948?

Ilan Pappe: Well, I think I come from a comfort zone, from a privileged side of Israeli society and I thought that part of that privilege was the ability to look at my society up-close and see what's wrong, what kind of injustices occur in it. And, as part of my professional career, I'm an historian, and these two impulses, the impulse not to abuse your position of privilege on the one hand, and my professional curiosity on the other, fused together in research on the foundational mythology of the state of Israel, and there I ran into the trouble that still haunts me today.

Doogue: Where did this material come from that so changed you?

Ilan Pappe: The material itself comes from two sources. One is archival material that has been declassified after 30 years in the Israeli state archives and the other was just opening my ears and listening to the Palestinians about what happened to them in 1948, which most Israelis do not do. So hearing the other side substantiating what is said in the archival material was for me a very powerful fusion that really changed my life both as a professional and as an activist.

Doogue: And how much did it fundamentally alter the story you'd been told and learned like every Israeli child about your national history?

Ilan Pappe: The two were diametrically opposed. Almost every bit of it came out the other way. Every villain in a way became a hero and every hero became a villain. But the most important thing was the fact that we were told that the Palestinians left Palestine voluntarily in 1948. That's why the country was emptied. But the documents showed really clearly that the Israelis had forcibly and systematically expelled the Palestinians so as to make way for the creation of the Jewish state. This was the greatest revelation for me compared to what I was taught in school and learned in university before starting my research.

Doogue: So essentially you're saying that this material revealed that the original Zionist Jews who first came to what is now Israel back in the late 19th century [sic] and continuing through the activism of the 30s and World War 2 planned for the expulsion of the Palestinians who lived on this land in what you now describe as the planned ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Jee, I can't think of anything more inflammatory to be suggesting.

Ilan Pappe: In a way yes, but there's so much more living proof to this crime, and it is a crime to uproot an indigenous population from its homeland. There's no justification for doing that. And the proof is there. Every Jewish settlement is built on the ruins of a Palestinian village. There are 5.5 million Palestinian refugees who are testimony to the fact that they were expelled. So actually, there's the true story even without going to the archives. But when you go to the archives you can see a very systematic planning, a realisation that is very sad for me, a realisation I don't agree with, but that was how Zionist leaders saw it.

Doogue (in disbelief): But... but... but... I mean, which Zionist leaders and what did they actually say?

Ilan Pappe: Mainstream Zionist leadership from the very beginning understood that from their perspective they could not have a Jewish state as long as the Palestinians remained in Palestine. In order to fulfil their main slogan - We are a people without a land looking for a land without a people.

Doogue (highly agitated, her bubble of ignorance quite burst): But... but not all Israelis even then were Zionists. I mean this is the point of the trouble... I'm trying to seek... What do mainstream Israelis who don't consider themselves Zionists at any point, what do they say in relation to this matter? 

Ilan Pappe: I think most Israeli Jews would consider themselves to be Zionists and would either be...

Doogue (interrupting):... really?

Ilan Pappe: Oh yes, indeed. Israeli Jews, about 95% of them, would tell you we are Zionists. Zionism for Israelis is a synonym for being an Israeli Jew. People like me who regard themselves as non-Zionists are a very, very small minority in the state of Israel. So the vast majority of the Israeli Jews were brought up on this narrative that the Palestinians left voluntarily and that's why actually there are very few of them in the land of Palestine, whereas the truth is that their country was built through what I call an operation of ethnic cleansing which has major implications for the moral validity of the state and for the future solution of the conflict with the Palestinians.

Doogue (clutching at straws): So what do official sources say and did say about this material when it came out? I'm seeking to ventilate the debate. I mean you're presenting a very blunt... err... sort of clear-cut view. Is it the view in Israel?

Ilan Pappe: Well, it's very interesting. We had a left-centre political elite ruling in Israel until 2000. They were in a state of denial and the struggle was to convince them that they were hiding the truth. Unfortunately, since then we've had a right-wing [inaudible]...

Doogue: With the second intifada...

Ilan Pappe: Exactly... and they don't deny it. They actually accept it as part of what should have been done and maybe what would be done again for the sake of Israel's survival. IOW, for them the idea that power was used in order to establish the state is not a problem, whereas for people on the centre-left this was a problem but they were denying it. So we're either in a state of denial, which is bad, or we have a position that endorses such actions, which is also not very positive. Unfortunately, the Israeli political scene today lies between those two positions.

Doogue: Have you been accused of being a self-hating Jew of the sort I thought was done very humorously in Howard Jacobson, a UK Jew, his [novel] The Finkler Question which won the Booker Prize, arguing against people in a way such as yourself who seem to be almost fortified by the notion that there's something inherently wrong with Jewish people being successful? [The only book Geraldine's ever read that touches on the Palestine/Israel problem, not counting Leon Uris' Exodus?]

Ilan Pappe (trying to get his head around such a ridiculous question): Yes... no... I always say that to be a self-hating person you need to hate yourself and I'm [actually] quite pleased with myself. I mean I have some criticisms but it's never hate. No, this term was produced by Jews who feel uncomfortable about what Israel is doing as a Jewish state, and who haven't come to terms with it and hate themselves in a way for being part of it. I don't think that people who expose an injustice that is done in their name and struggle against it are in an uncomfortable position. In fact, I felt very liberated after exposing what I did and feel much more at peace with myself. I think Jews who have a problem here are those who endorse policies in Israel that in any other part of the world they'd condemn.

Doogue (thoroughly discombobulated): But... I don't know where it leaves you because in a sense you're undermining the whole moral authority of this state are you not? [So Pappe, not the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine, is undermining some imagined Israeli 'moral authority'?]

Ilan Pappe: Well, I think I'm undermining the moral authority of a regime. There's a difference between a state and a regime. In South Africa you had an apartheid regime. You didn't undermine the validity of South Africa as a state by questioning the moral validity of its apartheid regime. So I am undermining and challenging the ideological regime that Israel subscribes to but not the state itself. I mean I do think that if quite simple, elementary democratic principles were applied to every citizen who lives in Israel it would be a more just and peaceful place.

Doogue: What is the state of citizenship of the Palestinian Arabs? 

Ilan Pappe: Well, it's not their state.

Doogue: Pardon me, Palestinian Israelis?

Ilan Pappe: Palestinian Israelis are not part of the common good in republican terms because there is an identification between Israel and the nation. The nation of Israel are the Jews, not the Palestinians. Israel does not admit being a binational state although it is of course to all intents and purposes. So if you are not Jewish in Israel you are already a second class citizen by definition. In fact, a Jewish baby born tomorrow in Sydney has more rights [in Israel] than a Palestinian in Haifa whose family has been living there for 600 years.

Doogue: But this is not new. We've known this for a while. [Who is she kidding here?] You say things are getting worse.

Ilan Pappe: It's getting much worse because the legislation against the Palestinians in Israel has become more xenophobic and ruthless. The whole political system in Israel has moved to the right. It is far more committed to ruthless and callous policies towards any Palestinian under Israeli control, whether inside Israel, in the West Bank, or in the Gaza Strip. So I think Israel is no longer playing the democratic game which it played until recently, which left some space for improvement and some scope for hope. I think this current Israeli political elite is very dangerous, not just for Jews and Arabs but for the Middle East as a whole.

Doogue (trotting out a favourite Israeli propaganda line): So has Israel, even this current regime as you put it, got anything to be proud of because quite a few Palestinians argue that even if they don't like it, they prefer to live in Israel than in other parts of the Middle East. [Well of course, Geraldine, it is their homeland!]

Ilan Pappe: Well, I don't know of many Palestinians who like being in Israel now. That may have been right about 10 or 15 years ago [but] it is becoming more and more unbearable to be a Palestinian or a non-Jew in Israel [today]. Of course there are many achievements for Israel as a state project, culturally, socially, economically. But I think they are dwarfed when you juxtapose them with its human rights record. You can have a thriving, prosperous society but if it's built on injustice all this prosperity will eventually be doomed because you cannot hold on to these achievements if the basic moral infrastructure of the state is questionable and contrary to basic human and civil rights.

Doogue: So Ilan, I know you feel you've been effectively driven out and are now living and working in the UK. How are you received when you do go back, because you're still an Israeli with an Israeli passport?

Ilan Pappe: I think that most Israeli Jews cannot yet subscribe to my views but more and more will eventually. There is always a difference between the way the state treats you and those who know you intimately treat you. So in my very close society people have far more respect for these views, but unfortunately the state and society as a whole still regard Jews like myself as too dangerous or challenging and would rather continue with the siege mentality that has characterised this society since it was created. But I'm very hopeful. There's a new generation and new realities developing around us in the Middle East. So I think in due course that the idea of a more just and democratic society won't be utopian any more and will maybe turn into the new Israel and Palestine we are all dreaming of.

Doogue: Have you felt threatened in Israel?

Ilan Pappe: Yes, I was threatened. My family was threatened. But I think I'm a very minor victim of such intimidation compared to the real victims of brutality, the Palestinians in prison without a trial, the mothers who sit next to their demolished homes. So it has to be put in context. Jewish dissidents in Israel are still treated in a tolerable way. This may change but it's mainly Palestinians who dare to resist that really receive the harsher treatment and they should be the ones who get our solidarity and empathy.

Doogue: Finally, where does this all go in the next 10 years, Ilan? I mean is there any chance Israel will be accepted as a genuine neighbour and will Israel accept the region as a decent neighbourhood? [That's right, Geraldine, it's all about Israel, isn't it?]

Ilan Pappe: Well, for that to happen Israel as a state and society would have to come to terms with the fact that they are part of the Middle East, part of its problems and part of its solutions. This is not yet the perceived position in Israel, so as long as the Israelis continue to regard themselves as alien actors in the Middle East, they will continue to be alienated by the Middle East or by the neighbouring societies around them and the conflict will continue. Israel is a very strong military power and that's why it has not been defeated. But military power is not enough to maintain a society as a vital place and Israelis are risking more and more losing the sympathy of the world, the support of the Americans, and the tolerance of the region around them, and they may soon become a pariah state which would lead a lot of good Israeli Jews to think twice whether they want to stay there or seek their future elsewhere.

My God, is the ABC a sheltered workshop or what?

Q&A, September 17

Q&A next Monday, the 17th is a must-view.

The advertised line up includes Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian and author of must-read The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006); barrister Irving Wallach, a former head of the Revisionist Zionist youth movement Betar and the Zionist Youth Council of Australia; Greg Sheridan, The Australian's foreign editor and no stranger to MERC readers; Clover Moore, Lord Mayor of Sydney; and Robyn Davidson, an Australian author.

Considering that the first 3 speakers at least have an interest in the Middle East conflict in common, I can't really understand the inclusion of Moore and Davidson, neither of whom have an interest in the issue that I'm aware of. More relevant would have been at least one Palestinian Arab speaker and maybe anti-Zionist blogger and journalist, Antony Loewenstein, who has never appeared on Q&A, for reasons best known to its producers.

Noting Pappe's expertise on the Palestinian Nakba of 1948, I recall a May 2009 Q&A stoush between Guy Rundle and Sheridan. Rundle had cited another Palestinian Nakba scholar, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, and referred to "dozens of massacres of Palestinians in 1948." Sheridan, who probably wouldn't know Benny Morris from Betty Boop, responded: "all rubbish... just rubbish." (See my 9/5/09 post Sheridan: Nakba Denier)

Sheridan has also ludicrously averred in an opinion piece that there has been only "one authentic Jewish Israeli terrorist, Baruch Goldstein." (See my 30/7/11 post Leave Our Islamophobes Alone, OK?)

Someone out there might like to put questions directly to Sheridan about these utterly bizarre assertions. With Pappe at hand to set the historical record straight, I'm expecting Sheridan to emerge groggy and bloodied at best, if not KOed outright.

Just to give you a flavour of Pappe, here are two extracts from his autobiographical Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel (2010):

1) The Palestinian Nakba of 1948 in a nutshell:

"In February 1948, within a year of the British decision to leave Palestine, the Zionist leadership began ethnically cleansing it. Three months later, when the British left, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were already refugees, pressuring the Arab world to take action, which it did on 15 May 1948. But the limited number of troops it sent to Palestine were no match for the efficient Jewish forces and they were defeated. The ethnic cleansing continued and at the end of it almost a million Palestinians became refugees (half of Palestine's population) and with them disappeared half of the country's villages and towns, erased from the face of the earth by the Jewish forces." (p 187)

2) Pappe's journey out of the Zionist cult:

"The year 1982 was also when I began the journey described in this book during and after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that summer. The first turning point was an invitation by the Israeli Embassy in London to speak at a pro-Israel rally in the north of Britain. The spokesperson explained that the ambassador, Shlomo Argov, was critically ill from an assassination attempt and it would be too dangerous to send his deputy. It was not only the willingness to sacrifice me, should there be another terrorist attack, but the presumption I had no reservations about or objections to the invasion that served as a wake-up call. From then on, I embarked on a journey of no return. Powerful as the Zionist grip is on one's thoughts and life, as an Israeli Jew, once you have extracted yourself from its hold, you cannot understand how you could ever have been captivated by its lure, logic or vision. This book is a modest attempt to try to decipher the riddle of an ideology that was once seen by this author as the ultimate expression of pristine humanity, but when abandoned, as a racist and quite evil philosophy of morality and life. Yet the 'divorce' from Zionism is in no way a desire to sever links with what is a vital and vibrant society, in which I still have family and dear friends and about which I cherish many fond memories. But in order to preserve the positive side of Jewish life in Israel, I believe that not only would Palestinians fare better under almost any non-zionist regime, so would most Israeli Jews." (p x)

Not For the Faint of Heart

"While the investigations published by the Israeli military have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that [Palestinian] civilians [in Gaza] were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy." ('If I knew then, what I know now': Israel did not target civilians in Gaza, Richard Goldstone, washingtonpost.com/Sydney Morning Herald, 4/4/11)

So, to invoke the military euphemism for bloody murder, His Honour seems to believe that those civilians were simply collateral damage, and that Israel is therefore off the hook as far as their deaths are concerned. But I'm afraid it's not that simple. As Canadian philosopher Michael Neumann points out:

"There is... another element of contemporary warfare that might be equivalent to terrorism, and that is 'collateral damage'... The critics... spare no effort to show that the US and Israel do, in fact, willfully kill innocent civilians. But it is not easy to show this, because you can't get inside people's heads: how do you prove their claimed intentions are not their real ones?... However, the issue is not whether a distinction can be made between collateral damage and terrorism; it is rather whether this distinction has moral importance. The answer depends on a further distinction: there is more than one kind of 'collateral damage'. One kind of collateral damage is, in important ways, morally distinct from terrorism. The other is not.

"Suppose, for instance, some naval battle in which a destroyer is sunk in shallow water. After the fighting is over, divers inspect the vessel and are horrified to discover it carried several dozen civilians... who were being transported to safe exile in a nonbelligerant country. This is unexpected collateral damage: no one imagined... this terrible but also terribly unusual circumstance.

"But when the Americans - or for that matter the Israelis - speak of collateral damage, they are not speaking of the unexpected kind. On the contrary, they know with certainty - the commanders, the soldiers, the decision-makers - that civilians are in the firing line and that they will be killed... This is expected collateral damage, innocent deaths that no reasonable person could fail to expect.

"Expected collateral damage involves knowingly killing innocent civilians. Terrorism involves intentionally killing civilians. The conceptual difference is discernible, but the moral difference is too academic even for an academic... An example will make this plain. Suppose Joanne decides she wants to kill Jack by running him over in her SUV. She knows he goes to a movie at the Paramount every Friday night. She plans to drive into that movie line at high speed. She will hit him and, as she knows full well, some of the people standing behind him and in front of him. She also knows full well that, when she hits them, they will be killed. She executes her plan. According to most legal codes, she is guilty of homicide; not only of Jack, but of anyone else she kills. It's literally collateral damage, but it's not accidental. Certainly to the dead it doesn't matter that she did not intend to kill them, but only decided to perform an action that she knew would kill them. If this difference doesn't matter, neither does the difference between terrorism and expected collateral damage." (The Case Against Israel, 2005, pp 160-162)

Nor is His Honour being entirely honest with us in this matter. As Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains:

"'If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone report would have been a different document'. Thus opens Judge Richard Goldstone's much-discussed op-ed in The Washington Post. I have a strong feeling that the editor might have tampered with the text and that the original sentence ought to have read something like: 'If I had known then that the report would turm me into a self-hating Jew in the eyes of my beloved Israel and my own Jewish community in South Africa, the Goldstone report would never have been written at all'. And if that wasn't the original sentence, it certainly is the subtext of Goldstone's article.

"This shameful U-turn did not happen this week. It comes after more than a year and a half of a sustained campaign of intimidation and character assassination against the judge, a campaign whose like in the past destroyed mighty people such as US Senator William Fulbright who was shot down politically for his brave attempt to disclose AIPAC's illegal dealings with the State of Israel.

"Already in October 2009, Goldstone told CNN, 'I've got a great love for Israel' and 'I've worked for many Israeli causes and continue to do so' (Video: 'Fareed Zakaria GPS.' 4/10/09)

"Given the fact that at the time he made this declaration of love he did not have any new evidence, as he claims now, one may wonder how could this love not be at least weakened by what he discovered when writing, along with other members of the UN commission, his original report.

"But worse was to come and exactly a year ago, in April 2010, the campaign against him reached new heights, or rather, lows. It was led by the chairman of the South African Zionist Federation, Avrom Krengel, who tried to prevent Goldstone from participating in his grandson's bar mitzvah in Johannesburg since 'Goldstone caused irreparable damage to the Jewish people as a whole'. The South African Zionist Federation threatened to picket outside the synagogue during the ceremony. Worse was the interference of South Africa's Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, who chastised Goldstone for 'doing greater damage to the State of Israel'. Last February, Goldstone said that 'Hamas perpetrated war crimes, but Israel did not', in an interview that was not broadcast, according to a 3 April report on the website of Israel's Channel 2. It was not enough: the Israelis demanded more.

"Readers might ask 'so what?' and 'why could Goldstone not withstand the heat?' Good questions, but alas the Zionization of Jewish communities and the false identification of Jewishness with Zionism is still a powerful disincentive that prevents liberal Jews from boldly facing Israel and its crimes. Every now and again many liberal Jews seem to liberate themselves and allow their conscience, rather than their fear, to lead them. However, many seem unable to stick to their more universalist inclinations for too long where Israel is concerned. The risk of being defined as a 'self-hating Jew' with all the ramifications of such an accusation is a real and frightening prospect for them. You have to be in this position to understand the power of this terror.

"Just weeks ago, Israeli military intelligence announced it had created a special unit to monitor, confront, and possibly hunt down, individuals and bodies suspected of 'delegitimising' Israel abroad. In light of this, perhaps quite a few of the faint-hearted felt standing up to Israel was not worth it.

"We should have recognised that Goldstone was one of them when he stated that, despite his report, he remains a Zionist. This adjective, 'Zionist', is far more meaningful and charged than is usually assumed. You cannot claim to be one if you oppose the ideology of the apartheid State of Israel. You can remain one if you just rebuke the state for a certain criminal policy and fail to see the connection between the ideology and that policy. 'I am a Zionist' is a declaration of loyalty to a frame of mind that cannot accept the 2009 Goldstone report. You can either be a Zionist or blame Israel for war crimes and crimes against humanity - if you do both, you will crack sooner rather than later.

"That this mea culpa has nothing to do with new facts is clear when one examines the 'evidence' brought by Goldstone to explain his retraction. To be honest, one should say that one did not have to be the world expert on international law to know that Israel committed war crimes in Gaza in 2009. The reports of bodies such as Breaking the Silence and the UN representatives on the ground attested to it, before and after the Goldstone report. It was also not the only evidence.

"The pictures and images we saw on our screens and those we saw on the ground told only one story of a criminal policy intending to kill, wound and maim as a collective punishment. 'The Palestinians are going to bring upon themselves a Holocaust', promised Matan Vilnai, Israel's deputy minister of defense to the people of Gaza on 29 February 2008. There is only one new piece of evidence Goldstone brings and this is an internal Israeli army investigation that explains that one of the cases suspected as a war crime was due to a mistake by the Israeli army that is still being investigated. This must be a winning card: a claim by the Israeli army that massive killings of Palestinians were a 'mistake'.

"Ever since the creation of the State of Israel, the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel were either terrorists or killed by 'mistake'. So 29 out of 1,400 deaths were killed by an unfortunate mistake? Only ideological commitment could base a revision of the report on an internal inquiry of the Israeli army focusing on only one of dozens of instances of unlawful killing and massacring. So it cannot be new evidence that caused Goldstone to write this article. Rather, it is his wish to return to the Zionist comfort zone that propelled this bizarre and faulty article.

"This is also clear from the way he escalates his language against Hamas in the article and de-escalates his words toward Israel. And he hopes that this would absolve him of Israel's righteous fury. But he is wrong, very wrong. Only a few hours passed from the publication of the article until Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of course the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate President Shimon Peres commissioned Goldstone with a new role in life: he is expected to move from one campus to the other and hop from one public venue to the next in the service of a new and pious Israel. He may choose not to do it; but then again he might not be allowed to attend his grandson's bar mitzvah as a retaliation.

"Goldstone and his colleagues wrote a very detailed report, but they were quite reserved in their conclusions. The picture unfolding from Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations was far more horrendous and was described less in the clinical and legal language that quite often fails to convey the magnitude of the horror. It was first Western public opinion that understood better than Goldstone the implications of his report. Israel's international legitimacy has suffered an unprecedented blow. He was genuinely shocked to learn that this was the result.

"We have been there before. In the late 1980s, Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote a similar, sterile, account of the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Palestinian academics such as Edward Said, Nur Masalha and Walid Khalidi were the ones who pointed to the significant implications for Israel's identity and self-image, and nature of the archival material he unearthed. Morris too cowered under pressure and asked to be readmitted to the tribe. He went very far with his mea culpa and re-emerged as an extreme anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racist: suggesting putting the Arabs in cages and promoting the idea of another ethnic cleansing. Goldstone can go in that direction too; or at least this is what the Israelis expect him to do now.

"Professionally, both Morris and Goldstone tried to retreat to a position that claimed, as Goldstone does in The Washington Post article, that Israel can only be judged by its intentions not the consequences of its deeds. Therefore only the Israeli army, in both cases, can be a reliable source for knowing what these intentions were. Very few decent and intelligent people in the world would accept such a bizarre analysis and explanation.

"Goldstone has not yet entered the lunatic fringe of ultra-Zionism as Morris did. But if he is not careful the future promises to be a pleasant journey with the likes of Morris, Alan Dershowitz (who already said that Goldstone is a 'repentant Jew') between annual meetings of the AIPAC rottweilers and the wacky conventions of the Christian Zionists. He would soon find out that once you cower in the face of Zionism - you are expected to go all the way or be at the very same spot you thought you had successfully left behind you.

"Winning Zionist love in the short-term is far less important than losing the world's respect in the long-run. Palestine should choose its friends with care: they cannot be faint-hearted nor can they claim to be Zionists as well as champions of peace, justice and human rights in Palestine." (Goldstone's fateful U-turn, The Electronic Intifada, 4/4/11)

Refugees

To rephrase Orwell: All refugees are equal, but some refugees are more equal than others:

Paul Howes, AWU national secretary, anti-Rudd conspirator, Murdoch columnist, and Israel luvvie, believes, correctly, that Australia's refugee policy should conform strictly to the requirements of international law, it being crystal clear on the subject:

"I have always been a strident (some would say overly strident) believer in our responsibility to welcome refugees, regardless of how they arrive in this country. I don't hold this belief because I'm some bleeding-heart lefty. I believe this because I feel it is our responsibility, as human beings, to demonstrate compassion to the most vulnerable people on the planet. But I'm in the minority on this. Most Australians, if we look at the polls, want to take a firm stance against those refugees arriving by boat. Most people, despite international law being crystal clear on the subject, still incorrectly believe that if you arrive by boat, you are an illegal immigrant. In my opinion, I think it's sad that we, as a nation of immigrants, are unable to feel more compassion and be more welcoming to those who arrive here after us." (Our sad boat policy, The Sunday Telegraph, 11/7/10)

International law, as our learned friend (we are talking law here) says, is crystal clear on the subject of refugees. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), for example, says unambiguously: "Article 14 (1) Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution."

Now I'm assuming that Article 13 (2) is equally crystal clear to our learned friend: "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."

At the risk of giving my learned friend a bad dose of cognitive dissonance, can I therefore assume that he supports the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands in what is today known as Israel, but was then (1948) known as Palestine?

Orwell again: All refugees are equal, but some refugees aren't even refugees:

Interestingly, Julia Gillard made her first official statement on the issue of refugees on July 6 at Frank Lowy 's think tank, the Lowy Institute. Of Mr Lowy, Australia's second richest man, she had this to say:

"I am very thankful to the Lowy Institute for hosting me today. This Institute has established a reputation for independent, robust and forceful analysis of our nation's place in the world. It is exactly the right place to make today's address: Moving Australia Forward. I first would like to acknowledge the enormous contribution of the Institute's benefactor, Frank Lowy. Frank Lowy is a great Australian. He was a refugee who escaped to Israel after World War II in a crowded boat full of asylum seekers. After fighting for Israel, he arrived on our shores as a very determined 21 year old. He worked hard and went from factory worker to milk bar owner to Blacktown shopping centre developer and, in time, to the largest retail property group in the world - truly great achievements, and what a remarkable story... But moving forward means we must agree on the organising principles for developing policy, and believe we can agree on most principles. That we should be prepared to accept people in legitimate need just as a young Frank Lowy was accepted 60 years ago." (From the Prime Minister's speech Moving Australia Forward)

So, according to Gillard, Lowy was a refugee who escaped to Israel after World War II in a boat crowded with asylum seekers, and in legitimate need when he later reached Australia.

A refugee? Escaping to Israel? After the war was over? Really?

The 16-year old Frank Lowy left Hungary in 1946 and boarded the Mossad* vessel Yagur in France, part of a Mossad people smuggling racket (to use the term much beloved of our polly-waffles these days) to transfer as many displaced European Jews to Palestine as possible, despite the British Mandate blockade on illegal Jewish immigration. The Yagur was intercepted by the British and its passengers detained in Cyprus, before being moved to a detention camp in northern Palestine.

Lowy eventually ended up in the Haganah's Golani Brigade which played an integral role in the ethnic cleansing of the Galilee area in 1948.

Israeli historian Ilan Pappe affords us a taste of what the Golanis got up to: "The first targets of the Israeli forces in the 10 days between the two truces were the pockets within the Galilee around Acre, and Nazareth. 'Cleanse totally the enemy from the villages' was the order that 3 brigades received on July 6, two days before the Israeli troops - straining at their leashes to continue the cleansing operations - were ordered to violate the first truce. Jewish soldiers automatically understood that 'enemy' meant defenceless Palestinian villagers and their families. The brigades they belonged to were the Carmeli, the Golani and Brigade Seven, the 3 brigades of the north that would also be responsible for the final cleansing operations in the upper Galilee in October. The inventive people whose job it was to come up with the names for operations of this kind had now switched from 'cleansing' synonyms ('Broom', 'Scissors') to trees: 'Palm' (Dekel) for the Nazareth area and 'Cypress' (Brosh) for the Jordan Valley area." (The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, 2006, p 158)

After fighting for Israel, as Gillard spins it, Lowy migrated to Australia in 1952. How he could be described, as Gillard does, as being in legitimate need at this time is beyond me.

[*Yes, a Mossad vessel. See Idith Zertal's From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors & the Emergence of Israel, 1998, p 237. See also my 17/6/10 post Cannon Fodder for Zion: Exodus 1947]

Shared Values?

"We share a unique relationship based on Australia's historical support for Israel and our shared commitment to freedom, security and democracy. Our friendship will remain strong because our values are shared." (Foreign Minister Stephen Smith speaking at an Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) lunch, 19/5/09)

The 2010 Global Peace Index (visionofhumanity.org) was recently released. 149 countries were ranked according to a range of 'Peace Indicators'. In light of our government's facile rhetoric about shared values, I thought it might be instructive to compare the results for Australia and Israel, with the United States thrown in for good measure. (NB: The higher the score, the more of a problem we have.)

Australia ranked 19/149; Israel 144/149; US 84/149

Looking at some of the key Peace Indicators, we get the following results:

Relations with neighbouring countries:
AUS 1/5; Israel 4/5; US 2/5

Level of respect for human rights:
AUS 1/5; Israel 5/5; US 3/5

Military expenditure as a % of GDP:
AUS 1.5; Israel 3/5; US 2/5

Number of armed services personnel per 100,000 people:
AUS 1/5; Israel 5/5; US 1/5

Exports of major conventional weapons per 1000,000 people:
AUS 1/5; Israel 5/5; US 2.5/5

Imports of major conventional weapons per 1000,000 people:
AUS 1.5/5; Israel 5/5; US 1/5

Aggregate weighted number of heavy weapons per 100,000 people:
AUS 1.5/5; Israel 5/5; US 2.5/5

Allow the courageous, clear-thinking (and now self-exiled) Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe to draw the obvious conclusion: "My quest for an authentic history of events in the Middle East required a personal de-militarisation of the mind. Even now, in 2010, Israel is in many ways a settler Prussian state: a combination of colonialist policies with a high level of militarisation in all aspects of life... It is manifested in the dominance of the army over political, cultural and economic life within Israel. Defence Minister Ehud Barak was the commanding officer of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, in a military unit similar to the one that assaulted the flotilla. The background was profoundly significant in terms of the State's Zionist response to what they and all the commando officers perceived as the most formidable and dangerous enemy. You probably have to be born in Israel, as I was, and go through the whole process of socialisation and education - including serving in the army - to grasp the power of this militarist mentality and its dire consequences. And you need such a background to understand why the whole premise on which the international community's approach to the Middle East is based, is utterly and disastrously wrong." (What drives Israel?, heraldscotland.com, 6/6/10)

Shared values?

Israel: Just Another Middle Eastern Autocracy

In a propaganda piece in today's Age, Isi Leibler (described as "a former leader of the Australian Jewish community who now lives in Israel") writes as follows: "Israel remains the only democracy in the region; 20% of its inhabitants are Arab citizens, who enjoy equality of rights, freedom of expression and elect their representatives to the Israeli parliament. By contrast, Israel's despotic neighbours are autocracies or dictatorships which deny freedom of religion and many other basic human rights." (Cowardly bias blights attitudes on Israel, 28/11/09)

This particular Zionist cliche is, of course, a staple in the mainstream media, and my earlier posts on the subject can be viewed by clicking on the relevant tag below.

Ilan Pappe, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (among other titles) and currently the chair of history at Exeter University, tackles it head on in his insightful contribution (The Mukhabarat State of Israel) to the recently published anthology, Thinking Palestine (ed Ronit Lentin, 2008). Outta the way, Isi!:

"[The role of the Israeli army and secret service testify] that Israel [is] a mukhabarat state, a local Arab and Middle East variant of the oppressive state. Politically, the mukhabarat (secret service) state exists mostly within the Arab world (although there are similar states elsewhere). Such a state is characterized by an all -pervasive bureaucracy and ruled by military and security apparatuses (Entelis 2005). The variants of this model range from robust to liberal autocracies, and the span is wide enough to include Israel. What characterizes such states is the sustainability of their security establishment (the mukhabarat) in the face of internal challenges and external pressures. This sustainability is ensured by a strong connection to an outside power: 'the mukhabarat state cannot long endure, if it lacks the financial resources to pay its soldiers, purchase arms, upgrade equipment, maintain supplies, and acquire externally-gathered intelligence data' (Entelis 2005:1)... Readers versed in the critique of Israel are familiar with its depiction as 'an army with a state'. This is actually a common reference to the mukhabarat state of Algeria, about which it was written that 'every state has an army but in Algeria the army has a state', describing the deeply enmeshed linkage between the state and the security apparatuses (Bellin 2004: 144). This is not dissimilar to the bold attempt by several critical Israeli sociologists to define Israel as a militarist society (Ben-Eliazer 1995; Erlich 1987; Karmi & Rosenfeld 1989). The role of the army or security apparatuses in these studies appears to be... part of the state's foundation and raison d'etat... The [non-democratic founding] ideology and colonialist reality produced a state in which the army and security apparatuses reign not in exceptional circumstances, but as a rule. While the militaristic model mobilizes Jewish society, as a typical mukhabarat state it oppresses the Palestinian population... In Israel, martial law is the legal and political reality for almost all its Palestinian citizens at any given time, directly or indirectly. The authoritarian, rentier militaristic state of the Arab world is a model that better corresponds, historically and theoretically, with the state within the State of Israel: the state of the Palestinians within the Jewish state. However, as argued by others before me (see, eg Ram 1993), it is a hybrid with another model, the settler-colonial state, which can be presented as a mixture of an Arab post-colonial model and a colonialist model such as Apartheid South Africa... My argument is that the Israeli paradigm is a colonialist and post-colonialist mixture, a political outfit of a settler state ruling through a mukhabarat state."

Pappe charts in Israel's history an "escalating cycle which carries the potential to end the pretence and the false inclusion of Israel in the western democracy frame of analysis":

"The first wave was in 1948, leading to the rights to own land and water and to buy and sell land being denied to the Palestinians by law, as was the right for full citizenship. This was followed by discrimination in every aspect of life, while welfare, education and protection from abuse of the law were all practised systematically and efficiently but not legalized. The second wave was legislation through the imposition of the Emergency Regulations on the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip in 1967 that denied basic human and civil rights to the millions who lived there. It began with ethnically cleansing 300,000 Palestinians and then constructing the oppressive regime we are familiar with today. All this was achieved without undermining Israel's membership in the exclusive democratic club. The third wave... concerns greater Jerusalem, defined as one-third of the West Bank, where potential Palestinian citizens of Israel have lived since it was officially annexed to Israel in 1967. A set of municipal regulations, town planning ordinances and other municipal legislation enabled the ethnic cleaning of the 200,000 Palestinians who live there - an operation that needed time and has not yet been completed at the time of writing (40% have already been transferred; see report on East Jerusalem at btselem.org). And there is a fourth wave of legislation that began in 2001. A series of parliamentary initiatives led to new discriminatory laws, among them 'The Nation and Admittance to the Country Law' which disables any reunion of Palestinian couples living on either side of the Green Line and of families separated for whatever other reason. In practice it is a means of preventing the return to the homeland of any Palestinian who 'overstayed' abroad. Other laws institutionalized discrimination in the realms of welfare and education (including the secret service's right to determine the employment of school principals and teachers). And finally, there are the laws, already mentioned, equating opposition to the Jewishness of the state with treason." (pp 164 -168)

Sheridan in Love 1

"What becomes clear, when one looks closely at [Sheridan's] ouvre is that [he] is an ideologue, a crusader and an apologist for one of the most barbaric regimes on the planet and for the acolytes who, without question, back the war crimes and despotic violence that this regime visits on those who disagree with its religious fundamentalism and lust for world domination. In Sheridan's worldview it is also legitimate to vilify, denigrate and misrepresent your intellectual and political opponents, while maintaining your position in the face of competing facts and analysis." (Getting the story straight: Greg Sheridan in the shifting moral sands of Iraq, Martin Hirst & Robert Schutze, espace.library.uq.edu.au, 1/1/04)

The Australian's foreign editor and self-styled "most influential foreign affairs analyst in Australian journalism"* Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan has just published the ultimate paean to Israel, for which his earlier effort, Deep inside the plucky country (19/1/08), was just a warm-up. It seems that the more Israel's stock plunges, the more obvious that something is indeed rotten in the State of Israel, like some demented diehard Stalinist, the more ardent he becomes. Being feted and stroked by the right people, or being on Murdoch's payroll, has nothing to do with it. It's quite simple: Sheridan's in love.

[*From Sheridan's bio on The Australian's website.]

Israel still looks good, warts & all (The Australian Literary Review, 6/5/09) is a ringing defence of the beloved against all who would look sideways at her (most of the planet by now). But I'm reluctant to touch it. After 36 posts hosing down Sheridan's ardours, I'd love nothing better than to let another such steamy display go by. However, considering his alleged influence (do Kevin and Stephen and Joel and crew really hang on his every word?), not to mention the sweep and breadth of this one (do I see a book coming on?), I feel have little choice but to unwind the hose once again. Still (I hate homework like the best of them), it'll be bit by bit, in a series of not necessarily consecutive posts:-

"I have my very own Israel problem and it is this: the Israel I know... bears no relation to the Israel I see in most of the Western media." IOW, the Israel Sheridan "knows" is the real Israel, the rest a mere figment of the Western/Arab imagination. But what kind of Israel can a cosseted, ideologically-blinkered News Ltd 'journalist' get to know?

"That Israel of the Western mind (and indeed of the Arab mind) is a hateful place: right-wing, militaristic, authoritarian, racist, ultra-religious, neo-colonial, narrow-minded, undemocratic, indifferent to world opinion, indifferent especially to Palestinian suffering. Yet the Israel I know is mostly secular, raucously, almost wildly democratic, has a vibrant left-wing, having founded in the kibbutz movement one of the only successful experiments in socialism in human history. It is intellectually disputatious... it is multi-ethnic, there is a great stress on human solidarity, there is due process. And I've never heard an Israeli speak casually about the value of Palestinian life."

Platitudes, form a queue! One at a time, please:

Mostly secular? How can a 'Jewish' state, a state where religion and nationality are one, be mostly secular?

Wildly democratic? Yes, democratic in a fashion. There are parties and elections, but how can a state which uses religious criteria to decide citizenship be wildly democratic? And how can a state that has ethnically cleansed most of its non-Jewish indigenous inhabitants (1948) and subjected the rest (since 1967) to decades of brutal occupation be wildly democratic? Wildly ethnocratic, perhaps, but certainly not wildly democratic. Nor did 66% of Israelis think Israel was wildly democratic when they registered their disatisfaction with Israeli democracy in an Israel Democracy Institute poll in 2007 (66% of public dissatisfied with Israeli democracy, ynetnews.com, 6/10/07) And nor is Israel wildly democratic enough for Israel's minority non-Jewish population: "Amidst the increasingly precarious situation of Palestinian citizens of Israel, prominent and broadly representative members of that community published in 2007 a series of documents setting out visions for Israel as a state of all its citizens with equality for all. The response of the Israeli body politic was overwhelmingly to view these initiatives as an unwelcome threat to the 'Jewish character' of the state. Israel's Shin-Bet secret police, responsible among other things for many 'targeted killings' in the Occupied territories, went so far as to warn that it would 'disrupt the activities of any groups that seek to change the Jewish or democratic character of Israel, even if they use democratic means'." (Anti-Arab racism & incitement in Israel, Ali Abunimeh, thejerusalemfund.org, 25/3/08)

The kibbutz movement - vibrant and socialist? Sorry, Greg, this is 2009 and the kibbutz movement is neither vibrant nor socialist. And anyway, weren't these pre-67 settlements Jews- only?

Intellectually disputatious? Really? Here's Israeli historian Ilan Pappe: "I was boycotted in my university and there had been attempts to expel me from my job. I am getting threatening phone calls from people every day." (Ilan Pappe leaves Israel for England, cites harrassment, muzzlewatch.com, 6/4/07) Ditto for the late Tanya Reinhart who had to leave for the US. (Not, of course, that Sheridan would even bother to read either scholar.) One thing's for sure though: Israel won't tolerate intellectual disputation among its neighbours. This year it bombed the Islamic University of Gaza, and in 2006 it bombed over 20 publishing houses and research centres in the southern suburbs of Beirut (Israel's war on intellectual life among untold stories of summer conflict, dailystar.com, 20/7/07)

Multi-ethnic? Maybe. But harmoniously so? How about the Border Guards of Ethiopian descent who cop such racist abuse from Israeli settlers as "Niggers don't expel Jews! This isn't what we brought you here for!" (Settlers to Ethiopian troops: Niggers don't expel Jews, ynetnews.com, 4/12/08) Which I suppose is preferable to the ubiquitous cry of 'Death to the Arabs'.

A great stress on human solidarity? Er, shouldn't that be 'tribal solidarity'?

Due process? *Sigh* I'm getting lazy. See my 21/7/08 post The 'Motiveless Malignancy' of Samir Quntar.

Nary a bad word about the Palestinians? In its 2007 Israeli Democracy Index, the Israel Democracy Institute found that 87% of all Israeli citizens rated Jewish-Arab relations in the country as being 'poor' and 'very poor'; 78% of Israeli Jews opposed having Arab parties or ministers join Israel's government; Just 56% of Israeli Jews supported full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel; 75% of Israeli Jews agreed with the statement that 'Arabs are inclined to violent behaviour'; 43% of Israeli Jews agreed that 'Arabs are not intelligent'; 55% agreed that 'the government should encourage Arab emigration from the country'. And Greg must've somehow have missed those wonderful t-shirts worn by Israeli soldiers with slogans such as Better use Durex (next to a dead Palestinian baby and his weeping mother) or 1 shot, 2 kills (next to a bull's eye superimposed on a pregnant Palestinian woman), or the comment by the Israeli soldier returned from the Gaza massacre: 'The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers'. (See my 22/3/09 post Ubermenschen)

Hey, but what's a love letter without platitudes? Stay tuned for Sheridan in Love 2.