Shliam critique: Second Bone of Contention: the Arab Israeli Military Balance Part 3

As already explained the British used the Jordanian government and its armed wing the Jordanian Legion as a proxy to exercise its interests in the coming regional shift of power in 1948. The case with the British in Egypt was even more damning. When the British left Egypt they left intact a supply of heavy and light weaponry along with training advisors to teach the Egyptian army how to use them. This tilted the balance of power severely in the direction of the Arab states during the war of 1948. [1] Egypt alone, if properly trained and with a well disciplined army could have defeated the Jews without the help of any other Arab army. The problem for the Arab states was not Israeli military dominance as historically argued. In the remaining months of 1947 until July 1948, and the end of the first truce, the Jews were severely handicapped and in a serious weakened position militarily. It was Arab incompetence that won the war for Israel not, Israeli superiority. By all customary military standards Israel should have lost the war in those first few weeks, absolutely no later than June 1.

There is the incident of Israel shooting down five British fighters at the beginning of 1949. On January 1, 1949, Egyptian war ships appeared off the coast of Tel Aviv, and fired on the city. On January 2, 1949 an enemy plane, presumably Egyptian dropped three bombs over Jewish Jerusalem. As a result Jewish forces launched a retaliatory raid on El Arish which was the Egyptian staging point for all military operations inside Palestine. The British used the incursion into the Sinai as a pretext to invoke a 1936 agreement in which they were obligated to defend Egypt in case of invasion. Ben Gurion was warned by the British and promptly ordered all Jewish forces removed back behind Israeli lines. By January 3, 1949, all Israeli forces had been removed from Egyptian soil [2] On January 7, Israel shot down five British flown spitfires, killing at least one pilot and taking another prisoner because their aircraft crashed inside Israeli lines. [3]

I agree with Shlaim’s analysis of the Jewish side that he offers in this section.

The heroism of the Jewish fighters is not in question, nor is there any doubt about the heavy price that the Yishuv paid for its victory. Altogether there were 6,000 dead, 4,000 soldiers and 2,000 civilians, or about 1 percent of the entire population…It is true that the Yishuv numbered merely 650,000 souls, compared with 1.2 million Palestinian Arabs and nearly 40 million Arabs in the surrounding states. It is true that the senior military advisors told the Political leadership on 12 May 1948 that the Hagana had only a “fifty-fifty” chance of withstanding the imminent Arab attack. It is true that the sense of weakness and vulnerability in the Jewish population was as acute as it was pervasive and that some segments of this population were gripped by a feeling of gloom and doom. And, it is true that during the three critical weeks, from the invasion of Palestine by the regular armies of the Arab states on 15 May until the start of the first truce on 11 June, this community had to struggle for its very survival.

It would be hard not to acknowledge the above truisms about the ’48 war since these are all established facts but, Shlaim sticks one sentence in this paragraph almost as if he were trying to sneak it in. Right after the ellipses of the above quote, Shlaim says “ Nevertheless, the Yishuv was not as hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned as the official history would have us believe.” I would argue this as hyperbole.

Military generals always think in terms of the other side’s strengths and weaknesses. It is not for them to speculate on how the enemy might utilize those strengths and weaknesses only that they possess the potential for using it. In assessing Arab strength the Hagana command had to consider that they might go up against everything the Arabs had to offer in their war of liberation. Nobody really knows how many Arab soldiers actually fought in the war of 1948. Estimates range from 20,000 to 65,000 depending on the time period we are talking about. “The Hagana… could draw on a large reserve of Western trained and homegrown officers with military experience” (p. 181). Shlaim is talking about the 4000 or so soldiers that the British trained to fight at the end of World War II, known popularly as the Jewish Brigade and did see some action in Sicily. [4]


[1] Kenneth M. Pollack, Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2002, p. 15. Pollack lists the Egyptian heavy armor as a battalion of British made Mark VI and Matilda tanks, sixteen 25 pounder guns, a battery of eight 6-pounder guns, a medium machine gun battalion, more than thirty British made Spitfire fighter planes, and four Hawker Hurricane fighters with twenty American C-47 transports which mechanics had made into crude bombers. The Israelis on the other hand had fewer than 900 light mortars, 85 antitank weapons, five “ancient” artillery pieces and four tanks. The Egyptians alone held a huge military advantage over the Jews in this area.

[2] United States Department of State / Foreign relations of the United States, 1948. The Near East, South Asia, and Africa (in two parts),FRUS. Vol VI, p. 605
[3] FRUS Vol. VI p. 627.
[4] Refer to note 9

Schlaim critique: first bone of contention: British policy at the end of the mandate, Pt 2

Between November 29, 1947 and May 14, 1948 Shlaim contends that traditional Zionist historiography’s “central charge is that Britain armed and secretly encouraged her Arab allies” p.179. Shlaim credits others like Ilan Pappe with “Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict” along with his own “Collusion across the Jordan” to smash this particular myth.

Actually the official records of State in both Great Britain and the United States show an England having a very hard time cutting loose the apron strings that held British imperial territory in the Middle East together for the previous half century. The record clearly shows that while there might have been some well founded trepidation on the part of the Yishuv of British motives, the fears of Jewish expansionism seems to have dominated British thinking during this time almost as much as the possibility of Soviet involvement which both England and the U.S. were loathe to accept. Shlaim’s thesis, minus the Marxist inspired psycho-babble, in “Collusion” was probably well founded. The Jews were not fools. If they could increase their chances of survival by eliminating a major military player like Abdullah, then they would do it. This is what drove Ernest Bevin, Britain’s foreign secretary, and the architect of British involvement, especially with Abdullah during that time, to push for a greater Transjordan. This in turn probably pushed the Yishuv into this victim mentality and led to a mistrust of Transjordan’s motives for an agreement. However, Shlaim rejects any notion that England supported the Arab side even though early British apologies allude to that fact. For example, Glubb discusses a meeting with Bevin where the secretary states categorically that he “did everything he could to help (the Arabs) them. [1]

Although Shlaim does not like to admit it, British interests in 1948 were in fact very much with the Arabs and not with the Jews. While there is no evidence to show that the British tried to stop the Jewish state from coming into existence after the UN partition vote on November 29th , one can build a very strong case that the British did financially, militarily, and politically helped the Arabs, and although unsuccessful, this was designed to protect British interests which were perceived to be in direct conflict with nascent Israeli interests.

Bevin insisted that Abdullah’s legion not take their war into Jewish territory, as Shlaim asserts. But British soldiers fought with and commanded the legion during their entire campaign of 1948. For all intents and purposes the Jordanian legion commanded by John Bagot Glubb was a proxy British force in the Middle East and for that reason the evidence shows that Bevin was extremely concerned for its existence and the only thing preventing the Jews from infringing onto British interests in the area according to Bevin’s thinking. The rank and file of the Legion were mostly Arabs, but the officers were British. Some were actually seconded from the British army into the legion. These men were not withdrawn from Legion duties until after May 14, 1948. [2] Weapons were still being delivered to Transjordan as late as May 28th of that year. [3] The English subverted U.N. restrictions which drew consternation against Israel for violating, by insisting that they were only fulfilling commitments made prior to the United Nations embargo to arm the Middle East. [4]

Shlaim relates the Februray 7, 1948 meeting between Abdul Huda, Transjordan’s prime minister, and Secretary Bevin which gave the green light to the legion to move into the Palestinian allotted areas and secure the land for the Kingdom. This in effect wiped out any chance for an Arab state in Palestine and created what Bevin had labeled a “Greater Transjordan.”

“Bevin also warned Jordan not to invade the area allocated by the U.N. to the Jews” p. 179. This shows according to Shlaim that Britain supported the idea of a Jewish State while not supporting the idea of an Arab state. What Shlaim does not tell us is that it would have been tantamount to diplomatic suicide for the British to circumvent the U.N. decision to create a Jewish state in Palestine given its tense relations over the issue with the U.S. position in respect to U.S. public opinion. England certainly did not see the creation of a Jewish State as satisfying British interests in the area and might very well have prevented a Jewish state from coming into existence had the U.S. not been so adamant to allow international law to take its course.

The British also used their forces in a failed attempt to take back Jaffa after Arab forces had been defeated by Menachem Begin’s IZL. Like Jerusalem, Tel Aviv was suffering casualties on a daily basis because of the sniping coming from Arab Jaffa. The IZL claimed that the British had colluded with the Arabs to create a corridor from Jaffa to Jerusalem to cut the proposed Jewish State in two and thereby seal its fate. Therefore, the Haganna agreed to allow the Urgun to take the city. [5] In the ceasefire agreement, between the British and Jewish forces, they both backed off to neutral areas with a no man’s land in between and faced each other down until the British left Palestine on May 14th.. The British involvement in Jaffa was a direct order coming from HMG.

[1] John Bagot Glubb, A Soldier with the Arabs, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957, p. 180

[2] United States Department of State / Foreign relations of the United States, 1948. The Near East, South Asia, and Africa (in two parts), (FRUS) Volume V, Part 2 (1948), p. 1066.

[3] FRUS, Vol. V, part 2 page 1071. In this report from Lovett he mentions that Britain is supplying weapons to Egypt, Iraq as well as British proxy military force in the Middle East, the Jordanian Legion.

[4] FRUS, Vol. V, part 2, Note 4 page 563
[5] H.Boyer Bell, Terror out of Zion, London: New Brunswick Publishers, 1996, p. 302. I should point out that Boyer Bell’s sources for these accounts rely heavily on personal memoirs and interviews with participants from all sides. There is an index in the back of personal interviews and notes on the memoirs. This is what Shlaim is arguing in this piece which he claims is not valid history writing. For more on this and a Jewish view on Jaffa see, Chaim Herzog, The Arab-Israeli Wars, New York: Vintage Books, 1982, p.36.

A critique on Avi shlaim's "the debate about 1948" Part 1

The following is a critique of Avi Shlaim’s Historiography of the 1948 war, “The Debate About 1948” first published in The International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 27, No.3, (August 1995) p. 287-304 and more recently in “The Israel/Palestine Question: Rewriting histories, edited by Ilan Pappe, Routledge, 1999, which this article uses as its reference.

After spending some time outlining what he calls the “old” history and briefly summarizing the litany of 80s publications exposing Israeli myths and counter myths about the country’s hallowed beginnings, he cites six “bones of contention” that traditional and “New Historian” researchers fundamentally disagree on. They are (1)“Britain’s policy at the end of the mandate, (2) The Arab-Israeli military balance in 1948, (3) the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, (4) the nature of the Israeli-Jordanian relations during the war, (5) Arab war aims, and(6) the reasons for the continuing political deadlock after the guns fell silent.

It is these bones of contention Shlaim concludes that divide the world of Zionist historiography into those that know and those that think they know. Why Shlaim chose those particular six is curious. As “bones of contention” many more issues can be debated than what is listed here. How about Israel’s settlement policy, it’s claim to water in the Levant’s tributaries, racist policies against Palestinian Israeli citizens, the claim to Jerusalem and all the conflict that has caused over the decades, and Jewish interests in general colliding with Palestinian interests. In a conflict this old, brewing with hatreds and long time scores not settled there are too many “bones of contention” to settle on only six. One has only to take his pick, and that is what it seems that Avi Shlaim has done in “The Debate.”


While admitting indirectly to such playful managing of the historical evidence (p. 174*) he concludes that earlier historians were not qualified to write the history of the 1948 war because “Most of the voluminous literature on the war was written not by professional historians but by participants, by politicians, soldiers, official historians, and a large host of sympathetic chroniclers, journalists, biographers, and hagiographers” and should therefore be rejected. (P. 173). There is good reason for Dr. Shlaim to reject this kind of evidence which will be argued throughout this piece because most of it is diametrically opposed to what Dr. Shlaim is promoting here.

It is interesting that Shlaim’s quote above about the Israeli favored histories on the war of 1948 is not too different from Avraham Sela’s description of the literature coming from the Arab side of that war in those first few years after the establishment of the State of Israel. The Arab history of 1948 according to Sela who revels in it, is almost exclusively the kind of history that Shlaim wants to reject. Sela describes it as a “large number of first-person accounts, textbooks, memoirs, diaries and polemics.” This can only suggest that most primary source material on both sides during that time came from these kinds of sources. Without it we would have almost no history at all. Does Shlaim suggest that we should disregard Walid Khalidi’s work on “The Fall of Haifa” or his “Documents of the ’48 Conflict” published in The Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 27, No.3,(Spring, 1998) p. 60-105? I doubt that even Shlaim’s admitted Marxist leanings (p. 189-190) would allow him to disregard such important historical information on the Arab perspective of 1948. It is precisely the Arab history of this time that Schlaim and others draw on to indict Israel’s founders of fabricating Israel’s early history. Could there be a double standard here?

Historical accounts after the war are “not history in the proper sense of the word.” P.172-173. I would argue against professor Shlaim’s assertion here. They are most certainly proper historical accounts, if for no other reason than they are the only sources of that war coming from that time period. That in itself makes them primary and vital to the historical record. Because they were decidedly Israeli or Arab centric, depending on the source you are reading, does not preclude that they are not valid. To reject any written material on any historical event even if it happened yesterday, simply because there are no official documents on which to draw the history, is absurd. The opening of Israeli political and military documents in the 1980s does not invalidate these sources, they only add another important dimension to the debate. Personal histories, eyewitness accounts or even partisan evaluations which lead to “sacred texts” of nations’ beginnings are every bit as important as released military documents in the 1980s.. Ben Gurion’s memoirs for example, offer a partisan view of the leader of Israel’s arguments and justifications for Israeli actions during the war. As the author, he has the inherent right to exclude or include any material that he wished. Is Ben Gurion’s point of view of no importance to the history? Under Shlaim’s present argument it would appear that it is.

Another avenue of history that often seems to be forgotten about this war is the British contribution. Shlaim is not the only historian guilty of this. This seems to follow the New Historian pattern of rewriting Israel’s beginning history. There were many British anti-Zionist apologies for the Arab disaster of 1948. However, they are rarely if ever referred to in modern historiographies on the war. And, that methodological tactic is present in this Shlaim piece. I can only assume that he does not because as an admitted leftist he is not comfortable with the motive of the British and its underlying imperialistic desires over the Middle East during that time, more than he is desiring to show sympathy with the underdog oppressed, persecuted Palestinians. E. O’Balance, Erskine Childers, John Baggot Glubb and others published a British view as to why the Arabs lost are all rejected by Shlaim as bonafied histories. Shlaim does see fit however, to quote A.J.P. Taylor a British Marxist who, unencumbered by Western capitalist influences, wrote a revisionism on the causes of World War II, and is remarkably similar to Shlaim’s thesis on “the Debate”.

No matter how much Avi Shlaim remains true to his Marxist ideology it does not give him license to rewrite history. It is the job of every historian to be as honest as they can otherwise the history they write will be meaningless. With that in mind Shlaim’s bones of contention might be valid but his perspective is suspect here. To me, a more accurate statement about these bones of contention are not so much between “old” and “new” historians, but between Marxist and the more traditional western style democratic influenced historians.

Are We Too Late?

The United States continues to stall for time in stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Consequently, Iran appears to be exploiting American weakness to have the resolve to stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies in the region. President Obama, coming off a disastrous policy decision on the Afghanistan problem, is following up with the same hesitant, restrained, indecisive pattern of ineffectiveness which has now put the west on the defensive against a growing Jihadi tide. And, this situation has our allies in the region, especially Israel, very worried because Obama at present is not risking the existence of the United States. He is using Tel Aviv as its minor’s canary to see how far he can stretch out the Iranian push to obtain nuclear weapons.

On December 19th Debka File reported that the Obama administration forced Israel to abandon any plans of direct action against Iran until the president has the opportunity to play out his hand at a diplomatic and peaceful solution. After all of Obama’s earlier tough talk at the United Nations last October in reality he is taking a much softer approach.

Our enemies are laughing at us

I would like to blame this on Obama’s Left wing agenda but the previous administration did the same thing. Like the Bush administration before him, he sends the wrong messages hoping the madman of Tehran will take them in the spirit in which they are given, as friends and colleagues on the world stage.

Wasn’t that what Chamberlain was hoping for at Munich in 1938?

Achmadinijad sensing American restraint on the issue demanded in Copenhagen last week “everything is possible, but not in a climate where they threaten us…those days are over.” Consequently, Obama is trying to appease Achmadinijad, telling him that America wants to make nice, even at the expense of the Israelis.

The president is hoping for another year to resolve the issue. But, Debka’s military sources say that it will be too late by then, Iran will have the bomb sometime in 2010. Israel will lose its strategic edge, and who knows what will happen after that. Does anyone really think that the Obama administration does not realize this is doomsday for Israel if they continue on this present course?

Like pulling an unloaded gun on a bad guy Obama made tough statements that America’s patience is running thin and that “tougher sanctions are imminent.” But, then, the administration acquiesced further this week with three measures all designed to appease. The first was a temporary shelving of a prior congressional approval to penalize American companies doing business with Iran. But last week John Kerry, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, announced that he “needs more time to consider the bill.” The second, the government announced a six month delay in deployment of the bunker buster bomb specifically designed for the Iranian strike, even though it is ready now. And third, Israeli journalists briefed by Obama administration officials have produced articles from those briefings that implore the Israeli electorate to get used to the idea of living with a nuclearized Iran.

Iran’s answer to the Obama acquiescence: the test firing of a new missile which can penetrate both Israeli and American defenses.

The time for talk is long over.

This kind of dialogue might have been constructive back in 2003 when Iran announced its re-initiation of its nuclear program. Once Iran had threatened Israel, and other American allies in the region, a plan for slowing them down should have been envisioned. Now, they have missiles which can hit Tel Aviv, advanced weaponry that nobody is really sure if it can be defended against, and an extra six years to build its defenses and strike capabilities in the event of an attack.

If Obama had the beitzim, he would have counted the last administration’s talks with the Iranian government as a failed negotiation and made direct plans either with or without Israel’s help to stop Iran from turning the world in a dangerous direction. But, sadly, he doesn’t, and therefore cannot do what is right. The West better get real serious about the Iranian situation soon. Time is running out fast.

The question for the Netanyahu government is simple but essential. Does it continue to rely on a weakened United States, led by an untested administration, one that cannot seem to recognize real evil in the world, and holds to the firm belief that it is possible to negotiate with it? Can it allow this kind of diplomatic brinkmanship to decide whether Israel lives or dies? Can Israel realistically put its survival in the hands of anyone else other than itself?

For Israel there is no choice, it would have been easier earlier but it has to remove the threat now at whatever cost. Not to will increase the possibility of a diminished Israel, in a region with enemies already bent on its destruction and the constant fear that at anytime, the worst enemy of the Jews since Adolph Hitler has got his finger on the button and is just waiting for an excuse. And, as we have seen previously, to Achmadinijad and his supporters, that excuse is the very existence of the Jewish state.

The option no one wants to think about

Published in the Jerusalem Post, December 2, 2009. you can find it at http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1259243055252&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull


Israel at one time was the world leader in combating terrorism. Military colleges studied how it performed the Entebbe raid of 1976. People marveled everywhere at their courage at storming a children’s house on Kibbutz Misgav Am in 1980 and killed all five terrorists before they could kill the remaining children. They launched a successful commando raid against a particular terrorist in Lebanon where they stole into the night, killed him and then went back out again, without losing a man, a perfect surgical strike. Israel is responsible for mandating that terror can never be negotiated with, knowing that once you go down that path it is slippery slope to surrender and defeat.

But, Israel has been languishing in recent years, consumed with the same political correctness that is politically drowning the rest of the Western world facing a terrorist threat. They just don’t seem to have what it takes to deal the proper blow to the terror in its midst. The debacle in Lebanon in 2006 and again missing the golden opportunity to cut the head off of one of these snakes in Gaza last year, Israel appears like the rest of us, doomed to live with terror until it either destroys us or burns itself out in a hundred years or so. Of course, waiting it out means that a lacerated nation will be scarred for who knows how long after that.

Enter the Sri Lankans. I think they have an answer. And, I think Israel should listen to what they have to say. Sri Lanka used to be just like Israel. They had a perennial terrorist problem with their Tamil minority. For almost thirty years, organized bands in that community terrorized the Sri Lankan nation to the point where the country could not evolve. Navin Dissanayake, Sri Lankan Minister of investment Promotion claims that they “could have been another Singapore if it had not been for that war.” Terrorism, in Sri Lanka, as it did in Israel, held that country from progressing forward which would have been good for Sri Lanka and good for the world.

The Tamil Tigers , sometimes referred to by its long name, The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) resemble Middle East terror groups. Actually, it is more correct to say that Middle East terror groups resemble the Tamil Tigers as they are the innovators of many of the terrorist techniques that have been utilize by Israel’s enemies. They invented the suicide belt and perfected the suicide bombing attack, turning it into a tactical device. They were the first to use women and children in these attacks. And, they have been accused of using their own innocent civilians, as human shields in their confrontation with Sri Lankan government forces. They are a vicious crowd and were implicated in the assassination of Ragiv Ghandi of India in 1991. As we all know, Palestinians have imitated these tactics with a devastating brutality against innocent Jews.


The Sri Lankans more or less lived with this horror since 1983. Then 9-11 happened and a new dynamic promoted by President Bush and the United States gave the Sri Lankans a new outlook. With a new administration elected on the promise of stopping the LTTE permanently, they embarked on a full scale military assault on Tamil positions which by 2007 held almost one fourth of the country, mostly in the north. They sent their army, a much stronger army than the Tamil tigers, into Tamil occupied territory and began to take back town by town, going street to street in some cases from their enemies. While doing this they killed anyone who resisted against them.

Jehan Perera of the Sri Lankan Peace Council said that “This government has taken the position that virtually any price is worth paying to rid the country of terrorism.” The price paid was indeed a heavy one. Many innocent people died. The Sri Lankan government regrets in the strongest terms the killing of innocent civilians but most government officials believe that they made a conscious choice of that “price” and that the alternative status quo was just not acceptable any more.

It was bloody and dirty, and they took a lot of criticism for it, “The U.N. Estimates that during the final months of fighting in Sri Lanka at least 7,000 Tamil civilians were killed and at least 13,000 were injured.” But, they also wiped out the scourge of terror that was choking the life out of their country. They did not stop until total victory was declared last May. Today, Sri Lankans can once again walk the streets of their cities, visit the marketplace, and conduct business without the threat of being murdered in such a way that not even their loved ones can identify their bodies. It is a new dawn and a new day for Sri Lanka.

Israel can take a real lesson from this experience. The threat facing the Jewish State from the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon is no different than the north of Sri Lanka and coastline into the south that the Tamils occupied before the Sri Lankan army began their elimination war against them.

The time has come to admit there might not be a solution to the Palestinian problem. But, there is a way to end it. The next time that terror forces Israel to take a military stand this option should be considered. Israel must realize that there will be no peace with an intransigent enemy that refuses to act in good faith. Palestinian rejectionist actions, and Iranian backed Hezbollah threats to their existence will never be placated, and they will never stop until Israel is destroyed. Once the population of Israel realizes this unfortunate reality, there is only one way to end it. Israel must take the Sri Lankan initiative and move into these areas one by one, corner, and envelop all armed resistance, and then kill it off.

Bending over backwards to make peace with the Palestinians has proved fruitless without Israel submitting to national weakening measures. It’s time to make the choice of a better life for all. More than sixty years of living with this is enough. When they have completely wiped out the enemy, a new dynamic will rise. Without the Muslim thuggery of holding their own people back, there will be nothing to stop them from negotiating a genuine peace with Israel. There might be a Palestinian, a Lebanese, a Syrian, maybe even an Iranian partner to draw up a peace which will transform the Middle East from a place of hatred and bloodshed to a prosperous community of nations which will work together making the daily lives of their individual citizens better.

No more Gilad Shalit's

Deir Yassin remembered

When discussing the Israeli Palestinian dispute, some Palestinian supporters who like to point to a history of Jewish abuses against innocent Arabs over the last six decades sometimes refer to a particularly infamous battle during the War of 1948 that took place in a small town on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem Hwy called Deir Yassin. For many reasons, not the least of which concerns political infighting between the major factions of the Israeli body politic, Deir Yassin has taken on a life of its own over the last 61 years.


Deir Yassin has been called a “massacre” by Palestinian and Arab groups as well as Leftist commentators in the West. It might be considered a “massacre” but no more than the Haifa Refinery massacre on December 30, 1947, and the doctors and nurses massacre on the road to Hadassa hospital on Mount Scopus, on April 13, 1948, or any of the other massacres that became part of the fighting history of Israel’s War of Independence. These other “massacres” have long been forgotten by most people accept for the few historians that deal with the course of this eighteen month war. This is not the case with Deir Yassin.


Deir Yassin was one of many towns and villages that had to be cleared during Operation Nachshon, the overall operation to open the road to besieged Jerusalem in April, 1948. Not to take action on this road would mean giving up on Jewish Jerusalem, which was as unthinkable then as it is now. The Jews of Jerusalem had been besieged since January, with no electricity, food, water, or any of the other vital necessities of life. People in the Jewish quarter of the city were literally starving to death. Without the opening of the road to allow convoys of supplies to enter the city, it was almost a certainty that Jewish Jerusalem would fall to the enemy. For this reason, Ben Gurion ordered 1500 Haganna troops to take part in the operation, the largest of its kind up to that time in the battle for Palestine in 1947 and 1948.


The Israeli military has long been the dominant force in the Middle East. No Arab army has been able to defeat it. A foregone conclusion for so long, that it’s hard to believe that the history was ever anything but total Israeli domination over its neighbors. But, this was not always the case. Before the start of the 1948 war it was very tenable on whether the Jews could defeat the Arab enemy and established their state by the time the British would leave in May. The belief that the Jews were in a dire strait and faced the very sobering possibility of defeat began to take shape almost immediately after the partition vote on November 29, 1947 and did not abate itself until June of 1948 when it became clear that by the end of the war a Jewish State of some kind would emerge intact. Operation Nachshon was part of the push to change this dynamic and many towns, including Deir Yassin along that stretch of road were fought over and won by Jewish forces. In discussing the beginning of this realization in March of 1948 Benny Morris, a prominent historian on the expulsion of the Arabs during Israel’s war of Independence wrote:


“The toll on Jewish life and security in the battle of the roads and dire prospect of pan-Arab invasion had left the Yishuv (community) with very narrow margins of safety. It could not afford to leave pockets of actively or potentially hostile Arabs behind its line. This was certainly true regarding vital roads and areas such as the Jerusalem Corridor…when the Yishuv faced, and it knew it faced, a life and death struggle. “ (p.236, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, Cambridge, 2004.)


Depending on the source any where between 300 to 600 Arab towns and villages were destroyed during the eighteen months of war in 1947-1948. Why does Deir Yassin stand out among all of the others? Why is this remembered and the other villages are not, at least from the Israeli Left? The answer to this is simple. Although massacres were common during that war the Left in Israel, politically signified at that time as the Mapam party had a stake in making an issue out of the Deir Yassin battle. As independence approached, their influence over the Yishuv began to wane. Their reactions were to lash out at the now growing middle of the road leadership, led by David Ben Gurion, and attempted to subvert it by making accusations of improper and immoral acts against the enemy. Deir Yassin was the perfect model to make this stand for several reasons. First, this town was singled out to be fought with primarily LEHI (Sternists) and ETZEL (Begin’s Urgun) forces in a Haganna sanctioned attack. LEHI and ETZEL were the ideological enemies of the Mapam. Second, by indicting the Haganna as sanctioning the operation and allowing these “barbarian” groups to “murder, rape, pillage and steal,” they believed that they could make criminal any political belief to the right of the extreme Left in Israel. Third, they saw this whole incident as an opportunity to oppose the Yishuv’s shift toward American and British democracy and away from Stalinist Russia.


The Palmach, the armed wing of the Mapam, was, like ETZEL and LEHI not opposed to establishing a state by force, and indeed took part in many militant operations before May 14,1948. But, Mapam never indicted Palmach, only those groups that were their ideological opposites and only because they lost favor and support from the people as a political force. Although Mapam has long been disbanded and the Palmach like ETZEL, LEHI and Haganna have all been melded into the IDF, the extreme political Left still uses this tactic today. Deir Yassin, according to the Left, is one of a long line of accused abuses by the Zionist movement.


Today, it is mostly forgotten that Deir Yassin was an ugly battle among many ugly battles of that war which were fought hard by both sides and perpetuated the deaths of many innocent people both Jewish and Arab. But, as this story lingers now into the 21st century, it is apparent that Deir Yassin is a cause celeb against Israel’s motives during the War of Independence, and that the Arabs for whatever reasons needed to be defeated, did not deserve to be tortured and massacred in such a manner. Through propaganda and emphasizing Israeli brutality it is mostly lost on history that the Jews with their proverbial backs up against the wall fought hard to survive and won their state motivated by liberty rather than motivated by domination over a lesser equipped Arab minority.


After the War of Independence Deir Yassin was so touted by the Left it was of course picked up by the Arab propaganda machine sometime in the late 1950s and the two groups joined in an unholy alliance against a common enemy that exists until this very day. It is one of the rallying cries to show the “barbarous” nature of the Israeli occupation forces. It is still taught in universities across the English and Arab speaking world as the proof that Israel needs to be punished for its actions. The calls for this punishment range from a much weaker diminished Israel to its complete annihilation and in its place an Arab Muslim state from the Jordan to the Mediterranean.


If we are going to be fair, when considering the place of the Deir Yassin battle it must be looked at in the context of the time, the desperation of one people to quite literally survive the conflict and the total incompetence of the other side in trying to explain why they lost that war so badly. The fact is that Israel’s war of Independence was a war not unlike most wars in that the human tragedy factor was very high on both sides. Probably more on the Jewish side simply because the Arabs had the opportunity to flee to the safety of bordering Arab governments and the Jews didn’t. The Jews, unlike their Arab counterparts, had to make their stand in Palestine and no where else. Consequently, many innocent Jews, without guns in their hands died in this endeavor. However, this is never indicated by the Left or for the obvious reasons by the Arab side. As Morris explained in the above quote in April of 1948, with the survival of the coming Jewish State, the very lives of hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women and children hung in the balance. And, it did not become clear that the Jews would survive at all until the first truce went into effect on June 9th, 1948.


Deir Yassin was awful. But, so were many of the battles fought during that time. We should be cognizant of that and urge our leaders, professors, journalists and historians to reflect that fairness in their reports on this history. It is time we set the record straight.

Two State Solution, Then and Now

Written in rebuttal to Rob Eshman's editorial in the Jewish Journal sometime around the beginning of 2007

Twenty years ago the idea of a two state solution to settle the Middle East conflict was not acceptable even though the extreme political left at the time said that it was. The problem then is more or less the same problem now; the Arabs just don’t want it. At a Peace Now sponsored 1980s rally at Roxbury Park in Los Angeles, three speakers who will be familiar to you for other reasons, Richard Dreyfuss, Betty Friedan, and Yael Dayan argued the merits of creating two states west of the Jordan River. Today some would say that those speakers were correct, even visionary, because that radical proposal of the 1980s is now mainstream thinking. Touché!

Here’s what’s wrong. Opponents back then objected to the two state argument for three main reasons. One, however noble their intentions, Jews calling for a two state solution showed the Jewish community as weak at a time when it should have closed ranks and remained strong. Two, if Israel somehow negotiated the agreement with a dishonest Arafat it would not bring peace. It would only act as a stepping stone to the Palestinians’ ultimate goal, the destruction of Israel. Three, it wasn’t that a two state solution was not a reasonable end to the conflict but, its timing was off. In the event that a negotiated peace could not be achieved as was suspected by Peace Now, their alternative was to just depart from the territories as an Israeli MK told me in a conversation in 1985. A nation that surrenders land taken in a war it did not start, cannot be interpreted in any other way other than complete defeat. Most of world Jewry could not accept such terms for Israel’s future in the 1980s.

The two state solution, then as now only works for Jews. The democratically elected leadership in Palestine, Hamas, are not interested. They insist that in any peace agreement Israel must literally cease to exist. There are several ways to achieve this, through violence and bloodshed, forcing Israel to take in several million Palestinians who claim refugee status, or simply by just negotiating away the first Jewish homeland in two thousand years. It doesn’t really matter to Khalid Mashaal and company how it happens as long as it happens. And, the Palestinians are counting on the Western Left to help make that happen. Just as it forced its self-promoted idea of a premature two state solution in the 1980s, the Arab world along with the Western Left now believe that current Left wing views can once again become Israeli policy someday. The destruction of the Jewish State is on the table and it’s coming unless we do something to stop it.

The modern day equivalent to Richard Dreyfuss’s 80s involvement in a two state solution are left wing Jews like Tony Judt and Tony Kushner. Both men advocate Israel take some of the steps that Hamas insists on in order to create peace. One can only speculate on why they would advocate forcing Israel into life threatening, compromising positions. Judt’s and Kushner’s position today are considered valid and attainable because Richard Dreyfuss’s unpopular speech twenty years ago has now become a fait accompli to the Arab Israeli conflict.

Didn’t I read somewhere that Tony Kushner believes that Israel was a mistake and should never have been created? But, he is a proud Jew and loves Israel. This is who the Left relies on to keep their finger on the pulse of the future. For those of you who don’t know, Tony Kushner was one-half of the writing team of Steven Spielberg’s indictment of Israel’s war on terror, the movie “Munich.”

Admittedly, Judt and Kushner are the lunatic fringe of Left wing politics. But, like Dreyfuss and the others, they are Hollywood types who have a certain amount of influence in these matters. And, like that rally in the park in the 1980s we would be fools to write off Judt and Kushner just because they represent the extreme of Jewish left wing thinking.

The Left regards the pullout from Gaza in 2005 as a great victory because of their advocacy in the 1980s. Before the post Zionist activists pat themselves on the back for taking responsibility for planting the seed of extricating Israel from Gaza, they should ask themselves if they actually think that Israel is better off now since they vacated Gaza. Is there any more peace on that border than there was before they pulled out? Is Israel any safer, more secure? Maybe they should ask the parents of Gilad Shalit that question.

Studying the issue, the accused right seems to be the more visionary of the two philosophies. Most of the world wide Jewish community have perennially argued against the leftwing agenda, labeling it accommodation, conciliation, acquiescence, and surrender by insisting that what would happen in the 1980s was exactly what happened in the middle of the first decade of the 21st. century. In the 80s the opponents argued that the Palestinians would never accept the Jews as an equal peace partner, that withdrawal from a territory either through negotiation or unilaterally, would embolden the enemy and that to practice this agenda could potentially mean the destruction of Israel. Two out of three of those scenarios have definitely proved true. If the rest of us are diligent in opposing the extreme left the third will never come to pass. Still every once in awhile you read an article or hear something on NPR celebrating the disturbing connection between Richard Dreyfuss “courageously” positing a two state solution back in the 80s and that Judt’s and Kushner’s prediction of a smaller more diminutive Israel might be in the offing in the near future.

Calling for dialogue with an entity that has no intention of settling the dispute peacefully can only work against the safety and security of Israel. The answer is usually that the objective is to bypass Hamas and negotiate directly with Fatah. Assuming that America and Israel can pull that off and undermine the elected government in Palestine, what makes anyone think that a second time might prove any different than the disaster at Camp David in the summer of 2000? I’m sure that Shalom Ackshov and other left wing groups in Israel think there is an opportunity to negotiate a real peace with Abbas. But, Fatah contains groups within its ranks who are just as violence orientated against Jews as Hamas. What the Left, Jewish and others need to realize is the sad truth that there are literally very few people in the Palestinian territories who want to end this conflict as much as Israel. In other words there is no one to talk peace with on the other side. There is no one home in the Palestinian peace camp and the lights are off for now.

We all want peace, but peace must be real, not one sided and only used as a jumping off point for the ultimate goal, revenge for 1948 and beyond. I am not Judt or Kushner so I shudder to think that such a scenario can come true. Peace is not possible at this time, that much is clear. What Jews need to do is to come together; hunker down, protect ourselves and expect more war before there will be peace. We must wait for the Palestinians to tire from all this bloodshed and in the meantime take our lumps and build our security. When this phenomenon finally burns out in a hundred years or so, then we might be able to come out into the sunshine and build the kind of two state solution that will work for everyone, not just for Western Civilization’s extreme leftwing or the Arab Muslim world, but for those who love Israel as well.

The Moral Equivalency Factor

Israelis killing Palestinians, and vice versa
Is 'moral equivalency' really so wrong?
By Henry Siegman, HENRY SIEGMAN is a senior fellow on the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations and a visiting professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The response is to his editorial in the L.A Times, June 18, 2006.

Professor Siegman argues in this piece that Israeli retaliation to Palestinian terror does not move the peace process forward. He makes several assertions to support his argument, however, the reasoning here is flawed and more often than not one sided, tilted in favor of exactly what Palestinian terrorism wishes for, the complete cessation of Israeli defense of their homeland.

The professor asks in his title “is moral equivalency really so wrong?” It is not so much wrong as it just doesn’t exist in this conflict. There is no moral equivalency between what Hamas does in the name of “ending the occupation” and what Israel does in response. A missile killing a known serial murderer in his car which also unfortunately takes the life of his children is not equivalent to a brainwashed, blood thirsty, vengeful, young man who would blow himself up at a kids party, a religious gathering where many children are present, or a dolphinarium.

The professor presents no scientific evidence that what the Israelis do promotes more terror and therefore is morally equivalent with what the Palestinians do. So, I would argue that Israeli retaliation is just as likely to reduce the violence level as to raise it and therefore, serves to protect Israeli lives. It is morally justified to kill 45 terrorists in Jenin because they can no longer kill any innocent people. And, if in that process seven innocents also die, that is the collateral damage that we all must accept as an unfortunate part of war. That is not the same as targeting innocent civilians specifically. If retaliation saves even one Jewish life then Israeli policy is worth it. After all, the primary purpose of a nation-state is to protect its citizens.

”Palestinians insist that, like the Israelis, their objective is not to kill innocent civilians but to end a crushing occupation that is now in its 40th year. Killing civilians is seen by some of them — immorally and stupidly — as a means to that end.”

I would like to know which Palestinians have said this. I have never heard that proclamation. On the contrary Palestinian actions do not support the above statement. Consider these examples:

1) Suicide bombs are packed with all kinds of nails and tacks so that even if they don’t kill everyone they stand a good chance of inflicting human casualties causing undo suffering.

2) When the Palestinians blew up Sbarro’s pizza parlor back in 2001 or whenever it was, they erected a side show shrine in the West Bank, complete with twisted metal, broken glass, and mutilated body parts some of which were small, obviously symbolizing the slaughter of small children. The people paid money to enter the display and cheered at what they saw, until an embarrassed American State Department forced Arafat to remove it.

3) Half of the 1000 or so Jewish deaths are of children under sixteen, which Palestinians seem to revel in.

4) When two young boys, ages twelve and thirteen, happened to wander into enemy territory without warning a couple of years ago, they were found in a cave so mutilated that their parents had to identify their dead bodies through dental records.

Does this sound like a people who regret the violence that they are forced into?

How many Arab children are among the 3500 casualties that the professor sites for Palestinians? Moreover, how many of those are trumped up casualties which are not truly the work of the Israeli military? The events that inspired this editorial began with a so called errant Israeli missile which supposedly landed on the beach in Gaza and killed a number of people including small children. But, the Israelis have raised a very strong case that the explosion which killed those unfortunate people was actually the work of Hamas trying to set booby traps for Israeli commandos who have used that very beach before to land and launch raids against terrorist activity. The Palestinians have a history of using their own incompetence to blame Israel.

The professor argues that Israeli strikes cannot be justified unless the strike has the ability to move toward a final settlement to the conflict. In the absence of diplomatic negotiations Israeli retaliations will never end Palestinian terror, therefore, they offer a morally inadequate solution.

While Israeli retaliations may not contribute to the end of the conflict something can be said for their effectiveness as a policy. I wonder if the professor would agree that at the very least the Palestinians are thrown off balance with Israeli counter attacks. They might even be running a little scared which might make them a little more timid in carrying out attacks against Israel. That in itself would save lives, and therefore, makes retaliations morally acceptable.

Take for example the killing of the leader of Hamas, Sheik Achmed Yassin in 2004. A month later Israel targeted his successor Abdel Aziz Rantisi and killed him while driving in a car in the Gaza Strip. The next leader coming to power would not reveal his identity to the international community because of fear that Israel was only a step away from having him join his predecessors. Thus, he could not obtain the stature of the two before him and remained incognito until he was safely ensconced in Damascus. His name is Khaled Meshaal and if the Israelis could get to him I am sure they have a missile with his name on it. Playing this kind of hardball sends a message to the Palestinians that they cannot deny. If any Palestinian contributes to the planning, and execution in full or in part in the wholesale slaughter of innocent people in Israel they will be targeted for elimination.


Israel accepts that it is destined to experience continued terror into the future unless one of two things happen, the Palestinians come to their senses and seek a negotiated settlement to the conflict, or Israel unilaterally takes some kind of action which will guarantee the security of its population. The Israelis are running out of patience. They will not wait forever. That is why you are seeing in small steps the unilateral withdraw of Israel from Palestinian claimed land and the definition of permanent borders in the presence of the barrier currently under construction on the West Bank. The professor argues that there is a “vast disproportion between Palestinian civilian casualties from Israeli ‘mistakes’ and Israeli casualties from Palestinian terrorist assaults.” He uses the example that Kassam rockets have not killed anyone, but Israeli air strikes kill Palestinians on a daily basis. So, Palestinian incompetence matched against Israeli efficiency equals brutality on Israel’s part. That is patently absurd.

If Israel waits until one of those rockets actually kills somebody will they be more justified in retaliating? It is morally outrageous to suggest that Israel not retaliate on that basis. As a nation state it has the imperative to protect its population from attack. Even if some in the Israeli body politic believe that Israeli retaliation does not diminish terror against their state they have the obligation to respond. And, when they can, take the initiative to disarm the terrorists by force, whether that means blowing up a bomb factory, taking out a publicly up front killer, or launch limited commando raids into the territories to keep the Palestinian militant stature off balance.

The professor insists that collateral damage in Israeli counter attacks are not justified on any level. This suggests that Israel cease retaliation for Palestinian terror against its population. It is unconscionable to tie Israel’s hands in such a manner. The only thing this accomplishes is that it gives the Palestinians carte blanche to do anything they want to Israel without fear of punishment. As long as they refuse to come to the negotiating table in good faith, which is part of their agenda anyway, they are protected against Israeli retribution. The professor’s assertion implies that if Israel stops retaliating that will somehow convince the Palestinians to negotiate rather than murder. Why can’t people see that it is not Israel’s borders that are bloody, but Palestine’s?

The professor seems to think that it is a simple matter of democratic politics that will change the situation. He implies that only since the Labor Party was voted out of office in 2000 that Israel decided not to negotiate. I would remind the professor that the Labor party took the negotiations as far as it could go in 1999. Ehud Barak thought he had a workable formula for both sides. But, he was wrong, Arafat refused to budge on a final settlement. And, Barak would not give up anymore. He conceded later that the people of Israel had given way on many painful concessions, and Arafat could not give way on even one, accepting a fair settlement for both sides. I wonder what the professor would suggest the opposition do, that Barak and his party did not? Even President Clinton, Ehud Barak’s ideological equivalent, thought that Arafat turned down a reasonable settlement on the total issue.

The professor asserts that it is “Ariel Sharon’s unilateralism, embraced by his successor, Ehud Olmert,” which is the stumbling block to peace. But this is incorrect, Even now as this is being written, Prime Minister Olmert is looking for ways to try and negotiate with President Abbas, but his hands are tide as long as Hamas, who intends on destroying Israel, remains the party in charge in Palestine. The unilateral moves Sharon implemented and Olmert will follow through with is not an “avoidance” of peace but a measure to secure the Israeli population in the event that peace will not be obtained. It is not what the government of Israel desires but in the absence of any real peace partner, “unilateralism” might turn out to be the only alternative. The government of Israel will make its people secure either through peace or unilateral measures, but it will be secure.

The prospects for peace have been on the table for six years. All the Palestinians need to do is to renounce its campaign to kill off the Jewish State and accept its terms. I agree, terrorism cannot be defeated, but Israel can make its own population safe, thus the reason for unilateral moves, building barriers and so forth.

I am surprised that the professor thinks his argument so weak that he must go back in history to find a parallel between the Jews and suicide bombers. Because he cites Israel’s pre-state underground as an example showing how Jews are just as barbaric as Palestinians, there are several things you should know which the good professor has conveniently left out of this assertion.

The killing of innocent civilians in Palestine did not begin with the Irgun. Palestinian Arabs were killing innocent Jews as early as the 1880s when some hearty European Jewish pilgrims began to set up working settlements in Palestine. The Jews finally responded in 1903 with the formation of Ha-shomer, the forerunner of the Haganna. Arab terror took a decisively violent turn after World War I and Jews were attacked time and time again. However, The Haganna always had a policy of defensive restraint, and continued that policy until its dissolution after Israeli independence.

After riots and continuous attacks in Jerusalem, Hebron, and many other Palestinian cities and hamlets through the 1920s and into the 1930s, a few Jewish defense force members grew tired of not taking the attack to the enemy. The Irgun, formed in 1932, was first devised to work against British occupation, and dealt very little with Arab terror. However, from 1936-1939, the Arab riots became so brutal against the Jewish population that the Irgun decided that the time was right to strike back.

The professor’s assertion based on a Benny Morris quote that it was Jewish terror that taught the Arabs how to be so murderously cruel apparently was just the opposite. It was the Arabs that taught the Jews how to kill with no mercy.

The professor would have you believe that the Irgun was widely accepted by the Yishuv (organized Palestinian Jewish community). In fact the underground was supported by a small minority of the population. The Irgun never reported more than 1500 members while the Haganna, with its policy of “restraint” contained around 6000 trained and equipped fighters along with maybe four or five thousand others who were mostly without weapons or special training. The Haganna received more support than any of pre-state Israel’s four main militia groups. It was the Hagana’s policy which followed into the IDF after Israel became a state.

While they were a force to be reckoned with in Jewish Palestine it is inaccurate to imply Irgun operations as having the support of the entire Yishuv. This is compared to a Palestinian population which sports a 60 to 80 per cent support for terrorism against innocent Israeli civilians. If the professor cares to dispute what I say, I would urge him to look at the voting results in the last Palestinian election. Where is the moral equivalency there, professor?

In conclusion, the professor makes some wild assertions that are not supported either by history or by current geopolitics. As long as the Palestinians refuse to negotiate in good faith, Israel will continue to defend itself and its population. The problem as I see it is that the vast majority of the people of Israel want a peace settlement, one that supports two free independent states, one Jewish and one Muslim. The vast majority of the Palestinian nation cannot accept a Jewish State along side its own. Therefore, the region will continue in this cycle of violence until Israel takes the necessary steps to safely separate itself unilaterally from the Palestinian in its midst.

A Simple Plea

During the Lebanon war CNN reported that the United States had made it clear to Israel to be ready for certain concessions. Concessions? The outrage I felt was familiar. Who started this war? Why should Israel be forced into any concessions? But, here they were. The Americans wanted Israel to be ready to commit to a cease fire, be prepared for a prisoner swap for their kidnapped soldiers, and be prepared to give back some land as well.

Is this the way it’s going to be? Is this how the war on terror will be prosecuted in the future? If it is we are going to lose.


To force Israel to commit to a cease fire while Hizbollah was still standing, to accept another prisoner swap when they already said that no such deal would be entertained and to give Shabaa Farms to Lebanon when even the U.N says that it does not belong to Lebanon, constitutes a forced two pronged defeat for Israel, one at the hands of Hizbollah, and the other at the hands of Israel’s Western allies. However, I doubt the Arab world would see it that way.

Doesn’t the West realize the change that has taken place since 9-11? Although it may have been that way in the past, it isn’t just Israel that will pay the consequences of a defeat to terrorism any more. Any forced defeat of Israel is a victory for Hizbollah, Iran, and Islamic terror in general. A victory for terror means that all of Western Civilization pays.

And, we will all pay dearly.

An early cease fire enabled the enemy to use the time to rebuild. While you are reading this Hizbollah is preparing for a more lethal next round. It gave Muslim street cred to the likes of Hassan Nasrallah and Mahmoud Achmadinijad, the Mussolini and Hitler of our time. It certainly was not in Western interests to make these guys appear bigger than life to their followers. In fact, it’s playing with fire when we know we are going to get burned. Pardon me for say so, but that’s stupid!

And, by the way, Israel is no less to blame for this travesty than the West. The government of Israel went right along with the U.S. proposal to end the war before victory could be claimed. They made huge mistakes and as time goes on we will learn more about them. The people of Israel are as outraged at their government as I am. They believe in growing angry numbers that Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party administration must go as a result.

Nobody wants innocent civilians to die. Images of loving family members in Lebanon wailing over their women and children and other obvious non-combatants is enough to make any normal person sick. Ok, war is an ugly thing, but if you are going to win, you have to have the resolve to do so. The United States, Israel and certainly not Europe failed to show the resolve necessary to complete this mission. I feel very bad for those people in Lebanon, but to be honest, given the choice of watching them crying over their dead loved ones and them watching me crying over mine, it may seem heartless to you, but I would rather watch them crying over theirs. Yet, I fear that if we do not start playing the kind of hardball necessary to win this thing, unconditionally, we are going to end up crying plenty for the people we love.


If you give the enemy the rope to hang you with, they will do it. Expect no mercy.

Even if you aren’t much of a fan of Israel or particularly fond of Jews or Israel, or both, you cannot honestly have liked the idea of forcing Israel to stop, that is unless you are MP George Galloway of England or people who think like that. The consequences for all of us are just too great.

A cease fire before Hizbollah was killed off has given them the opportunity to rebuild and become stronger, bolder and definitely more vicious. With the winning Hezbollah formula other Jew and Christian haters will of course be emboldened to strike against the West in any asymmetrical means available. They will spread their influence across the Western world and strive to bring Western Civilization to its knees. Intelligence analysts already admit that Hezbollah exists in the United States and Canada.

Next time allow Israel to finish the job.


This is not to say that the Arab Israeli conflict should not be addressed. Peace between Israel and its neighbors would benefit everyone but it is dead wrong to do it in the context of forcing a cease fire on Israel while it is engaged in destroying an enemy who delights in killing its citizens. Shabaa farms is a small disputed piece of territory and probably could be negotiated. It would be a tragedy not to let that issue take place when cooler heads are prevailing. There is no bigger definition of defeat than to do the Arabs’ bidding and force Israel to give the Shabaa farms to Lebanon.


If Israel wants to release some of its prisoners let it do it on its own time, not for any exchange of soldiers. The only effective way to have those soldiers released is to make it so painful that the Palestinians and Hizbollah would find it more in their interests to release them than to hold them. That can only be possible with the complete destruction of the enemy.

The enemy is on the assent and growing stronger every day. The West can ill afford battle losses at this time. With the growing alliances of Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, and Syria, and the continuing specter of nuclear weapons ominously coming closer to reality, wouldn’t it be in our interests to begin approaching this problem pragmatically rather than politically correct? Allow…no, encourage and support Israel against the terrorists who wish only to kill Jews, Christians, and anyone else who believes in freedom. Only the complete defeat of this enemy will bring victory. We need to act now!

The Case Against Israel

The following is a rebuttal to a review of Michael Neumann's "The Case Against Israel" that I found on Swans.com. Upon reading the review I could not allow it to go unchallenged. It is in a point counterpoint format. My comments are all in bold type.

Sir, In reading your review of “The Case Against Israel” I found myself squirming in my seat on several of the points you were making. I would like to converse with you on this subject and point out several issues you might not be aware of and if you are, perhaps you might see them a different way. I have read neither Dershowitz’s book or the one reviewed here which might work to our advantage because neither author will influence my comments. It is the ideology I detest not the particular person utilizing it. I appreciate the opportunity to express my interpretation of the history. I will answer in a point to point format. My comments will be written in the bold type you see here.

(Swans - December 19, 2005) The British essayist and novelist Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970), author of A Room With A View and A Passage To India, wrote in his 1951 collection of essays, Two Cheers for Democracy, "I suspect that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves." Amidst the one hundred-plus books I've read on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, none fits Forster's sentiment better than Michael Neumann's The Case Against Israel. This is simply the most cogent, reasoned, and lucid argumentation I have ever read in support of a two-state solution to the century-old conflict. Short (220 pages); to the point but not in your face; impeccably researched with 26 pages of references including a list of 28 important works, 188 endnotes, and a full index; there is no stone left unturned and practically no issue left unexplained in this highly condensed, unadulterated, and coherent analysis.

> > The book's title should not mislead readers. Those who follow the horrific tribulations of that small real estate with its strategic and religious confluences will obviously recognize that the title is a play on, or a response to, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz's The Case for Israel (John Wiley & Sons, August 2003). The argumentation is by and large a refutation of Dershowitz's case though it is not a point-by-point rebuttal of the 32 questions Dershowitz attempted (poorly) to answer.

Was it? Like I said I never read that one, but from what I heard his arguments were rather sound. Those opinions came from people on the Left by the way.

In actuality, Dershowitz is only mentioned once in the entire book. Instead of rebutting a lawyerly discourse based on polemical diatribes, crass emotionalism, and the repetitive regurgitation of falsities, Michael Neumann focuses on what has been lost in our recent historical travails: reality-based analysis -- historical facts, formal logic, ethics, behavioral rationality, philosophy, morality, and politics (Neumann is a professor of moral and political philosophy at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada). While he does not posit that he's an expert or historian, history is no stranger to him: his father, Franz Neumann, was the author of Behemoth: the structure and practice of national socialism, 1933-1944, the classic history of Nazi Germany. (And, for what

I don’t have Professor Neumann’s credentials, my father was a truck driver. In contrast to the professor’s background I am in fact an historian, I am currently working on my Masters thesis at California State University, Northridge. As an older student who returned to school after many years I have made a life study of the Middle East and the problems it has posed to our world.

it's worth, his stepfather was Herbert Marcuse.) > > Indeed, Neumann convincingly debunks the old canards, myths, and fallacies advanced by Dershowitz and the legions of Israeli apologetics: It is always interesting to me that for the Left any defense of Israel is an apology, but defense of the Palestinian is a righteous cause. Why can’t we just debate the issues without any sense of name calling or ad hominem attacks? The Zionist project was about redeeming the land or creating a "homeland" for the Jews, the bible says god gave the land to the Jews;

I disagree. The Zionists did not believe the land was theirs for the taking because of the biblical injunction that “God gave the land to the Jews.” God may have given it to the Jews but he did not give it to the Zionists. The Zionists simply looked around the world for the place that would be the most suitable to build a Jewish homeland. Although several sites were debated Palestine was the majority favorite. Why? Not because “God gave the land to the Jews” but because Palestine held the biggest connection for the Zionists for the following reasons.

1) Other than Europe and possibly the United States there were more Jews in Palestine than in any other region on Earth.

2) The Jews had maintained an unbroken physical existence on the land for the previous three thousand years.

3) Certainly by 1914 and probably before, Palestine was per capita the most densely populated Jewish presence in the world. The case for Jerusalem is even stronger:

4) When the Zionists began their enterprise in the 1890s the population of Palestine was around 100,000 people, total. In Jerusalem the Jews were the majority community between Muslims, Christians and Jews and had maintained that majority since the 1840s.

5) Several times over the previous millennia Jews held a majority in the city of Jerusalem. Because of several famines, war and several ethnic cleansings the Jews more than once lost that primacy. However, since they were the only people of the three great religions who maintained a constant flow of migration to Jerusalem from all over the known world since the fall of Rome in 476 CE, after every thinning of the population their numbers increased steadily until they once again became a majority. Consequently, every two or three generations the Jews would return as the majority community in Jerusalem. Without engaging in counter history it is formidable to speculate how many Jews might have ended up in Palestine if they had not been continually reduced by the calamitous ages.

6) Other than Jerusalem significant communities maintained a presence since the fall of the Second Temple (70CE) in Safat, Acre, Hebron, Jaffa and several other historical Palestinian cities. The Jews have an aboriginal connection to that area of the world. This can’t be said about any other piece of real estate on Earth. And, they have maintained that connection since the second millennia BCE. No other people can make this claim. Palestine was the Jews and the Jews were Palestine regardless of who else might have inhabited the place.

the Palestinians did not really exist

Well, there is no reference to Palestinians as a national entity of any kind in any reference before 1967. The fact is that they identified themselves as part of the larger Muslim community in the region. Every newspaper, every book, every collection of essays, at least in English, that I have read before 1967 doesn’t use the term. They distinguished themselves as Palestinian Arabs because the majority felt a connection to one of the surrounding powers, Jordan, Egypt or Syria.

However, the real question here is when did Palestinian Arabs begin to think of themselves as one people? I would argue that only after the Israelis changed the dynamic in 1967 did this happen. To understand this one must involve himself in Palestinian nationalist history. The evidence shows that the Arabs of Palestine were years behind the Jews in forming a national consciousness. The Jerusalem conference in 1931 was a watershed event for Palestinian history. It marked the first time that Palestinians actually came together to form a cohesive national charter. This puts the Arabs more than thirty years behind the Jews as they had done exactly that in Basle, in 1897. By the time of the Jerusalem Conference in 1931 the Jews had already established themselves as a nation within a nation in Palestine. They had a complete infrastructure in place, schools, hospitals, roads, civil administration and of course a military arm. The only thing lacking was the British refusal to leave Palestine and let them establish their country. History has shown that the Arabs have been playing catch-up ever since. Even their appeal to the English speaking world of their claims did not take place until the publication of George Antonious’ The Arab Awakening in 1938. I would add that even after 1931 the nationalist program in the Arab community failed to incorporate the rank and file of the Arabs of Palestine, whereas Zionism was all inclusive.

Something else you might want to look at was the their primary purpose. The Zionist movement was about establishing a country, Arab nationalism was primarily about preventing that, or after 1948 the destruction of it. The PLO Charter of 1964 (not any of the revised editions but the original) is remarkably devoid of any reference to establishing an Arab state in Gaza or the West Bank of the Jordan River. Its original goals were to destroy the State of Israel entirely. Why? There was no reason to “liberate” the territories since they were still under Arab control in 1964. Only years after its formation did the PLO demand an Arab State in the territories as well as the State of Israel proper. In other words, their nationalist agenda about establishing a country in the territories did not materialize until after the Six Day War.

(they're only Arabs), their actual state is
Jordan;

In 1922 the first official act of the British Mandate was to separate the Jews from the Arabs. They took the Palestinian mandated territory and severed it from the rest of Palestine creating an Arab state east of the Jordan River. Their purpose for doing that , Winston Churchill said, was to create an Arab kingdom out of the Palestine Mandate. The land west of the Jordan was then reserved to create the Jewish portion of the Mandate. The Zionists were furious at the decision but they accepted it because they had no choice.

they hate the Jews; they want to throw them to the sea;

A lot of people think that the “throw them into the sea” comment was some kind of Zionist propaganda and never happened. (The same way Arab propagandists insist that Arabs left Palestine during the 1948 war as a result of their “own leaders telling them to” was just Zionist drivel to put the blame on the victim.) The “throw them into the sea” comment” was real and was made in 1948 on the eve of the Arab invasion of Palestine By Azzam Pasha, the secretary general of the Arab League. (Habib Issa, in the daily US-published Lebanese newspaper Al Hoda, June 8 1951, New York). Yes, the Jews had a field day propaganda wise with the comment. But, can you blame them? The ending of the 1948 war was so monumental considering the Arab over confidence in May of 1948 and the huge victory snared by the Zionists by January 1949. In that six month period the Jews proved to the world that they were a force to be reckoned with. No observer of the Near East at that time gave Israel much of a chance of lasting even two weeks when the Arabs invaded. And, indeed the picture was bleak in that first week of fighting. But, thanks to backs-up-against-the-wall determination, a little luck, and a highly incompetent set of Arab armies, the Jews turned that around. They had earned the right to shove it back in their faces a little bit. We had the Nuremberg trials and the Jews had the “throw them into the sea” comment.

Arabs hating Jews is an interesting but complicated question. Historically Arabs did not hate Jews. But that is a relative statement because they were tolerated according to the laws of the Koran. True, Jews lived in the Islamic world with better results than Jews lived in the Christian world. But, that in no way excuses Muslim persecution of Jews and Christians under their control. The Jews lived under a set of restrictions called Dhimma. These laws “protected” Jews from a host of offenses, designed to accentuate the secondary nature of the non-Muslim in a Muslim world. However, the Jew in Israel is thought of quite differently than the Jew that was protected by the Koran. Dhimmi laws are out the window. Jews have proven that they can stand erect and meet the Muslim challenge head on. Consequently, Jewish nationalism constitutes a direct threat to the teachings of Mohammad. Muslims cannot justify Israeli dominance over the Arab world and the protection that Mohammad ordered his followers to practice. In their thinking to accept Jewish sovereignty in their realm would be to call Mohammad a liar. So, after almost sixty years of this the Muslim has now learned to hate the Jews. It is the Jews’ fault. They are the ones calling Mohammad a liar. (You think Danish cartoons are bad?). The State of Israel is in fact an affront to all of Islam. That is why you might be aware of anti Jewish beliefs coming from all over the Arab world, a phenomenon heretofore non-existent. It wasn’t always there, but it certainly is there now. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is almost unheard of in the western world but it does quite well in countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iraq.

never did and don't want to compromise (they are jusqu'au-boutistes); they are terrorists; there is no moral equivalence between Palestinian and Israeli violence (the former is terroristic, the latter sheer self defense); Israel is a "beacon of light"

I see no point engaging in this polemic as it has been debated many times. I will only ask you if the Palestinians were to somehow stop their “resistance” against the Jews of Israel tomorrow, do you think that Israel would continue to perform “terrorism” upon the Palestinians? Indeed, would Israel have any reason to maintain an occupation any more?

(of democracy, Western values) judged by a "double standard"; critics of Israel are anti-Semites, etc.

> > The last point -- opposition to Israel is anti-Semitic -- is quickly dismissed by the author. First, he has already addressed the charge in a brilliant essay, "What Is Anti-Semitism?", published in The Politics of Anti-Semitism (CounterPunch/AK Press, 2004), also reviewed in these pages. Second, "since not all Jews are Israelis or supporters of Israel, to be against all Israelis or Israel, is not to be against all Jews." Third, most criticisms are directed against the policies of Israel toward the Palestinians, not the existence of Israel; and lastly, as he states, "[N]o doubt many anti-Semites oppose Israel, and do so for anti-Semitic reasons, and conceal their motives. [But] none of this is relevant to whether or not Israel is in fact in the wrong." "No doubt," he concludes, "many people opposed Japanese fascism for racist reasons. It does not follow that such opposition was mistaken." End of discussion. Michael Neumann shows little patience with irrelevancies and false arguments. >

I find little to disagree with what the author says above. It’s like someone who opposes gay marriage is not necessarily homophobic, or against illegal immigration is not racist against Mexicans. Certainly racists and homophobes would be against those issues but that does not disqualify well meaning, clear thinking people who hold the traditional idea of marriage as sacred and illegal immigration to be undercutting American wages and destroying the middle class. I understand that sentiment completely. However, it should be pointed out that anti-Semitism, although a component of the problem as the author explained, has never been cited as a lynch pin of the argument against Israel from the Zionist side. The Zionists are quite aware of the opposition against them. And, anti-Semitism until very recently was a relatively small part of it.

> Furthermore, he does not make a legal disputation against Israel but confines his attention to a "moral and political argument," in search of "what ought to occur in Palestine, what solution to the conflict should be adopted," and he relies on three widely accepted views in political philosophy: That "there is some basic right of self-defense that on occasion permits a violent response"; that "one group can't normally acquire the power of life and death over another group without their consent"; and that one is responsible for the foreseeable consequences of one's action whatever the intentions that motivated it. Then he lays out his claim in two parts and dispassionately demonstrates that the Zionists and Israel with their allies du jour have mostly been in the wrong in their dealings with the Palestinians, and that the end of the conflict necessitates the unilateral end of the occupation and the recognition of the Palestinian people within the sovereign borders of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. His case is not so much against Israel that it is in favor of a Palestinian state.

I think you would find that 80% of the Jews in Israel, indeed of world Jewry agree with this statement. There is no conflict here. You need to summon the Palestinians and hold them accountable the same way you do Israel and then we’ll see if we can get a universal desired result. If you, Professor Neumann and the rest of The Left can do that I think it will happen.

> > "The central fact of the conflict is that Zionists sought sovereignty in Palestine. From this, all else follows: the Arab response and all that came after." (emphasis in the book) "Israel is the illegitimate child of ethnic nationalism." These are the two statements that best summarize "Zionism and the Birth of Israel," the first part of The Case Against Israel. They are reinforced by a methodical, logical, and historical narrative. From the inception of the Zionist project in the late 19th century, Zionism was not about a safe heaven (the "saving Jews" advocacy

Oh but it was exactly about a “safe haven.” Many of the Zionist leaders in the beginning vocalized and wrote about the need to establish a Jewish homeland in response to the rise of political anti-Semitism in Europe.

1)“The world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened a slumbering idea.” (Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, first published 1896. New York: Dover publications, 1988, P. 69.)

2)“Anti-Semitism passed for centuries through history as inseparable companions. Like the Jewish people, the real wandering Jew, Anti-Semitism, too, seems as if it would never die. He must be blind indeed who will assert that the Jews are not the chosen people, the people chosen for universal hatred.” Leon Pinsker, Auto Emancipation, First published 1882 Internet address, http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/6640/zion/pinsker.html.

3)“The terrible oppressions and frequent migrations , which intensified immeasurably the personal anxiety of every Jew for his own safety…contributed to the enfeebling of the already weakened national sentiment.” Ahad Ha’Am, Nationalism and the Jewish Ethic: Basic writings of Ahad Ha’Am, New York: Herzl Press, 1962, P. 40.

I could keep going citing example after example of European Jewish leaders who saw anti-Semitism as one of primary reasons to find and establish a separate homeland for the Jewish people, but, you get the point. Anyone who thinks that anti-Semitism did not play a major role in the formation of the modern Zionist movement is badly mistaken.

line would come much later, in the ashes of the Holocaust, and is not even convincing, as Neumann shows), or having a "homeland," or redeeming

The pressure of the Holocaust after World War II I would agree hastened the coming of the State of Israel. But, even without the Holocaust I would argue that the Jews would have had their state eventually. It is hard to say when that might have happened. But, it is unmistakable for those of us who study Zionist history to believe that within the next ten, fifteen maybe twenty-five years after WWII the Jews would have fought for and won their state. If true, the influence of the Holocaust on the creation of the State of Israel is a mute point. It wouldn’t have angered the Arabs any less if the Jewish State had been created in 1950, 1960 or 1970. They will never be resigned to accept a Jewish sovereignty it what they consider Muslim land.

ancestors' territories -- all contentions that keep being rehashed to this day. It was about taking sovereignty over a foreign land, a land inhabited by a people who had no interest or reason to be dominated in matters of life and death by Jews. From Theodore Herzl to David Ben Gurion, Zionists were about creating a state in Palestine -- a state, with its monopoly on power, of the Jews, by the Jews, and for the Jews.

Well, after a thousand years of persecution everywhere they settled, the Zionist movement demanded that Jews take control of their own destiny. You might not like that fact but that is what happened. To call it “a state for Jews” is inaccurate and has nasty racist and fascist connotations. Arab proxies in the West have gotten a lot of mileage out of that canard. To this day Israel’s enemies insist that Israel is “a state for Jews.” They refuse to acknowledge the democratic process that exists there. Almost twenty per cent of the population of Israel is not Jewish. All have representation. And, if you take a survey of all of the non-Jews living in Israel you will find that they are by and large happy to be living there. Even Israeli Arabs apart from their concerns about their people in the territories, have found a descent life living under Jewish rule, and say so in the poles. The Muslims under Jewish rule are treated far better than the Jews were treated in the Muslim world. It is a running vibrant democracy, which simply has a Jewish majority. The only democratic difference between Israel and the United States, England, France and Germany is that it possesses a Jewish majority where those countries are Christian. This is what the original Zionists worked for. Indeed, the Zionists could consider this part of their desires for a future Jewish State a success.

It matters not whether the Zionists were enlightened socialists, or idealists, or racists. What matters is that a group of people, foreign to the land, wanted to impose their sovereignty through expropriation -- and we now know, through expulsion too -- on another group of people that inhabited that land.

I don’t know if those are your words or your interpretation of his but that is definitely a Palestinian way of looking at the history. The Jews were keenly aware of this "other people" that inhabited the land. As early as 1890 Ahad Ha-Am warned his fellow colleagues about possible abuses against Arab Palestinians in rebuilding the homeland. Many attempts were made to combine the Arabs into their Zionist fabric during the Mandate era but with only a modicum of success. For example, in the 1920s the Jewish labor unions tried to combine themselves with the Arab workers to form stronger worker demands. First in the railroad industry and then it spread to other industries. “The creation of an organized class force of Jewish and Arab workers in order to improve the workers’ situation and their working condition is a necessary condition of the survival of the cultured worker in these occupations.” “The Jewish worker now works together with the Arab worker in government enterprises, that is in countrywide, general enterprises, on equal terms.” David Ben Gurion, from Zachary Lockman, Comrads and Enemies: Arab and Jewish workers in Palestine 1906-1948, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996, p. 75.

Lockman’s book is a tour de force in the scholarly treatment of a well hidden fact of history. As part of their bi-national plan, the Zionists struggled to bring the Arab worker into the labor fabric of Palestine. With only moderate success the struggle was abandoned in 1948 because of the change of facts on the ground. The Arabs resisted this western concept of the Marxist worker unification. Like all other western concepts they viewed it as anti Koran western filth infiltrating into their culture. Lockman’s book was praised by the likes of Rashid Khalidi and Juan Cole, an indication of his entrenchment into the academic left. So, if it is not one of the “one hundred plus books” you have read on this subject you might want to take a look at it.

This, contends Neumann, was the first mortal threat to the Palestinians -- a threat they could not but oppose and resist through violent or non-violent means.

Only the Arabs viewed this as a threat. Let’s be clear, the non violence was practiced by the Zionists at this stage, not the Arabs. Because the Arabs felt so threatened violence against Zionist Palestine began almost upon arrival. By the turn of the century it became unbearable and the Zionists reacted in self defense. In 1903 the first Jewish defense force was developed in order to guard the few agricultural Jewish settlements which were being constantly bombarded by Arab marauders. They used defensive actions in protecting Jewish settlers.

By 1920 some Jews began to grow tired of not taking an upper hand in the violence perpetrated upon them. It was a small faction led by a man named Ze’ev Jabotinsky who first stood up to the Arab demonstrations and drew the attention of the authorities. Jabotinsky believed that unprovoked violence against Jews should be met with an equal or greater force of violence in response. As violence became a more common tactic for Arab frustration of Zionist successes in Palestine so did more people begin to think Jabotinsky had a point. However, that school of thought and their descendents never were in the majority in Israel until the 1970s. And, by then they had significantly toned down their advocacy of retribution against Arab violence.

In the meantime that first defense force created back in 1903 grew and eventually included the majority philosophy of self defense in the Zionist movement. Marked by measured responses, the Hagana formed in the early Mandate period. It was by far the largest of Jewish Palestine’s defense organizations. These two philosophies, Jabotinski’s and the Hagana, melded together when Israel became a state and developed the best army, man for man in the world. The threats that Arabs feel is the almost tactically perfect methodology of the Israeli army, an institution that they themselves were responsible for creating. It surely began in non-violence with the pleas from Palestinian notables to the European powers to stop the influx of Jews in Palestine, but the pleas were not heeded and blood began to flow as early as the 1920s. It went downhill from then on.

> > Neumann notes that at the very moment Europeans were turning their backs on ethnic nationalism that had been so devastating, Zionists were imposing their own ethno-nationalism in Palestine. The establishment of sovereignty by one ethnic group over another has quite logically -- and sadly -- led to the consequences that we've witnessed for so long. For him,

> > Zionism always was, despite strategically motivated denials and brief flirtations with other objectives [e.g., bi-nationalism],

No, that’s incorrect. Bi-nationalist Palestine, was anything but brief, at least for the Zionists, was the only avenue for statehood into the 1930s. It was strongly supported by Martin Buber and his students which carried a heavy intellectual wallop inside Jewish Palestine. But the Arabs would have nothing to do with it. About 1935 or so the leaders of the Yishuv abandoned bi-nationalism because of Arab non-compliance to the idea. Along with the arguments in Lockman’s book it was unthinkable that Arabs should give Jews an equal status with their own in any government in the Muslim world. Statehood put a further damper on the bi-national idea but it never died. The descendents of Buber’s students carried the torch right into the present day. If you do an Internet search I am sure you could locate some of them inside Israel. Understand I am giving a very brief synopsis of a very large part of political Zionist history.

an attempt
to establish Jewish sovereignty over Palestine. This project was
illegitimate. Neither history nor religion, nor the sufferings of Jews in the Nazi era, sufficed to justify it. It posed a mortal threat to the Palestinians, and it left no room for meaningful compromise. Given that the Palestinians had no way to overcome Zionism peacefully, it also justified some form of violent resistance.

Is this the author’s way of justifying the wholesale slaughter of innocent people, many of whom have been children under the age of sixteen? I sincerely hope not. I will leave the rest of this to your response.

> By 1948 the Jewish state in Palestine was a fait accompli, and its existence quickly earned international legitimacy. By the early 1970s, following Israel's wars (1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973) and the military supremacy of the Jewish state, the existence of Israel was assured and secured. But, this fait accompli was not enough for the Zionists. Sovereignty within the 1948 borders was a tactical step in the direction of wider ambitions that went back all the way to early Zionism: Greater Israel. In the next part of his exposé, "The Current Situation,"

The “wider ambitions” that you mention did not go further than Jerusalem. The Zionists did want Jerusalem but were willing to give up everything else except that. However, even with that burning desire to embrace the Jewish Quarter and the holy sites could have all been worked out if the Jews had not been forced into the continuing violence perpetuated on them by the Palestinians. What Israel sought in those early years was a comprehensive peace from the surrounding belligerent Arab states. Ben Gurion believed it was possible. History has proved him wrong on this point. The three prime ministers of Israel from 1948 until the Six Day War were more than willing to live with the situation “as is” if they could just get access to their holy places. However, the Jordanians reneged on that promise that was guaranteed by the 1949 armistice. Nevertheless the Jews extended a running offer that to my knowledge was never rescinded until after 1967, that Israel was willing to talk a comprehensive peace with any Arab country which was willing to come to the table without preconditions. The Arabs never took them up on it. Even the Lausanne Protocol in which Ben Gurion offered to take in 100,000 Palestinian refugees in 1950 yielded no positive response from the Arab states. What the Arabs did do was to put their faith in the gun and worked toward building a significant army to destroy the Jewish State, which is what led to the Six Day War.

Michael Neumann examines the second mortal threat to the Palestinians -- the continuation of the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and, even more threatening to their existence, the settlement of these occupied territories -- that has resulted in the predictable, and understandable, violence that continues to this day. >

The Six Day War resulted in further loss of land, with more humiliation from the dhimmi Jew. Instead of admitting defeat and trying to gain back precious losses through negotiation, the Arabs continued and stepped up their task in finding a cure for this Jewish disease.

> The policies undertaken by the Israeli governments (both Labor and Likud) following the pre-emptive Six-Day War in 1967 -- occupation and settlement of the West Bank and Gaza -- will quite possibly be recorded by historians as the single most damaging political calculation ever made by this small state.

Yes but you see what you are doing is exactly what the Palestinians have been doing to themselves. You are giving them a free pass for their culpability in their own situation. Without their intransigence, insistence that Israel be destroyed, and refusal to recognize the Jewish State in any way since the 1950s, regardless of what Israel might be guilty of, the situation might be different today. It is quite possible that the region could have been enjoying a peaceful coexistence for many decades by now. This is not all Israel’s fault, even those that criticize Israeli policies have to acknowledge that. However, from this review, I see no indication of that.

Their consequences have now become a threat
to its existence; not its physical existence, which is quite secure,
but its moral existence -- a threat to the moral fabric of Israeli society.

That is an internal issue. And, no matter how much the enemies of Israel try to externalize it the Israelis will deal with it in their own way. That’s part of being a free people I guess. They live in a dangerous part of the world. The surrounding culture would like to see them disappear. They know it and there is a price to pay for that. But, what good is morality if your dead? Some would argue that even in these most trying of circumstances, the escalation of hatred and violence over the decades, and the seemingly unending conflict that lies before them, the Israelis have somehow maintained a degree of moral values, egalitarian thinking, and trust in the future. But, I suspect the good professor is not one of them.

The opprobrium Israel faces in the entire world, with the lonely exception of the United States, to which one could add the Marshall Islands and Micronesia,

This also is not accurate. England, Germany, Italy, Spain, several countries in Africa, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Mexico, several more countries in South America and many others have reasonably good relations with the Jewish State. Yes, they have disagreements over the Palestinians and other issues but make no mistake these countries are strongly allied with the State of Israel. Israel has lost relationships with some countries because of the huge oil block the Arab world presents in the United Nations, but other than that Israel enjoys good relations with many of the 120 democracies in the world. It is hardly alone.

can only be traced to the implacable continuation of these policies. This young country so endeared and admired in the 1950s and 1960s even though it was born out of the expropriation,

You have now accused Israel several times of expropriating land from the indigenous Arabs of Palestine. All of this needs to be in the context of the time and in relation to how poor Arabs were traditionally treated by their Arab brothers. Several points need to be made here.

1) The Jews bought land from Arab landlords for exorbitant prices and then exercised their land owning rights and evicted the few peasants that had been living on that land.

2) It should be noted that the Arab landlords had exploited these peasants for generations.

3) Unscrupulous landlords living in Beirut and Cairo thought nothing of their fellow Arabs to sell the land from underneath them to the enemy Zionists.

4) Of the claims to the Mandate authority of Jewish expropriation of peasant land by 1935 there were only thirty five claims made against the Mandate. Granted not all of the fellahin petitioned the authorities for reimbursement because of ignorance to the system or other issues. But, since these claims resulted from land purchased by the Zionists in the 20s, the British finally closed the issue and the opportunity in 1935. I would submit from these facts that there wasn’t enough of these cases to make a difference. Unlike the claims made in Transjordan where thousands of fellahin petitioned the Mandate for reimbursement only thirty-five in Western Jewish Palestine is a curious differentiation in the numbers. (A. Granovsky, The Land Issue in Palestine, Jerusalem: Keren Keyemet Le Israel Ltd., 1936, p. 39.)

partial expulsion, and imposition of a foreign sovereignty over the remaining indigenous population, the Palestinians, has become an international pariah. The time has long passed since one could speak of "a land without people, waiting for a people without land," or, as Golda Meir stated in 1969, "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."

You and the good professor might not like it but Golda’s assertion was true. There was no Palestinian people when the Jewish state was created in 1948. The United Nations tried to create one, but they refused. The Arabs of Palestine had a plethora of political governments to attach themselves to and they did so with great vigor. Palestinian nationalism was one of many political philosophies looking to gain dominance in the late 40s. The nationalist idea was rather elitist in nature and only advocated by the upper echelon of Western educated intellectuals. Being western, Palestinian nationalism naturally drew suspicion from the common Palestinian Arab.

> > It turns out that they did exist, were largely dispossessed, and became the subjects of an alien sovereignty; and they still exist, are still being dispossessed, and remain subjugated to a violent and humiliating occupation.

Ok, if they did exist then what was the purpose of the seven Arab countries taking part in the war against Israel in 1948? Were they there to help the Palestinians gain a homeland while destroying another? If you think that then you better read up on the history a little better. Each country that participated in that war was in it for its own selfish, imperialist interests. And Palestinian Arabs went right along with it.

The outcome could have been quite different. In the wake of the Six-Day War, the Palestinians hoped for an independent state and regarded the Israeli victory as a means to free themselves from Jordanian rule. This is not a well-known historical fact, but Neumann documents that for a short flimsy period the Palestinians felt that the Israelis were their liberators. The Palestinians let the Israelis know that they were ready to negotiate an immediate settlement to establish their own sovereign state alongside Israel.

That is very interesting. I did not know that. I am ashamed to say that I probably will not be buying the professor’s book any time soon, as I have already mounds of reading to do. But, if you wouldn’t mind I would like to know the source of this story. If it is genuine I would very much like to know why the Israelis did not take them up on it. I know that Israel was deeply disappointed that the Khartoum conference in August of 1967 came back with “the three no’s,” no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiation with Israel. So, it does not fit with the known history. Anyway, send it to me if you will. I would appreciate it.

Their calls were not answered or, to put it slightly differently, the answer was loud and clear. Israel annexed East Jerusalem and started its settlement policy.

Jerusalem is not and never has been on the table. As soon as the smoke cleared in June of 1967, the country began clamoring its government to at least make Jerusalem whole again. It is the eternal capital of the Jewish people as was even while it was run by the Arabs. Now, knowing that, would the Jews have ever invaded to take it back? That is hard to say. It would depend on how well the Jews were treated in reaching and accessing their holy places. But, given that Jordan would not allow Jews to enter that part of the city even though they were mandated to allow Jews to “The Wall” by the armistice agreement of 1949, I could see where an invasion might have been forth coming. But, who knows?

It's worth quoting a citation from a speech by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan:
> > This is what used to be called 'Jew after Jew'... It meant expansion, more Jews, more villages, more settlements. Twenty years ago we were 600,000; today we are near three million. There should be no Jew who says 'that's enough,' no one who says 'we are nearing the end of the road.' ...It is the same with the land. ...there will be complaints against you if you come and say: 'up to here.' Your duty is to not stop; it is to keep your sword unsheathed, to have faith, to keep the flag flying. You must not call a halt - heaven forbid - and say 'that's all; up there, up to Degania, to Musfallasim, to Nabal Oz!' For that is not all. > Which brings Michael Neumann to comment on "the comparison with fascist ideologies of 'blood and soil'"...and leads him to cover the deliberate ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians that has taken place ever since, as well as the inevitable violent resistance from the Palestinians. Their only choice was, and remains, to leave the territories or to resist. What's so infuriating here, and well documented by the author, is that Israeli leaders have consistently acknowledged -- not so much in public, for it is yet another argument used in the propaganda war to appropriate the Occupied Territories -- the uselessness of these territories for the strategic defense of Israel. The Palestinians have no alternative but to resist, when Israel has an obvious one, recommended by many Israeli military experts: unilateral withdrawal.

One must be able to put themselves into the enemy’s shoes in order to understand their logic. Even for the nearsighted Left that is a requirement for a debate on the Middle East. Numbers in Israel are an integral part of its defense. Since the world population of Jews is less than one-tenth of one percent and the Arab world by the 1930s was united in preventing the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine, the Zionists mapped out two strategies concerning their population. One, they would increase their numbers any way they could, not for military parity with the Arabs because that was impossible, but for creating a cohesive continuous Jewish unit in the country side to emphasize Jewish ownership of the land. And two, they would not just establish settlements but they would establish settlements strategically so in case of violence they would be able to defend themselves with the greatest force with the fewest number of people. For example, if you study Israeli settlements all over Israel including the occupied territories, many settlements are built on the tops of hills. It is common military strategy that in order to overcome an enemy maintaining the high ground is essential. This is what Dayan is talking about here. The Jewish people struggling to survive in a world that has them outnumbered at least 100 to 1.

> > Yet again, it is the Palestinians that are accused of violent actions and faulted for not resorting to non-violence. But, as Neumann convincingly establishes, "non-violence has never 'worked' in any politically relevant sense of the word, and there is no reason it ever will." His demonstration, using the examples of Gandhi (Indian independence), Martin Luther King (US Civil Rights), and South Africa (the end of Apartheid), may be resisted by the partisans of non-violence but I strongly recommend they read his analysis. A non-violent advocate myself, I must admit that Neumann makes a compelling case. Non-violence can only work when the powers-that-be are on the side of the struggle. Israel, evidently, has not been on the side of the Palestinian struggle for independence! It should also be noted that the Palestinians have gone through periods of substantial calm with little or no violence, to no avail. Suffice it to look at the current Israeli response to the non-violent resistance and demonstrations against the massive wall of separation that Israel is slowly completing. It does not make the news in the U.S. but its harshness is obvious to anyone who cares to look.

I couldn’t disagree more. Calling “Substantial periods of calm” as an experiment in non-violent political action is a joke. I think you are mistaking these quiet periods with exhaustion on the Palestinian side. They usually use the time to plan more rounds of attacks. The few non violent demonstrations that you do see are promoted by Israeli, American, and European groups. There are only token Palestinians that take part in them. It is unfair to characterize the Israeli Palestinian dispute the same as Gandhi, King or South Africa. There wasn’t near the level of violence perpetrated by those movements as there is among the Palestinian nation. The Israelis have been dealing with a constant barrage of this high level of terror for fifty-eight years. From commando style raids in the 50s, to plane hijackings in the 70s to suicide bombings today, all designed to kill as many innocent civilians as possible, Israel has been hard bitten into the realization that it must fight to survive. Nevertheless, like England the United States and White South Africa a majority of Israelis are willing to grant a peace in which two countries can live side by side in relative harmony, all “to no avail.”

> > So, we are left with the old hatred. "They" hate us...always have...always will. How, then, can we have a Palestinian state next door that will forever be Israel's enemy and never accept its existence? Neumann answers this old hogwash with the precision of a surgeon. Hatred comes from war. Hatred comes from occupation and from being treated worse than dogs. Hatred slowly rescinds with peace. And is not peace with Egypt (and Jordan) proof that the existence of the state of Israel is accepted by its former enemies?

Of this the good professor is correct. That is why, in the absence of any reasonable Palestinian partner, brought about by a nation whose hatred is so deep, the Israelis have decided to separate unilaterally. When the barrier is complete, the Palestinians will be left to make whatever kind of country they want. If they are smart they will move from the conflict and build a society that slowly will begin to take its place among the nations and in time the hatred will begin to slowly melt away or “rescind” as the professor says. It is the only chance for the Palestinians to make in this century what they so dismally failed to do in the last. However, my own opinion is that given the Palestinian “resistence” over the last half century I don’t think they are up to the task. But, I would love to say I am wrong on this point someday.

Even the latest bombastic comments originating in Iran cannot hide the actuality: Israel is a fully secured country whose legitimacy, within its 1948 boundaries, is a fact, fully recognized by the overwhelming majority of the world.

I will remind you that Iran intends to “wipe Israel off the map.” It holds no allegiance to any recognition of a Jewish State created in 1948. It is a bitter reminder to the international Left that Israel is not welcomed into the Middle East, only tolerated because of its military dominance. If any Islamic nation, Arab or otherwise ever thinks it can destroy the State of Israel, it will attempt to do so. Peace agreements in that part of the world will only hold as long as Israel maintains military superiority, extreme military superiority.

> > Neumann then turns his attention to terror and terrorism, which he dissects in both practical and moral terms. He also examines how Israel became an ally of the USA ("a child of the Cold War") and the role of US Evangelical Christians in the support of Greater Israel; why the alliance should end, for the benefit of all -- Israelis, Jews, Americans, Palestinians...

This is absolutely the worst idea the Left has ever come up with concerning the Middle East conflict. To cut off Israel’s lifeline, the military superiority it gets from primarily the United States, would bring the Middle East to the brink, and possibly a nuclear confrontation. As I said in my previous comments if the Muslims believe that Israel is in a weakened state, they will try to destroy it. I will stop here because I shudder to think of what would be the ramifications of this scenario. It frightens me so much I can’t even write about it.

-- and whether Israel is judged by a double standard, or "higher standard," as well it should be since, as the narrative goes, the country is deemed by its proselytizers a Great Beacon of Light.

> > But I can't get into his rationale further; this review is already too long.

Thank you.

I must confess that having a natural contrariant propensity, I was humbled by Michael Neumann as I could find nothing to object to in the case he makes. Perhaps he could have covered the importance of the West Bank aquifers in Israel's decision to hold tight to the Occupied Territories and colonize them; but I suspect he would dismiss this point as yet another irrelevancy that besieges this sorry state of affairs...and, darn, he would be correct. > > To close: I very much appreciate the even-handedness of Neumann's precise, thought through, and well-documented rationale. Very few people have the capability and the character to be intellectually relevant and to address this divisive subject so objectively. Yet, I sensed a subterraneous emotional thread in his faultless, short, yet exhaustive, dissertation: A call for justice. People from all backgrounds, Jews and non-Jews alike, are clamoring with quiet certitude: Enough is enough. A growing number of Israeli and Jewish people all over the world, including the U.S., are courageously raising their voices in favor of the end of the occupation. Michael Neumann is one of these voices. He deserves to be heard and widely disseminated. Please buy the book, read it, and if you feel like it, prove me wrong. >

I don’t know how even-handed his book is since I did not read it. However, I know many Jews who feel like Professor Neumann, I’ve debated them on a number of occasions and I can tell you that while the rest of The Left feels they are even-handed, the rest of world believes that what they are is extremely naïve. The Left would like to abandon Israel to what ever comes in the future. That is a future I care not to experience. Most of the Jews in Israel would die and those that are left would return to the second class nature that they experienced in the Muslim world for the previous 1500 years. We as a world community have passed that stage in history. The Jews have returned to their ancient homeland, no more persecutions, no more pogroms, no more holocausts, no more diasporas, and no more asking the gentile for permission…There is only freedom to look forward to.
Larry Hart