September 12, 2006
Is it only observers outside the conventional mainstream who have noticed that by its murderous assault on Lebanon and simultaneously on Gaza, Israel finally exposed, for even the most deluded to see, the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea?
Can it be that the deluded are still deluded? Can it truly still be that Israel's bankruptcy is evident only to those who already knew it, those who already recognized Zionism as illegitimate for the racist principle that underlies it?
Can it be therefore that only the already converted can see coming the ultimate collapse of Zionism and, with it, of Israel itself as the exclusivist state of Jews?
Racism has always been the lifeblood of Israel. Zionism rests on the fundamental belief that Jews have superior national, human, and natural rights in the land, an inherently racist foundation that excludes any possibility of true democracy or equality of peoples. Israel's destructive rampage in Lebanon and Gaza is merely the natural next step in the evolution of such a founding ideology. Precisely because that ideology posits the exclusivity and superiority of one people's rights, it can accept no legal or moral restraints on its behavior and no territorial limits, for it needs an ever-expanding geography to accommodate those unlimited rights.
Zionism cannot abide encroachment or even the slightest challenge to its total domination over its own space -- not merely of the space within Israel's 1967 borders, but of the surrounding space as well, extending outward to geographical limits that Zionism has not yet seen fit to set for itself. Total domination means no physical threat and no demographic threat: Jews reign, Jews are totally secure, Jews always outnumber, Jews hold all military power, Jews control all natural resources, all neighbors are powerless and totally subservient. This was the message Israel tried to send with its attack on Lebanon: that neither Hizbullah nor anything in Lebanon that nurtures Hizbullah should continue to exist, for the sole reason that Hizbullah challenges Israel's supreme authority in the region and Israel cannot abide this effrontery. Zionism cannot coexist with any other ideology or ethnicity except in the preeminent position, for everyone and every ideology that is not Zionist is a potential threat.
In Lebanon, Israel attempted by its wildly reckless violence to destroy the nation, to make of it a killing zone where only Zionism would reign, where non-Jews would die or flee or prostrate themselves, as they had during the nearly quarter-century of Israel's last occupation, from 1978 to 2000. Observing the war in Beirut after the first week of bombing, describing the murder in an Israeli bombing raid of four Lebanese army logistics techs who had been mending power and water lines "to keep Beirut alive," British
correspondent Robert Fisk wrote that it dawned on him that what Israel intended was that "Beirut is to die . . . . No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive." Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz (the man who four years ago when he headed the Israeli Air Force said he felt no psychological discomfort after one of his F-16s had dropped a one-ton bomb on an apartment building in Gaza in the middle of the night, killing 14 civilians, mostly children) pledged at the start of the Lebanon assault to take Lebanon back 20 years; 20 years ago Lebanon was not alive, its southern third occupied by Israel, the remainder a decade into a hopelessly destructive civil war.
The cluster bombs are a certain sign of Israel's intent to remake Lebanon, at least southern Lebanon, into a region cleansed of its Arab population and unable to function except at Israel's mercy. Cluster bombs, of which Israel's U.S. provider is the world's leading manufacturer (and user, in places like Yugoslavia and Iraq), explode in mid-flight and scatter hundreds of small bombs over a several-acre area. Up to one-quarter of the bomblets fail to explode on impact and are left to be found by unsuspecting civilians returning to their homes. UN surveyors estimate that there are as many as 100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets strewn around in 400 bomb-strike sites in southern Lebanon. Scores of Lebanese children and adults have been killed and injured by this unexploded ordnance since the cease-fire last month.
Laying anti-personnel munitions in heavily populated civilian areas is not the surgical targeting of a military force in pursuit of military objectives; it is ethnic cleansing. Fully 90 percent of Israel's cluster-bomb strikes were conducted, according to UN humanitarian coordinator Jan Egelund, in the last 72 hours before the cease-fire took effect, when it was apparent that a UN cease-fire resolution was in the works. This can only have been a further effort, no doubt intended to be more or less a coup de grace, to depopulate the area. Added to the preceding month of bombing attacks that destroyed as much as 50 or in some cases 80 percent of the homes in many villages, that did vast damage to the nation's entire civilian infrastructure, that crippled a coastal power plant that continues to spill tons of oil and benzene-laden toxins along the Lebanese and part of the Syrian coastlines, and that killed over 1,000 civilians in residential apartment blocks, being transported in ambulances, and fleeing in cars flying white flags, Israel's war can only be interpreted as a massiv act of ethnic cleansing, to keep the region safe for Jewish dominion.
In fact, approximately 250,000 people, by UN estimate, are unable to return to their homes because either the homes have been leveled or unexploded cluster bomblets and other ordnance have not yet been cleared by demining teams. This was not a war against Hizbullah, except incidentally. It was not a war against terror, as Israel and its U.S. acolytes would have us believe (indeed, Hizbullah was not conducting terrorist acts, but had been engaged in a sporadic series of military exchanges with Israeli forces along the border, usually initiated by Israel). This was a war for Israeli breathing space, for the absolute certainty that Israel would dominate the neighborhood. It was a war against a population that was not totally subservient, that had the audacity to harbor a force like Hizbullah that does not bow to Israel's will. It was a war on people and their way of thinking, people who are not Jewish and who do not act to promote Zionism and Jewish hegemony.
Israel has been doing this to its neighbors in one form or another since its creation. Palestinians have obviously been Zionism's longest suffering victims, and its most persistent opponents. The Zionists thought they had rid themselves of their most immediate problem, the problem at the very core of Zionism, in 1948 when they forced the flight of nearly two-thirds of the Palestinian population that stood in the way of a establishing Israel as an exclusive Jewish-majority state. You can't have a Jewish state if most of your population is not Jewish. Nineteen years later, when Israel began to expand its borders with the capture of the West Bank and Gaza, those Palestinians who it thought had disappeared turned out to be still around after all, threatening the Zionists' Jewish hegemony.
In the nearly 40 years since then, Israeli policy has been largely directed -- with periodic time-outs for attacks on Lebanon -- toward making the Palestinians disappear for certain. The methods of ethnic cleansing are myriad: land theft, destruction of agricultural land and resources, economic strangulation, crippling restrictions on commerce, home demolition, residency permit revocation, outright deportation, arrest, assassination, family separation, movement restriction, destruction of census and land ownership records, theft of tax monies, starvation. Israel wants all of the land of Palestine, including all of the West Bank and Gaza, but it cannot have a majority Jewish state in all of this land as long as the Palestinians are there. Hence the slow strangulation. In Gaza, where almost a million and a half people are crammed into an area less than one-tenth the size of Rhode Island, Israel is doing on a continuing basis what it did in Lebanon in a month's time -- killing civilians, destroying civilian infrastructure, making the place uninhabitable. Palestinians in Gaza are being murdered at the rate of eight a day. Maimings come at a higher rate. Such is the value of non-Jewish life in the Zionist scheme of things.
Israeli scholar Ilan Pappe calls it a slow genocide (ElectronicIntifada, September 2, 2006). Since 1948, every Palestinian act of resistance to Israeli oppression has been a further excuse for Israel to implement an ethnic cleansing policy, a phenomenon so inevitable and accepted in Israel that Pappe says "the daily business of slaying Palestinians, mainly children, is now reported in the internal pages of the local press, quite often in microscopic fonts." His prediction is that continued killing at this level either will produce a mass eviction or, if the Palestinians remain steadfast and continue to resist, as is far more likely, will result in an increasing level of killing. Pappe recalls that the world absolved Israel of responsibility and any accountability for its 1948 act of ethnic cleansing, allowing Israel to turn this policy "into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda." If the world remains silent again in response to the current round of ethnic cleansing, the policy will only escalate, "even more drastically."
And here is the crux of the situation today. Will anyone notice this horror? Has Israel, as proposed at the beginning, truly exposed by its wild summer campaign of ethnic cleansing in Lebanon and Gaza the total bankruptcy of its very founding idea, the essential illegitimacy of the Zionist principle of Jewish exclusivity? Can even the most deluded see this, or will they continue to be deluded and the world continue to turn away, excusing atrocity because it is committed by Israel in the name of keeping the neighborhood safe for Jews?
Since Israel's crazed run through Lebanon began, numerous clear-eyed observers in the alternative and the European and Arab media have noted the new moral nudity of Israel, and of its U.S. backer, with an unusual degree of bluntness. Also on many tongues is a new awareness of growing Arab and Muslim resistance to the staggering viciousness of Israeli-U.S. actions. Palestinian-British scholar Karma Nabulsi, writing in the Guardian in early August, laments the "indiscriminate wrath of an enemy driven by an existential mania that cannot be assuaged, only stopped." American scholar Virginia Tilley (Counterpunch, August 5, 2006) observes that any kind of normal, peaceful existence is anathema to Israel, for it "must see and treat its neighbors as an existential threat in order to justify . . . its ethnic/racial character." Even before the Lebanon war, but after Gaza had begun to be starved, political economist Edward Herman (Z Magazine, March 2006)condemned Israel's "long-term ethnic cleansing and institutionalized racism" and the hypocritical way in which the West and the western media accept and underwrite these policies "in violation of all purported enlightenment values."
Racism underlies the Israeli-U.S. neocon axis that is currently running amok in the Middle East. The inherent racism of Zionism has found a natural ally in the racist imperial philosophy espoused by the neoconservatives of the Bush administration. The ultimate logic of the Israeli-U.S. global war, writes Israeli activist Michel Warschawski of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem (July 30, 2006) is the "full ethnicization" of all conflicts, "in which one is not fighting a policy, a government or specific targets, but a 'threat' identified with a community" -- or, in Israel's case, with all non-Jewish communities.
The basically racist notion of a clash of civilizations, being promoted both by the Bush administration and by Israel, provides the rationale for the assaults on Palestine and Lebanon. As Azmi Bishara, a leading Palestinian member of Israel's Knesset, has observed (al-Ahram, August 10-16, 2006), if the Israeli-U.S. argument that the world is divided into two distinct and incompatible cultures, us vs. them, is accurate, then the notion that "we" operate by a double standard loses all moral opprobrium, for it becomes the natural order of things. This has always been Israel's natural order of things: in Israel's world and that of its U.S. supporters, the idea that Jews and the Jewish culture are superior to and incompatible with surrounding peoples and cultures is the very basis of the state.
In the wake of Israel's failure in Lebanon, Arabs and Muslims have a sense, for the first time since Israel's implantation in the heart of the Arab Middle East almost 60 years ago, that Israel in its arrogance has badly overreached and that its power and its reach can be limited. The "ethnicization" of the global conflict that Michel Warschawski speaks of -- the arrogant colonial approach of old, now in a new high-tech guise backed by F-16s and nuclear weapons, that assumes Western and Israeli superiority and posits a kind of apocalyptic clash between the "civilized" West and a backward, enraged East -- has been seen for what it is because of Israel's mad assault on Lebanon. What it is is a crude racist assertion of power by a Zionist regime pursuing absolute, unchallenged regional hegemony and a neoconservative regime in the United States pursuing absolute, unchallenged global hegemony. As Palestinian commentator Rami Khouri observed in an interview with Charlie Rose a week into the Lebanon war, Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, having both grown out of earlier Israeli wars of hegemony, are the political response of populations "that have been degraded and occupied and bombed and killed and humiliated repeatedly by the Israelis, and often with the direct or indirect acquiescence, or, as we see now, the direct support of the United States."
Those oppressed populations are now fighting back. No matter how much Arab leaders in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia may bow to the U.S. and Israel, the Arab people now recognize the fundamental weakness of Israel's race-based culture and polity and have a growing confidence that they can ultimately defeat it. The Palestinians in particular have been at this for 60 years, never disappearing despite Israel's best designs, never failing to remind Israel and the world of their existence. They will not succumb now, and the rest of the Arab world is taking heart from their endurance and Hizbullah's.
Something in the way Israel operates, and in the way the United States supports Israel's method of operating, must change. More and more commentators, inside the Arab world and outside, have begun to notice this, and a striking number are audacious enough to predict some sort of end to Zionism in the racist, exclusivist form in which it now exists and functions. This does not mean throwing the Jews into the sea. Israel will not be defeated militarily. But it can be defeated psychologically, which means putting limits on its hegemony, stopping its marauding advance through its neighborhood, ending Jewish racial/religious domination over other peoples.
Rami Khouri contends that the much greater public support throughout the Arab world for Hizbullah and Hamas is "a catastrophe" both for Israel and for the United States because it means resistance to their imperial designs. Khouri does not go further in his predictions, but others do, seeing at least in vague outline the vision of a future in which Israel no longer enjoys ultimate dominion. Gilad Atzmon, an ex-Israeli living in Britain, a jazz musician and thinker, sees Hizbullah's victory in Lebanon as signaling the defeat of what he calls global Zionism, by which he means the Israeli/U.S. neocon axis. It is the Lebanese, Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghani, and Iranian people, he says, who are "at the vanguard of the war for humanity and humanism," while Israel and the U.S. spread destruction and death, and more and more Europeans and Americans, recognizing this, are falling off the Zionist/neocon bandwagon. Atzmon talks about Israel as, ultimately, "an historic event" and a "dead entity."
Many others see similar visions. Commentators increasingly discuss the possibility of Israel, its myth of invincibility having been deflated, going through a South Africa-like epiphany, in which its leadership somehow recognizes the error of its racist ways and in a surge of humanitarian feeling renounces Zionism's inequities and agrees that Jews and Palestinians should live in equality in a unitary state. British MP George Galloway (Guardian, August 31, 2006) foresees the possibility of "an FW de Klerk moment" emerging in Israel and among its international backers when, as occurred in South Africa, a "critical mass of opposition" overwhelms the position of the previously invincible minority and the leadership is able to justify transferring power on the basis that doing so later under duress will be far less favorable. Short of such peaceful transition, along with a move to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, Galloway along with many others -- sees only "war, war and more war, until one day it is Tel Aviv which is on fire and the Israeli leaders' intransigence brings the whole state down on their heads."
This increasingly appears to be the shape of the future: either Israel and its neocon supporters in the United States can dismantle Zionism's most egregious aspects by agreeing to establish a unitary state in Palestine inhabited by the Palestinians and Jews whose land this is, or the world will face a conflagration of a scale not fully imaginable now.
Just as Hizbullah is an integral part of Lebanon, not to be destroyed by the bombing of bridges and power plants, the Palestinians before their expulsion in 1948 were Palestine and still are Palestine. By hitting the Palestinians where they lived, in the literal and the colloquial sense, Israel left them with only a goal and a vision. That vision is justice and redress in some form, whether redress means ultimately defeating Zionism and taking back Palestine, or reconciling with Israel on the condition that it act like a decent neighbor and not a conqueror, or finally joining with Israeli Jews to form a single state in which no people has superior rights . In Lebanon, Israel again seemed bent on imposing its will, its dominion, its culture and ethnicity on another Arab country. It never worked in Palestine, it has not worked in Lebanon, and it will not work anywhere in the Arab world.
We have reached a moral crossroads. In the "new Middle East" defined by Israel, Bush, and the neocons, only Israel and the U.S. may dominate, only they may be strong, only they may be secure. But in the just world that lies on the other side of that crossroads, this is unacceptable. Justice can ultimately prevail.
http://counterpunch.org/christison09122006.html
Kathleen Christison
is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30
years. She is the author of
Perceptions of Palestine and
The
Wound of Dispossession.
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http://www.counterpunch.org/finkelstein09122006.html
September 12, 2006
The Dream Philosophy of Paranoids
Kill Arabs, Cry Anti-Semitism
By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
A central thesis of my book Beyond Chutzpah is that whenever Israel
faces a public relations debacle its apologists sound the alarm that a
"new anti-Semitism" is upon us. So, predictably, just after Israel faced
another image problem due to its murderous destruction of Lebanon, a
British all-party parliamentary group led by notorious Israel-firster
Denis MacShane MP (Labor) released yet another report alleging a
resurgence of anti-Semitism (Report of the All-Party Parliamentary
Inquiry Into Antisemitism, September 2006).
To judge by the witnesses (David Cesarani, Lord Janner, Oona King,
Emanuele Ottolenghi, Melanie Phillips) and sources (MEMRI, Holocaust
Education Trust) cited in the body of the report, much time and money
could have been saved had it just been contracted out to the Israel
Foreign Ministry. (The report's statement that "we received no evidence
of the accusation of anti-Semitism being misused by mainstream British
Jewish community organizations and leaders" perhaps speaks more to the
selection of the witnesses than the reality.)
The single novelty of the report, which mostly rehashes fatuous
allegations already disposed of in Beyond Chutzpah, is the new
thresholds in idiocy it breaks. Consider the methodology deployed for
demonstrating a new anti-Semitism. The report defines an anti-Semitic
incident as any occasion "perceived" to be anti-Semitic by the "Jewish
community." This is the school of thought according to which it's
raining even in the absence of any precipitation because I feel it's
raining. It is the dream philosophy of paranoids, especially rational
paranoids, for whom alleged victimhood is politically serviceable.
The report includes under the rubric of anti-Semitic incidents not just
violent acts and incendiary speech but "conversations, discussions, or
pronouncements made in public or private, which cross the line of
acceptability," as well as "the mood and tone when Jews are discussed."
The wonder is that it didn't also tabulate repressed anti-Semitic
libidinal fantasies. In the category of inherently anti-Semitic
pronouncements the report includes "drawing comparisons of contemporary
Israeli policy to that of the Nazis" (only comparisons of contemporary
Arab policy to that of the Nazis are permissible) and "theories about
Jewish or Zionist influence on American foreign policy" (even if Jewish
and Zionist organizations boast about this influence).
Much of the evidence of pervasive British anti-Semitism requires real
strains in credulity. * The lone item listed under the ominous
subheading "The Blood Libel" is a Syrian television series "that would
be possible for viewers in the UK to seeif they had suitable satellite
receiving equipment." It also notes the unreferenced "case of a Jewish
university lecturer who was subjected to an anti-Semitic tirade from a
student in the middle of a lecture and subsequently asked to explain to
the university authorities why he ha upset the student."
Is it anti-Semitic to wonder whether this is a crock? And then the
report cites the warning of the London Assembly Conservative Group that
"there is a risk that in some political quarters 'views on international
events can, almost subconsciously, lead to subtly different attitudes
to, and levels of engagement with, different minority groups.'" The new
anti-Semitism business must be going seriously awry when British
conservatives start sounding like Lacan. Finally, it is anti-Semitic for
student unions to advocate a boycott of Israeli goods because this
"would restrict the availability of kosher food on campus." Maybe Israel
can organize a "Berlin airlift" of gefilte fish.
Although claiming that, in the struggle against anti-Semitism, "none of
those who gave evidence wished to see the right free speech eroded," and
"only in extreme circumstances would we advocate legal intervention,"
the report recommends that university authorities "take an active
interest in combating acts, speeches, literature and events that cause
anxiety or alarm among their Jewish students," and it registers disquiet
that "classic and modern anti-Semitic works are freely available for
ordering on the Amazon.com website," and that
"the United States in
particular has been slow to take action" in closing down "anti-Semitic
internet sites." It is at moments like this that even the least
patriotic of souls can take pride in being an American.
* The police data on an increase in anti-Semitic incidents in itself
proves little because, as the report concedes, the spike might be due to
more incidents being reported and a coarsening of British life
generally, as well as the "spillover" from the Israel-Palestine
conflict. In addition, there is little evidence of "organized,"
"politically motivated" anti-Semitic attacks; there is no evidence that
perpetrators of anti-Semitic attacks were disproportionately Muslim; and
most of the suspects in the incidents were adolescents. For 2005 the
report cites a couple incidents that were "potentially"
life-threatening. It cites no comparative data for other minorities in
Britain, although tacitly acknowledging that "the level of prejudice and
discrimination by Jews in Britain remains lower," a considerable
understatement . On a related note, it deplores that "less than one in
ten [anti-Semitic] incidents reported to the police resulted in a
suspect becoming an accused" , but cites
no comparative data indicating whether this ratio is aberrant.
Norman Finkelstein's most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse
of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California
Press). His web site is
www.NormanFinkelstein.com.
"Action is the life of all and if thou dost not act, thou dost
nothing." -Gerrard Winstanley
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A ZIONIST-IMPERIALIST JOINT VENTURE:
Imperialist powers realized the services a Jewish State would provide to their designs for hegemony and control and the first call for the creation of a ‘Jewish State’ was made by the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1807, Bonaparte issued an invitation for a Jewish convention to discuss the idea, long before Hess, Pinsker and Herzl called for the creation of Der Judenstaat. (For details on the French and British early efforts for the creation of a Jewish State in Palestine see: Mohammad Hassanine Haikal, Secret Negotiations between the Arabs and Israel (Arabic), Cairo, 1996, Book 1, pp. 27-51)
During WWI, extensive discussions were made between the Imperialist powers and the Zionist leadership, which led to the Balfour Declaration issued on 2 November 1917. These discussions included the British, the U.S., the French and the Italian Governments as well as the American Zionist leaders headed by Judge Brandeis. (For details of these discussions and other related topics, see: Walid Khalidi, ed., From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971. Second Printing, Washington, 1987, pp. 165-211)
HERZL’S COLONIAL PROJECT:
Herzl published his pamphlet at a time when European imperialist powers were involved in spreading their colonial projects all over the world. He considered the Jews to be a nation who are entitled to have their own colonial project.
Herzl’s colonial project was spelled out in the draft-agreement of The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company (JOLC) “for the purpose of settling Palestine and Syria with Jews” that Herzl lobbied for in Istanbul in 1901. (The full text of the draft-agreement is available as an appendix to an article by Walid Khalidi, The Jewish-Ottoman Land Company: Herzl's Blueprint for the Colonization of Palestine, Journal of Palestine Studies, Volume XXII, Number 2, Winter 1993, pp. 30-47)
Herzl’s efforts, however, almost died with him in 1904 and led to a period of disillusionment in the Zionist Movement. The Balfour Declaration was a lifesaver and opened the road for Imperialist-Zionist cooperation ever since.
BORDERS OF THE ‘JEWISH STATE’:
A map specifying the ‘homeland’ that the Zionists had in mind was submitted to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The map included the Golan Heights and Southern Lebanon up to the Litani River as well as the Western part of Trans Jordan. (Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities. New York: 1987, p. 17. See also: David McDowall, Palestine and Israel: The uprising and Beyond, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989The Uprising and beyond, p. 20)
The proclamation of Israel on 14 May 1948 did not specify Israel’s borders. This fact reflected the Zionist intention for territorial expansion beyond the partition lines of General Assembly Resolution # 181 (II) of 29 November 1947.
Ben-Gurion never regarded the partition borders as the last word. He considered a Jewish state in part of Palestine as a first step to be followed by other steps for expansion whenever the time was right. His vision was spelled out in a letter to his son, Amos: “A partial Jewish State is not the end, but only the beginning.... We shall bring into the state all the Jews it is possible to bring...we shall establish a multi-faceted Jewish economy - agricultural, industrial, and maritime. We shall organize a modern defense force, a select army...and then I am certain that we will not be prevented from settling in the other parts of the country, either by mutual agreement with our Arab neighbors or by some other means. Our ability to penetrate the country will increase if there is a state… (Michael Bar-Zohar, Ben-Gurion: A Biography. New York: Delacorte Press, 1977, pp. 91 - 92)
The first opportunity for expansion came in 1956 when Israel joined the British and the French in the Suez Canal War. In a round table meeting with the French at the Sévres Conference, Ben-Gurion proposed a plan for settling all the issues in the Middle East. The plan included, among other things, that Israel would annex southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. It also included partition of Jordan, with the West Bank going to Israel and the East Bank to Iraq. In exchange, Iraq would sign a peace treaty with Israel and undertake to absorb the Palestinian refugees. (Michael Bar-Zohar, Ben-Gurion: A Biography. New York: Delacorte Press, 1977, pp., pp. 236-244)
The Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza were occupied in the 1967 war.
In March 1978, Israel launched Operation Litani and occupied southern Lebanon up to the Litani River. (David McDowall, Palestine and Israel: The uprising and Beyond, Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989The Uprising and beyond, p. 33)
Israel remained in Southern Lebanon until May 2000 when Israeli PM Ehud Barak was obliged to withdraw as a result of the Lebanese resistance led by Hizbullah. On 12 July 2006, Israel re-invaded Lebanon but failed again as a result of the courageous resistance. This does not mean that they will not try again.
WAR ON TERROR:
In February 1982, Oded Yinon, a journalist and analyst of Middle Eastern affairs and former senior Foreign Ministry official wrote an article, which appeared in the WZO’s periodical Kivunim. In his article, Yinon outlined a strategy that calls for the dissolution and fragmentation of the Arab states. (Nur Masalha, pp. 196 - 198, citing Oded Yinon, A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s, [Hebrew], Kivunim, Jerusalem, No. 14, February 1982, pp. 53 - 58)
By the end of 1991, the USSR ceased to exist. The ‘Cold War’ was over, which meant that a new pretext was needed to justify U.S. wars for global hegemony and control.
In the summer of 1993, Samuel P. Huntington published his ‘Clash of Civilizations’ theory that culture and cultural identities, are shaping the patterns of conflict in the post-Cold War world. This opened the door for a talk of a Judeo-Christian civilization vs. ‘Islamic Terror’.
On July 8, 1996, Richard Perle, a former head of the Defense Policy Board in the Pentagon, delivered a document to the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Perle, and a team of American neo-cons, had been tasked by Netanyahu to draft a new Israeli strategy that would abrogate the Oslo Accords and overturn the entire concept of ‘comprehensive land for peace’ in favor of a policy of military conquest and occupation. (http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm)
A Washington-based neo-conservative think-tank, The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), was founded in 1997 to ‘rally support for American global leadership’. The events of September 11, 2001 provided a window of opportunity for furthering PNAC’s agenda. The ‘Cold War’ was replaced with a new war against ‘Islamic Terror’, which is used as a pretext to justify Imperialist and Zionist wars.
BANKRUPTCY OF ZIONISM:
Israel’s expansion in 1967 brought with it a ‘Demographic Threat’ represented by the millions of Palestinian Arabs whom Israel failed to replicate on them the ethnic cleansing of 1948. A systemic effort to confront the Arab ‘Demographic Threat’ was introduced according to which annual conferences were held in the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center – Herzliya to discuss and confront this basic and strategic threat to the ‘Jewish State’.
The report of the first conference, which was held during the period of 19-21 December 2000 stated, “The demographic trends in Israel and its surroundings and their ramifications pose a severe threat to Israel in terms of its character and identity as a Jewish state belonging to the Jewish people. The demographic threat to the continued existence of the State of Israel is the most immediate and most likely to materialize. The threat is developing rapidly, while the pace of designing a national policy dealing with the threat is slow…” (Journal of Palestine Studies 121, Volume XXXI, No. 1, Autumn 2001, pp. 50-61. For more details on all conferences held to this date, see the Website of the Institute of Policy and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center – Herzliya at: http://www.herzliyaconference.org/Eng/ )
ILLUSIONS OF PEACE:
On 30 October 1991, the ‘Middle East Peace Conference’ convened in Madrid under the auspices of the U.S. and the USSR to resolve the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israeli PM Shamir, later declared that he wanted the negotiations in Washington (following the Madrid conference) to continue for 10 years, if need be, so that he had enough time to keep on going with planned Israeli settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and leave nothing for the negotiations to talk about.
Secret negotiations were held in Oslo between Israel and a number of Palestinians headed by Mahmoud Abbas. These negotiations led to a Declaration of Principles that was signed between Israel and the PLO at the White House in Washington on 13 September 1993. The Oslo agreement did not stop Zionist theft of Palestinian lands to build more colonial settlements in the OPT, which made it clear that the Zionists are continuing with their strategic Zionist goal of an Exclusive Jewish State. This makes it clear that peace in the Middle East is a mere illusion.
Nizar Sakhnini, 15 September 2006
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