Pink Floyd Plays at Neve Shalom by J. Zel Lurie

Upon visiting Meretz khaver Dan Leon (a former editor of New Outlook and the Palestine-Israel Journal and an old Mapam khaver), immediately after the World Zionist Congress adjourned, I was warned by his wife not to take a bus to Haifa that evening as I had planned — due to chaos on the roads caused by the Pink Floyd concert that Zel Lurie discusses here, from his July 4 submission to the Jewish Journal of South Florida. To my relief, the traffic to Haifa was fine. – R. Seliger

Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam, the Oasis of Peace, is a unique egalitarian village of about 200 Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel. It was built on land bought from the Latrun Monastery, which is midway between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

This was the location chosen by Roger Waters, founder of the famous Pink Floyd rock band for his first concert in Israel. On June 22, when Olmert and Abu Mazen were hugging in Jordan, 20,000 cars and trucks carrying 54,000 ticket holders from all over Israel, including many Arabs from the Galilee, tied up Israeli roads in a massive traffic jam. Although Waters held up the flames that opened the concert for 45 minutes some of them never arrived.

For readers who are over 75 – I’m way over – Pink Floyd is a British band which has sold over 200 million albums world-wide and about 74 million in the United States. One of their biggest hits was “The Wall” issued in 1979. Concert-goers sang along “We don’t need no thought-control…all in all you’re just another brick in the wall.”

It was only right therefore that Roger Waters, who founded Pink Floyd, should visit The Wall that separates Bethlehem from Jerusalem and write on it: “We don’t need no thought control.”

Waters hosted a concert in Berlin celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall.... Jeff Halper, founder of the Israel Committee Against Home Demolitions, helped organize Waters' visit to this wall.

There were 3,600 people employed on the NSWAS concert site including 970 cops and 600 security personnel. Together with a couple of thousand listening outside the fence, NSWAS Mayor Rayek Rizek estimates that more than 60,000 enjoyed the concert.

54,000 tickets were printed. All of the ticket offices sold out. “On the day of the concert, my phone kept ringing. People were begging me for tickets. I could have sold another thousand tickets.” Mayor Rizek said.

Among the 60,000 was Deanna Armbruster, executive director of the American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salem, who lives in Los Angeles. She spent 42 hours in Israel and 43 hours traveling to and fro. “Yet, I wouldn’t have missed it,” she e-mailed to me.... “It was surely one of the biggest days in the community’s history,” she wrote....

Howard Shippen of the NSWAS public relations office has collected over 40 reports in English and Hebrew. Ynet was lyrical. In a piece titled “Impressive, Moving and Powerful” Ynet said that the concert was “one of the most impressive and moving concerts ever seen in Israel.”

The Hebrew press captured both the enthusiasm and the huge traffic jams. One report was titled “The Performance that Stopped the Nation.”

The TV news spent more time describing the village and its Jewish and Arab inhabitants than the concert.... Millions of Israelis had no idea where Neve Shalom was and how to get there. Now they know.

The SITUATION: At the World Union of Meretz

Upon arriving early in the morning of June 17, I was compelled to go directly to Tel Aviv for the opening session of the World Union of Meretz meeting in the kibbutz movement headquarters, rather than checking in at our Jerusalem hotel. Why meet in Tel Aviv and not at our hotel in Jerusalem? Because simultaneous translation and the use of loudspeakers could not occur over Shabbat in Jerusalem. The capital’s blue laws even obtained to urinals in a men’s room; flushed by an electronic sensor, a sign advised users that they should not pee there on Shabbat (I kid you not)!

The World Union meetings included some informative and stimulating discussions. A. B. Yehoshua, the outspoken writer, elaborated upon his controversial statement recently to the American Jewish Committee that one can only lead a “totally Jewish” life in Israel. It is not clear to me that he fully justified this remark, but he came across as reasonable and insightful nevertheless.

Among his insights: Israelis “don’t have a problem of continuity, we have a problem of content.... Israelis cannot be assimilated.” Zionism is not “an ideology” but rather a “joint platform” for diverse and different ideologies. A Zionist is classically a person who supported “a Jewish state in the Land of Israel”; Zionism covers a spectrum of ideologies and philosophies, ranging from fascism to socialism, and all points in between. Typically as a Zionist, he defines Jews as a “people” and not a religious group, adding that the religious path is a choice or an option for individual Jews. Perhaps counter-intuitively, he criticized American Jews for not supporting Israel’s peace camp enough, observing that all people have a full right to discuss issues in Israel, just as they do about other countries, and even stated that one’s willingness to speak out makes you more involved and therefore a better Zionist.

A colleague seated next to me, who is especially sensitive to the Israeli-Arab presence in Israel, suggested that Yehoshua confuses Israeli and Jewish identity. When Yehoshua made his point about Israelis not assimilating, I thought of the counterpoint, which I’ve heard both from the avowed secularist, Martin Ben-Moreh (head of the Meitar College, “Judaism as culture” school of thought) and from numerous religious voices, that most Israeli Jews are becoming “secular pagans” – losing their sense of connection to Judaism and the Jewish diaspora. [Incidentally, Charney Bromberg, Theodore Bikel (a story in himself), Larry Lerner and myself visited Ben-Moreh’s institution – one which veteran Mapamniks (later Meretz personages) Yair Tsaban and Yehuda Bauer are affiliated with.]

On the same day, June 17, the World Union hosted a panel discussion on the infamous Mearsheimer-Walt analysis of the US “Israel Lobby.” Moderated by Meretz USA president Lilly Rivlin, the panelists included Meretz party leader M.K. Yossi Beilin, Haaretz journalist Akiva Eldar, and Dr. Gady Taub. Most significant to me were Beilin’s comments: first mentioning how shocked he was by the "hatred" he detected in the professors' tone, Beilin went on to describe several instances when, as a high official in the dovish governments of the 1990s, the so-called Israel lobby of AIPAC went against both the interests and the wishes of the sitting Israeli government.

To be continued...

The SITUATION: World Zionist Congress Con't.

As is customary, the Congress convened with a festive opening, addressed by the president of Israel, currently Moshe Katsav, Mayor Lupolianski of Jerusalem, and Chairman Bielski of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization. In the next days, plenary sessions were separately addressed by Prime Minister Olmert and the Knesset opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu.

In contrast to Pres. Katsav, who refused to address a Reform rabbinical leader present as a “rabbi,” Olmert addressed him reverentially as “rabbi and teacher.” This was a symbolic matter, but must be regarded, along with Olmert’s alliance with Mercaz (Conservative Jews) as significant for the status of non-Orthodox religious movements within Israel.

A dramatic plus for the Congress was the passage of a resolution favoring the establishment of civil marriage and divorce. The Congress also went on record as approving more equitable treatment for Israel’s Arab citizens. These breakthroughs counter anti-Zionist views that regard Zionism as theocratic and inherently racist.

Meretz failed, however, in winning passage for a resolution to enforce the findings of the Sasson Commission of the illegal use of the World Zionist Organization’s Settlement Division as a conduit for funding unauthorized West Bank settlement outposts. Meretz had attempted to get the Congress to go on record as mandating the Settlement Division to only work within the pre-1967 Green Line boundaries of Israel.

In the process, Gavri Bargil, co-head of the Kibbutz Movement and a former shaliakh based in New York, was personally escorted off the stage by the young Kadima MK who presided over the Congress as its president. After first being recognized to speak on behalf of the Meretz resolution, Gavri attempted to respond to an ensuing vitriolic attack on Meretz by Shlomo Gravitz, an elderly and well-known right winger who has headed the Settlement Division. Gavri had wished to correct Gravitz’s accusation that this resolution violated Meretz’s own commitment in signing the “wall-to-wall coalition” agreement that Kadima run the Settlements Division; yet the Meretz resolution only sought to ensure that the Settlements Division work within the Green Line.

The SITUATION: At World Zionist Congress

Meretz USA’s delegation of a half dozen delegates and alternates attended the World Union of Meretz meetings in Tel Aviv, June 16-18, followed by the World Zionist Congress, June 19-22, in Jerusalem’s convention center. The total international Meretz faction mustered about 34 delegates, with two alternates per delegate, and included one Reconstructionist delegate and two alternates from the United States — about ten percent of the Congress total. When counted with the international union associated with the Labor party, with whom we agreed (as customary) to sit as a unified group, we constituted one of the three or four largest factions.

What differed in this Congress from those in the immediate past — which convenes approximately every four years — is that there was a strong center and a weakened political right. This was achieved by the sudden emergence of Kadima as a major presence, with its 30 seats in the Knesset entitling it to 60 delegates in the Congress, further reinforced by the seven MKs of Gil (the Pensioners party) contributing 14 delegates and the addition of the Mercaz (the religious Conservative movement, having elected over 20 percent of US delegates), plus the Greens and one other small group.

Mercaz representatives were identifiable by wearing blue or white versions of a knitted kipah, decorated with a repeated rendering of the Hebrew letter Mem. Together, this Kadima-Mercaz centrist coalition outnumbered the 90 delegates of the Mizrachi (Orthodox) movement, the single largest faction.

The Kadima alliance with Mercaz was something of a bold move by Prime Minister Olmert, who weathered criticism from Orthodox elements for doing so. Olmert was quoted as characterizing Masorti/Conservative Judaism as being moderate and “centrist” like Kadima.

ARZA, the Zionist arm of Reform Judaism, lost ground from the previous Congress, mainly because its erstwhile Israeli ally, the Shinui party, went down in flames from its prior Knesset presence of 15 seats to oblivion. By the same token, the right lost ground because of the fall of Likud in the last Israeli election from 40 seats to 12 — although some of this ground was made up for by the increased strength in the Knesset of Yisrael Beitenu.

On the substance of the Congress, the deliberations and passing of resolutions, the results were a mixed bag. Meretz failed to get the Congress to vote to explicitly reorient the activities of the Settlement Division solely to projects within the Green Line, although the Congress appeared mostly to favor projects within the Galil and the Negev.

Meretz also failed to gain Congress recognition and support for “free Judaism,” a secular perspective that regards Judaism as culture. Meretz reminded ARZA and Mercaz delegates that it has long supported their right to full participation and support of the World Zionist Organization in a shared commitment to pluralism. A Reform delegate responded that this was “not the time” for their support, however, leaving the impression that non-Orthodox movements are jealous of sharing limited money resources with another Jewish philosophical stream.

Stay tuned for more....

THINGS YOU SEE FROM HERE #3 by David Eden: The Palestinian Referendum

With a month to go before the date set by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) for a national referendum vote on accepting or rejecting the “Prisoner’s Document,” it is still not clear if the vote will take place. Hamas is raising all kinds of arguments against it, with its representatives in the Palestinian Legislative Council claiming it is against the law to hold a referendum. Ministers in the PA government are saying that a referendum amounts to a delegitimation of the results of the January elections that brought them to power. Ismail Haniyeh, the Prime Minister, says there is no need for a vote, because Hamas is still negotiating with Fatah over the document and, in any case, the Palestinians need to remain united and work to create a “National Unity Coalition.”

The PA is undoubtedly in a crisis. The economic sanctions imposed by Israel, the US and the European Union after the creation of the Hamas government are having a serious effect on Palestinians' quality of life. While they are not starving, they are certainly suffering. Hospitals lack essential supplies and equipment. Women are pawning their jewelry to pay for food. And Hamas remains unbending in their opposition to recognizing Israel and ending terrorism.

I’m not going to argue about the “Prisoner’s Document” itself. I agree with others who have written about it in this blog, that it is a flawed document at best, and that its contents are a step backwards in terms of Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. It only implicitly accepts the existence of the State of Israel (within pre-1967 borders) by calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state in all the Occupied Territories. The Oslo Accords, which Abu Mazen signed on behalf of the Palestinians, are much clearer about the right of Israel to exist.

But holding a referendum on a document that implicitly recognizes Israel is tremendously significant. Hamas is trying to prevent the referendum, whether by reaching a compromise with Fatah, or possibly even resigning from the PA government en-masse (so that a technocratic government may be formed). If they fail to prevent the referendum, they may well try to get the voters to boycott it. But if the referendum vote actually takes place, it will be the first time that the Palestinians will be directly making their voice heard about their willingness to support a two-state solution to the conflict. Support of the document would represent a rejection to the policies of Hamas.

Most analysts agree that it wasn’t Hamas that won the Palestinian elections, but it was Fatah that lost. Hamas had better campaign tacticts, and a reputation for altruism that served it well with a population tired of corruption and favoritism. But this referendum isn’t about who can provide basic services without taking bribes, or who can make sure that law enforcement is impartial. It is about returning to the negotiating table with a clear understanding that the outcome will be a Palestinian state next to Israel. It is about recognizing that a solution to the conflict exists and that it is based on compromise.

Working together despite the fence, by J. Zel Lurie

The following is Zel Lurie's submission for his column in the June 20 issue of the Palm Beach Jewish Journal:


When the Israel-Jordanian armistice conference in 1949 at Rhodes fixed boundaries, half of the lands of the Arab village of Qaffin fell into Israel. On this land the left-wing Hashomer Hatzair founded a kibbutz called Metzer, Hebrew for boundary.

Relations between Arabs in Qaffin and the leftist Jews in Metzer across Israel's frontier were good, relates Isabel Kershner in "Barrier," (Palgrave/Macmillan) the story of the wall and fence now being built. When the Army laid out a fence between Qaffin and Metzer, it was not on the Green Line, the boundary which had been fixed on a map in green ink in Rhodes. The Army said it needed yardage for a patrol road and a dirt embankment so it delved further into Qaffin lands, separating the Arab homes from their olive groves and fields.

The kibbbutzniks from Metzer and the Palestinians from Qaffin staged a joint demonstration against the fence. But this idyll ended on June 10, 2002 when a 19-year-old Moslem from Tulkarim crept under the flimsy kibbutz perimeter fence and killed five, including a mother and two toddlers. Then he walked home to Tulkarim. It took the Army eleven months, Ms. Kershner writes, to find and kill him.

The fence was erected as planned soon after the massacre in Metzer, For three years, the Arab farmers have watched from the other side of the fence as their olive grove became filled with debris.

The farmers in Metzer have not forgotten their Palestinian neighbors, who were once a pleasant quarter hour walk across the fields. It's not just because they are doves, It's self interest, Dov Avital, the mazkir, manager of Metzer, recently told Reuters.

"If our neighbors don't have a life. We won't be able to have peace," Mr. Avital said.

Doron Lieber, 52, led a delegation from Metzer to clean up the debris that had collected in three years on the 250 acres of Qassim land on the other side of the fence. Qassim Mayor Tsair Harashi joined in the celebration. He said that it was the first time in three years that he had received permission to cross through the fence.

He said conditions in his village were deplorable. "We have lost half our land and our income. Workers who used to work in construction in Israel are unemployed."

Doron Lieber has a plan to help Qassim and Metzer revive their friendship and economic viability. He will get an NGO to build a greenhouse on Qassim land on the Metzer side of the fence. The greenhouse will grow vegetables and spices for export to Europe.

He will still need permits for the Qassim farmers to come through the fence. "We will turn the world upside down to get the permits," Lieber told Reuters.

A few more words about Ms. Kershner's remarkable book. She engages the reader in her tour of the 450 mile barrier that will eventually cost over two billion dollars. We see all its complexities, the walls in the cities and the fences, with computerized sensors, elsewhere. The language is colorful. The Jewish builders and the Arabs, whose land is being taken, are whole human beings, expressing their feelings in telling phrases.

"They stole my sunsets," exclaimed a land owner in Qalqilya who used to sit on his porch and watch the sun set. Now he faces a wall.

"They took away the sea," said the villagers of Qibya, made famous by Arik Sharon's retaliatory strike in 1953, which inadvertently killed 60 women and children.

Among the moving stories she tells of the victims of suicide bombers and their families, one stands out. Her cousin, Ruthie Gillis, is the widow of a gifted Hadassah hematologist, Dr. Shmuel Gillis, who was ambushed on his way home from Ein Karim to his home in Karnei Tzur, north of Hebron

When the route was fixed by the Israel cabinet. Ruthie's home in Karnei Tzur was not included on the Israel side. Ruthie doesn't care. The fence, she says, will be "the departure point for the next war." Sooner or later, she predicts, mortars and rockets will be flying over the fence.

Ruthie's prediction is a fact on the Gaza border where a fence was built some years ago. Hamas and Islamic Jihad have been flying rockets over the fence. Most of them have been aimed at Sderot, where schools were closed one day last week in fear of rockets. The day before a rocket went through the roof of a house and landed on the bed of a boy who had just left for school.

Unless the rockets are stopped there is bound to be a fatality.

I will close with my personal reaction to the fence around East Jerusalem. Three years ago I first saw the shocking wall. 10-meters high, smack across the old road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Up the hill there was a gate with Palestinian pedestrians streaming through. It was a Friday morning and there were transit buses waiting to take them to the Al-Aksa mosque.

"Why are you spending money to separate Arabs from Arabs?" I asked my guide. "Don't ask me," she replied.

Last week, the Council of Peace and Security, which is made up of retired generals and intelligence officers, asked the same question.

"A fence with Palestinians living on both sides is not a security fence." said the Council.

Obviously, it never was. Not in East Jerusalem. Ms. Kershner relates that the designer of the fence felt that he could not exclude residents of Jerusalem, holders of blue identity cards. Three years later, Ehud Olmert is beginning to talk about excluding them.

Schenker and Rosenberg on the current bloody impasse

Writing originally under the title of “Huda Ghalia or David Bekham?”, Hillel Schenker continues to blog on the UK Guardian “Comment is Free” Web site:

All most Israelis wanted to do this past weekend was to forget their daily troubles and escape into the month-long World Cup bubble of fan ecstacy. My 18 year old son even quit his job to help found a World Cup viewing club with his friends. But when we woke up on Sunday morning, instead of seeing Ronaldinho or Henry on the front pages, we were greeted by the tearful face of 12 year old Huda Ghalia, who lost seven members of her intimate family on the Gaza beach.

No matter how hard the average Israeli keeps on trying to evade reality, it has a persistant way of intruding into our consciousness. Last night Israeli TV viewers were treated to a surrealistic exhibition. While France and Switzerland were battling to a 0-0 draw and everyone was getting ready for Brazil's premier performance, the odd couple of dovish Defense Minister Amir Peretz and IDF Chief-of-Staff Dan Halutz faced the TV cameras while Major Meir Klifi explained, with diagrams and unclear long-distance video footage, why the IDF investigation team had concluded "beyond all doubt" that the seven Palestinians killed on the Gaza beach were not hit by an Israeli shell.

Watching the show, I couldn't help recalling Secretary of State Colin Powell's attempt to explain to the UN Security Council, with all of the sophisticated audio-visual aids at his disposal, why the Americans believed they had "proof" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Even government-run Channel l got tired of the show. Switching to the studio, former IDF Spokesperson Nachman Shai admitted that the attempt to prove Israel's lack of responsibility was rather tedious, and anyway, it was clear that the IDF was shelling the area, even if it was not responsible for this particularly tragic incident. And if the government and the army had hopes that at least the front pages of the Israeli media would lead with a story about how the internal IDF investigation team had exonerated Israel of responsibility for the beach incident, once again reality proved too strong for the best laid plans.

The lead story in all of today's daily papers was "seven Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza City" in the course of an Israeli Air Force strike against a GRAD Katyusha missile launching cell, while last night's show was relegated to the inside pages. And today's Internet bulletins featured the fact that UN Secretary General Kofi Annan and an American military expert doubt the veracity of the IDF committee explanation.

The truth is the average Israeli would rather not know what is going on in the Gaza Strip that was supposedly left behind after last summer's disengagement, and in the West Bank as well. Let us get on with our lives. But continued Israeli targeted killings of Hamas activists, the constant rounds of missiles being fired from Gaza at the southern town of Sderot (home of the Israeli defense minister) and the IDF reprisals against the rocket launchers, make that impossible. And according to today's Maariv daily, a senior Israeli security official believes that the Israeli policy of trying to prevent the Palestinian government from realising any civilian achievements is one of the factors driving the Hamas government back to the use of terrorism.

If there were an international community worthy of the name "international" and "community," if the UN had teeth, if the EU had clout, if the American pretension to be the world's policeman had any substance, then international forces would step in to stop the mutual bloodletting. I don't know who is directly responsible for the tragedy that befell Huda Ghalia on the Gaza beach last Friday. I do know that all of us, Israelis, Palestinians and particularly the international community, share responsibility for finding a way out of this bloody impasse.

Click below for Robert Rosenberg’s perspective from his “Today” posting (“No Justice”), sharp and well-informed as ever, June 14.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was apparently sending an envoy to the region for a first hand look at the results of the IDF inquiry that absolved the Israeli army of direct responsibility for last Friday’s explosion on a Gaza beach that massacred a Palestinian family, and the Palestinian version of events. Annan reportedly said it was ‘odd’ that the Hamas-run Palestinian Authority would allow civilians to picnic on a beach that was mined by Palestinians trying to block Israeli naval commando raids. He might have added that it is odd that Palestinians would choose to picnic on a beach used by Islamic Jihad and other militants to launch Qassam rockets into the Western Negev and routinely targeted by Israeli artillery to prevent those Qassam launchings from taking place.

Whether it was a mine or a dud Israeli shell that blew up last Friday, the events of the last 24 hours make it clear that the accident of the Friday incident being filmed was the only reason for the inquiry. After all, even more innocent civilians were killed yesterday by an airborne Israeli missile attack on a car carrying two Islamic Jihad operatives and a Katyusha rocket, capable of reaching Ahskelon, twenty kilometers north of Gaza. But there was no iconic image, like the one of young Huda Ghalia crying for her father and hurling herself to the ground, to flash around the world. Instead, there were the ‘usual’ pictures of a destroyed car, Palestinian men trying to carry bodies to ambulances, and the ambulances careening through the streets of Gaza.

The IDF probe, while ruling out one of the artillery shells lobbed onto the beach that day, however was unable to say unequivocally that it was not an earlier Israeli shell. In other words, the probe succeeded only in assuaging Israelis who had made up their minds already by the second day that it was not the Israeli shelling that killed six children and their father. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand why a dud shell exploding on the beach would not be at least partially Israeli responsibility....

The SITUATION: Prisoners vs. Arab League

It is more than a bit worrying that I, and my Meretz USA and Ameinu khaverim of the Hatikva Progressive Zionist Slate, go to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for the World Zionist Congress at precisely this moment of crisis and escalating violence. I am not sure if I will be able to continue posting from Israel, before I return on June 25.

Ami Isseroff examines the shortcomings of the Palestinian prisoners’ agreement at his Mideast Web site. Mahmoud Abbas is using this as a basis for a projected referendum in July.

The NY Times editorial of June 10, regards this document as a step forward, despite its flaws, only because things look so grim right now:
“... unlike the unfulfilled Oslo agreements of the 1990's and the Arab League peace plan of 2002, the prisoners' proposal offers only implicit, not explicit, recognition to Israel. Even worse, it appears to legitimize Palestinian violence against Israelis in the West Bank and other occupied territories. And in contradiction to the spirit of a two-state solution, it asserts the right of Palestinian refugees to return to pre-1967 Israel.”

As for the Arab League's peace initiative of 2002, which is reportedly still on the table, it's a good basis for discussions. Israel needs to clarify whether the Arab League would support some formula of a solution to the refugees issue that does not involve a total and unconditional right of return. The Geneva Initiative envisions such a solution, which important Palestinians have signed on to, which speaks of a moral right of return yet would implement it mostly through settlement in permanent homes in the future Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and in resettlement to other countries in the region and elsewhere, and/or in monetary compensation. I believe that the Arab League peace plan is amenable to such an interpretation, which fully safeguards Israel's rights as a sovereign state with a Jewish majority.

Largely for this reason, dovish Israeli analyst Gershon Baskin, sees the Arab League plan as a much better basis for negotiations than the prisoners' agreement, which has received publicity of late in defining Mahmoud Abbas's referendum scheduled for July. Baskin, the co-CEO of IPCRI, the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, has recently written “Vote Yes, But On the Right Plan,” in the Jerusalem Post Online, which I quote in part:

... I would urge Palestinian President Abbas to reconsider the document that he plans to present to the public for its approval. The so-called ‘Prisoners’ Document’ may have some appeal at the level of the internal Palestinian national dialogue, but is a complete non-starter as far as Israel is concerned.... Without explicit recognition of Israel’s right to exist, a clear denouncement of terrorism and an explicit agreement to adhere to all of the Israel-PLO signed agreements, there is nothing positive that can be achieved by a Palestinian referendum on a document which emphasizes the right of return of the refugees to Israel and recognizes and calls for resistance (violence) against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank.

President Abbas has one shot at a referendum and he cannot afford to waste it on a document that will not leverage the renewal of the political process with Israel. It would be much more valuable for Abbas to put his weight behind the Arab peace Initiative which received the unanimous support of the Arab League in 2002 and then [was] once again ratified in 2006.... The Arab League peace initiative makes many precedents by stating: “The Arab countries … consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended, and enter into a peace agreement with Israel, and provide security for all the states of the region; establish normal relations with Israel in the context of this comprehensive peace.”

Click below to read more from Baskin's article.

.... The initiative calls on Israel to support this plan “to safeguard the prospects for peace and stop the further shedding of blood, enabling the Arab countries and Israel to live in peace and good neighborliness and provide future generations with security, stability and prosperity.”

.... The Arab League would be well advised to pressure Abbas to use the moment of referendum to gain public support for their peace initiative. The Arab League would be also well advised to launch an aggressive public media and education campaign to gain the support of the Israeli public for the initiative, and then, perhaps; there should be a call for a similar referendum in Israel.

There is no document or initiative around that provides a better package of benefits for the entire region than the Arab League peace plan. During different times, the people of Israel would have danced in the streets to the calls from the Arab world for real and full peace. Clearly no Israeli-Palestinian bilateral initiative could contain such a package of benefits for Israel.... It also calls on the Saudis, Moroccans and others to lend a hand in solving the very complex and sensitive details of creating a workable and acceptable solution for Jerusalem. It also recognizes, for the first time, that the solution for the refugee problem must be agreed to by Israel.

The SITUATION: Bias at the BBC?

This issue has emerged in the e-mail discussions emanating from the “Facing A Challenge” conferences in Oakland and Newark, organized by Judy Andreas for leftists to address anti-Semitism within their ranks. For better or worse, this discussion has mostly devolved into argumentation (often heated) on the Arab/Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The latest discussion has been triggered by the official British panel which mostly exonerated the “Beeb” (the BBC) from allegations of anti-Israel bias. The current e-mail exchange was informed by a critical article on this report, written in the UK’s “Prospect Magazine.”

One of the problems with almost anybody who attempts to opine or analyze on this conflict, and the media coverage thereof, is that this matter is so multi-layered that almost anything one says can be legitimately challenged. I don't think that the BBC is biased against Israel as a result of a policy decision and I have noticed in my listening and watching of late (via American public radio and television which carries a great deal of BBC news broadcasting) that its tone has improved. Editorializing in the guise of reporting or in conducting interviews is bad journalism and Orla Guerrin, Lise Ducette (the latter not mentioned in the article) and other BBC reporters and anchors have done that – usually showing bias against Israel.

But when Sharon fell ill last January, BBC coverage was almost worshipful of Sharon. I saw this clearly when Yossi Beilin, head of the dovish Meretz party, was interviewed. Beilin properly expressed his humane concern for the prime minister's health and the well-being of his family, but he shocked the BBC reporter by saying that Sharon was not a dove -- dah! Meretz supported the Gaza disengagement, but only because they wanted Israel out of the territories; Meretz lamented Sharon's insistence on unilateralism and his refusal to attempt to engage PA Pres. Abbas in a genuine peace process. That this was too complex for the BBC reporter to grasp, or even to realize that this was Beilin's view, shows journalistic incompetence more than bias. Maybe that's the real problem with so much journalism nowadays, that reporters don't have a sophisticated grasp of the subjects they're reporting on.

Reporters too often seem to be captive to what is immediately happening in front of them, without background or perspective that would make for better-informed rather than emotional reporting. A superficial look at what's happening on the ground, clearly sees that the Palestinians are suffering much more than Israelis in this conflict. This is not Israel's moral failing; Israel should not be required to suffer in a one-to-one proportion to have the right to defend itself from attack.

But it is either a moral or a political failing when Israel fails to follow-up, to at least fully explore peaceful alternatives to the escalating mess that’s going on today, as the lull or truce in the Intifada has been declared ended by Hamas, in the wake of the terrible tragic events on the beach at Gaza a few days ago. And clearly, with the escalation of rockets fired at the Negev town of Sderot and other Israeli targets, and as we hold our breath for the next terrorist atrocity, Israel’s tough military response is not working.

To be continued....

LIVE FROM BAGHDAD: ‘Spider’

This is another missive from our friend in Iraq, which we reproduce anonymously.

In his mid to late 30s, with a teenage smile and polite ways, private security contractor Spider served as a sergeant in Afghanistan. We call him spider because of a large spiderweb tattoo around his elbow reaching up to a massive tricep, plus a spider with a human head taking up most of the other forearm. His body is a ripped billboard of very large pictures and inscriptions in garish colors against his pale Puerto Rican skin, from the twin skulls on the back of his neck down both sides of his torso. Together they proclaim loyalty to his special forces unit, the Marines, his Navy Seal training, etc., plus a certain "don't tread on me" spirit.

As a young man, Spider drank his way out of a college scholarship and into the Marines. His skills took him beyond special forces and ultimately into a super-special unit in the State Department for extracting hostages and other top government personnel (not including Hilary). Spider needed more action. A fiercely loyal American, he convinced his best friend, also married to his sister, to re-enlist and join him in Afghanistan.

While investigating a cave, Spider led his team into an ambush from which only he emerged. It appears that the $2/day Afghani informant, received a better offer from the other side. Spider returned to the US to bury his brother-in-law, guilty, broken, suffering from PTSD. He required years of hospitalization and psychotherapy before he could deal with those events. He completed college and went to work in law enforcement in Florida. But he needed more action again. So here he is.

Now Spider profoundly understands the difference between being macho and being strong. He can talk to a very aggressive crew in terms that help them solve problems and moderate behavior. He teaches every day, directly and by example. Spider is respected, not feared. He helps families and kids with every spare dollar he does not send home to his wife and three daughters. He does not drink. He does not party. But Spider has messed up one of his tattoos. Where it once said "pray for war," there is an ugly blue-black splotch. Only the large red death head underneath it and his memory are left.

Click below for our correspondent's musings on the physical look and feel of Baghdad.

I doubt that Baghdad ever really was a beautiful city. But it has its features. There is a peaceful place where at dusk I can climb ten flights of dark stairs in an abandoned building to a flat rooftop with a chest-high cement wall. I chat with the Kurds in their machine gun hut there through gestures and jokes. I can look out for 360 degrees—and down on our compound--so long as I don't stand in one place long enough to get noticed from below.
Looking to the west and south, I can see the Tigris dodging clumps of reeds, beautiful and lazy. Due east, the Green Zone. The GZ once must have featured resort-like buildings along the far bank. It still sports some very attractive and interesting architecture. My view along the river southeast is interrupted by several real hotels, including the famous Palestine, and ends in a slim factory smokestack burning off industrial effluents. Sometimes when I walk in the morning I notice smoke from nearby explosions mingling with the factory smoke, in a kind of military industrial love.

Three bridges cross the Tigris to the north. Mid-rise buildings poke up through low miscellaneous badly maintained constructions and apartments across the river. Some office buildings are quite nicely designed, clearly commercial but in a non-Western way. On this side of the river bombed taller buildings, whose precision holes are scarier than if they had been knocked down, alternate with towers that look as if they should fall down any minute but have not so far.

Toward the Palestine [Hotel] and just slightly east, miscellaneous light industrial and commercial buildings and houses jumble together. Around to the "front" east-northeast of the building lies a busy commercial street from which we are separated by barricades and armed personnel. It is not a safe place. By chance, I happened to snap a car bomb gone awry on the street last month, in a fire that crisped up only its occupant(s). A more successful car bomb penetrated the lighter security we had about 3 months before I came, destroying our hotel's street entrance. No chance for a repeat now. There's more cement than a gypsum quarry between us and "civilization." The street is heavily trafficked, ugly, dirty, and miscellaneous. People dump trash everywhere or burn it in front of their stores or houses—or in the street. They throw tires and broken household equipment on the flat roofs. It is easy to hide an IED in this mess, and people have.

In the distance to the north lie several mosques, quite beautiful, really, and beyond them the outline of a great (and doubtless evil—note Fatwa above) football stadium. Although I cannot see it from the roof, there is a massive stadium on the far side of the Green Zone. Its entrances and exits are marked by monstrous 40' arches made of crossed scimitars held by iron fists. It is the type of oversized monumental architecture I've seen in other dictatorships, affirming power of the primacy of the state against things merely human in scale.

Housing is largely apartment style, and around here, small houses, not exactly beautiful. They often house multiple families. Sometimes families live in single rooms. We try to help one that is a single family with four young children in a 6x10 room--no air conditioning (today it is 117 degrees F), no refrigeration, only a hibachi like thing outside, no bathroom facilities I could locate. We can only buy them canned food. We help another family that lives a bit better, but with a single mom and no visible source of income. On hot nights, the boy, 7, sleeps outside for comfort on a set of bed springs, no mattress. This is not a good place to be poor.

Iraqis are very "clean," but sand and dust accumulate everywhere—especially where wood and charcoal are burned, but really as a result of being in a desert. It I wash my face in the afternoon, the white Holiday Inn towel (honest) gets visibly dirty. If I wash a dish in the morning (hey, it has been known to happen), by evening a fine coating of sand blankets it—not perceptible to the eye, but "feelable." I also have all the water—hot, cold, and potable--I need, frequent and regular laundry, and work and sitting space. My quarters could probably house half the population of Baghdad, especially if I had enough can openers.

Anti-Semitism on the Left, Pt. 1

Here's an interesting weblog entry at JewSchool by the ever-perceptive Mobius. You might want to peruse some of his stuff online at the Orthodox Anarchist.

[This weblog entry originally appeared here, dated June 7, 2006.]

>> Arieh

Left-wing antisemitism is really pissing me off these days.

Last week I found myself backed into a corner on a Myspace forum, putting forth a right-wing Zionist argument only to provide a counterpoint to a deluge of anti-Zionism that breached the Judeophobic line. The main argument revolved around the idea that Israel is a client to the US, and that the state itself was formed for the sake of advancing Western imperialism and stifling the establishment of a pan-Arab union. I took umbrage with this characterization and from there things quickly heated up.

The antisemitic breach occured at the point where two of the people I was arguing with basically sought to invalidate the authenticity of my Jewishness, one providing an afrocentric argument that the real Jews were black Africans, the other stating that even if I’m 1/64th Jewish by the merits of genetics and my family tree, that I have no legitimate claim to Israel as my historic homeland. That’s when I started going a little batty, clearly feeling threatened by such remarks, regarding them as an attempt at the destruction of my identity. That’s when I pulled out the antisemite card — a place where I loathe to venture — and by Godwin’s Law, I soon lost the argument in the eyes of the forum’s participants.

I spoke to a few friends about the issue, one of whom is writing a book on the subject — a Jewish Left-winger’s take on Left-wing antisemitism — and another who is an Israeli activist who has also found himself consistently perplexed by this phenomenon.

The latter pointed me to a couple of essays: The first, “How to strengthen the Palestine Solidarity Movement by making friends with Jews” and the second (written by his partner) “Fear and loathing”. Both pieces attempt to articulate the moral failure of the Left in its interaction with the Jewish community.

I’m wondering if anyone else has any thoughts or resources on the subject — those that aren’t from Right-wing Lefty-bashers who’ll have nothing productive to add to the conversation — as it’s a subject I’m presently intrigued with and would like to make some headway in addressing. Any help in this area would be well-appreciated.
***
Arieh adds a postscript: there are over 50 responses to the above - one is mine ... see them at the bottom of the original post, or try this pop-up.

Art Strickler (1945-2006): Our pride and his

The sudden passing of Art Strickler on March 12, at the age of 61, was an unexpected shock. He was a valued member of the Meretz USA executive committee, our former treasurer, and a major fundraiser.

His commitments grew naturally from components of his diverse identity: his activities as a Mason, his life as a gay man, a resident of New York’s Greenwich Village, a Democratic party activist (a former party district leader), a Jew and a Zionist. He served Greenwich Village as chair of his community planning board and then professionally as its district manager.

His funeral dramatized the several significant strands and commitments of his life. The ceremony itself was a unique combination of Masonic and Jewish rituals and attended by an overflow crowd, part of which had to be accommodated in a second room with a telecast of the proceedings. It was attended by many important figures in New York City politics and in the gay community, and a host of his Masonic brothers.

Many of these people and a few others (including Meretz USA president, Lilly Rivlin, and myself) assembled at the Village Temple, the evening of June 7, to celebrate his life in a memorial gathering. Among the many friends and colleagues addressing the mourners/ celebrants included the borough president of Manhattan and the speaker of the New York City Council.

His god-daughter and her father recalled their memorable trip together to Israel a few years ago, when Artie served as their guide. He had spent a somewhat lonely year on a kibbutz in 1975, at a time when Israel was very much behind the US in the advancement of gay rights and gay culture. Today, thanks in part to the activities of Meretz party officials and activists, gay rights in Israel are more advanced and arguably less in contention than in the US.

I chatted with Andy Humm, a journalist who chronicles the gay world and is co-host of “Gay USA,” the weekly news show broadcast on public access cable television. We discussed the gay-friendly initiatives of such Meretz politicians as Yael Dayan, deputy mayor of Tel Aviv. Meretz was also the first party which launched the political careers of openly gay individuals to serve in the Knesset and in the city councils of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Humm’s TV program recently hosted Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum of New York’s Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (the “gay synagogue), who is the US representative for the World Pride celebration convening in Jerusalem in August, 2006. — Ralph Seliger.

Things That You See From Here: the Prisoners’ Document by David Eden

David Eden immigrated to Israel as a teenager, after a childhood spent in the US and Peru. He joined a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz after service in an IDF combat unit. Active in Mapam (the socialist-Zionist party that was a founding component of Meretz), he was former party chair Elazar Granot's bureau chief in the late ‘80s. A graduate of the Ruppin Institute's course in public administration, he later served as treasurer of his kibbutz. Married to a Princeton, New Jersey resident since the late ‘90s, he currently works for a social policy research firm in the US.

It may seem ironic that despite all the effort that Israel, the US, and most of the EU countries put into trying to pressure the Hamas government -- to recognize Israel, declare their opposition to the use of violence and to accept the legitimacy of previously signed accords between Israel and the PLO -- it is apparent that it is going to be internal Palestinian pressure that will force this decision. Ironic, but not surprising.

One of the most respected groups within Palestinian society, the Palestinian prisoners are important participants in Palestinian political life. Forcibly isolated from the daily struggle, organized into groups based on party affiliation, the Palestinian prisoners have not only forged bonds with each other across party lines, but have also become some of the most savvy observers of Israeli politics and society. They study Hebrew and avidly read the Israeli press.

One of the surprising results of their incarceration, is that many of the prisoners become more politically sophisticated and lose some of their extremism. In fact, many come to see that a compromise based on a two-state solution is the only possible resolution of the conflict.

So it is no surprise that their 18-point document, including the most popular Fatah leader, Marwan Barghouti, includes the establishment of a Palestinian state in the territories occupied by Israel in the West Bank and Gaza in June 1967. Implicitly, this means the acceptance of the existence of Israel, within the pre-67 borders. While most Israelis would not find these borders acceptable, this proposal would certainly be acceptable as the basis of negotiations. Over the years, many other Palestinians, both individuals and groups, have held similar positions. But the credibility carried by the Palestinian prisoners is unique, and their statements have an influence that reaches all sectors of Palestinian society.

This document has served Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas as a tool to force Hamas to confront its positions regarding the future of negotiations with Israel. In declaring that if Hamas rejects the plan, he will declare a referendum, Abbas is essentially forcing Hamas to choose its future: either it adopts the plan and accepts participating in negotiations with Israel; or it rejects the plan and is seen by Palestinians as being responsible for the worsening conditions in the PA.

But the most significant thing about the proposed referendum, is that the Palestinian population would be involved in deciding on which approach they want their leaders to take in regards to the future: either the path of negotiations represented by Abbas, and implicitly endorsed by the prisoners, or continued conflict. And they are probably as tired of the unending conflict as we are.

Getting To Know You: George & Laura, Ehud & Aliza by J. Zel Lurie

The following is an abridged version of J. Zel Lurie's column submitted for the June 6 issue of the Palm Beach Jewish Journal:

It was an unusually comfortable spring day in May and the two couples were able to enjoy an interlude on the White House porch. Did they discuss their children as strangers often do? Did they discuss George Bush’s concept of bringing democracy to the Mideast? Did they discuss the Palestine Anti-Terrorism Act which the House of Representatives had just passed by an eight to one margin? I doubt it because both knew that the Senate version, totally different, would prevail.

The rhetoric on the House bill, labeled H.R. 4681, was against Hamas but, by tying the terrorists to the Palestinian Authority, headed by Mahmoud Abbas, the act would hobble US assistance to the PA.

The House version recalled George Bush’s Roadmap of 2003 without mentioning it. The bill called on the Palestinians to end all violence unequivocally. But the Roadmap was two-sided.
The Roadmap, to which all sides still give lip service, calls on Israel to “immediately dismantle settlement outposts erected since March 2001” and “freeze all settlement activity.”

Peace Now has counted 102 outposts erected in the West Bank since March 2001. And the large settlement blocs adjacent to Israel will be enlarged, not frozen, when Ehud Olmert’s plans go into effect in a year or two.

AIPAC revived the Palestinian provisions of the Roadmap with no quid pro quo from Israel and without the customary provision for presidential waiver in the national interest. Heavy lobbying was carried on by AIPAC. What AIPAC wants AIPAC gets... The final count was 295 cosponsors and the vote on the bill was an overwhelming 361 to 27....

Did the 361 Congressmen who voted for the bill know what they were voting for? Of course they did. The Israel Policy Forum had sent an analysis of the bill to every Congressman. The IPF said:
“We need to l) secure US influence in the region, 2) promote the security of Israel, 3) advance Prime Minister Olmert’s goal of “disengagement” from the Palestinian areas and 4) promote negotiations. This legislation works against each of these goals.”

This was clear enough. But the Congressmen had an out. They knew that the Senate version, S. 2370 met most of IPF’s objections and more. The House bill would never become law. So why antagonize AIPAC by voting against it and be labeled a “supporter of terrorists.”

The Senate bill, among other things, permits the administration to deal with Abbas. Most important to me — according to Americans for Peace Now, which opposed the House version and supports the Senate bill — it adds a 20 million dollar fund for the Secretary of State “to support through Palestinian and Israeli organizations the promotion of democracy, human rights, freedom of the press, and non-violence among Palestinians, and peaceful co-existence and reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.”

The SITUATION: Morris on Mearsheimer

The “New Historian,” Benny Morris, has long ago ceased to be new. Two or three years ago, in the wake of his complete loss of faith in Arafat and despair at the terror campaign known as the Al-Aksa Intifada, he seemed to lose his cool in a long interview in Haaretz, daring to state that Ben-Gurion perhaps should have captured the West Bank and expelled more Palestinians during the Independence War of 1948. He hastened to add that the historical moment had passed and he did not advocate ethnic cleansing as a solution to the current impasse.

For these public musings, the famous professor of history at Beersheva’s Ben-Gurion University was roundly condemned by leftists as a “right-winger.” But he never renounced his research, which depicts the ethnic cleansing that Israel in fact engaged in during and after its war of national self-defense. He even published a new version of his earlier work documenting in more sickening detail, the crimes and human tragedies of 1948 and after.

But his new anti-Palestinian tone won him a frequent and prominent perch in the moderately liberal and fervently pro-Israel New Republic magazine, including a long piece assaulting Mearsheimer-Walt — “THE IGNORANCE AT THE HEART OF AN INNUENDO: And Now For Some Facts” — posted online April 28 and published in its print issue of May 8.

I do not agree with all of it. I think it's unfair to assume that Professors Walt and Mearsheimer meant to advance an anti-Semitic "innuendo." I also believe that Morris whitewashes the bumblings and unwise actions of Ehud Barak and other Israeli authorities — during, before and after the Camp David summit of 2000 — which contributed to the violently downward spiral that became the Al-Aksa Intifada. In other words, although fully worthy of the historian's indignation, Arafat and the Palestinians are not alone in a measure of responsibility for what went wrong.

But what I especially like about his article, is how Morris recounts succinctly and in complex detail, the early history of the conflict, rebutting the two professors' frightful ignorance of the facts.

If you choose to click on the link below to read this article, see if you agree that Morris is especially strong in relating the complexities of the War of Independence of 1947-48, in noting that it was really two wars — first a "civil war" with the Palestinian Arabs and then, upon Israel's declaration of independence, a war to repel invading Arab armies. Prof. Morris is particularly good in evaluating the relative strengths of the combatants — depending upon the time period examined (e.g., if before or after a ceasefire and a successful spate of Israel's arms purchases from abroad) and how one counts the number of troops in the field versus numbers in the rear, constituting a vital chain of supply and other forms of support.

The New Republic Online
THE IGNORANCE AT THE HEART OF AN INNUENDO.
And Now For Some Facts
by Benny Morris
Post date: 04.28.06
Issue date: 05.08.06

I.

John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" is a nasty piece of work. Some of what they assert regarding the terrorist tactics of certain Zionist groups during the 1930s, and the atrocities committed by Israeli troops in the War of 1948, and the harsh Israeli measures against the Palestinians during the second intifada, and certain activities of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States over the past decades--some of this is correct, and I realize as I write this sentence that it will henceforth be trotted out by the Mearsheimers and Walts of the world, as by their Arab admirers, while they omit the previous sentence and all that now follows. But what these distinguished professors have produced is otherwise depressing to anyone who values intellectual integrity.

Mearsheimer and Walt build their case mainly by means of omission: they tell certain facts while omitting others, sometimes more apt and crucial. And occasionally they distort facts and figures. The thesis of their study, which was supported by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, is that America's support of Israel runs contrary to American national interests, and that it is not grounded in "a compelling moral case." To establish the latter contention, they deny that Israel is the weaker party in the Arab-Israeli conflict; and that it is a democracy; and that "Israel's conduct has been morally superior to [that of] its adversaries."

In order to highlight the authors' methodology and to give an accurate picture of their scholarship, I wish to focus on several historical points that they make to sustain their case. (I will leave it to others to show what should be perfectly obvious: that the pro-Israel lobby is not the conspiratorial tail that wags the American dog.) I must confess to a personal interest in the matter. Like many pro-Arab propagandists at work today, Mearsheimer and Walt often cite my own books, sometimes quoting directly from them, in apparent corroboration of their arguments. Yet their work is a travesty of the history that I have studied and written for the past two decades. Their work is riddled with shoddiness and defiled by mendacity. Were "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" an actual person, I would have to say that he did not have a single honest bone in his body.



II.

I will begin with the question of the balance of forces between Israel and the Arab world--a political-military issue with moral overtones, because it begs the question of who in this conflict was, and remains, the underdog deserving of Western sympathy. Mearsheimer and Walt write that "Israel is often portrayed as weak and besieged, a Jewish David surrounded by a hostile Arab Goliath ... but the opposite image is closer to the truth." For some reason, weakness is commonly seen as entailing moral superiority, an illogical proposition.

I would recommend that they take a look at any atlas and yearbook for the key years of the conflict--1948, 1956, 1967, 1973. Even a child would notice that the Arab world, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, does actually "surround" Israel and is infinitely larger than the eight-thousand-square-mile Jewish state (which is the size of New Hampshire). He would notice also that the population of the confrontation states--Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq, who were often joined in their wars with Israel by expeditionary forces from Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Yemen--has always been at least twenty times greater than Israel's; and in 1948 it was about fifty times greater. The material resources of the Arab world similarly have been (as they still are) infinitely larger than Israel's.

It is true that Israel's "organizational ability" has enabled it to concentrate and focus its resources where they count in wartime, on the successive battlefields, with far greater efficiency than the Arabs; and it is true that Israel's troops, and especially its officer corps, have always been of a far higher caliber than the Arabs' counterparts; and it is true that the motivation of Israel's troops--often with their backs to the wall--has generally been superior to that of their Arab foes. But this is still a far cry from implying, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, regarding the war in 1947-1949, that Israel won its wars because "the Zionists had larger, better-equipped" forces than the Arabs.

During the October (or Yom Kippur) War in 1973, the Egyptians mustered about one million men under arms, and their Syrian allies some 400,000, when they launched their surprise attacks across the Suez Canal and on the Golan Heights. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) fielded 350,000 to 400,000 troops at most. The Israelis won that war because of superior "grit" and better quality of troops and organization, even though the wings of their better air force and tank corps were badly clipped by the Arabs' massive deployment of state-of-the-art missile shields.



As regards the war of 1948, the picture is more complex--but it is certainly not the picture painted by Mearsheimer and Walt of flat Israeli superiority. (I don't know about political science, but history--I mean good history--needs to account for complexity and nuance.) It is true that in the first part of the war, the "civil war" between the Jewish and Arab communities in Palestine (from late November 1947 until May 14, 1948, when the state of Israel came into being), the Jews enjoyed a gradually mobilized military superiority, owed primarily to better organization and only marginally to an advantage in some types of weaponry (mortars and possibly machine guns). But the Palestinians probably had an edge in light arms, the main armaments during the civil war. And they enjoyed the support of the 4,000-man Arab Liberation Army, consisting mainly of Syrian and Iraqi volunteers, which had field artillery, which the Yishuv--the Jewish community in Palestine--did not possess. Except in the last few weeks of the civil war, the Arabs probably had an overall edge in men-under-arms--say 15,000-30,000 to the Yishuv's 15,000-25,000; but they proved unable to bring the advantage to bear in the successive battlefields. The militiamen of Nablus and Hebron, where no fighting occurred, saw no reason to come to the aid of their embattled brothers in Jaffa and Haifa.

During the second and conventional phase of the war (mid-May 1948 to January 1949), which was fought between the invading armies of the Arab states--Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan (supplemented by Sudanese, Saudi, Yemeni, and Moroccan contingents)--and the newborn state of Israel, the Arab side began with an overwhelming, or what should have been an overwhelming, advantage in equipment and firepower. In the first fortnight of the invasion, the Arabs had more than seventy combat aircraft, Spitfires and Furies, and the Yishuv had none. (The Israelis assembled and sent into action their first four combat aircraft, Czech-built Messerschmidt 109s, on May 29, and lost two of them.) During the following months, the Arabs continued to enjoy an overwhelming advantage in combat aircraft. Until the end of June, certainly, the Arab invaders possessed a massive superiority in all other types of heavy weaponry: they deployed about two hundred standard armored fighting vehicles (Humbers, Daimlers, and Marmon Harringtons), many of them mounting two- and six-pounder cannon; dozens of tanks (Cruiser, Locust, Mark 6, and Renault); and dozens of artillery pieces. The Israelis had two tanks, one of them without a gun; and one, then two, batteries of light pre-World War I-vintage 65mm Mountain artillery; and makeshift armored cars, civilian trucks patched up with steel plates in Tel Aviv workshops.

During the following months, until the war's practical end in January 1949 (the war formally ended in a series of armistice agreements signed between February and July), the Arab edge in heavy weaponry gradually decreased, partly as a result of attrition and the failure to acquire spare parts and ammunition, and partly because of Israel's successful arms purchases in Czechoslovakia and the West. But at the end of hostilities the Arabs still had more fighter aircraft and tanks, and perhaps even artillery, than the Israelis--though they lacked the expertise to use them and, over time, progressively lacked the necessary spare parts and munitions to deploy them effectively. The Israelis managed to circumvent the international arms embargo that had been imposed on the Middle East; the Arabs tried to do so, but largely failed.

As for manpower, the picture of relative force remains somewhat murky. The reason for the incompleteness of our knowledge is simple. Israel's archives are open, and the figures for the Israeli side are clear and available; but the archives of all the Arab states, which are dictatorships, remain closed. Thus the figures about Arab military manpower at given stages of the war remain partial and tentative, based perforce mainly on IDF intelligence estimates. But according to the latest research, particularly the work of Amitzur Ilan and Yehoshua Ben-Aryeh and Asaf Agin, the invading Arab troops (in the third week of May 1948) numbered 22,000 to 28,000, bolstered by several thousand irregulars, while the Haganah, the mainstream Zionist militia, which became the IDF on June 1, 1948, fielded some 27,000 to 30,000 troops, with another 6,000 elderly Home Guardsmen, and some 2,000 to 3,000 IZL members. (The IZL was the Irgun Zva'i Leumi, or National Military Organization, a terrorist-militia group of the Zionist right.) But the invading Arab forces were all combat troops, teeth formations, who were backed, in terms of logistics, training, and so on, by at least a similar number of rear-echelon base camp troops; whereas the Haganah figure includes both combat troops (all told, about 16,000 to 17,000) and rear echelon units.

In mid-October, the balance stood at 79,000-95,000 to 47,000-53,000 in favor of the Israelis, who vastly expanded their recruitment. But again, the figure for the Arabs represents the numbers engaged in Palestine, not the full roll call of the relevant Arab armies, with their rear echelons. (All these figures relate to ground forces; the air and naval forces of the two sides, which were negligible in terms of manpower and importance, are omitted.) It is perhaps worth adding that in 1948 Israel suffered just over 6,000 dead, one-third of them civilians, out of a total population of 650,000 to 700,000--or one killed and two seriously wounded out of every hundred in the population--in the course of a year-long war that was launched, in two stages, by the Palestinian Arabs (in November-December 1947) and by the Arab states (in May 1948) after they had rejected the United Nations Partition Resolution of November 29, 1947. (Had America suffered a similar proportion of casualties in the Vietnam War, there would have been more than two million dead and four million wounded.) Arab losses in 1948 are uncertain. It is usually estimated that about 8,000 Palestinians died, and that the Arab armies' fatalities were about half that number.

So yes, Israel won each of its wars against the Arab states. But no, this was not because it had greater manpower or more equipment; it usually had less of each. The wars were decided by the failure of the significantly stronger and more populous Arab world to mobilize its resources or concentrate its forces where they counted, or to provide them with adequate leadership.



III.

This brings us to Israel's recent conflict with the Palestinians, on a lower level of intensity but still ongoing, and to its treatment by Mearsheimer and Walt. Without a doubt, the ratio of Israeli power to Palestinian power in 2000-2005, the years of the second intifada, was at least 100:1 in Israel's favor, in terms of raw conventional military strength. (This, without taking into account Israel's non-conventional military capabilities.) This intifada, this war, was launched by the Palestinians, who enjoyed the propaganda benefit of underdog status. The photograph of the disheveled stone-throwing or Kalashnikov-brandishing fighter facing down the Merkava Mark-III main battle tank became a representative image of this conflict. But it was a misleading representation. For the fearsome Merkava tanks almost never used their firepower against the Palestinians, much as the IAF F-16s and Apache attack helicopters usually (but not always) attacked empty Palestinian public buildings or individual terrorists in cars. The Hamas and Fatah fighters operated from behind a shield of Palestinian civilians and from crowded urban refugee camps and neighborhoods, and so Israel fought with both hands tied behind its back. Its actual firepower--its tanks, aircraft, and cannon--was never unleashed.

This accounts for the relatively low number of Arab deaths (four thousand in five years of warfare), and the relatively low proportion of Arab to Jewish deaths (3.5:1), as compared with the actual calculus of Israeli versus Arab military strength (100:1) and the relative proportion of armed to unarmed Arab casualties (about 2:1). Most of the Arabs killed in the intifada, despite the fact that it was mostly fought in heavily populated Arab areas, were armed fighters, not civilians. And the ratio of armed to unarmed Arab casualties has steadily risen in recent years as the IDF has perfected its modus operandi and become more careful. The famous battle of the Jenin refugee camp in spring 2002 is an illuminating example. Arab lies and gullible journalism about an indiscriminate slaughter notwithstanding (Human Rights Watch and other non-partisan bodies subsequently upheld the Israeli version), only fifty-three Jeninites died, all but five or six of them armed combatants. Israel lost twenty-three infantrymen in the battle. Had Israel dealt with that Fatah-Hamas bastion as, say, the Russians dealt with Grozny--from afar, with massive ground and aerial bombardments--no Israeli lives would have been lost, and Jenin would no longer be standing.

Throughout the second intifada, Israeli policy was to avoid, so far as possible, harm to non-combatants, and the IDF generally took great operational care to avoid civilian casualties. Some "collateral damage" did occur, given the nature of the battlefield. Some Israeli soldiers were trigger-happy and exceeded orders. But generally the targeted killing of terrorists--who see themselves, quite correctly, as soldiers in a war, and hence are legitimate targets for attack--resulted in few civilian casualties. (The Israeli air and artillery attacks in Gaza earlier this month offer a characteristic example: of eighteen Arabs killed, fifteen or sixteen, by Palestinian admission, were combatants.)

On the other hand, during the second intifada Arab attacks on Israelis claimed twice as many civilians' lives as soldiers' lives. (Mearsheimer and Walt bury this fact in a footnote, without explanation.) This was a result of deliberation and intention, not accident. Throughout the intifada, Hamas, Fatah, and Islamic Jihad primarily targeted "soft" civilian targets (buses, restaurants, shopping malls, and last week a Tel Aviv falafel kiosk), preferring them to "hard" military targets, which were more difficult and more dangerous. The Palestinian objective was to sow terror in Israel's rear areas. The difference in strategy, and all that this implies in terms of moral orientation, was stark. The Palestinian aim was to kill as many civilians as possible; and the Palestinian masses rejoiced in the streets of Gaza and Ramallah every time a suicide bomber successfully blew up a bus or a shopping mall or a café in Israel. And this, historically speaking, was merely a refinement of the Palestinian tactics of terror used against the Yishuv since the 1920s (and not, as Arab propagandists would have it, only after 1967).

The IDF's aim, by contrast, was to kill guerrillas/terrorists and their commanders, such as Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Mearsheimer and Walt misleadingly call him the "spiritual" head of Hamas. One might, with equal accuracy, call Hitler the "spiritual" head of the Nazi Party. Neither actually murdered anyone with his bare hands. But their differences notwithstanding, both were the organizational and operational directors of their respective movements, as well as the movements' "spiritual" leaders.

IV.

In their survey of the conflict's history, Mearsheimer and Walt write that "the mainstream Zionist leadership was not interested in establishing a bi-national state or accepting a permanent partition of Palestine ... To achieve this goal [of turning all of Palestine into a sovereign Jewish state], the Zionists had to expel large numbers of Arabs from the territory that would eventually become Israel. There was simply no other way to accomplish their objective. ... This opportunity came in 1947-1948, when Jewish forces drove up to 700,000 Palestinians into exile. ... The fact that the creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian people was well understood by Israel's leaders." Let us examine these assertions one by one.

Mearsheimer and Walt are implicitly arguing that the Zionist movement never really wanted or accepted a compromise--at the very least, that the Jewish national movement was no different from the Palestinian national movement, which always demanded a one-state solution and rejected a compromise based on partition. Now, it is true that Zionism sought the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, not a bi-national state in which Jews would enjoy minority status in yet another Muslim-Arab land or in which there would be temporary Jewish-Muslim parity--which, as everybody understood, given the high Arab birth rate, would quickly be transformed into a state with an Arab majority and a Jewish minority. But the acceptance or non-acceptance of partition is another matter. Mearsheimer and Walt imply that down to (and maybe even beyond) 1948, the Zionist leadership rejected the partition of Palestine. This is simply false, no matter what misleading quotations they cull from eminent Israeli historians.

Until 1936-1937, certainly, the Zionist mainstream sought to establish a Jewish state over all of Palestine. But something began to change fundamentally during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, which was conducted against the background of resurgent anti-Semitism in Europe and the threat of genocide. In July 1937, the British royal commission headed by Lord Peel recommended the partition of Palestine, with the Jews to establish their own state on some 20 percent of the land and the bulk of the remainder to fall under Arab sovereignty (ultimately to be conjoined to the Emirate of Transjordan, ruled by the Emir Abdullah). The commission also recommended the transfer--by agreement or "voluntarily," and if necessary by force--of all or most of the Arabs from the area destined for Jewish statehood. The Zionist right, the Revisionist movement, rejected the proposals. But mainstream Zionism, representing 80 to 90 percent of the movement, was thrown into ferocious debate; and, shepherded by David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leadership ended up formally accepting the principle of partition, if not the actual award of 20 percent of the land. The movement resolved that the Peel proposals were a basis for further negotiation.

It is true that Ben-Gurion harbored a hope, in 1937, that such a partition would be but a "first step," to be followed by eventual Zionist expansion throughout Palestine. But the years that followed sobered Zionism and changed the movement's thinking. The movement's formal acceptance of the principle of partition was gradually digested and incorporated into the mentality of the Zionist mainstream, which understood that the Jewish people needed an immediate safe haven from European savagery, and that the movement would have to take what history was offering and could gain no more. The Jewish nationalist leaders called this "pragmatism."

By November 1947, the Zionists' reconciliation to a partial realization of their dreams was complete (except on the fringes of the movement), and Zionism's mainstream, led by Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, once and for all internalized the necessity of partition and accepted the U.N. partition resolution. The 1948 war was fought by Israel with a partitionist outlook, and it ended in partition (with the West Bank and East Jerusalem under Jordanian rule and the Gaza Strip controlled by Egypt), despite Israel's military superiority at its conclusion. During the following two decades, down to June 1967, there was a general acceptance by the Israeli mainstream of the fact, and the permanence, of partition.

As is well known, the Israeli victory and conquests of 1967 re-awakened the controversy about partition and for a time empowered the "Greater Israel" anti-partitionists, until their decline and fall, which began with Yitzhak Rabin's election to the premiership in 1992. Partition--or a two-state solution--remained the goal of all Rabin's successors: Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, and most notably Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert (though not Benjamin Netanyahu), and also of the bulk of the Israeli public. But Mearsheimer and Walt do not venture into this significant field.

The Palestinian story was different. The Palestinian national movement, from its inception up to 2000, from Haj Amin al Husseini to Yasser Arafat, backed by the Arab world, rejected a two-state solution. There was no great debate. The Palestinian leadership rejected the 1937 and 1947 partition plans (and the Begin-Sadat "autonomy plan" of 1978, which would have led to a two-state solution), and insisted that the Jews had no right to even an inch of Palestine. And the Palestinian government of today, led by the popularly elected Hamas, continues to espouse this uncompromising, anti-partitionist one-state position. All of this is completely ignored in Mearsheimer and Walt's "history."



V.

And now to the issue of transfer and expulsion. It is true, as Mearsheimer and Walt observe, quoting me, that "the idea of transfer is as old as modern Zionism and has accompanied its evolution and praxis during the past century." But once again the matter is complicated, and the problem of who said and did what, and where, and when, and why, is all-important. This complexity has proved too great for Mearsheimer and Walt to handle.

Zionist leaders, from Herzl through Ben-Gurion and Weizmann, between 1881 and the mid-1940s, occasionally expressed support for the "transfer" of Arabs, or of "the Arabs," out of the territory of the future Jewish state. But three salient facts must be recalled. First, the Zionist leadership throughout never adopted the idea as part of the movement's political platform; nor did it ever figure in the platforms of any of the major Zionist parties. Second, the Zionist leaders generally said, and believed, that a Jewish majority would be achieved in Palestine, or in whatever part of it became a Jewish state, by means of massive Jewish immigration, and that this immigration would also materially benefit the Arab population (which it generally did during the Mandate). Third, the awful idea of transfer was resurrected and pressed by Zionist leaders at particular historical junctures, at moments of acute crisis, in response to Arab waves of violence that seemed to vitiate the possibility of Arab-Jewish co-existence in a single state, and in response to waves of European anti-Semitic violence that, from the Zionist viewpoint, necessitated the achievement of a safe haven for Europe's oppressed and threatened Jews. Such a haven required space in which to settle the Jewish masses and an environment free of murderous Arabs: this, indeed, was the logic behind the Peel Commission's transfer recommendation.

Moreover, during the 1930s and 1940s, the espoused policy of the leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement, the Muslim cleric Haj Amin al Husseini, was frankly expulsionist about the Yishuv. He repeatedly stated that he was willing, in his future Palestinian state, to accommodate as citizens only those Jews who had been residents or citizens of Palestine up to 1917--say, 60,000 to 80,000 in all. When asked in 1937 by the Peel Commission what he intended to do with the 80 percent of the Jews who had been born in or come to Palestine after that date, he responded that time will tell. The commissioners understood him to mean that they were destined for expulsion or worse.

In other words, the surge in thinking about transfer in the late 1930s among mainstream Zionist leaders was in part a response to the expulsionist mentality of the Palestinians, which was reinforced by ongoing Arab violence and terrorism. The violence resulted in Britain's severely curtailing immigration to Palestine, thus assuring that many Jews who otherwise might have been saved were left stranded in Europe (and consigned to death), while at the same time foreclosing the traditional Zionist option and aim of achieving a Jewish majority in Palestine through immigration. Mearsheimer and Walt rightly take to task the anti-Arab terrorism of the Irgun in those years; but they omit to mention that the Irgun unleashed its bloody operations in response to Arab terrorism, and that in any case it represented only the fringe right wing of the Zionist movement, of which the mainstream--unlike the Palestinian Arab national movement--consistently rejected and condemned terrorism.

During the early 1940s, against the backdrop of the Holocaust and official British deliberations about a postwar solution to the Palestine problem based on partition, all understood (as had the Peel Commission) that any partition not accompanied by a transfer of Arabs out of the territory of the Jewish-state-to-be would be unstable or pointless, as the large Arab minority, if left in place, would be disloyal and rebellious, and would inevitably enjoy the support of the surrounding Arab world. Such a settlement would solve nothing. British officials and Arab heads of state (who, of course, feared to state these views in public) shared this view. That is why the British Labour Party Executive in 1944 supported partition accompanied by transfer, and that is why Jordan's Emir Abdullah and Iraq's prime minister Nuri Said, among other Arab statesmen, supported such a population transfer if Palestine was to be partitioned.

And, indeed, in 1947-1948 the Palestinian Arabs, supported by the surrounding Arab world, rebelled against the U.N. partition resolution and unleashed a bloody civil war, which was followed by a pan-Arab invasion. The war resulted in a large, partial transfer of population. The chaos that all had foreseen if Palestine were partitioned without an orderly population transfer in fact enveloped the country. But this is emphatically not to say, as Mearsheimer and Walt do, that the Zionists' occasional ruminations about transfer were translated in 1947-1948 into a overall plan and policy--unleashed, as they put it, when the "opportunity came," as if what occurred in 1948 was a general and premeditated expulsion.

The Zionist leadership accepted the partition plan, which provided for a Jewish state in 55 percent of Palestine with 550,000 Jews and between 400,000 and 500,000 Arabs. The Jewish Agency called on the Arabs to desist from violence, and promised a life of beneficial co-existence. In private, Zionist officials began planning agricultural and regional development that took into account the large Arab minority and its continued citizenship in the new Jewish state. Indeed, down to the end of March 1948, after four months of the Palestinian Arab assault on the Yishuv, backed by the Arab League, Zionist policy was geared to the establishment of a Jewish state with a large Arab minority. Haganah policy throughout these months was to remain on the defensive, to avoid hitting civilians, and generally to refrain from spreading the conflagration to parts of Palestine still untouched by warfare. Indeed, on March 24, 1948, Yisrael Galili, the head of the Haganah National Command, the political leadership of the organization, issued a secret blanket directive to all brigades and units to abide by long-standing official Zionist policy toward the Arab communities in the territory of the emergent Jewish state--to secure "the full rights, needs, and freedom of the Arabs in the Hebrew state without discrimination" and to strive for "co-existence with freedom and respect," as he put it. And this was not a document devised for Western or U.N. eyes, with a propagandistic purpose; it was a secret, blanket, internal operational directive, in Hebrew.

It was only at the start of April, with its back to the wall (much of the Yishuv, in particular Jewish Jerusalem, was being strangled by Arab ambushes along the roads) and facing the prospect of pan-Arab invasion six weeks hence, that the Haganah changed its strategy and went over to the offensive, and began uprooting Palestinian communities, unsystematically and without a general policy. Needless to say, the invasion by the combined armies of the Arab states on May 15 only hardened Yishuv hearts toward the Palestinians who had summoned the invaders, whose declared purpose--as Azzam Pasha, the secretary-general of the Arab League, put it--was to re-enact a Mongol-like massacre, or, as others said, to drive the Jews into the sea. And yet Israel never adopted a general policy of expulsion (or incarceration--as did the United States in its internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, without being under direct existential threat), which accounts for the fact that 160,000 Arabs remained in Israel and became citizens in 1949. They accounted for more than 15 percent of the country's population.

From Mearsheimer and Walt, you would never suspect that the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem in 1948 occurred against the backdrop, and as the result, of a war--a war that for the Jews was a matter of survival, and which those same Palestinians and their Arab brothers had launched. To omit this historical background is bad history--and stark dishonesty. It is quite true, and quite understandable, that the Israeli government during the war decided to bar a return of the refugees to their homes--to bar the return of those who, before becoming refugees, had attempted to destroy the Jewish state and whose continued loyalty to the Jewish state, if they were readmitted, would have been more than questionable. There was nothing "innocent," as Mearsheimer and Walt put it, about the Palestinians and their behavior before their eviction-evacuation in 1947-1948 (as there was nothing innocent about Haj Amin al Husseini's work for the Nazis in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, broadcasting anti-Allied propaganda and recruiting Muslim troops for the Wehrmacht). And what befell the Palestinians was not "a moral crime," whatever that might mean; it was something the Palestinians brought down upon themselves, with their own decisions and actions, their own historical agency. But they like to deny their historical agency, and many "sympathetic" outsiders like to abet them in this illusion, which is significantly responsible for their continued statelessness.



VI.

One last historical point, about contemporary history. Mearsheimer and Walt recycle the canard that Israel and the United States offered the Palestinians nothing of worth, nothing that they should have accepted, in the negotiations in 2000. They write that Barak's peace proposals at Camp David offered the Palestinians "a disarmed and dismembered set of 'Bantustans' under de facto Israeli control." But according to the most reliable witnesses and participants in the talks--and the Palestinian side, for good reason, has never produced a detailed description of the negotiations at Camp David, a day-by-day account of who offered what and when--by the end of the Camp David negotiation in the summer of 2000 Barak had offered the Palestinians a state comprising 90 to 91 percent of the West Bank, 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, and functional control of parts of East Jerusalem. A bridge or tunnel would have connected the West Bank and Gaza. Was this really not a reasonable basis for Palestinian sovereignty? But Arafat said no and walked out, and the Palestinians launched the second intifada.

And unlike what readers might infer from Mearsheimer and Walt, this was not the end of that year's diplomatic process. In December, President Clinton--with Barak's approval--improved the deal, offering the Palestinians 94 to 96 percent of the West Bank (with territorial compensation elsewhere for the 4 to 6 percent lost), 100 percent of the Gaza Strip, sovereignty over East Jerusalem including at least half of the Old City, sovereignty over the surface of the disputed Temple Mount, and massive help to rehabilitate the refugees. Again the Palestinians said no, and continued shooting. The Israeli Cabinet, with a heavy heart, endorsed the Clinton parameters. The Americans and the Israelis, contrary to Mearsheimer and Walt, most certainly offered the Palestinians "a viable state of their own." It was precisely such a state that the Palestinians, in their stupidity, turned down.

Accurate descriptions and maps of the Israeli offer in July and the Israeli-endorsed Clinton parameters of December--as well as the Palestinians' spurious map of what was offered them--may be found in Dennis Ross's The Missing Peace. Ross was the chief American Middle East negotiator. (Mearsheimer and Walt rely on a map contained in The New Intifada, edited by Roane Carey; but Ross, unlike Carey, was party to and knew in great detail what went on, and was privy to all the documentation.) In his autobiography, Clinton backs to the hilt Ross's version of what was said and offered (as does Shlomo Ben-Ami, who was the Israeli foreign minister at the time, in his recent book Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy, which elsewhere is highly critical of Israel). All three state clearly that Arafat said no. Mearsheimer and Walt, amateur students of the subject with a political ax to grind, transform this no into a yes.

I say amateur students because there are outrageously incorrect historical assertions in Mearsheimer and Walt's work, often buried in the footnotes. For instance, footnote 10 states: "It is also worth noting that the British favored the Zionists over the Palestinians during the period of the British Mandate (1919-1948)." But during the Mandate, both Arabs and Jews were "Palestinians"; and the Mandate began de facto in 1917-1918, when the British conquered Palestine, in two stages, from the Turks; or in 1920, when the civilian administration was installed and the San Remo conference endorsed the Mandate ("1919" is in any case a meaningless date in this regard). And most importantly, the British government clearly "favored" Zionism in the years between 1917 and 1936 (though many of its officers and officials in Palestine, including some of the high commissioners, did not); but it certainly did not in the years between 1938 and 1948. In 1939, Whitehall published a White Paper that portended and backed the establishment in Palestine of an Arab-majority state (Husseini rejected that, too); and in 1947 the British abstained when the U.N. General Assembly authorized partition and Jewish statehood; and in 1947-1948 the British provided the Egyptian and Iraqi armies with arms and advice, and in 1948 they provided money, arms, and leadership to the Jordanian Army, the Arab Legion, as it battled the Jewish state under the command of a British officer, John Glubb. The British can hardly be described in 1939-1948 as pro-Zionist, though Ben-Gurion's traditional depiction of them in 1948 as orchestrating the pan-Arab assault on Israel was also wide of the mark.

Consider some other examples. On page 6, Mearsheimer and Walt assert that Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish-American naval intelligence analyst in the 1980s, provided Israel with classified American material, "which Israel reportedly passed onto the Soviet Union to gain more exit visas for Soviet Jewry." To the best of my knowledge, this is a lie. On page 9, Mearsheimer and Walt write that "citizenship [of Israel] is based on the principle of blood kinship." This is an outrageous assertion, with the worst possible echoes. The truth is that since the state's inception, 15 to 20 percent of Israel's citizens have been Muslim and Christian Arabs. In 1948-1949, citizenship was granted to all persons living in the country, regardless of race or religion, and it is granted by law after five years of residency and the satisfaction of various qualifications (as in all western democracies) to applicants today regardless of race or religion--though it is true that Jewish immigrants can and do receive citizenship upon arrival in Israel, and it is also true that Israel is a Jewish state, as France is (and, I hope, will remain) a French state and Britain is a British state. On page 12, Mearsheimer and Walt write, referring to my book Israel's Border Wars, 1949-1956, that Israel's retaliatory strikes in the early 1950s "were actually part of a broader effort to expand Israel's borders." This is incorrect--and had they used my book honestly, they could not have reached such a conclusion. On page 10, they observe that "The Arabs ... had been in continuous possession of [Palestine] for 1300 years," which is incorrect, and that there were "only about 15,000 Jews in Palestine" in 1882, which is also incorrect. (Typically, Mearsheimer and Walt cite as their authority Justin McCarthy's The Population of Palestine, without noting that he also assumed the existence of additional thousands of Jews in Palestine who were not Ottoman citizens.) And so on.

In their introduction, Mearsheimer and Walt tell their readers that "the facts recounted here are not in serious dispute among scholars.... The evidence on which they rest is not controversial." This is ludicrous. I would offer their readers a contrary proposition: that the "facts" presented by Mearsheimer and Walt suggest a fundamental ignorance of the history with which they deal, and that the "evidence" they deploy is so tendentious as to be evidence only of an acute bias. That is what will be not in serious dispute among scholars.
Benny Morris , a professor Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University, is the author, most recently, of The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge University Press).

Copyright 2006, The New Republic

More on Mearsheimer-Walt

The following is a thoughtful analysis of the issues raised by the Mearsheimer-Walt paper and related articles on the so-called Israel Lobby. The author is a former Soviet Jew who immigrated to the United States 15-20 years ago, and is a longtime prominent commentator on Russian affairs.

Simes apparently knows Mearsheimer personally and felt the need to defend him against the charge of anti-Semitism. Although the main point of Simes' piece is to protest against such personal or out-sized attacks, his criticisms of Mearsheimer and Walt's actual work are well-taken and well expressed. It was more serious a critique (and also clearly sympathetic to Israel) than those of Judt and other M & W defenders, who establish their "fairness" by registering a token criticism of M & W, here or there, while REALLY wanting to defend them and to bash pro-Israel Jews.

Click on the Web link if you want to read the entire article.

UNREALISTS By Dimitri K. Simes, Nixon Center/National Interest, May 26, 2006

.... Beginning in the late 1990s, a highly vocal group of
neoconservatives—many involved in the Project for a New American
Century—started a crusade for regime change in Iraq. In letters,
articles and speeches, they argued that there was no other way to
deal with Iraq than by wholesale regime change—and they did not
hesitate to attack those who disagreed with their assessment as
unpatriotic or cowardly. Removing Saddam Hussein was deemed to be
such a priority that, almost immediately after 9/11, then-Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was arguing that the United
States should attack Iraq before dealing with Al-Qaeda's sanctuary
in Afghanistan.

Champions of regime change in Iraq were certainly not limited to
Jewish Americans or, even more generally, to supporters of Israel.
But it is also clear that many of those who were vociferous
proponents of the Iraq invasion were also those who
enthusiastically endorsed and even encouraged policy proposals
advanced by the segment of the Israeli political spectrum in
Benyamin Netanyahu's corner of the Likud Party—essentially
requiring the United States to promote permanent revolution in the
Middle East as the only way to ensure Israel's security and
survival. Those who disagreed with this agenda were accused of
being soft on terror and, in more recent years, of being "enemies
of democracy", unsympathetic to Israel, or worse.

The important yet troubling discussion of the Israeli lobby this
spring is a dramatic illustration of our difficulty in having an
honest conversation about U.S. foreign policy among ourselves. The
"scandal" started when two professors—John Mearsheimer of the
University of Chicago (who is also a valued member of The National
Interest's Advisory Council) and Stephen Walt of Harvard
University—published a "working paper" that concluded that U.S.
foreign policy has been twisted by the "Israel Lobby" to such a
degree that it no longer reflects fundamental American interests
and values.

I disagree with many points in the paper, beginning with its first
footnote, which asserts that the very existence of an Israel lobby
suggests that a pro-Israel policy "is not in the American national
interest." Policy in the modern American system is not determined
by a council of the learned and the disinterested. Fundamental to
our democracy is the notion that those with an interest in shaping
decisions should organize, advise and advocate—and anyone who wants
a role needs a lobby.

Also, although they acknowledge that what they call "the Lobby" is
in fact a "loose coalition of individuals and organizations",
Mearsheimer and Walt never made sufficient distinctions among the
many groups and individuals who support Israel to varying degrees
for varying reasons. Being committed to Israel's secure existence
does not necessarily make someone a member of "the Lobby", and
grouping together organizations and individuals with very different
philosophies and agendas only confuses both who Israel's supporters
are and how they exercise influence in Washington. Some groups,
like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, are clearly
lobbyists and would not deny it. Others have strong affection for
Israel but act entirely on their own without any direction from
anyone inside or outside the United States.

And there are people like me, who disagree with specific Israeli policies on many
occasions, particularly on the settlements, but are not prepared to
dictate to Israel how to protect itself while it is subject to
regular terrorist attacks and menacing threats from Iran. (And here
I must note that Mearsheimer and Walt might have had greater
credibility if they had acknowledged that Israel never had a
credible Palestinian partner willing and able to assure the
security of the Jewish state in exchange for territorial
concessions.)

One can also fault Mearsheimer and Walt for a lack of
nuance or sensitivity. They do not express any special sympathy for
the Jewish predicament in the Middle East or in Europe, the
Holocaust notwithstanding. On a personal level, as someone who
experienced anti-Semitism firsthand in the Soviet Union, I would
have welcomed a little more understanding on their part—but there
is a great difference between not being particularly sympathetic to
a person or group and expressing bigotry or hatred, such as
anti-Semitism. Nothing in Mearsheimer and Walt's paper merits the
latter accusation.

Still, Mearsheimer and Walt are serious people raising serious
issues in a serious way. They—and by extension all Americans who
want a rational discussion about U.S. foreign policy—deserve better
than the virtual lynching to which they were subjected by some
influential pundits. A former Israeli official commented that it is
"certainly time for a debate. Sadly, if predictably, response to
the Harvard study has been characterized by a combination of the
shrill and the smug"—including charges of bigotry, hatred and
anti-Semitism....

Again, if you want to read the entire article, click here for the Web link.