Alan Hart

My blog has moved to www.alanhart.net

2009-05-19T18:41:00.002+01:00

Dear Readers,

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A Call For Murder

2009-03-21T10:52:00.000Z

Question:Who said the following?

"We must kill all terrorist leaders, starting with Mahmoud Abbas, and all others."

Answer: Nadia Matar, co-chairwoman of the pro-settler Israeli group Women For Israel's Tomorrow also known as Women in Green.

When did she say it?

Wednesday 18 March 2009.

Where did she say it?

In the Edmond J. Safra Synagogue in New York City.

How did the audience respond?

With applause.

We know all of the above from a report published the following day the by JTA - The Jewish Telegraph Agency, "The Global News Service of the Jewish People". It noted that Matar's comments were recorded by Philip Weiss.

If Nadia Matar had been a Muslim calling in a Mosque for the murder of one named Israeli leader and unnamed others, she would have been denounced as a Jew hater and charged with incitement to murder.

Will anything happen to the Israeli Nadia Matar? No. Why not? As I have written in my book Zionism, The Real Enemy of the Jews, and often say on public platforms, there are two sets of rules for the behaviour of states and their citizens - one set for all the nations of the world minus only the Zionist state of Israel, and one set exclusively for Israel and Israelis.This shocking and awesome double-standard is the Mother and Father of the hurt, humiliation, despair and anger which is radicalising the entire Arab and wider Muslim world.

Oh Dear, Mr. President, Perhaps You Can't

2009-03-11T21:10:00.000Z

Follow-up to yesterday's open letter to President Obama

Dear President Obama,

In my open letter to you yesterday, I said that your decision in the teeth of Zionist lobby opposition to give Charles W. Freeman the responsibility for producing the National Intelligence Estimate added real substance to the belief "that you really do want to prevent this lobby from determining (more or less) your foreign policy agenda as it relates to ending the Israel-Palestine conflict and, beyond that, winning what your predecessor called "the war against global terrorism." Very soon after I posted the letter and it was published here on the admirable ICH web site, news came that Ambassador Freeman "had asked for the appointment not to proceed".

My own immediate response was to wonder if it was pure co-incidence that shortly before this news, National Security director Dennis Blair had, in effect, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that Israel's leaders and their lobby in America were massively exaggerating the alleged nuclear threat from Iran. What he actually said was that Tehran had only low-enriched uranium, which would need processing to be used for weapons, and that Iran did not yet possess the technology to do this processing and, in fact, had "not yet made the decision" to convert the low-enriched uranium. This was in stark contrast to the assertion of General Amos Yadin, Director of Israeli Military Intelligence, that Iran had "crossed the technological threshold" and was now capable of making a (nuclear) weapon. The other contrast with Yadin's assertion was in the statement made to the Senate Armed Services Committee by the Israeli's American counterpart, General Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He said Israel and the US had "the same information but came to different conclusions".

I also thought it was not unreasonable to speculate that implicit in what both director Blair and General Maples told senators was a message to the effect that Israel's leaders and their lobby in America were exaggerating the threat to put pressure on you, Mr. President, to do what even your predecessor refused to do - give Israel the greenlight to attack selected sites in Iran (most probably with nuclear-tipped, bunker busting missiles supplied by America).

I also noted that shortly before he briefed senators, director Blair had defended Ambassador Freeman and his appointment.

Taken at face value, Ambassador Freeman's own explanation of why he had asked for his appointment not to proceed suggests that it was his own decision. In a posting to the web site for the magazine Foreign Policy, he wrote (my emphasis added): "I have concluded that the barrage of libelous distortions of my record would not cease upon my entry into office. The effort to smear me and to destroy my credibility would instead continue. I do not believe the National Intelligence Council could function effectively while its chair was under constant attack by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country." (Translated, what he seemed to me to be saying was that he is not prepared to work with a bunch of traitors).

But even if it really was Ambassador Freeman's own decision, I have a question for you, Mr. President.

You presumably appointed him, or approved his appointment on the recommendation of Director Blair, only after very careful consideration, and, in full knowledge that when he was named for the post of chair of the NIC, and because he was critical of Israeli policy, the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress and the media would seek by all and any means, fair and foul, to destroy his credibility, in order to prevent him taking up the post. In other words, you must have decided initially that, because his appointment was so important if you were not to be lied to as your predecessor was, you could and would take the heat from the Zionist lobby. My question is this: Even if the decision was Ambassador Freeman's own, not yours, did you make any attempt to persuade to him to reconsider it and take the Zionist lobby's heat?

I think an answer to the effect that you shared his view that the NIC could not function effectively if its chair was under constant attack directed by the Zionist lobby would not be good enough. Why not? Because it would indicate that you, too, Mr. President, have surrendered to the Zionist lobby. Either you're in charge of your foreign policy and can make your own appointments or you're not and can't.

With a conspirator's hat on (I don't often wear it), I can hear your Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, saying to you something like: "Mr. President, if this Freeman appointment goes ahead, you'll find yourself in confrontation with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu." Of course I would like to think that such a conversation did not actually take place.

Yours sincerely,

Alan Hart

Footnote: This follow-up letter was not published by ICH (Information Clearing House) as the first one was, most probably because my postings to ICH are sometimes blocked by an agent or agency unknown.

Open Letter to President Obama - Yes, You Could.

2009-03-10T19:24:00.000Z

Dear President Obama,

In the teeth of Zionist lobby opposition, your decision to give veteran diplomat Charles W. Freeman the responsibility for producing the National Intelligence Estimate adds substance to the case for believing that you really do want to prevent this lobby from determining (more or less) your foreign policy agenda as it relates to ending the Israel-Palestine conflict and, beyond that, winning what your predecessor called "the war against global terrorism". The world, and not least the Jews of the world, needs you to be successful in this effort. In my assessment your chances of success will be greatly improved if you are prepared to look one Great Truth in the face. It is that Israel's political and military leaders are not interested (and never have been) in peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept.

I emphasized leaders in the sentence above to indicate my belief that, for policy making purposes, a distinction must be made between Israel's leaders and most if not all of the Jewish citizens of Israel, the voters. A related Great Truth is that they, too, have been brainwashed by Zionist propaganda. I mean that it was not only the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian or Western world that was conditioned by Zionism's spin doctors to believe that poor little Israel has lived in constant danger of annihilation - the "driving into the sea" of its Jews. The Jews of Israel were also fed the same propaganda nonsense by their leaders.

As I document in my book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, (the American edition of Volume One is being published by Clarity Press in April with the sub-title The False Messiah), Israel's existence has never, ever, been in danger from any combination of Arab military force. Not in 1948. Not in 1956. Not in 1967. And not even in 1973. Zionism's assertion to the contrary was the cover that allowed Israel to get away where it mattered most, in America and Western Europe, with presenting its aggression as self-defense and itself as the victim when actually it was, and is, the oppressor.

Since you, Mr. President, are unlikely to have the time to read my book (even if you had the inclination), I'd like you to be aware of one tiny fragment of its substance. It's at the end of the Prologue to Volume One which is titled Waiting for the Apocalypse. I quote from a conversation I had in 1980 with then retired Major General Shlomo Gazit, the best and the brightest of Israel's Directors of Military Intelligence. Over coffee one morning when I was the linkman in a secret, exploratory dialogue between Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, I took a very deep breath and said to Shlomo: "I've come to the conclusion that it's all a myth. Israel's existence has never, ever, been in danger." Through a sad smile, he replied, "The trouble with us Israelis is that we've become the victims of our own propaganda." Later I tell my readers there were times during the writing of the book when the Gentile me wanted to cry out with the pain of knowing how much the Jews of Israel (as well as the Jews of the world) have been deceived by their leaders.

In my assessment there is not a snowball's chance in hell of solving the Palestine problem, curing the cancer at the heart of international affairs before it consumes us all, unless and until enough Israelis, by definition a majority of them, are assisted to understand that peace based on justice for the Palestinians and security for all Jews now living in Israel-Palestine is there for the taking. If they could be convinced of that, there would, surely, be a good chance of them insisting that their deluded leaders make peace not war without end.

The question arising is what could you do, Mr. President, to arrange things to give most if not all Jews in Israel-Palestine good reason to believe that peace based on security for them and an acceptable amount of justice for the Palestinians is available?

You've made a good start by authorizing a dialogue with Syria. I say that assuming you're not running an agenda which is premised on the expectation that in exchange for the return of the Golan Heights, Syria can be prevailed upon to become, like Eygpt and Jordan, an American-and-Israeli stooge. I can tell you that a separate Israel-Syria peace was Arafat's "nightmare". In my last conversation with him before he was murdered (do you know that he was most probably the first victim of Israeli biological warfare?), he said that a separate Israel-Syria peace could result in Syria, to please America and Israel, working with Jordan and Eygpt to oblige the Palestinians to accept whatever crumbs the Zionist state was prepared to offer them. And worse still in that scenario, Arafat added, was the probability that if the Palestinians refused to accept the crumbs on offer, Syria would be complicit with Jordan, Eygpt and Israel in eliminating any further possibility of Palestinian resistance to Zionism's iron fist and will.

That said, I am assuming that you, Mr. President, are wise enough to know that peace, if it is to be real and enduring, must be a comprehensive one. (And therefore that a separate Israel-Syria peace could well create more problems than it solved).

In that context bringing Syria in from the cold is a good start but it's not enough. You must also bring Iran into the peace making process.

The fact that Damascus has influence with Hamas and Tehran has influence with Hizbollah and Hamas is not really the point. Neither Hamas nor Hizbollah need their arms twisted by their friends to make peace with Israel on terms which any rational government and people in Israel would accept with relief.

As I'm sure Ambassador Freeman will confirm if you don't already know, Hamas's real position has been a matter of record for some time. I often put it this way. If tomorrow Israel said and meant that it was ready for final negotiations on the basis of its withdrawal to the borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war (give or take some mutually agreed and minor border modifications), and with Jerusalem an open city and the capital of two states, Hamas's leaders would say, "Let's do the business". And they would mean it because they are not stupid. They know that a genuine and viable two-state solution is still what the vast majority of Palestinians are prepared to settle for. (Though for how much longer that will remain the case is a good question).

Also true (I'm sure Ambassador Freeman could confirm this, too) is that Hizbollah's real position is known. It is prepared to accept whatever the Palestinians accept.

And that is also what could be described as Iran's fallback position, fallback because Iran's preferred solution is the complete de-Zionisation of Palestine, otherwise known as the One State Solution - one secular, democratic state in which Arabs and Jews enjoyed equal political, other civil and human rights. (As you may or may not know, Mr. President, Iran's Ahmadinejad never called for Israel to be "wiped off the face of the earth". Those words, which were not the words he used, obviously implied that he did want Israel's Jews to be driven into the sea. What he actually said was that he wished to see the Zionist colonial entity "vanish from the pages of history" in the same way as the Soviet Union vanished. The notion that he called for Jews now living in Israel-Palestine to be liquidated was and is nothing but Zionist propaganda nonsense which, unfortunately, the mainstream Israeli-occupied American media was happy to promote as truth).

So here, Mr. President, is what I think you should do. Give your diplomats the authority to talk honestly and openly with all parties to the conflict including Hamas, Hizbollah and Iran. By so doing you could establish that what I've summarised above is true - that the whole Arab world and Iran is ready, willing and able to make peace with Israel on terms which, to repeat, any rational government and people in Israel would accept with relief.

Once you had established that fact, you could go to Israel and tell its Jewish citizens the truth and that they have a real choice to make.

If I was writing your speech for that occasion, I would have you tell Israel's Jews that they need to make the right decision not only for their own self-interest but also for the continued wellbeing of the Jews of the world. And I'd have you reinforcing that point by quoting Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel's longest-serving and universally respected Director of Military Intelligence. In his seminal book, Israel's Fateful Hour, published in 1986, he wrote these warning words:

"Israel is the criterion according to which all Jews will tend to be judged. Israel as a Jewish state is an example of the Jewish character, which finds free and concentrated expression within it. Anti-Semitism has deep and historical roots. Nevertheless, any flaw in Israeli conduct, which initially is cited as anti-Israelism, is likely to be transformed into empirical proof of the validity of anti-Semitism. It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism. Israelis must be aware that the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also Jews throughout the world."

More than two decades on, I think it could and should be said (and I would seek to persuade you, Mr. President, to say it), that Israel's "misconduct" has become the prime factor in the rise of anti-Semitism.

In engagements with Israel's Jews you would have to address their three main fears. They are not rational fears, but they are nonetheless real fears in minds that have been closed to reason by Zionist propaganda.

One fear is in the belief that a Palestinian mini-state on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip would pose an unacceptable and perhaps unmanageable threat to Israel's security and even its existence. The reason why this is complete and utter nonsense was given to me by Yasser Arafat. He said, "Alan, we Palestinians are really not that stupid!" What he meant and went on to say was that if a Palestinian mini-state was in existence, and if from it Palestinian rejectors of compromise attacked Israel, there would come a point (if the Palestinian government did not stop the attacks) when the Israeli army would roll over the mini state's borders and crush it out of existence, and would do so with the understanding if not the full approval of the whole world. Arafat then asked me this question. "Do you really believe that after struggling for so many years against impossible odds to achieve an acceptable minimum of justice, we Palestinians would then give Israel the pretext to take away for all of time what we had gained?" I replied: "No, I don't believe that, and nor should any person of sound mind.

Another fear that could be explained away if the minds of Israel's Jews were open to reason concerns the return of the Palestinian refugees - those and the descendents of those who were dispossessed of their land, their homes and their rights by, mainly, Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing in the months immediately before and after Israel's unilateral declaration of the independence. Zionism has always insisted that the return of the refugees to all of what was once Palestine is an insurmountable obstacle to peace because it would swamp the Israel of a two-state solution and end its existence as a Jewish state by numbers (by peaceful means). The fact is that the return of Palestinian refugees ceased to be an insurmountable obstacle to peace many years ago. As far back as the early 1980's, the pragmatism of Arafat and his mainstream PLO leadership colleagues went as far as understanding and accepting that, in territorial terms, the return would have to be limited to the land of the Palestinian mini-state. They even worked out approximately how many refugees would be able to return. The number was not greatly in excess of 100,000. The rest, several millions, would have to settle for financial compensation and, for their heritage and dignity, a Palestinian passport. The problem at the time Arafat and his leadership colleagues decided that they'd got to make this unthinkable concession to the reality of Israel's existence was that they could not say so publicly - because they knew they could not sell it to their people without some real proof that Israel was going to negotiate a genuine and viable two-state solution in good faith. That never happened. Israel has never negotiated in good faith.

And then, of course, there's the fear of Israel being annihilated by a nuclear-armed Iran, a fear that is currently being reinforced and exploited to the full by Israel's deluded leaders and the Zionist lobby in America and elsewhere. I don't know if Iran wants to possess an atom bomb, but so what if it does and actually succeeds in producing one or some? Israel is and will remain the military and nuclear-armed superpower of the region. It has considerably in excess of 300 nuclear warheads and the missiles to deliver them, and hundreds of tactical battlefield nuclear weapons. In my view only leaders deluded to the point of clinical madness could imagine that a nuclear-armed Iran would initiate a first strike on Israel. To do so would be to invite the certain destruction of all of Iran. None of its present leaders are, and none of its future leaders will be, so stupid. The real problem for Israel's political and military leaders is that Iran's possession of an atomic bomb would greatly limit and perhaps end their ability to impose Zionism's will on the region.

Mr. President, what I've been trying to say comes down to this. The only real obstacle to peace in the Middle East is in the fact that Israel's Jews, most but not all of them, are beyond reason. Against the ever present background of the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, it's the way they've been conditioned to be by their Zionist leaders. You, Mr. President, are uniquely placed to gather and then present to Israel's Jews the evidence that could open their minds to reason - to an understanding that peace is there for the taking if they are prepared to insist that their leaders negotiate in good faith.

Can you do that, Mr. President? Yes, you could. If you did and brought the longest running conflict in all of human history to an end, you would not only save Israel from itself and stop the countdown to Armageddon, you would go down in history, (even if the American economy collapsed around you, which would not be your fault), as the greatest of all American presidents.

So no more "Yes, we can" or even "Yes, I can". Let's have "Yes, I will." As Winston Churchill used to say, carpe diem. (I think the American equivalent is "step up to the plate").

With truly respectful best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Alan Hart

Yes, you could

An open letter to President Obama

From Alan Hart

Dear President Obama,

In that context bringing Syria in from the cold is a good start but it's not enough. You must also bring Iran into the peace making process.

Also true (I'm sure Ambassador Freeman could confirm this, too) is that Hizbollah's real position is known. It is prepared to accept whatever the Palestinians accept.

Once you had established that fact, you could go to Israel and tell its Jewish citizens the truth and that they have a real choice to make.

So no more "Yes, we can" or even "Yes, I can". Let's have "Yes, I will." As Winston Churchill used to say, carpe diem. (I think the American equivalent is step up to the plate).

With truly respectful best wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Alan Hart

Message to Fahed

2009-02-02T11:39:00.000Z

Dear Fahed,

Thanks for your kind comment on my contribution NO LAW, NO PEACE.

You asked how you could be in touch with me. Could you let me have an e-mail contact for yourself? If you can provide a contact, I will respond to it from one of my accounts. (People everywhere who care about truth and justice should be in touch and making common cause).

Best wishes,

Alan

No Law, No Peace

2009-01-29T16:10:00.000Z

The following is the text of an address I delivered to the Annual General Meeting of Solicitors International Human Rights Group (SIHRG) at the Law Society, Chancery Lane in London on Wednesday 28 January.

I'll start with a question for you. Who described Israel's persecution of the Palestinians as "one of the worst abuses of human rights I know"?

It was former President Jimmy Carter in a television interview with the Hardball programme on MSNBC. He made that observation long before Israel's war on the Gaza Strip. Though he might not be prepared to say so in public today, I'd be surprised if he didn't agree with me that operation Cast Lead was pure and unbridled Israeli state terrorism.

Israel's assertion that it acted in self-defence to stop the rockets was just another of Zionism's propaganda lies. Adolf Hitler best defined "The Big Lie". It was, he wrote in Mein Kampf, a lie so enormous that people "would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Zionism is the master of that art. In my opinion, Prime Minister Olmert took Orwellian double-speak, Israeli-style, to a fantastic new height when, announcing Israel's unilateral cease-fire, he said, "We genuinely never wanted to cause any discomfort to the people of Gaza."

It was Israel not Hamas that broke the cease-fire (on 4th November to be precise), and the rockets provoked were the pretext for a war Israel had planned from June 2007 when democratically elected Hamas moved against Fatah in the Gaza Strip to pre-empt an Israeli and CIA supported Fatah coup against it.

The prime purpose of Israel's all-out war on the Gaza Strip was to de-grade Hamas enough, militarily and politically, to give Israel's leaders greater freedom to bully and bribe President Abbas and his quisling Palestine National Authority into accepting crumbs from Zionism's table - the crumbs being only a token Israeli withdrawal from the occupied West Bank to make the space for two or three bantustans which the Palestinians could call a state if they wished.

In my view it's not enough to say that most of the regimes of the existing corrupt, repressive and impotent Arab order were complicit, again, in a Zionist crime. The governments of all the major Western powers were also complicit if only by default. The question is - WHY did our governments not act to stop Israel's obscenely disproportionate and criminal use of force? In my view there are only two possible answers.

One is that our governments fully support Zionism's agenda.

The other is that our governments believe - but dare not say - that the Zionist state of Israel is, has long been, a monster beyond control and, therefore, there's no point in seeking to oblige it do what it won't do.

I have a view on which of those two answers is most likely the correct one, but it's beyond the scope of my talk this evening.

Back to former President Jimmy Carter..... For saying what he said, he was, of course, accused of anti-Semitism (and vilified in many other ways) by the Zionist lobby in America and by supporters of Israel right or wrong everywhere.

I am fully aware that criticism of Israel - a Zionist not a Jewish state - is pregnant with extreme danger because it could provoke anti-Semitism throughout the mainly Gentile nations of the Judeo-Christian or Western world where most Jews live. But there is a way to exorcise this danger. It is by explaining the difference between Judaism and Zionism. Knowledge of this difference is the key to understanding.

Supporters of Israel right or wrong conflate Judaism and Zionism because the assertion that they are one and the same appears to give credibility to the claim that criticism of the Zionist state of Israel is a manifestation of anti-Semitism. Often, almost always these days, the accusation that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitism is false. And this false charge is a blackmail card played to silence criticism of, and suppress informed and honest debate about, the Zionist state and its policies. The reality is that Judaism and Zionism are total opposites.

Judaism is the religion of Jews, not "the" Jews because not all Jews are religious. Like Christianity and Islam, Judaism has at its core a set of moral values and ethical principles. As holocaust survivor Dr. Hajo Meyer states in his recently published book An Ethical Tradition Betrayed, The End of Judaism, these were values and principles which put Jews "at the forefront of humanitarian and socially constructive endeavours" throughout much of history. (A sort of light unto nations, I add, until Zionism came along).

Even the shortest definition of Zionism must begin by recognising that there is what might be called spiritual Zionism and political Zionism. In the sense that they look to Jerusalem as their spiritual capital or centre, all Jews who are religious could regard themselves as spiritual Zionists. The Zionism of my book's title and substance and the Zionism I am speaking about is political Zionism (from here on Zionism).

It is Jewish nationalism in the form of a sectarian, colonial enterprise which, in the process of creating in the Arab heartland a state for some Jews - mainly by terrorism and ethnic cleansing - made a mockery of, and demonstrated contempt for, Judaism's moral values and ethical principles. Judaism insists that the return of Jews to the Israel of the bible must await the Second Coming of the Messiah. Zionism said, in effect: "We can't wait for Him. Zionism is the Messiah." As noted by Yehoshafat Harkabi in his book Israel's Fateful Hour, the "return" of Jews by the efforts of man and thus Zionism was "proscribed" by Judaism. (As I'll explain later, there is another reason why the return of Jews was a deeply flawed concept).

For those who may not be familiar with Harkabi - he was Israel's longest serving Director of Military Intelligence. In the same book he said Israelis had to be aware that "the price of their misconduct is paid not only by them but also by Jews throughout the world." And he gave this warning: "It would be a tragic irony if the Jewish state, which was intended to solve the problem of anti-Semitism, was to become a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism." Those warning words were published in Hebrew in 1986 and in English two years later. Today, more than two decades on, I think Israel's "misconduct" and its appalling self-righteousness has become not only a factor in the rise of anti-Semitism, it is becoming the prime factor. And that's why my latest book is titled Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews - a title which I believe has been given additional meaning by the latest display of Israeli state terrorism.

Now to why knowledge of the difference between Judaism and Zionism is the key to understanding. It explains two things:

One is why it is perfectly possible to be passionately anti-Zionist - opposed to Zionism's colonial enterprise - without being in any way, shape or form anti-Semitic.

The other is why it is wrong to blame all Jews everywhere for the crimes of the hardest core Zionist few in Palestine that became Israel.

I gave more than five years of my life to researching and writing my book not only because I want justice for the Palestinians. I was also driven by the need to do my Gentile bit to stop Holocaust II, shorthand for another great turning against Jews.

In passing it's worth noting that virtually all Arabs and other Muslims have always known the difference between Judaism and Zionism. And it can be said without fear of contradiction that throughout much of their history, Arabs and other Muslims were the best protectors of Jews in need of sanctuary. It was Zionism's colonial enterprise that poisoned the relationship, but not to the point, yet, at which most Arabs and other Muslims blame all Jews for Zionism's crimes.

I titled my talk PALESTINE AND ISRAEL - NO LAW, NO PEACE because I believe there's not a snowball's chance in hell of peace unless and until the Zionist state is called and held to account for its crimes. I also believe there's not a snowball's chance in hell of that happening unless and until the citizens of the Western world are informed about the difference between the lies and truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of the conflict in and over Palestine, a conflict I describe as the cancer at the heart of international affairs.

In my view governments will never use the leverage they have to call and hold Israel to account unless and until they are pushed to do so by informed public opinion - by manifestations of real democracy in action. The problem throughout the Western world, and America most of all, is that most citizens, the voters, are too uninformed to do the pushing; and that's because they've been conditioned by the corporate-controlled mainstream media to believe a version of history, Zionism's version, which is simply not true. It follows, or so it seems to me, that the name of the game is, must be, empowering the citizens of nations to make what passes for democracy work for justice for the Palestinians and peace for all. (In verbal parenthesis I'll add that I believe it's wrong to say - as many Arabs and other Muslims do say - that "the Jews control the media". It might like as though they do, but they don't. The problem in the mainstream media, generally speaking, is one of self-censorship, which is born of the fear of offending Zionism too much or at all).

The core assertion of Zionist mythology, upon which the first and still existing draft of Judeo-Christian history is constructed, can be simply stated. Poor little Israel has lived in danger of annihilation - the "driving into the sea" of its Jews.

The truth of history, which flows fully documented through both volumes of my book as published in the UK (it's going to be three volumes with possibly a fourth in America) is that Israel's existence has never, ever been in danger from any combination of Arab force. Not in 1948. Not in 1967. And not even in 1973. Zionism's assertion to the contrary was the cover which allowed Israel to get away where it mattered most - in America and Western Europe - with having its aggression perceived as self-defence and presenting itself as the victim when, actually, it was and is the oppressor.

I write and speak as an eye-witness to the Six Days war of June 1967. For ITN I was the first Western correspondent to the banks of the Suez Canal with the advancing Israelis; and because of the quality of my contacts - they included one of the founding fathers of Israel's Directorate of Military Intelligence - I was privy to some of the plotting behind closed doors on the Israeli side in the countdown to war.

Four decades on, almost all Jews everywhere and most other people still believe that Israel went to war either because the Arabs attacked (that was Israel's first claim), or because the Arabs were intending to attack (thus requiring Israel to launch a pre-emptive strike). The truth about that war only begins with the statement that the Arabs did not attack and were not intending to attack. The complete truth includes the following facts:

Israel's prime minister of the time, the much maligned Levi Eshkol, did not want to take his country to war. And nor did his chief of staff, Yitzhak Rabin. They wanted only very limited military action, an operation far, far short of war, to put pressure on the international community to cause Egypt's President Nasser to re-open the Straits of Tiran. (Nasser was, in fact, looking forward to that pressure to help him save face).

Israel went to war because its military and political hawks insisted that the Arabs were about to attack. They, Israel's hawks, knew that was nonsense - years latter some of them admitted that much, but at the time they promoted it to undermine Eshkol by portraying him to the country as weak. The climax to the campaign to rubbish Eshkol was a demand by the hawks that he surrender the defence portfolio and give it to Moshe Dayan, Zionism's one-eyed warlord and master of deception. Four days after Dayan got the portfolio he wanted, and the hawks had secured the green light from the Johnson administration to smash Egypt's air and ground forces, Israel went to war.

What actually happened in Israel in the final countdown to that war was something very close to a military coup, executed quietly behind closed doors without a shot being fired. For Israel's hawks the war of 1967 was the unfinished business of 1948/49 - to create Greater Israel with all of Jerusalem its capital. (In reality Israel's hawks set a trap for Nasser and, for reasons of face, he was daft enough to walk into it).

Now to my main point for this evening.

The single most catastrophic happening of 1967 was NOT the war itself and the creation of Greater Israel. At America's insistence, and with the eventual complicity of the Soviet Union, it (the single most catastrophic happening) was THE REFUSAL OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL OF THE UNITED NATIONS TO CONDEMN ISRAEL AS THE AGGRESSOR. If it had done so, the history of the region and the world might well have taken a very different course. There might well have been a negotiated end to the Arab-Israeli conflict and a comprehensive peace within two or three years. If you think that's a far-fetched notion of what could have been - read my book, which includes a chapter headed Goodbye to the Security Council's Integrity.

Question: Why, really, was it so important from the Zionist state's point of view that it NOT be branded the aggressor when actually it WAS? The full answer is in my book, the short version of it comes down to this.

Aggressors are not allowed to keep the territory they take in war, they have to withdraw from it UNCONDITIONALLY. This is the requirement of international law and, also, a fundamental principle which the UN is committed to uphold. Eisenhower was the first and last American president to uphold it with regard to Israel when he read the riot act after it had colluded with Britain and France in 1956 to invade Eygpt. That is on the one hand.

On the other hand is the generally accepted view that when a state is attacked, is the victim of aggression, and then goes to war in genuine self-defence and ends up occupying some (or even all) of the aggressor's territory, the occupier has the right, in negotiations, to attach conditions to its withdrawal.

In summary it can be said that although Security Council Resolution 242 of 23 November 1967 did pay lip-service to "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war", it effectively put Zionism in the diplomatic driving seat. By not condemning Israel as the aggressor and thereby giving Israel the scope to attach conditions to its withdrawal, Resolution 242 effectively gave Israel's leaders and the Zionist lobby in America A VETO OVER ANY PEACE PROCESS.

In 1956, when he insisted that Israel withdraw from the Sinai without conditions, President Eisenhower said that if a nation which attacked and occupied foreign territory was allowed to impose conditions on its withdrawal, "this would be tantamount to turning back the clock of international order." That's what happened in 1967. President Johnson, President Johnson, on the advice of those including the Zionists in their ranks who saw Nasser and the Arab nationalism he represented as a huge potential threat to U.S. interests in the region and therefore encouraged Israel to go to war, turned back the clock of international order. (In reality what Nasser wanted most of all was friendship and even partnership with America on an equal footing with Israel - but that's another story). The turning back of the clock effectively created TWO SETS OF RULES FOR THE BEHAVIOUR OF NATIONS - one set for all the nations of the world excluding only Israel, which were expected to behave in accordance with international law and their obligations of members of the United Nations; and one set for Israel, which was not expected to behave, and would not be required to behave, in accordance with international law and its obligations as a member of the United Nations. THAT DOUBLE-STANDARD IS THE MOTHER AND FATHER OF ARAB AND ALL OTHER MUSLIM HURT, HUMILIATION AND ANGER.

And that's where we still are today, with two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations. But it's no longer one set of rules for the Zionist state of Israel only. Under President George "Dubya" Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, America and Britain became associate members of Israel's Club of One and demonstrated complete contempt for international law. They turned back the clock on it.

Still on the subject of international law, I'd also like to say a few words about Israel's right (or not) to exist.

According to first and still existing draft of Judeo-Christian history, Israel was given its birth certificate and thus legitimacy by the UN Partition Resolution of 29 November 1947. This , too, is nonsense.

In the first place the UN without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own. (I'll be returning to the subject of "alien" immigrants).

Despite that, by the narrowest of margins, and only after a rigged vote, the UN General Assembly did pass a resolution to partition Palestine and create two states, one Arab, one Jewish, with Jerusalem not part of either. It was a formula for a massive injustice. Some 56.4 percent of Palestine was to be given for a Jewish state to a people (many of them recently arrived alien immigrants) who constituted 33 percent of the population and owned 5.57 percent of the land.

But the General Assembly resolution was only a proposal - meaning that it could have no effect, would not become policy or confer even spurious legitmacy, unless approved by the Security Council.

The truth is that the General Assembly's partition proposal never went to the Security Council for a vote! Why not? Because the US knew that if approved it could only be implemented by force; and President Truman was not prepared to use force to partition Palestine.

So the partition plan was VITIATED (became invalid), and the question of what the hell to do about Palestine - after Britain had been driven out of it by Zionist terrorism - was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the US was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel UNILATERALLY declared itself to be in existence - actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

The truth of the time was that the Zionist state, which (it bears repeating) came into being mainly as a consequence of Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing, had no right to exist and, more to the point, could have no right to exist unless .. Unless it was recognised and legitimized by those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during the creation of the Zionist state. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved. And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not take from the Palestinians by force.

Also true is that most if not all of the Jews who went to Palestine in answer to Zionism's call had no biological connection to the ancient Hebrews. The incoming Zionist Jews were mainly foreign nationals of many lands, descended from those who became Jewish by conversion to Judaism centuries after the fall of the ancient Jewish kingdom of Israel and what is called the "dispersal" into "oblivion" of its people. The notion that there were, are, two entire peoples with an equally valid claim to the same land is an historical nonsense. The relatively few Jews with a valid claim were the descendants of those who stayed in Palestine through everything. They numbered only a few thousand at the time of Zionism's birth in 1897; they regarded themselves as Palestinians; and they were fiercely opposed to Zionism's colonial enterprise - because they rightly feared that it would make them as well as the incoming, alien Zionist Jews enemies of the Arabs among whom they had lived in peace and security).

The question that should be addressed to all who demand that Hamas recognise Israel and to President Obama in particular, is this: WHICH ISRAEL is to be recognised? Israel inside its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war or a Greater Israel?

In a recent article for Counterpunch, Virginia Tilley, associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at South Africa's Hobart and William Smith Colleges wrote: "It should be incumbent on the international community to confirm where the borders will be before asking that Hamas recognise Israel's 'right' to them." Nobody could put it better or more honestly.

IT'S MY VIEW THAT UNLESS PRESIDENT OBAMA IS PREPARED TO DECLARE AND INSIST THAT THE ISRAEL TO BE RECOGNISED IS THE ONE THAT EXISTED ON THE EVE OF THE 1967 WAR, THERE WILL BE NO PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST ON HIS WATCH (however long or short that may be).

If George Mitchell, a good man with real and rare integrity, returns from his listening visit to the region with a recommendation that the U.S. must talk to Hamas without pre-conditions, it's my view that President Obama, if he says "Let's do it", will face his first presidential confrontation with Zionist lobby, with Secretary of State Clinton, probably, on its side. And that will tell us whose side Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanual, is on. Watch this space as they say.

There was, in fact, no mystery about Hamas's real position prior to Israel's all-out declaration of war on it. If prior to that Israel had said and meant it was ready to negotiate a full and final peace on the basis of a genuine two-state solution - one that would see Israel back to its pre-1967 borders with Jerusalem the capital of two states, Hamas would have said, "Let's do the business". And Hamas's leaders would have said that and meant it because they are not stupid. They knew that a genuine two-state solution was still what the vast majority of Palestinians were prepared to settle for. But how much longer that will remain the case is a good question.

In my analysis, Zionism's own end-game strategy for a solution to the Palestine problem leaves nothing to the imagination. Israel's leaders still believe that by means of brute force, reducing the Palestinians to abject poverty and more generally making life hell for them, they can break their will to continue the struggle for their rights. The Zionist assumption being that, at a point, and out of total despair, the Palestinians will be prepared to accept crumbs from Zionism's table in the shape of two or three bantustans, or, better still, will abandon their homeland and seek a new life in other countries. In my view the conviction that Zionism will one day succeed in breaking the Palestinian will to continue the struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice is the product of minds which are deluded to the point of clinical madness. Some - including some Israelis - say that Israel is well on its way to becoming a fascist state. I think the more appropriate terminology is lunatic asylum.

The question that's almost too awful to think about is something like this: What will the in-Israel Zionists do when it becomes apparent even to them that they can't destroy Palestinian nationalism with bombs and bullets and brutal repressive measures of all kinds?

My guess is that they, the Zionists, will go for a final round of ethnic cleansing - to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan and beyond. That, I fear, will be Zionism's final solution to the Palestine problem If that is allowed to happen, the West Bank (as well as the Gaza Strip) will be turned red with blood, mostly Palestinian blood. And honest reporters will describe it as a Zionist holocaust.

But that does not have to be the end of the story of Palestine. There still could be a new beginning.

Many years ago, in the Introduction to my first book, Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker? I said that, generally speaking, the Jews are the intellectual elite of the Western civilisation and the Palestinians the intellectual elite of the Arab world. What those two peoples could do together in peace and partnership was, I suggested, the stuff that real dreams are made of. They could change and develop the region for the better and, by so doing, give much needed hope and inspiration to the whole world. I still believe (perhaps I'm very naive) that dream could be made to come true, but only within the context of a One State solution to the Palestine problem. The only alternative I can see to One State for all is Catastrophe for All; and by "all" in the catastrophe scenario I don't mean only the Jews and Arabs of the region, I mean all of us, no matter where we live.

Am I suggesting that a genuine and viable two-state solution is dead if not yet formally buried? Yes! Though the pragmatic Arafat prepared his people to be ready for such an unthinkable compromise, the truth is that Zionism has never been interested in peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept. That, I know, is a very big statement to make but there's a mountain of evidence to support it including explicit statements by various Israeli leaders over the years. Zionism's real position was and is as stated by Moshe Dayan many years ago: "It's them or us."

I'll draw to a close by quoting the words of an Israeli I greatly admire and respect. He is Major General (now retired) Shlomo Gazit. For about two decades he was the head of research at Israel's Directorate of Military Intelligence. That meant he was the world's leading authority on the reality of the Arab military threat to Israel's existence. In 1973 he was called upon to become the Director of Military Intelligence, with a brief to make sure there could never again be an intelligence failure of the kind that had occurred in the countdown to the war of that year. He was, in short, the man to whom the government of Israel turned for salvation in the aftermarth of what it perceived at the time, wrongly, to be a real threat to the Zionist state's existence. Shlomo didn't want the job but he took it out of duty. I got to know him in 1980 when I was the linkman in an exploratory, secret dialogue between Arafat and Shimon Peres, who was then hoping to become prime minister and deny Menachem Begin a second term in office. In our conspiracy for peace, Shlomo Gazit was advising Peres. (I call it a conspiracy because if Prime Minister Begin had been aware of what we were doing, he probably would have had Peres and Gazit hanged as traitors and me shot).

Over coffee one morning I took a deep breath and said to Shlomo: "I've come to the conclusion that it's all a myth. Israel's existence has never, ever, been in danger."

Through a sad smile he replied: "Alan, the trouble with us Israelis is that we've become the victims of our own propaganda."

I end the Prologue to Volume One of my book with that Gazit quote. (The Prologue is titled Waiting for the Apocalypse). I didn't tell my readers how that conversation continued, but I'll tell you. I said to Shlomo, "Would you object if I said the name of the game is saving Israel from itself?" He replied, "No."

In my opinion the question today is not so much how can Israel be saved from itself, but how can the Jews (not to mention the rest of us) be saved from Zionism?

At this point the Gentile me takes a deep breath as he steps into a mine field..... Most of Israel's Jews and many Jews of the world are in desperate need of some shocking and awesome therapy. What, really, do I mean?

It's long been my view that most Israelis and Jews everywhere don't want to know the truth of history as it relates to the creation of the Zionist state and its policies. The truth is apparently too uncomfortable and morally challenging. Over the last two and three years I've discussed this phenomenon with some of my dearest Jewish friends, including Dr. Hajo Meyer who I quoted earlier. He was born in Germany, served in the Jewish underground, was captured by the Gestapo and transported to Aushchwitz. In a recent conversation, he said he had come to the conclusion that his Jewish people - traumatized by the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust and brainwashed by Zionism's exploitation of it - were sick and beyond reason. That, I believe, as Hajo does, is why it has been, and still is, impossible for most Jews - Israelis and others - to engage in rational discussion about who must do what and why for justice and peace in the Middle East.

About the shocking and awesome therapy required, I'll say this much. There needs to be a declaration by the international community, led by President Obama, to the effect that the days of the double-standard are over, and that Zionism will now be called and held to account for its crimes - not only its most recent crimes in the Gaza Strip, but the crime on which the Zionist state was founded, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

I'll conclude (well almost) with a question a question to which I don't pretend to know the answer. In the wake of Israel's latest demonstration of state terrorism, could it be that charging some of is political and military leaders with war crimes and prosecuting them would be the catharsis needed to open very many if not all Jewish minds to the idea that Zionism - not the Arabs and other Muslims - IS their real enemy; and that silence is not the way to refute and demolish a charge of complicity in Zionism's crimes?

That was to have been the end of my talk but I can't shut up without a comment on the BBC's refusal to give air-time to the Disaster Emergency Committee's Gaza appeal. I think the explanation given by Director General Mark Thompson is proof, repeat proof, that he and some if not all of his senior management colleagues are frightened, no terrified, of offending the Zionist lobby. The DG actually said in his interview with John Humphrys that he was concerned that the corporation would be "accused of taking sides" - i.e. with Hamas and the Palestinians - if it transmitted the Gaza appeal. Question: WHO would have accused the BBC of taking sides? There is only one answer. Give or take a very few others, only supporters of Israel right or wrong as organised and directed by the Zionist lobby here in the UK and no doubt America, too. I think the BBC of Mark Thompson's leadership should be renamed - ZBC and I don't have to tell you what Z stands for. There are some fine reporters and other BBC production people who are as disgusted as I am, but they can't speak out because they have mortgages to pay and children to educate. As I've said, it's wrong to blame all Jews for Zionism's crimes. It's also wrong to blame "the BBC" for the cowardice of its disingenuous Director General and his senior executives.

Thank you.

How and why the BBC is not impartial

2009-01-25T19:37:00.000Z

In the light of the BBC's refusal to give air-time to the Disaster Emergency Committee's Gaza appeal, and even if it changes its mind before this article is posted, it really is time for an open and honest debate about what, really, determines the corporation's editorial decision-making on matters to do with Israel.

On 23rd January, the first on-air words of Newsnight presenter Gavin Esler to Caroline Thomson, the BBC's Chief Operating Officer, were "This looks as if you are just scared of the Israelis" (for which read the lobby of supporters of Israel right or wrong, and which should properly be called the Zionist lobby not the Israel lobby because it doesn't speak for all Israelis let alone all Jews). There is truth in what Gavin Esler said even if he was only being properly provocative, but it needs to be unpacked.

Caroline Thomson's initial justification for the refusal to give air-time to DEC's appeal was the need to "avoid compromising public confidence in the impartiality of the corporation". A day later this was qualified a bit. Interviewed on the BBC's World TV News, she said it was important not to endanger the trust of "certain parts of the audience". (My emphasis added).

That implies, surely, that the BBC has identified or is aware of a particular and quantifiable part of its audience which would accuse the BBC of having compromised its impartiality if it gave air-time to DEC's appeal. So which part?

Caroline Thomson could not have meant Britain's Muslim community, in number about two million, because it is rightly outraged by the BBC's decision.

I think it's more than reasonable to presume that she was meaning - without wanting to say so - Britain's Jewish community, in number about 300,000 or less, and by no means of one view. (The views of Britain's Jewish citizens range all the way from total and unquestioned support for Israel right or wrong to condemnation of Israel as a terrorist state).

As I listened to Caroline Thomson, I was reminded of a most revealing statement made to me three years ago by Professor Greg Philo, the research director of Glasgow University's universally respected Media Unit, and the team leader of its two-year study of BBC and ITN news coverage of what has come to be called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The unit's report was an indictment of the BBC's lack of impartiality which included a "strong emphasis on Israeli perspectives" and an "absence" of Palestinian perspectives. After the unit's findings were published in book form - Bad News From Israel - I was sitting alone with Greg in his university office. At a point he told me what had been said to him by an editor of BBC 1's flagship 10.0pm main news programme. Greg prefaced his revelation by quoting the BBC employee as saying to him, "If you quote me by name, I'll deny it." Here's what the editor told Greg (my emphasis added):

"We live in fear of the incoming call from the Israelis. When it comes, we ask ourselves only two questions. From what level did it come - from the Israeli embassy press office, from the ambassador himself or the government in Israel? To what level in the corporation did the call go - to our immediate superiors, to the director general or the chairman?"

At the time Greg was speaking to me in confidence but later that evening he shared a public platform with me and on it he repeated what the BBC news editor had said to him. And that freed me to quote him.

So why does the BBC live in fear of incoming calls from Israelis (for which read callers who are part of, or are activated by, the Zionist lobby)?

If the BBC was a commercial organization in the sense of being dependent for most if not all of its income on revenue generated by the selling of air-time for advertising, it would fear punishment in the form of a withdrawal of advertising if the Zionist lobby was offended too much by the corporation's reporting. (This is, in fact, the fear that almost all newspapers and commercial broadcasting organizations in the Western world have to live with). But the BBC is not a commercial organization in the sense above.

The real problem at the BBC is what is known as HF, the hassle factor, and its consequences. As all BBC staff who have anything to do with the corporation's Middle East coverage know, a report that offends supporters of Israel right or wrong generates a highly organised campaign of protest and abuse including false charges of anti-Semitism. Such campaigns can result in many thousands of e-mails, letters and telephone calls, usually directed from two or three places. This intimidation, and the wish to minimize controversy if it can't avoid it, has resulted in BBC news and management executives opting for an interpretation of what might be called the balance and fairness doctrine which, in effect, makes its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict partial and pro-Israel.

In principle the idea of balance - equal time for both sides - is fine, but it becomes a nonsense when one side is allowed to go on telling obvious propaganda lies without being challenged by the known facts. I'll give just one of very many examples to make the point.

Israel's line, asserted time after time by its official military and political spin doctors, was that Hamas broke the cease-fire and was therefore responsible for the war. Hamas did not break the cease-fire. Israel did, on 4 November. Two of Israel's newspapers - Ha'aretz and Yediot Ahronot - are among the prime sources of that truth. (Despite the fact of Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip, collective punishment in all but name and a crime against humanity, Hamas not only kept the cease-fire until provoked by Israel, it was also, again contrary to Israel's assertions, ready and willing to re-new the cease-fire on condition that Israel ended the blockade).

Israel's spin doctors were not challenged by the facts of this particular matter (and many others) because BBC correspondents have red lines drawn for them by management - red lines that, if crossed, would bring the wrath of the Zionist lobby upon the BBC. (Governments, including the one in Washington D.C., are frightened of offending the Zionist lobby too much, so it's not surprising that the BBC is frightened, too).

The BBC's decision-makers need to understand that there is much more to balance and fairness than "one side says this and the other side says that". The truth, when it can be established, does matter, and BBC reporters ought to be allowed to tell it, even when doing so offends supporters of Israel right or wrong.

A present for Thermblog

2009-01-14T10:28:00.003Z

My last posting The New Nazis drew a response from Thermblog as published below. I "may be called a Nazi" he wrote. In Thermblog's logic it must follow that my dear Jewish friend Dr. Hajo Meyer, a Nazi holocaust survivor, may also be called a Nazi. What crazy nonsense! (Hajo was born in Germany, served in the Jewish underground, was captured by the Gestapo and transported to Aushchwitz. Today at 82 he is still in the frontline of the war for the truth of history. When I asked why he is still exposing himself to Zionist abuse and vilification, he replied, "The first person I see every morning is myself." He has to be able to live with himself. I wonder if all those who support the Zionist state of Israel right or wrong can do that. I imagine not, which might be part of their problem.

Anyway, I am now posting a present for Thermblog. It's a remarkable video documentary I received yesterday from Information Clearing House. It's a very powerful and moving portrait of the reality of Israel's illegal occupation.

Occupation 101

The New Nazis

2009-01-13T15:31:00.001Z

Knowing the documented truth about the creation of Israel by Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing, and watching (mainly thanks to Al Jazeera and PressTV live feeds) the war on Gaza, Israel's latest display of state terrorism, I have come to a conclusion. It's time to give Israel's hardcore Zionists their real name. They are the New Nazis. Europeans and Americans could have stopped the original Nazis and prevented the extermination of six million Jews. If Europeans and Americans don't stop the New Nazis, it's likely that their end game will be the extermination of millions of Palestinians.

In his book An Ethical Tradition Betrayed, The End of Judaism, Dr. Hajo G. Meyer, a Nazi holocaust (Auschwitz) survivor, compared Israel's policies - as of 2007 when the book was published - with the early stages of the Nazi persecution of Germany's Jews. He stressed that he was not seeking to draw a parallel between Israel's current policies and the Nazis' "endgame" - the slaughter of six million European Jews (and also the mass murder of many non-Jews). He was merely trying to point out, he wrote, "the slippery slope" that eventually led to that catastrophe, and the necessity of "forseeing the possible consequences" of a policy that oppresses and marginalizes the Palestinians in their own homeland.

The Gentile me is privileged to have Hajo Meyer as a dear friend and I have just talked with him. In the light of what Israeli forces are doing over and in the Gaza Strip, I asked him if he was still not seeking to draw a parallel between Israel's policies and the Nazis' endgame. He replied, "It's becoming harder and harder not to draw that parallel." And he agreed that it was now time to describe Israel's hardcore Zionists and those Israelis who follow their orders as "Nazis".

As we were speaking, I opened an e-mail from another Jewish friend. It contained quotes from a statement made yesterday in the House of Commons by Sir Gerald Kaufman, the only Jewish MP who has been consistent for many years in his criticism of Israeli policy. His statement included this: "Is it not an incontrovertible fact that Olmert, Livni and Barak are mass murderers and war criminals?" I read that to Hajo. He said: "Kaufman is right. Every effort must now be made to bring Israel's leaders to trial."

Of course that won't happen, so how might their endgame be played out?

In my analysis there's no mystery about Israel's current real purpose. It is to put Hamas out of political as well as military business in order to improve the prospects for bullying and bribing President Abbas and his Fatah-dominated, quisling Palestine National Authority into accepting crumbs from Zionism's table - the crumbs being an Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank to provide the Palestinians with two or three Bantustans which they could call a state if they wished.

Would President Abbas actually be prepared to settle for very much less than a complete Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem? The answer ought to be "No" because to do so would be to betray his own people and their 60 years of struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice. But what if he came under pressure from President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, and their message to him, endorsed by Quartet envoi Tony Blair, was something like: "You've got to be pragmatic. This is the best deal you Palestinians are ever likely to get." Obama and Clinton wouldn't need to add "because we're not going to press the Israelis to do what they don't want to do."

Under such pressure, and also that applied by the regimes of the existing corrupt, repressive and impotent Arab Order, it's not impossible that President Abbas would buckle completely and accept the crumbs on offer from Zionism's table, but if he did, he and they would be rejected by the overwhelming majority of the occupied Palestinian people.

Then what?

Israel creates a pretext for war with them all. Endgame. A Zionist holocaust.

In my view, which Hajo Meyer shares, that could happen unless enough Israelis and the Jews of the world are prepared to acknowledge that a terrible wrong was done to the Palestinians by Zionism (the few) in the name of all Jews.

Which of the two of us is mad?

2009-01-06T10:19:00.001Z

My post immediately below - The Final Betrayal of the Palestinians? - provoked a response from "Jan" in the Netherlands. I can't respond to her or him directly because the response was sent from "Omri" which has a "no reply" address. (Surprise! Surprise!) Never mind. Jan's message to me can be viewed as a comment below the posting but I am publishing it here because I think it's worthy of study for the mindset it represents.

It seems to me that one of the two of us, Jan or me, is brainwashed and deluded to the point of clinical madness. I am more than content for readers of my blog and my book ZIONISM; THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS to decide for themselves. Here is Jan's response:

I know Alan, that you will dismiss any criticism of the evil that you do as "evil brainwashed zionist propaganda" - but no - i am just a mere concerned citizen, who is worried about the lies and filth that you spread.

Instead of promoting a sane palestinian leadership, and a two state solution - which could have brought peace years ago - you promote a load of ridiculous conspiracy theories (Ilan Pappe has very little evidence on his side), and maniacs with a nationalist agenda who seek eternal war and further suffering (Abdel Bari Atwan, Arafat). You offer support to such abominations as Hizballah and Hamas, (instead of calling for negotiations over Sheba farms - you call for war over it)

You promote a completley false, and unfounded perception of what zionism is, what israel is and what the history and ideas behind them is.The filthy lies you spread only serve to perpetuate a state of war, hatred and misunderstanding.
Sadly enough, through your actions - not only do you give legitimacy to the genocidal ideologies of those who want to destroy israel - You thereby cause much more death and suffering among Palestinians - which is at the moment much more severe.
You see zionist and mossad agents everywhere, and you are happy to take on any load of crap as long as it promotes israel's destruction.
If you are not mentally ill in someway, then I really do not know what your driving force is.

You will dismiss this, in your paranoid ways, as "another zionist sympathizer" or sometihng of the sort. Well that is only your own problem.
You are scum - you promote war and bloodshed. Shame on you.
Jan - the netherlands

Recommended reading for Jan - ISRAEL'S FATEFUL HOUR, a seminal book by a most remarkable Israeli, Yehoshafat Harkabi who was Israel's longest serving and universally respected Director of Military Intelligence. (A man I greatly admired). On page 199 he wrote the following (my emphasis added):

"All these lessons can be summed up as the pressing need for self-criticism. Certainly Israel is not guilty of everything that has gone wrong in the occupied lands. But self-criticism is imperative in order to counter-balance the tendencies to self-righteousness and self-pity that stem from basic Jewish attitudes, from the historical experience of persecution, and from the ethos fostered by Menachem Begin. No factor endangers Israel's future more than self-righteousness, which blinds us to reality and prevents a complex understanding of the situation, and legitimizes extreme behavior."

The Final Betrayal of the Palestinians?

2009-01-05T12:23:00.001Z

Why does Israel still find it impossible to understand that the Palestinians will not give up their struggle for freedom and independence? That was the question posed in an analysis by Abu Manneh, Znet 2 January 2009. In my analysis it's because Israel's present leaders in government do understand that the Palestinians are not going to abandon their struggle for some justice that they - defense minister Barak and foreign minister Livni principally - decided on "total war" with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. (Labour leader Barak and Kadima leader Livni were also playing politics. By demonstrating that they were prepared to be as ruthless as Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu, they were hoping to prevent him winning February's election and becoming prime minister. And no doubt President-elect Obama shared their hope on that account).

The real problem today is what it's always been - the refusal of the Palestinians to let their cause be a sacrificial lamb on the altar of political expediency. After Israel's first fait accompli in 1948/9, which saw 700,000 Palestinians dispossessed of their land, their homes and their rights, there was not supposed to have been a regeneration of Palestinian nationalism. Zionism didn't want it to happen. The major Western powers didn't want it to happen. And the Arab regimes didn't want it to happen. Yasser Arafat's real crime was making it happen.

The mainstream Western media, like President Bush, prefers to peddle Zionism's propaganda lies about who bears the responsibility for ending the cease-fire in Gaza, but the truth is readily available for all of wish to know it. (Two of Israel's newspapers - Ha'aretz and Yediot Ahronot - are probably the best prime sources). From June 2008 until 4 November, Hamas maintained the cease-fire. On that day it fired some rockets into Israel but They were a response to a cease-fire-breaking ground incursion by Israeli special forces and an air strike which killed at least six Palestinians. The name of the Israeli game thereafter was to provoke Hamas into firing more rockets to give Israel the pretext for total war on the basis of target information gathered over five months.

In my analysis there's no mystery about Israel's real purpose. It is to put Hamas out of political as well as military business in order to improve the prospects for bullying and bribing Palestinian President Abbas and his Fatah-dominated, quisling National Authority into accepting crumbs from Zionism's table - the crumbs being an Israeli withdrawal from parts of the West Bank to provide the Palestinians with two or three Bantustans which they could call a state if they wished.

Would President Abbas actually be prepared to settle for very much less than a complete Israeli withdrawal from all of the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem? The answer ought to be "No" because to do so would be to betray his own people and their 60 years of struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice. But what if he came under pressure from President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, and their message to him was something like: "You've got to be pragmatic. This is the best deal you Palestinians are ever likely to get." Obama and Clinton wouldn't need to add "because we're not going to press the Israelis to do what they don't want to do."

But that's not the only pressure that could be brought to bear on Abbas and his National Authority (the PCA or "Palestinian Collaborationist Authority" in the words of Joseph Massad).

In one of my last private conversations with Yasser Arafat, he told me about his "real nightmare". It was that Israel would give back the Golan Heights for a separate peace with Syria.

Why was a separate Israel-Syria peace the stuff of Arafat's nightmare?

It would leave the Palestinian claim for an acceptable minimum of justice unaddressed; and with Eygpt and Jordan already at peace with Israel, it was what most probably would happen then that terrified Arafat. If Syria got what it wanted for a separate peace, Arafat said, it most likely would join forces with Jordan and Eygpt and do America's bidding by insisting that the Palestinians accept whatever Israel was prepared to offer them; and if the Palestinians still refused to settle for crumbs from Zionism's table, the intelligence and other security services of the three frontline Arab states would collaborate with Israel's agencies to make further Palestinian resistance impossible.

That, said Arafat, would amount to "the final Arab regime betrayal of our cause."

If President Obama does authorize Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to go flat out for a separate Israel-Syria peace, it's likely that a new Israeli government led by Barak or Livni would oblige on the understanding, secret of course, that Syria, Jordan and Eygpt would play their necessary part in pressing the Palestinians to accept crumbs from Zionism's table while making it clear to them, the Palestinians, that further resistance was useless.

Under such pressure, and assuming Hamas had been rendered militarily and politically impotent (at least for a while), it's not impossible that President Abbas would accept Israel's terms, in order to establish an entity that could be called a Palestinian state but which would not come even close to satisfying the demands and needs of the Palestinians for an acceptable minimum amount of justice. I can imagine Abbas reading from an acceptance statement written for him by the Quartet's Middle East envoi, former British prime minister Blair. "My dear people, we must be realistic. This is the best deal we're ever going to get."

So it's also not impossible that there could come a moment when President Obama would be able to claim that he had changed the world by delivering peace to the Middle East.

But what if the Palestinians - the people not their leaders - did not buy the American, Israeli and Arab regime fix?

My guess is that the Israelis would slaughter them. And the regimes of the existing impotent, corrupt and repressive Arab Order would celebrate the final closing of the Palestine file.

In my view the world would then be on an unstoppable course for a Clash of Civilisations, Judeo-Christian v Islamic.

The American edition of Alan Hart's book, ZIONISM: THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS, is to be published by Clarity Press Inc in April, beginning with Volume One (of three with possibly a fourth) which has the subtitle The False Messiah.

Message to "Robert" - Correcting your misrepresentation

2008-09-02T09:11:00.001+01:00

YOU are wrong. I did NOT as you imply say that Senator Hillary Clinton would go for the kill at Democrats' Denver convention. I merely asked a question. And I made this statement:

It's not my fault if those words were beyond your understanding.

In passing... I think it's not impossible that one of Hillary's considerations was that if she gave Obama total support (in words if not completely in spirit), she would be well placed to lead and win the race for the White House the next time around if Obama is defeated.

And re Alan Johnston... We still do not know, and may never know, if his kidnappers were proxies - by design or default - for another party

Is Hillary Going For The Kill At The Denver Convention?

2008-08-22T11:35:00.001+01:00

According to conventional wisdom Barak Obama agreed, for the sake of party unity, that Hillary Clinton should be "put into nomination" at the Denver Convention, on the understanding that when nominated, and before the first roll call, she would release her delegates to him and urge them to vote for him. That, apparently, is how it's supposed to happen next Tuesday evening. But is that the way it will happen?

The key to understanding what could actually happen is in the fact that Hillary did not withdraw from the race. She announced only that she was "suspending" her campaign.

At the time one or two (perhaps more) of the most thoughtful American commentators wondered aloud why she had refrained from saying that she was withdrawing from the race. The point made, quite properly and fairly, was that the word "suspension" carries the connotation that the hiatus is temporary. "Suspended" players in sports, for example, return to play after their period of suspension. In Hillary's case one possible implication was that she was hoping that something would turn up between June and the convention in Denver to allow her to resume the fight on the floor there.

The something that has turned up, thanks mainly to Obama's apparent inability to develop his early promise and come on strong, is that Senator McCain is ahead in the polls. One could say there are many reasons why that ought not to have happened but it has happened.

The day after the release of the poll findings indicating that McCain was five points ahead, I received telephone calls from an extremely well informed American friend telling me that Hillary was in the process of putting the finishing touches to her strategy to take Obama out at the convention. The friend named the four key people who were preparing the ground for the putsch, including the lady who is acting as Hillary's eminence grise. (The latter is a very powerful lady with loads of money).

If my friend's information is correct, the following is the scenario that will be played out next Tuesday evening, prime time. When she is nominated, Hillary will not realease her delegates to Obama and will say words to the effect that circumstances have changed, and it's now clear that only she can guarantee to win the White House for the party. Whether or not she herself would go as far as challenging Obama to release his delegates to her is not something my friend was prepared to speculate about. He said he thought that aspect of the matter had not yet been determined. He also said it was more than reasonable to assume that enough delegates would be prepared to dump Barak and give Hillary victory on the convention floor if they were persuaded that he was, or was most likely to be, a loser.

My American friend's information may or may not reflect the reality of what Hillary is up to in the final countdown to the convention. I have no way of knowing from my side of the pond (I live in the UK). But I am still intrigued by her refusal in June to say that she was withdrawing from the race. And I note what was said to me when I ran my friend's Denver scenario past a former American congressman who knows better than most how the game, dirty tricks and all, is played. He said: "It's a remote possibility but not impossible. The Clintons don't take prisoners and play for keeps.".

Well soon know.

Before I decided to write this piece, I watched a short YouTube video of Hillary in conversation with some of her most zealous supporters. All women. It starts with one of them asking her if she would consider having her name put into nomination at the convention. She replies: "That's an obvious question and we are working on it…." The clip ends with another lady saying that she was a delegate and was aware that some of those who had been committed to Obama had signed a statement to indicate that they would switch to Hillary if she was put into nomination at the convention. I had the quite strong impression that this last speaker in the clip was a plant - to convey a message for Hillary that she herself did not want to speak.

Sometimes You Have To Smile

2008-08-15T18:03:00.001+01:00

I received with others the following very amusing short story from lawyer Ed Corrigan, a Canadian campaigner for justice and peace in the Middle East. He received it from Pat, a friend of his. I imagine it will appeal rather more to the ladies than the men (most men).

A woman rubbed a bottle and out popped a genie.

The woman, amazed, asked the genie if she could make three wishes.

""Nope, sorry," the genie replied. "Three wishes are a storybook myth. I'm a one-wish genie. So… What will it be?"

The woman didn't hestitate."I want peace in the Middle East. See this map? I want these countries to stop fighting with each other, and I want all the Arabs to love the Jews and Americans and vice-versa. It will bring about world peace and harmony."

"The genie looked at the map and exclaimed: "Lady, be reasonable! These countries have been at war for thousands of years. I'm out of shape after being in a bottle for 500 years. I'm good but not THAT good. I don't think it can be done. Make another wish and, p-l-e-a-s-e, be reasonable."

The woman thought for a moment and then said: "Well, I've never been able to find the right man. You know - one that's considerate and fun, likes to cook and help with the house cleaning, is great in bed, gets along with my family, doesn't watch sports all the time and is faithful. That's what I wish for… A good man."

The genie let out a long, very audible sigh and said, "Let me see the friggin' map again."

"Neocon Flap Highlights Jewish Divide"

2008-08-06T11:55:00.001+01:00

That was the headline over a splendid piece of reporting for IPS (Inter Press Service) published on 30 July by Daniel Luban and Jim Lobe. They concluded that "new political space is being created for the public airing of more moderate views on Middle East policy." If they are right, and I think they are, there is reason, at last, to be less than totally pessimistic about the prospects of finding a cure for the cancer at the heart of international affairs, the Palestine problem, before it consumes us all.

In the quotation above "more moderate views" is a euphemism for views other than those of the Zionist (not Jewish!) lobby, of which AIPAC is the most prominent public face. It was described by Luban and Lobe as "the powerful lobbying group whose hawkish right-wing leadership has often defied both the views of the broader U.S. .Jewish community and the policies of Israeli governments." (In my two-volume book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, I quote Shimon Peres telling me way back in 1980, when he was the leader of the opposition Labour Party, that the lobby in America "is not an Israel lobby. It's a Likud lobby and that's my problem.")

The excellent IPS article by Luban and Lobe is primarily a review of the controversy sparked by TIME columnist Joe Klein's blogged statement that by pushing for war on Iraq and now for a "foolish assault on Iran", Jewish neo-conversatives had caused the question of "divided loyalties" to be asked - because what Jewish neo-conservatives pushed and are pushing for is not in America's own best interests. (As Mearsheimer and Walt argued in great detail).

Klein was accused by the usual cast of those who support Israel right or wrong of being anti-Semitic; but he refused to back down, accusing his accusers of using charges of anti-Semitism to silence his and other criticism of neo-conservative policies. Klein said those who called him anti-Semitic were wrong. What then was he? "I am anti neo-conversative," he told Luban and Lobe.

In the same article they quote MJ. Rosenberg, a former AIPAC staffer now associated with the moderate Israel Policy Forum, as saying, "Although most neocons are Jews, few Jews are neocons." That is undoubtedly so, which is a tribute to the effectiveness of the few who are. Luban and Lobe also quote Rosenburg as expressing the hope that commentators would "stop equating neo-conservatism with Judaism." (My emphasis added).

Indeed they should, but there is a much bigger and related imperative. As I never tire of writing and saying, commentators should stop equating Zionism with Judaism. The difference between the two, why they are total opposites, is THE key to understanding who must do what and why for justice and peace in the Middle East.

For those who are not familiar with the matter, I must add that I am, of course, aware that there are two kinds of Zionism - one purely spiritual, the other political. In the sense that religious Jews look to Jerusalem as their spiritual home, it can be said that all religious Jews are spiritual Zionists. The Zionism that should not be equated with Judaism is political Zionism. And why is not all that complicated.

Judaism is the religion of Jews, not "the" Jews because not all Jews are religious. Like Chistianity and Islam, Judaism has at its core a set or moral values and ethical principles.

Political Zionism is a sectarian, colonial ideology which created in the Arab heartland, mainly by terrorism and ethnic cleansing, a state for some Jews. Simply put, political Zionism made a mockey of, and has contempt for, Judaism's moral values and ethical prnciples.

Political Zionism's own ethic was set down in writing by Vladimir Jabotsinky, the founding father of Israel's army. He was a Russian Jew born in Odessa in 1880. In 1923, years before Adolf Hitler came to power, he published The Iron Wall, which became the main inspirational text for all Jewish nationalists who committed themselves to Zionism's colonial enterprise. Its purpose was to take for keeping the maximum amount of Arab land with the minimum number of Arabs on it. In The Iron Wall, Jabotinsky was brutally frank about what Zionism's ethic had to be. He wrote this (my emphasis added):

"Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. There is no other ethic. It is important to speak Hebrew but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot- or else I am through with playing at colonization. To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer - absolutely untrue. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes - not for any tasty morsel because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall."

In the light of subsequent events including the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, an honest, up-to-date statement of what political Zionism is really all about would be something like the following:

Jews can never again trust Gentiles. If the Gentile world cannot understand why the Zionist state of Israel must do what it's doing to hold and keep what it has (most if not all of it), the Gentile world can go to hell."

In private conversation I once asked Israel's one-eyed warlord, General Moshe Dayan, the creator in 1967 of Greater Israel, why it had nuclear weapons when, I said, we both knew it didn't need them vis-à-vis the Arabs. He replied to this effect: "Ben Gurion wasn't stupid, I'm not stupid. We know how the real world works. We took it as read that a day will come when even our best friends will say to us, 'You've become a liability and to protect our own best interests we want you to do this.'" The obvious implication, which Dayan knew he didn't have to put into words for me, was that if ever a day came when America required Israel to do what it did not consider to be in its own best interests, an Israeli leader would say something very like, "Mr. President, don't push as further than we are prapared to go because, if we must, we'll use all the weapons at our disposal." Simply stated, Israel went nuclear in order to possess the ultimate in blackmail cards. At about the time Dayan said that to me, Prime Minister Golda Meir also told me, on-the-record during the course of an interview I did with her for the BBC's Panorama programme, that in a doomsday situation Israel would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it. (Her full quote with its context is as set down on page xii of Waiting for the Apocalypse, the Prologue to Volume One of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews).

Question: Why, really, is it so important for the citizens of the mainly Gentile nations of the Judeo-Christian or Western world to be made aware of the difference between Judaism and political Zionism?

The answer is in two related parts.

One is that knowledge of the difference is the key to understanding why it is perfectly possible to be passionately anti-Zionist (opposed to Zionism's still on-going colonial enterprise) without being in any way, shape or form anti-Semitic (meaning anti-Jew because Arabs are Semites, too).

The other is that knowledge of the difference explains why it is wrong to blame all Jews everywhere, or even all Israelis, for the crimes of the hardest core Zionist few in Palestine that became Israel. (It is a fact that prior to the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, many if not most Jews everywhere were opposed to Zionism's colonial enterprise. They believed it to be morally wrong and they feared it would lead to unending conflict. Some also feared that there could come a day when Zionism, if it was allowed by the major powers to have its way, would provoke anti-Semitism).

Message to "Faizal" re JFK and Obama

2008-05-28T16:26:00.001+01:00

Dear Faizal,

You asked me to comment on possible parallels that could be made between JFK and Obama especially in the light Hilary's recall of Bobby Kennedy's assassination. That's a good idea. When I can find the time in the next week or two I will.

Thank you for your kind comment about my latest book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. Yes, it is currently only obtainable by Americans from Amazon because even the few sometimes courageous American publishers don't want the hassle they would get from the Zionist lobby for taking it on. But in due course it will be printed in America.

Take care. (I say that to you but would say the same to Senator Obama!)

Alan

Christian fundamentalism and Zionism: Time to terminate this unholy alliance?

2008-05-23T09:55:00.001+01:00

In the light of the revelation (devine or not) about Pastor John Hagee's assertion that Hitler was God's agent, is it too much to hope that Jews everywhere, and Jewish Americans especially, will insist that Zionism terminate its unholy alliance with Christian fundamentalism?

This alliance has always seemed to me to be the greatest madness and also the biggest obscenity in the continuing story of conflict in and over Palestine.

Historically speaking, Christian fundamentalists were classic Jew haters on the grounds, they said, that the Jews were the "Christ killers". So what explains Christian fundamentalism's support for Israel right or wrong - support which today includes much of the money to fund Zionism's on-going colonisation of the occupied West Bank?

The evangelical preacher Jerry Falwell gave this answer.

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 was the most crucial event in history since the ascension of Jesus to heaven and

"proof that the second coming of Jesus Christ is nigh… Without a State of Israel in the Holy Land, there cannot be the second coming of Jesus Christ, nor can there be a Last Judgement, nor the End of the World.".

Another answer is that provided by Yakov M. Rabkin, the Jewish Canadian Professor of History at the University of Montreal. In his book A Threat From Within, A CENTURY OF JEWISH OPPOSITION TO ZIONISM, he writes:

"The massive support extended to the State of Israel by millions of Christian supporters of Zionism is overtly motivated by a single consideration: that the return of the Jews to the Holy Land will be a prelude to their acceptance of Christ (when he returns) or, for those who fail to do so, to their physical destruction." (My emphasis added).

Simply stated, Christian fundamentalism's only interest in the Zionist state of Israel is in assisting it to become the instrument for bringing about, as foretold by the Christian Bible, the end of the world in a final battle at Armageddon between the forces of good and evil. In this scenario the Jews will have a choice - either to junk their Judaism and become Christians, in which case they will be beamed up to heaven, or to be annihlated… It seems to me that there's a case for saying that Christian fundamentalism is, potentially, a far bigger threat to Jews and Judaism than all the Arabs and other Muslims of the world put together, including a nuclear-armed Iran!

So why is Zionism in alliance with Christian fundamentalism?

The short answer needs only two words - political expendiency.

On its own and in its various manifestations, the Zionist (not Israel!) lobby is awesomely powerful. It is even more influential, in America especially, in association with Christian fundamentalism. In May 2002, the BBC's admirable Stephen Sackur presented a remarkable radio documentary, A Lobby to Reckon With. It was honest, investigative journalism at its very best. The programme explained why it was no longer accurate to talk about the Zionist lobby (which in my view was wrongly called the Israel lobby) as the main influence on American policy for the Middle East. There was now a more powerful lobby, one that had been formed, effectively if not institutionally, by the Zionists joining forces with Christian fundamentalism. As Sackur observed, "It is an alliance of the two best organised networks in the U.S."

Another way to put it would be to say that America's elected representatives, almost all of them including their Presidents, are frightened of offending Zionism too much and sometimes at all, and terrified of offending Zionism in alliance with Christian fundamentalism.

A truth about Zionism is that it's always been ready, willing and able to use or be used by any power or interest when doing so advanced its own cause. It has never needed a spoon, long or short, to sup with the devil. Those who are familiar with the most intimate details of Zionism's history know that in 1940 there was a Zionist offer to collaborate with Nazi Germany - to participate in the war on Germany's side and to assist the establishment of Hitler's New (totalitarian) Order in Europe.

To this day Zionism and all supporters of Israel right or wrong deny there was ever a Zionist proposal for collaboration with Nazi Germany, just as they deny Zionism's ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948/49 and on-going; but 45 years after the offer was made in writing, Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel's longest serving director of Military Intelligence, made the following observation about it in his book, Israel's Fateful Hour:

"Perhaps, for peace of mind, we ought to see this affair as an aberrant episode in Jewish history. Nevertheless, it should alert us to how far extremists may go in times of distress, and where their manias may lead." (My empassis added).

It could also that there was a financial consideration in Zionsm's decision to use and be used by Christian fundamentalism. At some point in the future it's not impossible that the more American and European Jews realise that Zionism is their enemy, the less they will be willing to pump money into the Zionist state.. In that event, Zionism may have calculated, it will need Christian fundamentalist money more than ever.

I've never believed that enough Americans would be stupid enough to put Senator John McCain in the White House, and hopefully his better-late-than-never rejection of Hagee's endorsement will guarantee his defeat.

The only "end of times" I wish for is the termination of the unholy alliance between Christian fundamentalism and Zionism. Amen.

Celebrating the denial of ethnic cleansing

2008-05-13T17:52:00.000+01:00

On 14 May 1948, the Zionist state of Israel declared itself to be in existence. Before and after that event 60 years ago, many of the Arabs of Palestine were dispossessed of their land and their rights, and the Palestinian refugee problem was created. How, really, did it happen? (The essence as summarised below gives due prominence to the statements of Zionism's own leaders)

The birthplace of Israel's founding father was the small Polish factory town of Plonsk, about 38 miles from Warsaw. He was born David Green, the son of a lawyer, in 1886. He arrived in Palestine from his Polish homeland in 1906 as a Russian tourist on a three-month visa and, in his own words, he "simply overstayed."

On his first visit to Jerusalem, and reflecting the fact that the small number of Jews then in Palestine were from many homelands, he described the Holy City as a "Tower of Babel", with Jews "speaking to each other in 40 different languages, half of them unable to communicate with the other half."

As David Ben-Gurion he was Israel's first and long-serving prime minister and minister of defence.

In 1937, and as he recorded in his diary, Ben-Gurion wrote a letter to his son. In it he said: "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as war."

The founding father of Israel's army was Vladimir Jabotinsky. He was a Russian Jew, born in Odessa in 1880. In 1923 he published The Iron Wall, which became the main inspirational text for all Jewish nationalists who committed themselves to Zionism's colonial enterprise. Its purpose was to take for keeping the maximum amount of Arab land with the minimum number of Arabs on it. In The Iron Wall, Jabotinsky was brutally frank about what Zionism's ethic had to be. He wrote this:

"Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. There is no other ethic. It is important to speak Hebrew but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonization. To the hackneyed reproach that this point of view is unethical, I answer – absolutely untrue. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes – not for any tasty morsel because this is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall". (Emphasis added).

The need for most if not all of Palestine's Arabs to be dispossessed of their land and their rights had, in fact, been recognised and accepted by Zionism's founding father, Theodore Herzl. A Hungarian-born Jew who worked as a journalist and playwright in Vienna, Herzl convened the first Congress of the World Zionist Organisation at Basel in Switzerland in 1897. It ended with Zionism's first public statement of its mission. It was "to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine." The term "home" was used because the Zionists did not want the world to know their real intention - to create a sovereign state. What Herzl really thought at the time was confined to his diary, which was not made public, published, until 1960. His diary entry for 3 September 1897 included the following:

"Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word - which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly - it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish STATE. Perhaps in five years, and certainly 50, everyone will know it… At Basel, then, I created this abstraction which, as such, is invisible to the vast majority of people." (Emphasis added).

Herzl also confided to his diary his vision of what would have to happen to the Palestinian Arabs:

"We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries while denying it any employment in our own country… Both the process of expropriation (of Arab land) and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly." (Emphasis added).

In 1940, when Nazi persecution of Europe's Jews was turning to extermination, Joseph Weitz, the head of the Jewish Agency's Colonisation Department in Palestine, wrote a secret memorandum headed A Solution to the (Jewish) Refugee Problem. In it he said:

"It must be clear that there is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighbouring countries - all of them. Not one village, not one tribe, should be left!" (Emphasis added).

"Transfer" was and is Zionism's euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

It was Arthur James Balfour, the foreign minister in Britain's wartime coalition government, and before that prime minister, who gave Zionism's colonial enterprise a degreee of spurious legitimacy. He did it in a note addressed to Baron Lionel Rothschild on 2 November 1917. The Balfour Declaration (as it became known) was in part a response to the personal pleading and lobbying of Dr. Chaim Weizmann, who had become the leader of the World Zionist Organisation after Herzl's premature death. The document said:

"His Majesty's Government views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to faciliate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." (Emphasis added).

Palestine at the time was controlled by Turkey, and Britain had no right of any kind to give Palestine away, in whole or in part, to anybody. In 1957 an article in the American Bar Association Journal by Sol Linowitz (who was to become an adviser to, and negotiator for, President Carter) concluded that the Balfour Declaration was "legally impotent".

The Balfour Declaration concealed from public view a reality which, if it had been acknowledged, would have invited the conclusion that catastrophe was bound to be the outcome if Zionism was allowed to have its way. The concealed reality was the make-up of the population of Palestine. At the moment the Balfour Declaration was issued, the Arabs numbered about 670,000 and constituted 93 percent of the population. Jews then in Palestine numbered about 60,000 and constituted seven percent of the population. The term "Arab" or "Arabs" did not appear in the Balfour Declaration. As we have seen, it reduced the 93 percent Arab majority to "existing non-Jewish communities."

In the House of Commons in July 1937, Winston Churchill, (then excluded from office and campaigning for the Hitler threat to be taken seriously), gave an explanation of why the Balfour Declaration was issued. He said:

"It is a delusion to suppose this was a mere act of crusading enthusiasm or quixotic philanthrophy. On the contrary, it was a measure taken… in due need of the war with the object of promoting the general victory of the Allies, for which we expected and received valued and important assistance." (Emphasis added).

The clear implication of those words is that in November 1917 Britain had needed the Zionists and their influence and had been prepared to pay the price they asked for it.

There is not space inthis shortish article to go into the documented detail of what assistance Britain needed from Zionism and where it was needed. But the following can be said in summary.

In November 1917, Britain was facing the prospect of defeat in World War I. The Admiralty had warned that Britain might have to surrender. To stave off any prospect of defeat, Britain needed Zionism's influence in revolutionary Russia and America. The Zionists were expected to use their influence to keep Russia (Britain's ally) in the war and, also, to prevent a complete communist takeover (of Russia); and the Zionists were expected to use their influence to bring America into the war, and to see that, against the clock, the money was available to fund the upgrading and expansion of America's war machine.

And there were two other factors at work.

British policy makers believed that the establishment of a Zionist state in the Arab heartland would assist Britain's control of the region by, among other things, keeping the Arabs divided about how to deal with it.

It was also the case that Britain's leaders, the anti-Semitic Balfour in particular, did not want any more Jews in Britain. From 1881, because of poverty and persecution including pogroms, Jews had been streaming out of their Tsarist Russian homeland in search of a better life in America and Western Europe. Senior figures in Britain's Conservative establishment feared, as did Britain's long settled Jews, that an influx of more Jews might provoke anti-Semitism.

When, with the the help of the Arabs it was intending to betray, Britain defeated Turkey and occupied Palestine, it was in a position to give substance to the Balfour Declaration. But what substance? Balfour spelled it out in a memorandum he prepared on 11 August 1919 for the Paris Peace Conference. It said:

"In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country…. The four great powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land." (Emphasis added).

Twenty years later, and shortly after the British occupation forces had put down a full-scale Arab rebellion and destroyed the Palestinian leadership, Balfour's policy was repudiated by a committee whose members included the Lord Chancellor, Vincent Caldecot. The committee investigated Britain's promises to the Arabs, and the Lord Chancellor was privately appalled by the British duplicity the committee uncovered. Its unanimous report was issued on 11 March 1939. It said:

"His Majesty's Government was not free to dispose of Palestine without regard for the wishes and interests of the inhabitants of Palestine." (Emphasis added).

Six weeks later, in the countdown to World War II, and terrified by the prospect of the Arabs throwing in their lot with Nazi Germany on the basis that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, the British government unveiled a White Paper setting out its new policy for Palestine. It said:

"His Majesty's Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is not part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish state." (Emphasis added)

In a most exlicit way that left no scope for misunderstanding by anybody, and no opportunity for misrepresentation by Zionism, the White Paper spelled out what Britain's Palestine policy was to be from here on.

The objective was "an independent Palestinian state within 10 years," in which "Arabs and Jews could share in such a way as to ensure that the essential interests of each are safeguarded."

As a concession to the Zionists, the White Paper also stated that Britain would permit a total of 75,000 more Jews to enter Palestine over the next five years, which would take the Jewish population of Palestine to approximately one-third. But after five years Britain was not intending to allow any more Jews to enter Palestine without the consent of the Arabs. Since it was predictable that the Arabs would not agree to further Jewish immigation, the 1939 White Paper was effectively announcing the end of it after five years.

In addition the White Paper pledged that Britain would check the ever-increasing illegal Jewish immigation into Palestine; and that the British High Commissioner would be given powers to regulate the sale and transfer of land.

Zionism rejected the White Paper and accused Britain of betraying the Jews. Ben-Gurion himself declared:

"We will fight with the British against Hitler as if there was no White Paper; and fight the White Paper as if there were no war.

What was about to happen in Palestine, and much of what is still happening today, was determined more than anything else by what happened in Europe - the slaughter of six million Jews.

Prior to the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, Zionism's prospects for creating a state for Jews in Palestine were not good. They were even poor. And that was due in large part to the fact that very many Jews of the world, particularly the most informed and thoughtful of them, were opposed to Zionism's colonial enterprise. They believed it to be morally wrong. They believed it would lead to unending conflict. And they feared that if Zionism had its way, it would one day provoke anti-Semitism which could threaten the wellbeing and perhaps even the survival of Jews everywhere.

Also documented is the fact that very many of the Jews who were displaced and uprooted in Nazi occupied Europe and needed refuge elsewhere did not want to go to Palestine. Their preference was America.

- President Roosevelt did, in fact, seek to organise a rescue plan which he hoped would allow up to half a million European refugees, Jews and others, into America, Britain and elsewhere. But this initiative was killed by the Zionist lobby, a victory that was due in large part to the fact that many of America's settled Jews, like their English counterparts in an earlier time, did not want the arrival of too many more Jewish immigrants.

- After Roosevelt's death in office, President Truman also tried to get a rescue plan going, but again because of the Zionist lobby's influence, it didn't get the necessary support in Congress.

Zionism didn't want European Jewish refugees anywhere but in Palestine, where they were to be a battering ram for the creation of the Zionist state.

In Volume One of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, there is a chapter headed Holocaust - Jewish Death, Zionist Life. It was the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust that gave Zionism everything it needed to proceed with confidence and self-righteousness. Everything included the emotional and political support of most if not all of world Jewry, and, in due course, the money, much of it from America, to buy the weapons with which to fight and defeat Arab armies, all of them if necessary. But Zionism's first strategic priority was to get British forces out of Palestine.

One Zionist initiative for bringing this about was a proposal for an alliance with Nazi Germany. The proposer was Avraham Stern. He arrived in Palestine from his Polish homeland in 1925. He was one of the founder members of the Irgun (formally the National Military Organisation or NMO). It was to become Zionism's most successful terrorist organisation; but Stern broke with it to form his own group which was best known as the Stern Gang.

In September 1940, Stern approached Mussolini's Italian Fascists for a deal with them. When they were not interested, he turned to the Nazis. In Janury 1941, Stern met with two important Nazis. One of them was Otto von Hentig, the head of the Oriental Department of Nazi Germany's foreign office. The outcome of the discussions was a proposal, in writing, dated 11 January 1941, from Stern. The text of the proposal said, in part, the following (emphasis added):

"The establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by treaty with with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East.

"Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition of the above mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freeedom movement are recognised on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany's side.

"This offer by the NMO… would be connected to the military training and organising of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be decided upon.

"The indirect participation of the Israeli freedom movement in the New Order in Europe, already in the preparatory stage, would be linked with a positive solution of the European Jewish problem in conformity with the above mentioned aspirations of the Jewish people. This would extraordinarily strengthen the moral basis of the New Order in the eyes of all humanity."

Stern was assassinated by British special forces in 1942.

Forty-five years later, Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel's longest serving director of Military Intelligence, offered an observation on this Zionist attempt to do business with Hitler's Germany:

It was another Jewish immigrant from Poland, Menachem Begin, who turned the Irgun into a most successful terrorist organisation. The same Menachem Begin who, in 1977, would become Israel's prime minister and speed up the illegal settlement of the occupied West Bank, in order to deny the Palestinians any prospect of sufficient land for a viable independent state of their own, or so he hoped.

While he was re-structuring and re-focusing the Irgun, Begin had a message for the Gentiles of the world, and the British in particular:

"Lest they be unwilling to realise, or all too ready to overlook, the fact is that out of blood and fire and tears and ashes, a new specimen of human being was born, a new specimen completely unknown to the world for over eighteen hundred years, the FIGHTING JEW. That Jew, who the world considered dead and buried and never to rise again, has risen… never again to go down the sides of the pit and vanish off the earth."

In Cairo on 6 November 1944, two representatives of this "new specimen of human being" assassinated Lord Moyne, Britain's Resident Minister for the Middle East. In the House of Commons, Churchill responded with these words:

"If our dreams for Zionism are to end in the smoke of assassins' guns and our labours for its future produce only a new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany, then many like myself will have to reconsider the position we have maintained so consistently and so long in the past." (Emphasis added).

In Palestine the Irgun concentrated on bombing British installations, facilities and communications networks of all kinds, for the purpose of making government impossible. The blowing up of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946 was the most spectacular and politically important of the Irgun's operations against the occupying British. They had taken over the southern wing of this most prestigious hotel to house the central institutions of their administration. It was the very heart of British authority and power in Palestine. Ben-Gurion denied that he or Zionism's official military organisations - the Haganah and the Palmach - had anything do with, or advance knowledge of, the blowing up of the King David.. He was not telling the truth. At least 91 people were killed and twice that number were injured. And Britain was humiliated.

So, having made a mess of it, Britain decided to get out of Palestine by midnight on 13 May 1948; and it dumped the problem of what to do about Palestine into the lap of infant United Nations. Zionist terrorism had succeeded in its mission to break Britain's will to stay.

On 20 November 1947, at the end of a voting process that was influenced by the Zionist lobby, the General Assembly of the UN approved by a narrow majority a resolution, number 181, to partition Palestine. It was a proposal for injustice on a massive scale. IF it was approved by the Security Council, 56.4 percent of Palestine was to be given for a Jewish state to people - many of them recently arrived, alien immigrants with no biological connection to the ancient Hebrews - who constituted 33 percent of the population and owned 5.6 percent of the land.

But the bare facts abut the Partition Plan proposal itself tell only a fraction of this part of the truth of history.

Without the consent of the majority of the people of Palestine, the UN did not have the right to decide to partition Palestine or assign any part of its territory to a minority of alien immigrants in order for them to establish a state of their own.

Even so, the partition plan proposal approved by the General Assembly did NOT become UN policy because it did NOT go to the Security Council for approval - because the US believed that, if approved in the face of Arab and other Muslim opposition. it could only be implemented by force; and President Truman was NOT prepared to use force to partition Palestine.

So the partition plan was vitiated, became invalid, and the question of what to do about Palestine was taken back to the General Assembly for more discussion. The option favoured and proposed by the US was temporary UN Trusteeship. It was while the General Assembly was debating what do that Israel UNILATERALLY declared itself to be in existence - actually in defiance of the will of the organised international community, including the Truman administration.

Zionism's assertion that Israel was given its birth certificate and thus its legitmacy by the UN Partition Plan is a myth. Propaganda nonsense. The truth of the time was that the Zionist state of Israel had no right to exist and could have no right to exist unless ….. Unless it was recognised and legitimized by those who were dispossessed of their land and their rights during its creation. In international law only the Palestinians could give Israel the legitimacy it craved. And that legitimacy was the only thing the Zionists could not take from the Palestinians by force.

The Arabs were not only the overwhelming majority in the territory to be allotted to them by the Partition Plan proposal, they were also about 40 percent of the population in the territory to be allotted to the Jews. For Ben-Gurion and his most senior leadership colleagues, this gave added urgency to their task of finalising the plan - Plan Dalet - to ethnically cleanse, de-Arabise, as much as Palestine as possible.

According to Zionism's version of history, most if not all of the 800,000 Arabs who took their leave of Palestine in the months before and after Israel's declaration of independence left voluntarily, in response to a call from Arab leaders to make way and leave a clear field of fire for incoming Arab armies. In his latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Professor Ilan Pappe, Israel's leading "revisionist" (which means honest) historian, describes this version of history, Israel's foundational myth, as "a sheer fabrication." He documents the planning and implementation of Zionism's ethnic cleansing policy - a systematic reign of terror which, from December 1947 to January 1949, included 31 massacres.

The massacre at the the Arab village of Deir Yassin on 9 April 1947, was correctly described by Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-Jewish writer, as "the psychologically decisive factor in the spectacular exodus of the Arabs from the Holy Land and the creation of the Palestinan refugee problem." At Deir Yassin, 254 Palestinians, including 145 women of whom 35 were pregnant, were butchered. Menachem Begin, whose Irgun terrorists led the attack with assistance from the Stern Gang, was later to write this:

"In the rest of the country the Arabs began to flee in terror, even before they clashed with Jewish forces…. The legend of Deir Yassin helped us in particular in the saving of Tiberias and the conquest of Haifa… All the Jewish forces proceeded to advance through Haifa like a knife through butter. The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting 'Deir Yassin!'" (Emphasis added).

On 17 November 1948, Aharon Cizling, Israel's first minister of agriculture, said the following at a cabinet meeting:

"Now the Jews have behaved like Nazis and my entire being is shaken."

But having spoken those words, he agreed that the Zionist state's crimes should be covered up. And they have been for 60 years.

The conclusion invited by honest study of what really happened is that there won't be, can't be, a real peace process unless and until enough Israelis, and Jews everywhere, are prepared to acknowledge the terrible wrong done to the Palestinians by Zionism, with the collusion of the major powers.

"Farewell Israel": Myth and Reality

2008-04-27T09:29:00.001+01:00

With his political documentary FAREWELL ISRAEL, Bush, Iran and The Revolt of Islam, American director Joel Gilbert has launched what could be described as Zionism's propaganda weapon of last resort.

The film is described by its promoters as "An historic journey, from the birth of Islam, through its 1,200 year reign over the civilised world, to the last 300 years of Islamic decline, overtaken and dominated by the West - then humiliated by a Jewish state… In this groundbreaking film, the total rejection of Israel by Muslim states since its inception in 1948 comes to light as a religious duty for Believers." (My emphasis added).

According to the same promotional script: "The Iranian agenda for acquiring strategic weapons to eliminate Israel comes clearly into focus. Today, at the direction of Iran, Islamists are preparing for a fateful war for Islam - and Israel is the number one target and obstacle in the path of Islamic revival for Muslims."

For the sake of discussion, let's suppose that sometime in the foreseable future Iran does have nuclear weapons. Would it then go for a nuclear first strike against Israel? The answer, I assert, is no. Never! So what really is all the Zionist and American neo-con fuss about?

Perhaps without realising that he has let a great, big cat out of the bag, Joel Gilbert has provided the answer. He says (my empasis added): "Even without attacking Israel, the mere capabilty of Iranian missiles to lay waste to Tel Aviv would create a 'strategic umbrella,' preventing Israel from using its superior strategic assets in a conventional war. With Israeli missiles neutralised, Muslim countries could overwhelm Israel with their superior numbers, conventional armor and short range missiles."

And that's the real point. Israel's military leaders and their political yes-men don't believe, and never have believed, that Iran, if it possessed nuclear weapons, would unleash them in a first strike against the Zionist state. The real problem for its leaders is that the moment Israel ceased to be the only nuclear-armed power in the region, would be the moment it lost its ability to impose its will on the region. And actually the world.

I don't doubt that Joel Gilbert is "one of the few Western scholars of historic Islamic-Jewish relations", but that has not prevented him from closing his mind to the reality of events and the truth of history. The statement that Muslim states have totally rejected Israel from its birth in 1948 is nothing but a manifestation of Zionist propaganda nonsense. As documented in THE IRON WALL, Israel and the Arab World by Professor Avi Shlaim, one of the two leading Israeli "revisionist" (which means honest) historians of our time, de-classified Israeli state papers and the diaries of departed leaders leave no room to doubt that it was Israel, not the Arab states, which never missed an opportunity to close the door to peace.

And still today the impotent but pragmatic regimes of the Arab and wider Muslim world are prepared, with the consent of the overwhelming majority of their citizens, to make peace with an Israel inside its pre-1967 borders. It's true that Zionism is not interested in a genuine two-state solution because it's mission was and is to take for keeping the maximum amount of Arab land with the minimum number of Arabs on it; but that doesn't change the fact that most Arabs and other Muslims would, even now, accept an Israel withdrawn from all the territory it grabbed in the 1967 war.

The main message of FAREWELL ISRAEL, Bush, Iran and the Revolt of Islam is addressed in particular to the present and the next occupant of the White House. It, the message, is something like this: "Don't push Israel to do things it doesn't want to do because it's facing the real danger of annihilation, and that being so, it's prepared to tell the world to go to hell if necessary." (If necessary means in the event of the major powers led by America requiring Israel to be serious about peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept).

From reading between the lines of what Zionists and other supporters of Israel right or wrong have been saying and writing for the past year and more, it's clear that at least some of them do believe that the day is coming when an America administration will conclude that the Zionist state is more of a liability than an asset, and will be prepared to apply all necessary pressure in an effort to cause it to make peace on terms the overwhelming majority of Palestinians and other Arabs and most Muslims everywhere could accept.

And that's the context in which I suggest that Joel Gilbert's documentary could be described as a Zionist propaganda weapon of last resort. Its purpose is to explain in advance why Israel might one day tell an American President to go to hell.

On the subject of Joel Gilbert's vision of Israel one day being overwhelmed, I recall the words spoken to me many years ago by Golda Meir, Mother Israel, when she was prime minister. At a point during an interview I did with her for the BBC's Panorama programme, I interrupted her to say: "Prime Minister, I want to be sure I understand what you're saying… You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and the whole world down with it?"

As stated on the second page of Waiting for the Apocalypse, the Prologue to Volume One of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, Golda replied, without the shortest of pauses for reflection, and in the gravel voice that could charm or intimidate American Presidents according to need, "Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying."

Within an hour of that interview being transmitted at eight o'clock on a Monday evening, The Times (pre-Murdoch and not then a cheer leader for Zionism) had changed its lead editorial. Its new one quoted what Golda had said to me and then added its own opinion - "We had better believe her."

I did and still do.

Has the U.S. State Department Gone Completely Zionist?

2008-04-09T09:51:00.000+01:00

How can criticism of Israel be stopped? By labelling it as anti-Semitism, or so supporters of Israel right or wrong believe. This has always been Zionism's game but now the U.S. State Department, no doubt under immense pressure from the Zionist lobby and its Christian fundamentalist allies, is playing it, too. In my view the State Department's 94-page study, Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism, is a disengenuous and dangerous document which might well make all Jews everywhere more not less vulnerable.

In his report of the study, Ron Kampeas of the JTA ("The Global News Service of the Jewish People") says: "U.S. diplomats and other officials will be expected to take their cues from this forceful language in how they deal with political groups and individuals overseas."

The "forceful" language of the State Department study includes the following two paragraphs (my emphasis added for comment below):

"Anti-Semitism has proven to be an adaptive phenomenon. New forms of anti-Semitism have evolved. They often incorporate elements of traditional anti-Semitism. However, the distinguishing feature of the new anti-Semitism is criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy – whether intentionally or unintentionally – has the effect of promoting prejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributing Israel's perceived faults to its Jewish character.

"Regardless of the intent, disproportionate criticism of Israel as barbaric and unprincipled, and correspondingly discriminatory measures adopted by the UN against Israel, have the effect of causing audiences to associate negative attributes with Jews in general, thus fuelling anti-Semitism."

I am very much aware that telling the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine could provoke classical anti-Semitism, this because the truth of history includes the fact that Israel was created, mainly, by Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleaning. Though the two crimes against humanity were different in scale, the denial by supporters of Israel right or wrong of Zionism's ethnic cleansing in Palestine is as obscene as the denial of the Nazi holocaust.

The question is… How can the truth of history be told, and Israel be criticised, without provoking classical anti-Semitism? The short answer is that the context must explain the difference between Judaism and Zionism. As I never tire of writing and saying, knowledge of this difference is the key to understanding why it is perfectly possible to be passionately anti-Zionist (opposed to Zionism's colonial enterprise) without being in any way shape or form anti-Semitic; and, also, why it is wrong to blame all Jews everywhere for the crimes of the hardest core Zionist few in Israel.

If citizens of all faiths and none in the nations of the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian world were aware of the differencies between Judiasm and Zionism, and how Zionism has made a mockery of and has contempt for the moral values and ethical principles of Judaism, there would be no danger of the truth of history and criticism of Israel provoking anti-Semitism.

As it relates to those of us who, with our books and public speaking, are on the frontline of the war for the truth of history and are by definition anti-Zionist, the State Department's assertion (emphasised above) that we attribute Israel's "perceived faults" to it's "Jewish character" is libellous nonsense. We say the very opposite - that Israel is a Zionist state, not a Jewish state.

In conversation with me for a forthcoming television production, Professor Ilan Pappe, Israel's leading "revisionist" or honest historian, offered a most penetrating observation. He was talking about the principle of the One State solution and he said:

"The One State would replace the racist and apartheid state with a shared democracy, a state for all of its citizens. This would create a state that was far more Jewish than the Zionist state because the Zionist state is not a Jewish state and abuses the principles of Judaism." (My emphasis added).

As emphasised above, the State Department's study also asserts that regardless of intention, "disproportionate criticism of Israel" (what the hell is that?) has the effect of "causing audiences to associate negative attributes with Jews in general." This could not happen if audiences were aware of the difference between Judaism and Zionism.

Memo to the State Department: If you really want to play a part in stopping the monster of classical anti-Semitism going on the rampage again, take the lead in explaining the difference between Judaism and Zionism. (And read my two-volume book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews).

Is The "Israel Lobby" Really Losing Its Grip, and, If It Is, What Are The Implications?

2008-03-31T17:40:00.001+01:00

In an perceptive piece for The American Conservative under the headline OBAMA'S ISRAEL TEST, Scott McConnell asked, "Is the lobby losing its grip?" It seems so, but I think it's important to understand the choice that will exist for the Jews of the world, and Jewish Americans especially, if American politicians (many if not all) and the mainstream media do stop being frightened of offending the lobby.

But first things first. The lobby in question is not what McConnell and others including Mearsheimer and Walt state it to be. It's not "the Israel lobby". It could only be called that if it represented the views of all Israeli Jews. It does not do so any more than AIPAC represents the views of all Jewish Americans. (According to recent polls, AIPAC probably speaks for not more than one-third of all Jewish Americans and possibly considerably less).

A more accurate (but not completely accurate) description of the particular phenomenon is "Likud lobby", terminology which conveys the correct impression that the lobby is rightwing and very hardline, even extreme, and opposed to peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept.

Way back in February 1980, I had a private conversation with Shimon Peres. He was then the leader of Israel's Labour Party, the main opposition to Menachem Begin's Likud dominated ruling coalition, which was speeding up the colonisation of the occupied West Bank. In the course of this conversation, I used the term "Israel lobby". In a voice laced with despair and a hint of anger, Peres said: "It's not an Israel lobby. It's a Likud lobby. And that's my problem." (At the time Peres and almost the whole world including President Carter was hoping that he would win Israel's next election and deny Begin a second term in office as prime minister. He didn't).

In due course, after Ariel Sharon broke with Likud to form the Kadima Party, the lobby became the Likud-Kadima lobby, but it remained Likud in its core essence. The only major difference between Likud and Kadima is that the latter understands, as Prime Minister Olmert recently admitted, that the Zionist state of Israel would be finished, destroyed by the demographic time-bomb of occupation, if it did not withdraw from some of the West Bank. (Sharon did not withdraw from Gaza for peace but as a first step to defusing the demographic time-bomb; and, if he could do it without provoking a Jewish civil war, he was intending at some point to withdraw from about half, more or less, of the West Bank. He was not at all concerned that the 40 to 60 percent of it he was intending to withdraw from would not and could not constitute a viable Palestinian mini-state).

All things considered, including Israel's on-going colonisation of those parts of the occupied West Bank its leaders intend to keep for ever, I think (and have long thought) that the best way to serve the cause of understanding is to give the particular phenomenon its proper name. It is not the Israel lobby, or even the Likud or Likud-Kadima lobby. It is the Zionist lobby.

For those who are unaware of what Zionism actually is - I mean political Zionism as opposed to spiritual Zionism - and why it is the complete opposite of Judaism, I offer the following brief explanation.

Judaism is the religion of Jews, not the Jews because not all Jews are religious. And, like Christianity and Islam, Judaism has at its core a set of moral values and ethical principles. All the religious Jews of the world look to Jerusalem as the centre of their religion and spiritual capital, and in that sense they could be said to be, and many do regard themselves as being, spiritual Zionists.

Political Zionism is the nationalism of some Jews, actually a tiny minority of the world's Jews at the time of Zionism's first public and dishonest mission statement in 1897, which colonised land, Palestine, to create a state for some Jews; an enterprise which required the incoming, alien Zionist colonisers - most if not all of whom had no biological connection to the ancient Hebrews, the first Israelites - to ethnically cleanse the land of most of its indigenous Arab inhabitants, the majority population at the time of the colonisation. A Zionist today is one, not necessarily a Jew, who (to quote Balfour) supports the Zionist state of Israel "right or wrong", and who cannot or will not admit that a wrong was done to the Palestinians by Zionism, a wrong that must be righted on terms acceptable to the Palestinians for justice and peace.

The whole point of Zionism's colonial enterprise was, as it still is, to take for keeping the maximum amount of Arab land with the minimum number of Arabs on it; an enterprise that was assisted by the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, which gave Zionism a blackmail card to silence criticism of Israel thoughout the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian world and suppress informed and honest debate about who must do what and why for justice and peace.

In summary it can be said that Zionism makes a mockery of, and has contempt for, the moral values and ethical principles of Judaism. That being so, it's all the more amazing that Zionist spin doctors succeeded in making the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian world believe that Judaism and Zionism are one and the same thing. They are emphatically not. Zionism, as the title of my latest book asserts and its substance demonstrates, is the real enemy of the Jews, as well as being the biggest single threat to the peace of the region and arguably the world.

Knowledge of the difference between Judaism and Zionism is the key to understanding. It's the explanation of why it is perfectly possible to be passionately anti-Zionist (opposed to Zionism's colonial enterprise) without being in any way, shape or form anti-Semitic (anti-Jew). It's also the explanation of why it it is wrong to blame all Jews for the crimes of the relative few. (As a matter of fact, almost all Arabs have always known the difference between Judaism and Zionism; and that's why they call for the de-Zionization of Palestine, and not, repeat not, the destruction of the Jews now living in it).

McConnell noted that President Kennedy buckled under Zionist lobby pressure. He did indeed, and he was very angry about having to do so and become what he himself described as a "political whore". As I document in Volume Two of my book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, presidential candidate Kennedy said the following to an old and trusted friend, newspaper columnist Charles Bartlett, after he, Kennedy, had been summoned to a fund raising meeting:

"As an American citizen I am outraged to have a Zionist group come to me and say - 'We know your campaign is in trouble. We're willing to pay your bills if you let us have control of your Middle East policy." (In further remarks to Bartlett, a furious JFK emphasised "they wanted control!" My guess is that they didn't put it that way, but that what they said left no room for JFK to doubt that control was what they wanted).

As I also document in my book, there is good evidence for believing that, if he had been allowed to live, a second term President Kennedy would have addressed the root cause of the conflict in and over Palestine, even at the cost of, Eisenhower-like, confronting the Zionist lobby. (I think - see McConnell's obeservations below - that it's not unreasonable to speculate that a second term President Obama, if he is allowed to live, could be the White House occupant who calls and holds Zionism to account).

McConnell wrote that several wars and many billions of dollars later (after JFK), the politics of Israel-Palestine are not exactly the same as 50 years ago but not that different either. "Israel is more powerful and more dependent on American largesse. Americans are far more deeply engaged in the Middle East and for the most part they are not happy about it."

And this about the man most likely to be America's next President: "On the surface, the tie between Barack Obama and Israel's establishment supporters is warm and comfortable… Nonetheless, there's a sense among the Jewish establishment (I imagine McConnell probably means the Zionist establishment) that all is not as it seems - and if the view has not yet crystallized that Obama has a less Israelocentric perception of he Middle East than any other major party nominee since Eisenhower, there is foreboding that times are a changin'." (My emphasis added).

And this is how McConnell sees change manifesting itself:

"For the first time in a presidential race, the Israel-Palestine issue will consist of something other than two men squabbling over who will more rapidly overrule the State Department and absolutely positively move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. (I note that although he is sticking pretty much to Zionism's script as all candidates must when running for office - all offices not just the highest - Obama has already indicated that he does not accept that Likud and Israel are synonymous).

"A welcome corollary will be realization that there are different ways for Americans to be "pro-Israel" and push back against the view that being pro-Israel means supporting the right of the Jewsh state to lord it over 5 million Palestinians in conditions increasingly seen as resembling South Africa apartheid. The alternative view won't sweep the country, but it will migrate from its present home on university campuses and liberal Protestant churches into the wider body politic."

And finally will come recognition, McConnell wrote, that "the Israel lobby's power to dominate the American debate is beginning to weaken."

The reason why I agree with McConnell can be simply stated. In the last few years, and for the first time ever, Zionism's version of the history of the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine has started to be exposed for the propaganda nonsense it is. And that is thanks in large part to the work and courage of Israel's "new" or "revisionist" historians. (The terms "new" and "revisionist" in this context are euphemisms. The more accurate or proper adjective to describe Israel's truth-telling professors of history - Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappe are the giants in their field - is honest. Am I suggesting that before them Israel's historians were dishonest by default if not design? Yes, I most certainly am). The task of telling the truth of history is also being assisted by a bottom-up media revolution made possible by the internet.

Zionism's narrative, upon which the first and still existing draft of Judeo-Christian history is constructed, is rooted in denial of ethnic cleansing. (The most comprehensive and fully documented work on this subject is Ilan Pappe's latest book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine).

There are people who'll say that what's done is done. Israel, no matter how it was created, exists. But that's not the point. There is not a snowball's chance in hell of a real peace process unless and until the Jews, and Israelis especially, are prepared to acknowledge the wrong done to the Arabs of Palestine by Zionism.

Zionism's denial of ethnic cleansing is underpined by two great propaganda lies.

The first is that poor little Israel has lived in constant danger of annihilation - the "driving into the sea" of its Jews. The truth of history is that Israel's existence has never, ever, been in danger from any combination of Arab force. Not in 1948/49. Not in 1967. And not even in 1973. Zionism's assertion to the contrary was the cover which allowed Israel to get away where it mattered most, America and Western Europe, with presenting its aggression as self-defence and itself as the victim when, actually, it was and is the oppressor.

The second great lie of Zionism's version of history was that Israel had "no partners" for peace. On this account the truth of history includes the fact, for example, that Arafat the pragmatist opened the door to a genuine and viable two-state solution as far back as 1979, more than a quarter of a century ago. And long before that, another example, Eygpt's President Nasser, who never had any intention of fighting Israel to liberate Palestine, authorised, and himself took part in, secret, exploratory exchanges with Israel in the hope of making an accomodation with it. (Avi Shlaim's magnificent book, THE IRON WALL, Israel and the Arab World, which is informed in part by Avi's access to de-classified Israeli state papers, leaves no room to doubt that it was Israel's leaders, not Arab leaders, who never missed an opportunity to close the door to peace).

Professors Mearsheimer and Walt (the distinguished authors of The Israel Lobby) have declared that the best way of dealing with the lobby is "to encourage a more open debate… in order to correct existing myths about the Middle East and to force groups in the lobby to defend their positions in the face of well informed opposition." (My emphasis added).

The problem for Zionism (as I'm sure Mearsheimer and Walt know) is that its positions are indefensible when they are challenged by those who are armed with the documented facts and truth of history. And that's why the Zionist lobby is beginning to lose its grip.

My very dear friend Ilan Pappe told me that Zionism was more worried by my book than any other because of its title, which, he agreed, represents a great and profound truth in seven words. The more the citizens of the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian or Western world become aware that Judaism and Zionism are opposites, the less Zionism's propaganda maestros will be able to suppress informed and honest debate with the charge, almost always false and malicious, that criticism of Israel is a manifesation of anti-Semitism.

Ilan also offered me this observation:

"Zionism's main defense is not money and military might but a wall of propaganda lies. If one or two of the main bricks in this wall can be dislodged, the whole thing might collapse faster than any of us would dare to imagine."

At the time of writing, as in the past, the mainstream media, almost all publishing houses and virtually all politicians are still too frightened of offending Zionism to come to grips with the truth of history as it relates to the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine; but despite this complicity in Zionism's suppression of the truth of history, one or two of the main bricks in Zionism's wall of propaganda lies are in the process of being dislodged.

So what are the implications if the Zionist lobby really is beginning to lose its grip?

The short answer is that the next American president will be more free than any of his predecessors to use the leverage he has to require Israel to behave in accordance with international law, and to be serious about peace in accordance with the will of the organised international community as expressed in the spirit as well as the letter of UN resolutions. (If I was writing a speech for the next president, I'd having him saying something like the following to Israel. Until now there have been two sets of rules for the behaviour of nations - one for all the nations of the world excluding only Israel, and one exclusively for Israel. This double-standard is no longer acceptable to the peoples and governments of the world).

If the next American president (or possibly his successor) was prepared to require Israel to be serious about peace on terms which the vast majority of Palestinians and almost all other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept, I think that what would actually happen would be determined by how the Jews of the world, and Jewish Amercans especially, responded.

Because the Zionist lobby is beginning to lose its grip, and does not anyway represent the majority of Jewish Americans, it's my guess that most of them would say, perhaps not out loud: "We are Americans first, and if our president deems it to be in our national interest that leverage be used to require Israel to be serious about peace, so be it."

But that would be mere acquiescence and it would not necessarily be enough. The hardest core Zionist leadership in Israel, political and military, is quite capable of telling the whole world, including the president of America, to go to hell. Why do I say that?

Many years ago, in private conversation, I asked General Moshe Dayan, Israel's one-eyed warlord, why Israel had nuclear weapons. I said we both knew Israel didn't need them vis-à-vis the Arabs. Dayan replied as follows. "Ben-Gurion was not stupid. I'm not stupid. We know how international politics work. We know that a day could come when even our best friends will want us to do something that we would not consider to be in Israel's best interests." Dayan meant, and obviously did not want to be more explicit, that if ever a day came when an American president said to Israel, "You must do this," Israel could say, "Mr.President, don't push us further than we are prepared to go because, if you do, we will be prepared to use all the weapons at our disposal." (I am sometimes asked if I think that Bush and Blair would have invaded Iraq if Saddam Hussein had had nuclear weapons. My answer is always "No").

My main point in summary is this. Even if the Zionist lobby really is losing its grip, and even if, as a consequence, an Amercan president feels himself free enough to use the leverage he has to require Israel to be serious about peace on terms almost all Palestinians, most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept, a just and peaceful resolution of the conflict may still not be possible unless the Jews of the world, and Jewish Americans especially, end their silence on the matter of Zionism's crimes and use all of their influence with the Jews of Israel.

Footnote: The day that Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews can be published in America, and reviewed by the mainstream media, is the day that I will say, without fear of contradiction, that the power of the Zionist lobby has been broken.

An honest American reports: "The two-state solution is as dead as a doornail."

2008-03-26T22:19:00.001Z

The following is a report received from Ed Abington, a former U.S. Consul-General in Jerusalem, on current conditions in the "Holy Land." (The report was sent on 23 March 2008 and the emphasis added is mine).

I got back Saturday morning from ten days in Jerusalem and Ramallah where I met with many Palestinians and Israelis. I came back convinced more than ever that the two-state solution is dead as a doornail. There is absolutely no willingness on the part of the IDF to change the situation on the ground from the stranglehold they now have. In fact several Israelis said that there are an increasing number of IDF officers serving in the West Bank who live in the settlements and do everything they can to frustrate any dismantlement of roadblocks or other barriers. The head of a well-respected Israeli organization told me that former Defense MinisterAmir Peretz's advisor for the West Bank said that the IDF does everything it can to frustrate positive changes on the ground per the Roadmap and Tony Blair's mission. The Israeli said Peretz's advisor said that the IDF had recruited Palestinian youngsters from Nablus to try to get through the Hawara checkpoint wearing a suicide belt. They were caught (since it was a set-up), the IDF trumpeted their arrest and used that to justify the continuing seige of Nablus. The boys were released within a short time after their arrest.

The Office of the UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs has the absolute best -- and most depressing -- power point presentation of the situation on the West Bank that I have seen, layering information on a map showing Palestinian cities and villages, areas a, b and c, closed military areas, Israeli-declared nature reserves, the separation barrier, settlements, including their master plan for development, the Israeli road network for settlements, barriers and roadblocks -- all of which puts forty percent of the West Bank off limit to Palestinians. When one looks at the presentation and sees how fragmented and disjointed the West Bank has become, and how East Jerusalem is almost totally surrounded by Israeli settlements, it is beyond imagination that there can ever be a viable Palestinian state.

There is a sense of despair among almost all Palestinians I talked to. They see no willingness on the part of the Israelis to engage in meaningful final status talks. In fact, they say, the talks are frozen, yet settlement expansion is going on at a steady and growing rate. Tenders for new housing units are being approved almost every day, not only in East Jerusalem but elsewhere in the West Bank. No Palestinian building for any purpose is allowed in area c, even if Palestinians have owned the land for generations. The IDF destroys any building done by Palestinians in area c. The West Bank is now truly fragmented by checkpoints, Israeli-only roads, closed military areas and permanent "border-crossing"-like terminals around all the major Palestinian cities. Someone shipping goods to or from Nablus, for example, must off-load/on-load their trucks at least twice on any trip.

The IDF has clamped down even tighter on the daily lives of Palestinians. Nabil Kassis, the president of Bir Zeit University, said that he has not been able to hire foreign faculty for the university for several years. The Israelis refuse to give foreign faculty work permits. In the past, foreigners would get a three month visa at the Israeli point of entry and after three months, go out to Jordan or elsewhere for a day or two and then come back in and get another three month visa. That practice has now stopped by the Israelis, making it even more difficult for anyone in the West Bank who overstays their visa.

I found no Palestinian who had anything positive to say about Tony Blair's mission. One Palestinian involved in negotiations said Blair comes two or three days a month and spends only a couple of hours with the Palestinians. They see no positive changes on the ground as a result of his efforts. I heard that a State Department official will shortly join the Blair mission as chief of party. One wag unkindly commented that his assignment was a rare example of a rat jumping on a sinking ship.

The situation in Gaza is truly horrific and on the brink of a humanitarian disaster. UNRWA says fully 80 percent of the people in Gaza depend on food aid to meet the absolute minimum daily caloric intake. UNRWA only supplies 60 percent of daily food requirements to the refugees to whom it distributes food packets and depends on a functioning economy to supply the rest. The economy in Gaza, however, is close to collapse. Unemployment is over 50 percent and rising. Many factories have closed down altogether and have laid off their workers because they can't get inputs into Gaza nor distribute their products.The agricultural sector is collapsing. The IDF allows no fertilzer into Gaza, nor chicken feed, very little fuel, no spare parts for the electricity. At least forty percent of Gaza City is permanently without electricity and the situation is even worse in other parts of the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians are pumping tens of thousands of cubic meters of raw, untreated sewage into the Med because sewage plants are breaking down. There is a huge reservoir of raw sewage in northern Gaza that could flood villages at any time. Ground water is increasingly being contaminated (it has been increasingly saline for some time). Drinking water is increasingly untreated because of a deterioration in the water treatment system due to a lack of spare parts, creating the danger of a pandemic in Gaza. UNRWA is worried about malnutrition and seeing signs of stress in pregnant women, usually the harbinger of malnutrition. Undernutrition is widespread among children and adults.

In general, Palestinians recognize that it is only the international community that is keeping Gaza from collapsing altogether, but Palestinians hold out little hope that the international community will do much to make the situation better. And the Bush
Administration is seen as aligning itself totally with Israel on punishing Gaza and unwilling to do much of anything to persuade Israel to ease the pressure on Gaza. I heard one anecdote that summarized US impotence vis-a-vis Israel. The Consulate in Jerusalem sent a Palestinian from Gaza to the

on a Fulbright fellowship. The Palestinian scholar returned to Amman almost a year ago but has been unable to get back to Gaza. The US has been putting him up in a hotel in Amman and paying him per diem for close to a year. His plight reminds me of the Tom Hanks movie, The Terminal, of someone who got stuck at JFK for a year because his country went out of existence.

There seems to be a sense that, sooner or later, the IDF will go into Gaza in a big way to try to destroy the Hamas government and its infrastructure, which will make the humanitarian situation even worse, as well as result in heavy casualties. Despite the grim situation in Gaza, no Palestinian I talked to thought Hamas was in the slightest danger of being overthrown. Fatah in the West Bank has done little or nothing to rehabilitate itself, some two years after the 2006 parliamentary elections.

There is uncertainty what will happen when Mahmoud Abbas' term of office expires in January 2009. One Palestinian said that the Presidency is considering a draft election law, which would be promulgated by president decree since the Legislative Council has not met (and cannot meet) for over a year. Interestingly, the draft election law states that legislative and presidential elections will be held in 2010, thereby giving Abu Mazin another year in office. I don't know whether this is true or not, but so much for the Bush Administration emphasis on democracy. Palestinians to whom I spoke could see no way, in any case, that elections could be held, given the political fragmentation between the West Bank and Gaza. And elections held only in the West Bank (and perhaps East Jerusalem) would have zero credibility.

Palestinians see Salam Fayyad as imposed upon them by the Bush Administration. Some Fatah members were critical of Fayyad, probably because Fatah no longer feeds at the public trough. Other Palestinians praised his efforts but suggested that if neither the US nor the Israelis (much less other members of the Quartet) were doing much to make Fayyad succeed, then what hope is there?

I first went to Gaza and the West Bank and have been returning regularly for the past fifteen years, although this is my first visit for 14 months. I always think the situation could not get worse, at least since 2000 and the outbreak of the second intifada, but somehow it does. I fully expect that conditions will be even worse on the ground when I next visit.

Thanks Ed. Israel's military and political leaders (and their awesomely powerful lobby in America) still believe that by means of brute force and reducing them to abject poverty, they can break the will of the Palestinians to continue the struggle for their rights. The assumption being that, at a point, and out of total despair, the Palestinians will be prepared to accept crumbs from Zionism's table in the shape of two or three bantustans, or, better still, will abandon their homeland and seek a new life in other countries. The question that's almost too awful to think about is something like this: What will the Zionists do when it becomes apparent even to them that, with bombs and bullets and brutal repressive measures of all kinds, they can't break the will of the Palestinians to continue their struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice?

I address this question in a number of articles on my blog.

An Example of Clinical Madness?

2008-03-15T11:48:00.001Z

My posting immediately below - Who Is Going Go Destroy Israel? - received the following response from "Nakwaday".

"You are one of the worst liar that I saw in my short life. It's because of people as you that the peace in Israel remains impossible, ireal, because of stupids and wastes of humanity as you. I hope that if one day I meet somebody as you, I shall not hesitate to destroy him. Don't try telling all your fucking lies, 'cause I'll make you it your words and dies."

I have no comment to make but the following question seems to me to be in order: Is this (Nakwaday's text quoted in full) an example of clinical madness?

Who Is Going To Destroy Israel?

2008-03-11T20:52:00.001Z

The short answer is nobody (except perhaps Zionism itself).

That's a conclusion. Now let's see how we get to it.

The more Zionism's version of the history of the making and sustaining of conflict in and over Palestine comes to be seen for the propaganda nonsense it is, the more supporters of Israel right or wrong are being mobilised - see below - to tell the world that Israel's Jews really are in danger of being driven into the sea or nuked by Iran, if not today, tomorrow. The beauty of this assertion from Zionism's perpsective is that, feeding off the obscenity of the Nazi holocaust, it justifies anything and everything Israel does, war crimes and all, to consolidate its hold on those parts of the occupied West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem it intends to keep for all time, and go oppressing the Palestinians and denying them an acceptable minimum of justice.

Soon after he arrived in London in November 2007 to take up his appointment as Israel's ambassador, Ron Prosor unveiled an Israeli Foreign Ministry plan to beef-up its propaganda offensive. He said that he and all of his staff would be getting out of their offices and into television and radio studios up and down the UK. And he called on Jews everywhere to become engaged in the process of pressing Israel's line on the media by all available means. Prosor's declaration of intent amounted to an admission that critics of Israel's policies (including a growing number of eminent Israeli and other Jews) are beginning to make some waves, and that unless further great effort was made by its unquestioning supporters, Israel would be in danger of becoming widely perceived as the real obstacle to peace. (Which, of course, it is).
The extent to which this mobilisation is producing concrete results was on display over the weekend of 9/10 March in Have Your Say, the BBC's global call-in programme. The question put forward by presenter Jonathan Charles for discussion was - What can be done to break the deadlock in the Middle East and put the peace process back on track? This particular Have Your Say programme was quite unlike all previous editions devoted to the Israel/Palestine conflict. How so?
In all previous editions, the majority of callers were (perhaps I should say seemed to be if memory serves me correctly) critical of Israel to one degree or another. Hardly surprising given that there are about 1.4 billion Muslims in the world and only between 13 and 17 million Jews. But in the programme broadcast over 9/10 March, the majority of callers - I mean those invited to express an opinion on-air - were supporters of Israel right or wrong. For listeners who know little or nothing worth knowing about the making and sustaining of the conflict, the main impressions conveyed by the programme were that Hamas not Israel is to blame for the fact that the peace processs is going nowhere, and that Hamas and others (Hizbollah and Iran were most frequently mentioned) want to destroy Israel. Presenter Charles mentioned that before going on-air, the programme received "many thousands" of e-mails. I think it's more than reasonsable to assume that the majority of the e-mails on this occasion were the product of a highly organised Zionist lobby campaign, designed to influence the balance of opinion to be called by the BBC for the programme. Informed and honest debate was not well served and, no doubt, Ambassador Prosor and his foreign ministry colleagues would have been more than happy with the show.

During the programme a Palestinian from Gaza got as far as saying, "Who is going to destroy Israel?" He obviously believed that the assertion that nuclear-armed Israel could be destroyed by any combination of non-nuclear Arab force was nothing more than Zionist propaganda nonsense. Presenter Charles didn't want to open that can of worms. But I will.

The truth of the past 60 years can be summarised as follows. From its unilateral declaration of independence in 1948 to the present,

Israel

's existence has never, ever been in danger from any combination of Arab force. Zionism's assertion to the contrary was the cover which allowed its monster child to get away where it mattered most - in America and Western Europe - with having its aggression perceived as self-defence. As I document in detail in my two-volume book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, the frontline Arab states, despite some empty and stupid rheoric to the contrary, never had any intention of fighting Israel to liberate Palestine. They knew that was a mission impossible. And that is even more their conviction today.

What of the future?

There can be no doubt that Hamas and Hizbollah could do some serious damage to Israel, but only to a point at which Israel would respond with maximum force to destroy the military capabilities of both movements

Some commentators made much of Israel's failure to defeat Hamas in the warrens of its home ground in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006, but that was a failure of strategic military thinking not military capability. If instead of trying to do the job mainly by air Israel's generals had launched a major ground offensive with the objective of rolling up Lebanon to the Litani River, it would have been a very different story. Sure the IDF would have taken heavy casualties, but it could have destroyed Hizbollah as a fighting force and prevented the return of armed hostiles to Lebanon south of the Litani. The point is that what Israel did not do in southern Lebanon in 2006, it could do at any time of its chosing in the future.

The assertion that Hizbollah and Hamas do or could pose a threat to

Israel

's existence is plain silly.

So, given that the Arab regimes are not going to war with Israel, what about a nuclear-armed Iran as a threat to Israel's existence?

For the sake of argument, let's assume that

Iran

has nuclear weapons a few years from now. Would it then launch a nuclearstrike to wipe

Israel

off the map? How one answers that question depends on whether or not one thinks that any leadership in

Iran

would be mad enough to invite nuclear retaliation. I don't think any Iranian leadership would be that stupid. I also believe that if there are some in the present leadership who do want Iran to have nuclear weapons, they want them for only one purpose - deterence, to deter Israel from attacking Iran.

But I also think it's most unlikely that Iran will actually develop nuclear weapons. Its leaders know that if they got to within one or two years of doing so, Israel, with or without Amerca's blessing, would take them (Iran's nuclear facilities) out, and would do with with a nuclear strike if its generals believed they could not do the job with conventional weapons.

The assertion that Iran does pose or could pose a threat to Israel's existence is also plain silly.

Only Jews (and not all of them) believe that Israel's enemies have, or one day will have, both the desire and the capability to destroy the Zionist state; and they believe it only because they've been conditioned by Zionism to so believe. A large part of the problem, or so it seems to me, is that many Jews, Israelis and others, need to believe that Israel's very existence is threatened by its enemies. And this need exists because it saves Jews from having to ask themselves uncomfortable and painful questions about the nature of the Zionist state and its criminal behaviour.

The irony, perhaps the greatest irony in all of human history to date, is that the only real threat to Israel's existence is the demographic time-bomb created by Zionism's conquest and colonisation of the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in 1967.

Sharon's decision to end Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip had nothing whatever to do with advancing a peace process. In his advancing years Prime Minister Sharon had come to grips with one aspect of reality, it being that Israel would have three options if it stayed in occupation of the Gaza Strip and all of the West Bank.

OPTION 1 was formally annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and, to enable Israel to go on claiming that it was a democracy, to grant all of its citizens equal rights. The problem with this was that it would bring about the end of the Jewish state by political means because, in due course, the Arab citizens of Greater Israel would outnumber and outvote its Jewish citizens.

OPTION 2 was formally annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but denying Greater Israel's Arab citizens (the majority in-the-making) equal rights. In this scenario Greater Israel would have to treat its Arab citizens even worse than the black majority in South Africa was treated by its apartheid regime. And that would not be acceptable to most Jews of the world and, perhaps, at least half the Jews of Israel. It would also present the international community with no choice, at some point, but to declare Greater Israel a pariah state and impose sanctions on it.

OPTION 3 was to resort to another and final round of ethnic cleansing - provoking an all-out confrontation with the Palestinians to give the IDF and the armed settlers the pretext for driving the Palestinians out of the occupied territories and into Eygpt, Jordan or wherever, all in the name of self-defence, of course. If the Palestinians refused to flee, there would be a bloodbath. A Zionist holocaust.

It was in the light of those options that Sharon decided to withdraw from the Gaza Strip as a first step to defusing the demographic time-bomb of occupation.

The second step, which Sharon had thought through before he was taken out by a stroke, was to be a withdrawal from up to 40% of the West Bank, to create the space for three or four bantustans which the Palestinians could call a state if they wished. Sharon was not remotely concerned that such a solution would fail to provide the Palestinians with an acceptable minimum of justice and would be rejected by them. It was to be a take-it or leave-it offer, and if the Palestinians refused it, there was always OPTION 3. Sharon's only concern was defusing the demographic time-bomb of occupation. He was aware that some Israelis (and probably all of America's Christian fundamentalists) would call him a traitor; but he was at peace with himself in the knowledge that what he was proposing would be true to Zionism's mission - taking for keeps the maximum amount of Arab land with the minimum number of Arabs on it.

The job of telling Israelis the truth about why there had to be some withdrawals from the West Bank was eventually taken on by Sharon's successor, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In November 2007, in an interview with Ha'aretz, he said that if Israel didn't agree to the creation of an independent Palestinian state (on bits and pieces of the West Bank), Israel would face "a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights", and as soon as that happened "the state of Israel is finished."

Don't blame the inmates of the lunatic asylum

2008-03-04T10:07:00.001Z

Some Israeli and other Jewish opponents of Zionism's colonial enterprise have described Israel as a "fascist" state. I think the more appropriate terminology is lunatic asylum. But I don't blame the inmates (the Jewish citizens of the state) for what's happening. They are as much the products of Zionist brainwashing as are the supporters of Israel right or wrong throughout the mainly Gentile Judeo-Christian world. I blame the wardens and management of the asylum (Israel's military and political leaders)

Israel's leaders still believe that by means of brute force and reducing them to abject poverty, they can break the will of the Palestinians to continue their struggle for their rights. The assumption being that, at a point, and out of total despair, the Palestinians will be prepared to accept crumbs from Zionism's table in the shape of two or three bantustans, or, better still, will abandon their homeland and seek a new life in other countries. In my view the conviction that Zionism will one day succeed in breaking the Palestinian will to continue the struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice is the product of minds which are deluded to the point of clinical madness.

There is, however, one solid piece of evidence that a majority of Israeli Jews are not as mad as their leaders. It's in the fact that 64% of them have said their government must hold direct talks with Hamas. Less than one-third, 28%, opposes such talks. (Those were the findings of a Ha'aretz-Dialog poll. It was was conducted, under the supervision of Professor Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, before Israel's escalation of its confrontation with Hamas in Gaza; and it could be, because of the international condemnation of Israel's massively disproportionate action of the past few days, that even more than 64% now favour direct talks with Hamas).

That's on the one hand. On the other is the fact that Hamas has long been calling for a ceasefire or truce, which, it has indicated, could be extended indefinitely. The problem is that Hamas's leaders are insisting - they would be as mad as Israel's leaders if they were not - that a ceasefire must be a two-way street. And that means Israel would have to end its incursions of Gaza and abandon its policy of targeted assassinations.

Israel's leaders are not going to do that. Their present strategy for Gaza is to make life hell for all of its people in the hope that they will abandon Hamas. And when that doesn't happen? Israel will seek to annihiliate Hamas. I mean competely, not bit by bit.

Question: When is a war crime not a war crime?

Answer: When the perpetrator is the Zionist state of Israel.

Message to Shehzad re your request

2008-03-02T21:28:00.001Z

Dear Shehzad,

In principle I'll be happy for you to have me on a local radio show to discuss "the recent bombings in Palestine". (I'd describe Israel's Gaza policy as unfolding genocide). However, before I give you my direct contact e-mail, I'd like to know a little bit about you and the local radio station. I'm being cautious because you came to me out of a blog posting of mine in April of 2007 and not later ones. My latest was on 25 February this year and was headlined UNITY OR ANNIHILATION - THE REAL CHOICE FOR THE PALESTINIANS.

I hope you'll undersand that I have to take precautions to avoid being swamped with organised hate mail. It doesn't bother me. In fact it makes me laugh. And it's evidence of how sick supporters of Israel right or wrong are. The problem is that I don't have the time or mind space to deal with it.

Regards

Alan

Unity or Annihilation - The Real Choice For The Palestinians

2008-02-25T14:57:00.000Z

With Israel seriously considering how best to destroy Hamas (and Hizbollah and possibly Iran) and bolster the stooge leadership of Fatah's Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian friends have been asking me what I think the Palestinians could and should now do to improve their prospects for obtaining an acceptable amount of justice.

I thought my answer would not go down well with some of them but, in fact, it went down very well with all of them (including, for example, Bishop Riah Abu El-Assal, the former Bishop of Jerusalem).

My view is that the Palestinians would be well advised to wind-up (close down) the discredited Palestine National Authority (PNA), and put policy making and implementation into the hands of a reconstructed Palestine National Council (PNC). The latter, which used to be called the "Palestinian parliament in exile",. would be re-constructed, refreshed and re-invigorated, by elections in every place where there are Palestinians – the occupied West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza concentration camp and the diaspora. This, it seems to me, would provide the Palestinians with what they most desperately need now – UNITY.

When it came into being in May 1964, the PNC (as I explained in my book Arafat, Terrorist or Peacemaker?) was intended to be nothing more than a puppet of the frontline Arab states, with Eygpt's President Nasser the puppet master.

The documented truth about Nasser and Israel - one of many truths denied by supporters of Israel right or wrong - can be simply stated. From the moment he came to power in a bloodless coup in 1951, Nasser wanted, and in secret seriously explored the prospects for, an accomodation with Israel. On the matter of how to deal with the Zionist state, he was, in fact, a pragmatist. Despite stupid Arab rhetoric to the contrary, rhetoric which enabled Zionist and imperial Western spin doctors to paint him as the "Hitler of the Nile", Nasser had no intention, ever, of fighting Israel to liberate Palestine. And the major Western powers knew that. (So why did he take arms from the Soviet Union? He wanted Eygpt to be strong enough to prevent Israel imposing its will on him by brute force, and the Americans refused to supply him. When, after much hesitation and still with great reluctance, Nasser turned to the Soviet Union for arms, his message to Israel was, in effect, "I want you to know that attacking Eygpt and other Arab states will not be a cost free option.")

The documented truth about the stance of the rest of the Arab regimes prior to the creation of the PNC in 1964 can also be simply stated. None of them had any intention of fighting Israel to liberate Palestine. The Palestine file had been closed, mainly by Zionist terrorism and ethnic cleansing, in 1948/49 and, in their minds if not their hearts, they shared Zionism's hope that it would remain closed. Put another way, the Arab regimes, more by default than design, were requiring the Palestinians to accept their lot as the sacrificial lamb on the altar of political expediency. If the Palestine file was ever re-opened - if there was a regeneration of Palestinian nationalism - a confrontation with the Zionist state and its Western backers would one day be inevitable. And that was to be avoided at any and all costs.

So the PNC was brought into being not so much as it actually happened to prevent a regeneration of Palestinian nationalism - that process was already underway, but to prevent it resorting to armed struggle which would give Israel, in the name of fighting "terrorism", the pretext it wanted to strike at the frontline Arab states and take more Arab land. (Arab leaders didn't have to be mind readers. Zionism's ambition, the creation of a Jewish state from the Litani River in Southern Lebanon to the Jordan River, was a matter of record).

In other words, the PNC as conceived by Nasser was to be a mechanism for giving the Palestinians hope while preventing resurgent Palestinian nationalism becoming the tail that wagged the Arab dog and provoked an unwinnable war with Israel.

Nasser's containment policy failed for two related reasons.

The first was that Yasser Arafat and other leaders of the embryonic Fatah movement were fully aware that the Eygptian President had no intention of allowing the Palestinians to take matters into their own hands and initiated pin-prick attacks on Israel (hit-and-run missions) of their own.

The second was Israel's massively disproportionate reprisal attacks on the frontline Arab states. The reprisals were totally counterproductive because they gave the embryo Palestine liberation movement (the authentic one) the oxygen of publicity Nasser was seeking to deny it. Without Israel's reprisal attacks, the Arab street would never have known that there was a real Palestine liberation movement in-the-making. Abu Jihad, the co-founder with Arafat of the first Fatah cell, told me that the IDF was their best recruitng sergeant, and that without Israel's reprisal attacks the frontline Arab states most probably would have succeeded in their efforts to strangle the organisation that became Fatah at birth.

It was actually the security services of Eygpt, Jordan and Lebanon, not those of Israel, which made the first attempts to liquidate Arafat and his organisation. Fatah and all it represented would have been destroyed if Syria had not given Arafat and his military colleagues a safe haven. Syria's motives were far from noble. In their rivalry with Nasser, its leaders wanted to possess and play the Palestinian card for their own ends, but they, too, had no intention of letting the Palestinians drag them into an unwinnable war with Israel.

Apart from the fact that Israel's political and military hawks had been waiting for a pretext to complete the unfinished busines of 1948/49, the 1967 war happened in large part abecause of the naivety of Arafat and Abu Jihad, the two men who did most to give life to Fatah. They presumed that if only they could provoke a confrontation with Israel, make the Arab armies fight, the Zionist state was bound to be defeated. So for Arafat and Abu Jihad in particular, the humiliating defeat of the Arabs in six days was a revelation like no other. For Arafat especially it was also the beginning of a journey into the reality of Israel's existence as the military superpower of the region.

When subsequently Arafat and his fighters gave that superpower a bloody nose at the battle of Karameh, a fleeting moment of victory that made Fatah and its fighters heroes in the hearts of the humiliated Arrab masses, Nasser decided that he needed Arafat as much as the Fatah leader needed him. That opened the way to an honest dialogue between the two of them.

Nasser told Arafat that before the 1967 war it had been his hope that he could negotiate Israel back to the 1948 Armistice borders. After the 1967 war, Nasser said, the best he could hope to do was prevail upon the international community to oblige Israel to withdraw from the newly occupied Arab territories in accordance with the letter and the spirit of 242, the Security Council's land-for-peace resolution. Nasser was also explicit about what was required from Arafat and his leadership colleagues if they wished to be taken seriously by the international community. They had to be realistic. What did that mean? They would have to come up with a policy for an accomodation with Israel inside more or less its pre-1967 borders, in accordance with 242. If they did that, and in the event of an Israeli withdrawal, Nasser promised he would do his best to persuade King Hussein to let the Palestinians have the West Bank, with the Gaza Strip, for a mini state of their own.

To make sure that Arafat got the message about the need for the Palestinians to come to grips with the reality of Israel's existence, Nasser arrranged for him to be part of an Eygptian delegation to Moscow under an assumed name. Nasser knew precisely what he would hear from the lips of Soviet leaders - that they, like their American counterparts, were committed to Israel's existence and security inside its pre-1967 borders. Those were the words Arafat did hear and they marked the end of his journey into reality.

In February 1969 Arafat became the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which was dominated by Fatah, and, with Nasser's blessing, an authentic PNC (not the puppet of the Eygptian leader's creation) became its supreme organ.

It was subsequently to take Arafat ten long years to persuade first his Fatah leadership colleagues and then the PNC to back his policy of politics and unthinkable compromise with Israel. (The compromise was unthinkable at the outset because it required the Palestinians to legitimise Israel's existence and make peace with it in return for only 22% of the land they are claiming with right, legal and moral, on their side).

Arafat's task of convincing his Fatah leadership colleagues that they had to compromise and be prepared to settle for a mini state of their own on the West Bank and Gaza was assisted by the 1973 war. It created the scenario for Nasser's successor, Anwar Sadat, who launched his "war for peace" in collusion with U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger, to be sucked and suckered by American diplomacy into making a separate peace with Israel. When it became clear that Kissinger had Sadat under control and that Eygpt would make peace with Israel, Arafat's leadership colleagues had no difficulty in concluding that the PLO would be abandoned by even the Arab states if it did not come up with a political programme the Arab regimes could support without putting their relationship with America in complete jeopardy.

But the task of getting the PNC to endorse his policy of politics and compromise with Israel required Arafat to perform a miracle of leadership. He performed it over five years, from 1974 to 1979.

There were two overtures to the main performance.

The first, in October 1974, was the decision of an Arab summit meeting in Rabat to recognise the PLO as the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. (In advance of that summit, Kissinger, who wanted the PLO to be marginalised and destroyed, tried and failed to persuade key Arab leaders to use their influence to prevent any recognition of it).

The second, a month later, was Arafat's dramatic appearance at the UN in New York. His "gun and olive branch" speech to the world body was a coded but clear signal that he was ready for peace with Israel on the basis of a two-state solution. This was, in fact, the message Arafat had been sending to Israel's leaders for months through secret emissaries.. (Kissinger tried to prevent Arafat's appearance at the UN, but in this particular game of chess he was checkmated by Saudi Arabia's King Feisal, the only Arab leader who was not afraid, in his own way, to tell Kissinger to go to hell).

If Arafat had been asked by Israel then, November 1974, to deliver the compromise he was signalling, he could not have done so. The PNC still had to be persuaded and probably an easy majority of its available 300 members from all over the world were strongly opposed to the compromise. (PNC members in the occupied territories were not available because Israel refused to allow them to travel).

One by one, and when circumstances allowed, Arafat summoned each and every available member of the PNC to Beirut for a private conversation behind closed doors. Some told him to his face that he was a traitor to the cause and would be assassinated if he proceeded with his policy of unthinkable compromise. When he failed in a first conversation to persuade rejectionists to give him a commitment to vote for compromise when the time came, he asked them to go back home, to think over what he had said, and return when he called them again for another conversation.

It's worth noting that for nearly two of those five years of the Great Conversation between Arafat and individual PNC members from all over the world, the PLO was caught up in the first round of the civil war in the Lebanon in which, unknown to reporters, Arafat was playing the role of mediator and fighting for his own survival. For much of the rest of the period Arafat was organising the PLO's defences as the Israelis escalated their attacks on Lebanon. And still he found the time to receive and lobby each and every available member of the PNC. (The message of Israel's attacks was addressed to the Lebanese, Muslim communities in particular. It, the message, was: "If you were not giving shelter to Palestian terrorists, we would not be attacking Lebanon. In your own best interests, you should turn against the Palestinians and kick them out.")

Some months after the PNC's critical debate and vote on his policy of politics and compromise, I had the first of many meetings with Arafat. "I kept a record of the time I devoted to those conversations," he told me. "It was a total of 550 hours over the five-year period." As he came to the end of the story of his struggle to sell compromise, he extracted a notebook from his hip pocket. "It's all here," he said with triumph. "Let me tell you the figures… 296 votes FOR the mini-state formula, only FOUR against. Imagine that! We have turned our people around. No more this silly talk of driving the Jews into the sea. Now we are prepared to live alongside them in a little state of of our own. It is a miracle."

Arafat himself was the miracle worker. No other Palestinian leader could have done it. With his policy of politics and compromise now endorsed by the PNC, the highest decision-making authority on the Palestinian side, Arafat was at the height of his powers. He could have delivered the compromise necessary from his side for peace on terms which any rational government and people in Israel would have accepted with relief. The problem was that Arafat did not have a partner for peace on the Israeli side. The most successful terrorist leader of modern times, Menachem Begin, was in power in the Zionist state; and he was stuffing the occupied West Bank with settlers to make it impossible for any future Israeli government to withdraw for peace. And that was a manifestation of an underlying truth - that Zionism was not and is not interested in peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians, other Arabs and Muslms everywhere could accept. (The essence of Zionism's philosophy of doom was once put into words by its one-eyed warlord, General Moshe Dayan. "It's them or us", he said).

Let us now fast-forward to the present day.

Zionism's own end-game strategy for a solution to the Palestine problem now leaves nothing to the imagination. Israel's leaders still believe that by means of brute force and reducing the Palestinians to abject poverty, they can destroy Hamas and break the will of the Palestinians to continue the struggle for their rights. The assumption being that, at a point, and out of total despair, the Palestinians will be prepared to accept crumbs from Zionism's table in the shape of two or three bantustans, or, better still, will abandon their homeland and seek a new life in other countries.

In my view the conviction that Zionism will one day succeed in breaking the Palestinian will to continue the struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice is the product of minds which are deluded close to the point of clinical madness. Some say that nuclear-armed Israel is on its way to becoming a fascist state. I think the more appropriate terminology is lunatic asylum.

The question that's almost too awful to think about is something like this: What will the Zionists do when it becomes apparent even to them that they can't destroy Palestinian nationalism with bombs and bullets and brutal repressive measures of all kinds?

My guess is that they, the Zionists, will go for a final round of ethnic cleansing - to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan and beyond. That, I fear, could very well be Zionism's final solution to the Palestine problem. If that happens, the West Bank will be turned red with blood, mostly Palestinian blood. And honest reporters will describe it as a Zionist holocaust.

That's what I mean by "Annihilation" as in the headline over this article.

I know that my Gentile fear on this account is shared by some eminent Jewish critics of Zionism and, for example, I'll name two of those I am privileged to have as dear friends and allies in common cause, it being to tell in the truth of history.

Professor Ilan Pappe is Israel's leading "new" or "revisionist" (honest) historian. His latest book is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Ilan has described Israel's policies for oppressing and suppressing the Palestinians as "genocide in slow motion." In conversation with me, and on public platforms he has shared with me, he has also stated that it's by no means impossible that what I describe as a Zionist holocaust could happen.

Dr. Hajo G. Meyer is an Auschwitz survivor. His latest book is The End of Judaism; An Ethical Tradition Betrayed. In it Hajo expresses his dismay at what he sees as the "moral collapse of contemporary Israeli society and the worldwide Jewish community as a whole." He compares Israel's current policies with the early stages of the Nazi persecution of Germany's Jews. He stresses that he is not seeking to draw a parallel between Israel's current policies and the Nazis' "endgame" - the slaughter of six million European Jews (and also the mass murder of perhaps as many as six million non-Jews). He is merely trying to point out, he says, "the slippery slope" that eventually led to this catastrophe, and the necessity of "forseeing the possible consequences" of a policy that oppresses and marginalizes the Palestinians in their own homeland.

As things are today, and unless they are pushed to do so by informed public opinion (by manifestations of real democracy in action), I think it is unrealistic to expect the governments of the major powers either to use the leverage they do have to call and hold the Zionist state to account for its past crimes, or to intervene to prevent the crimes it might very well commit in a foreseeable future.

It follows, or so it seems to me, that the Palestinians of the world must now become united and fully engaged in the political struggle not only to improve their prospects for some justice, but also to play their necessary part in stopping the possibility of a final round of Zionist ethnic cleansing (which some might call "transfer") in Israel/Palestine.

The obstacle to Palestinian unity on the occupied West Bank and in the Gaza concentration camp is not Hamas. There is no mystery about its real position. If tomorrow, for example, Israel said and meant that it was ready in good faith to negotiate a full and final peace on the basis of a genuine and viable two-state solution - one that would see Israel back to more or less its pre-1967 borders with Jerusalem (preferably as an open city) the capital of two states, Hamas's leaders would say, "Let's do the business". And they would mean it because they would have no choice - because, as they know, a genuine and viable two-state solution is still what the vast majority of Palestinians in the conflict zone are prepared to settle for. (Though for how much longer this will remain the case is a very good question).

The right of return for the refugees - those Palestinians and their descendants who were dispossed of their homes, their land and their rights in 1948/49 and again in 1967 - did not have to be the obstacle to peace Israel asserted it to be. When Arafat and his senior leadership colleagues came to grips with the need to make peace with Israel on the basis of a genuine and viable two-state solution, they accepted but could not then say in public that the right of return would have to be confined to the Palestinian mini-state – i.e. not to Israel inside more it less its pre-1967 borders. That would have meant, they knew, that probably not more than 100,000 refugees would be able to return to their homeland. The rest would have to be compensated… The information in this paragraph is essential for understanding, but the point being made here is academic because, as things are today, the idea of a two-state solution is dead, killed by Israel's still on-going colonisation of the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem.

The obstacle to Palestinian unity on the West Bank and in the Gaza concentration camp is not difficult to identity. It's in the fact that under the leadership of "President" Abbas and his Fatah colleagues, the PNA has become an instrument of Israeli-and-American (and Western European) policy. The PNA is, in short, a collaborator (meaning quisling) regime. Israeli-and-American (and Western European) policy requires Hamas to be marginalised and destroyed. And the PNA, it seems, is content to go along with this policy. (Why did Hamas take on and defeat Fatah in Gaza? Fatah was planning, with American encouragement and Israeli assistance as required, to crush Hamas. It moved first with what the Israelis, if they had been initiating an attack, would have described as a pre-emptive strike).

It's my guess that, at a point, Abbas will resign rather than seek to compel the Palestinians to accept crumbs from Zionism's table; but whether he stays or goes will not change the fact that in the eyes of many if not most Palestinians everywhere, the PNA, like Fatah (and the regimes of the existing Arab Order), is impotent and discredited. That alone is a good enough reason for the PNA to be put out of its misery and for Palestinian policy making and implementation to be put into the hands of a reconstructed PNC.

But there's more to it. In their claim for justice, the Palestinians have 100% of right, legal and moral, on their side. If this claim was properly presented and pressed by a credible Palestinian leadership, by definition a democratically elected leadership duly authorised to act on behalf of ALL Palestinians everywhere, it would be much more difficult for the governments of the major powers, the one in Washington DC especially, to go on supporting Israel right or wrong. (Unconditional support which is not in anybody's best interests including those of America itself and the Jews of the world).

I hate cliches but some of them are expressions of great wisdom. United the Palestinians will stand. Divided they will fall and, in the conflict zone, might be annihilated..