ISRAEL ADAM SHAMIR

White Nationalists - a possible ally?,

The Marxists and the Lobby

Book banned

Nazis in Israel?

A mistake of Prof Neumann

Death of Art is a symptom of civilisation collapse

Marek Glogoczowski: Globalization: The Project of "Flat Earth" and Flat Brain Cortices - but No Dialogue of Civilizations Ahead

The Palestinian Authority has told the Bush administration it would
consider abandoning its support for a two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and instead press for equal citizenship
for Palestinians inside one binational state if Israeli settlement
activity continues unabated.

In a little-noticed memo and a letter handed earlier this month to top
American officials, the P.A. states that Israeli settlement expansion
is eliminating the possibility of a viable Palestinian state and thus
forcing the Palestinian leadership to reconsider the two-state concept
that has been the basis of negotiations during the last decade.

While Israel and its supporters here have accused the P.A. of de facto
abandoning the two-state solution by launching the intifada in
September 2000, the Palestinian leadership has never officially
renounced the Oslo process.

The P.A. messages suggest the deepest deterioration yet of the
diplomatic process since the outbreak of the intifada, and come as the
Bush administration is pushing a three-year roadmap toward two states.

The messages were echoed by a recent opinion article in the Israeli and
Arab press by the United Nations' special envoy to the region, Terje
Roed-Larsen, in which he claimed that Israeli settlement expansion and
"vicious terror attacks" by Palestinians are threatening the prospects
of a two-state solution.

"This is just despair setting in," said Stephen P. Cohen, a Middle East
expert with the Israel Policy Forum, a left-leaning think tank. "There
is a growing realization in Israel and among Palestinians that the
situation on the ground is becoming defined by the erasure of the Green
Line as previously understood... You now have a Jewish state on both
sides of the Green Line, one where there is a Jewish majority and one
where there is a Jewish minority ruling an Arab majority. So you have
the feeling we are back to the notion of Palestinians getting civil
rights in a single state."

Palestinian Finance Minister Salem Fayad handed the 10-page memo and
five detailed maps of settlement activity on October 7 to Secretary of
State Colin Powell and his senior aide David Satterfield, according to
Diana Buttu, a Palestinian legal adviser who was briefed by Fayad.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice received the package the
following day, Buttu said.

A week later, Ahmed Qureia, the speaker of the Palestinian parliament
and veteran negotiator also known as Abu Ala, sent a letter to the
White House repeating the allegations, according to Edward Abington, a
former American consul general in Jerusalem who now works as a lobbyist
for the P.A. in Washington.

"Israel's ongoing colony construction and other unilateral measures in
the Occupied Palestinian territories are effectively pre-empting the
possibility of a two-state solution of a viable Palestinian State
alongside Israel," the memo said. "If the international community
continues to remain unwilling to rein in Israeli colony construction
and expansion, irreversible 'facts on the ground' and the de facto
apartheid system such facts create will force Palestinian policy makers
to re-evaluate the plausibility of a two-state solution.... Israel's
ultimate goal is to permit a Palestinian 'state' which would be in
effect the Middle Eastern equivalent of a Native American Indian
reservation."

While the memo did not explain what alternatives to a two-state
solution the P.A. would pursue, Buttu said Fayad told American
officials that the two other choices would be the transfer of the
Palestinian population by Israel or Palestinian demand of equal
citizenship in a single state.

"Powell and Rice were surprised," she said.

Sean Mac Cormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council,
declined to comment about the details of the meeting with Rice. The
State Department did not return calls seeking comment. No official
American reaction to the memo or letter has been registered.

An Israeli official dismissed the Palestinian contentions.

"Israel has long been committed to reaching a two-state solution based
on land-for-peace through negotiations, but there can be negotiations
only when the P.A.-supported terror ends," said Yaffa Ben-Ari, a
spokeswoman for the Foreign Ministry. "The settlement issue may be a
concern for some people but it certainly is not an obstacle.
Palestinian terror is."

In what Palestinian and U.N. officials claim was not a coordinated
move, Roed-Larsen, the U.N. special envoy to the region and a former
Norwegian foreign minister who played a key role in the Oslo
negotiations, wrote a somber opinion article that was published last
week in the London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat and the Israeli daily
Ha'aretz and repeated in a statement from his office.

"A viable, independent Palestine alongside Israel is still possible.
But perhaps not for much longer, given four undeniable trends at work
today," he wrote in Ha'aretz. "The first two are readily apparent - a
deteriorating security situation fueled by vicious terror attacks and
widespread violence against civilians, and an unprecedented Palestinian
humanitarian crisis. The other two, while less visceral, have serious
long-term implications: The gradual destruction of the Palestinian
Authority and Israel's expansion of its West Bank settlements."

Larsen claimed the unabated settlement activity "is perhaps the most
significant of all." In an unusual departure from his diplomatic
reserve, he issued a blunt warning to the international community.

"These trends force me, and I am far from alone, to ask two very
troubling questions," he added. "Are we nearing the death of the
two-state solution, the bedrock for all our peacemaking efforts? And if
so, are we prepared for the consequences? If indeed we are at a
critical juncture, it is most vividly seen in the growing chasm between
the diplomatic efforts to forge a peace agreement."

The Foreign Ministry's Ben-Ari declined to react to Larsen's
statements, adding, "anyone who comes to assist the two sides should be
acting as a facilitator."

Larsen has had numerous run-ins with the Israeli government in recent
months, most notably after he said during a visit to the Jenin camp
last April in the wake of an Israeli operation that what he saw was
"horrific beyond belief." Several Israeli officials then called for
Larsen's removal, but U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan refused. A U.N.
report later confirmed that no massacre had taken place.

Some sources speculated that the P.A. had timed the delivery of the
memo to come before Prime Minister Sharon's visit to Washington and a
trip to the region by the assistant secretary of state for Near East
affairs, William Burns. The sources said the Palestinians realize the
Bush administration is seeking to calm Arab anger over Iraq and that it
might therefore be more inclined to listen to Palestinian complaints.

But it is equally likely that the P.A. may simply have seized the
opportunity of a rare meeting with top American officials to convey its
message.

Fayad, a former World Bank official picked several months ago by Arafat
to streamline the P.A. finances - he is likely to be reappointed in the
upcoming cabinet - was in Washington to negotiate the release by Israel
of Palestinian tax revenues.

Since he is one of the few Palestinian officials considered by both
Israel and the Bush administration to be a reliable interlocutor,
Palestinian diplomats hurriedly summarized a 22-page memo they are
still working on into a 10-page document so that Fayad could hand it to
the administration.

"We have been repeating the same message for months," Ghassan Khatib,
the acting Palestinian labor minister, told the Forward. "This was a
way to alert the administration. But I am not sure this administration
cares," he added, pointing to the lack of official reaction.

The memo, which was distributed to diplomats in the region in recent
weeks, details settlement construction around Jerusalem, concluding,
"Municipal Jerusalem is a prominent example of the elimination of any
signs of the Green Line through contiguous urban development."

It also claims that the construction of the security fence "will
effectively serve as a means by which Israel can consolidate and de
facto annex all Occupied Palestinian territory on the western side of
the wall," where some 320,000 Palestinians live.

Some experts pointed out that by raising the equal-citizenship issue,
the P.A. was playing with Israeli demographic fears.

"The abandonment of a two-state solution would be a catastrophe for
Israel as the Palestinian will be a majority within a decade in the
area from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River now controlled by
Israel," said Judith Kipper, an expert with the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in Washington.

The FORWARD is a Jewish weekly published in New York.

      "I would much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the
basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state."
(Albert Einstein, in Ideas and Opinions, [Crown Publishers, New York, 1954],
p. 190)

      "A state cannot be Jewish, just as a chair or a bus cannot be
Jewish...The state is no more than a tool, a tool that is efficient or a
tool that is defective, a tool that is suitable or a tool that is
undesirable. And this tool must belong to all its citizens -- Jews, Moslems,
Christians...The concept of a 'Jewish State' is nothing other than a snare."
(Amos Oz, Israel's preeminent writer of fiction, in "A Laden Wagon and an
Empty Wagon? Reflections on the Culture of Israel," Free Judaism, October
1997, p. 5 [Hebrew])

SHOULD THERE BE A JEWISH STATE?

By John Spritzler
New Democracy Newsletter, May-August 2002.
newdemocracyworld.org

Ted Koppel's Nightline ABC-TV show April 18, 2002 featured the question, "Is
it anti-Semitic to criticize the Israeli government's policy towards
Palestinians?" Koppel was interviewing the head of the Jewish
Anti-Defamation League, who replied that Israel was a sovereign state and of
course it was permissible to criticize its policies. But, he warned, to
oppose the idea of a Jewish state went over the line and was pure
anti-Semitism. Koppel smiled agreeably and gave no hint that a reasonable
person might disagree.

The idea of a Jewish state (whose Jewish proponents call themselves
'Zionists') is sacrosanct in the mainstream U.S. media, which does not give
voice to the troublesome questions raised by the issue, in particular that
many Jews have historically opposed the idea of a Jewish state. The
establishment of Israel has been far more controversial among Jews than most
Americans are aware. Jewish opponents of a Jewish state believed in
democracy with equal rights for Jews and non-Jews, and thought a purely
Jewish sovereignty would be disastrous for ordinary Jews.

THE APARTHEID STATE

What is Jewish about the Jewish state of Israel? It's not that Israel is a
state where only Jews live. One fifth of the Israeli population is
non-Jewish. The Jewishness of Israel is embodied in a set of laws which
confer rights and benefits on Jews but not on others. Were this not true,
Israel would not deserve to be called a Jewish state. But because it is
true, Jews and non-Jews are not equal before the law in Israel.

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, Israel's
declaration of independence, signed May 14, 1948 is a two page document
which clearly defines Israel as a Jewish state. The document stresses that
the sovereign authority in Israel is the Jewish people: "This right is the
natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all
other nations, in their own sovereign state." It repeatedly uses phrases to
emphasize this point: 'Jewish people...in its own country', 'Jewish people
to rebuild its national home', 'Jewish state', 'right of the Jewish people
to establish their state', 'Jewish people in the upbuilding of its state',
'sovereign Jewish people'.

Where does this leave Arabs, who are currently 20% of the population inside
Israel (not counting the Gaza Strip and the West Bank)? The Declaration
makes a clear distinction between Jews, who are the sovereign authority in
Israel, and the Arab inhabitants who are not. The second-class status of
Arabs inside Israel is enforced by laws that privilege being Jewish, rather
than by a formal denial to Arabs of citizenship or the right to vote and
hold office. Thus the document says that Arabs shall have "complete equality
of social and political rights" and "full and equal citizenship and due
representation in all its [Israel's] provisional and permanent
institutions." But the Law of Return, passed in 1950, begins: "Every Jew has
the right to immigrate to the country." Yet one of the central grievances of
Palestinians is that they cannot do the same thing; they cannot return to
their homes of many generations in Israel. Even Arabs who never left Israel,
but who only stayed for a few days in a nearby village with relatives to
wait for the fighting in 1948 to end, are now categorized in Israel as
"present absentees," a category in which they remain forever, and in
consequence of which their homes and property remain in the possession of
the Custodian of Absentee Property, who puts the property at the disposal of
Jews. [1]

Private organizations serving only Jewish interests hold quasi-governmental
authority in Israel for policies that affect non-Jews. The main example of
this is the Jewish Agency, which calls itself "the agency for Jewish
interests in Eretz ["the land of"] Israel...[it's] role is defined...as a
voluntary, philanthropic organization with responsibility for immigration,
settlement and development, and coordination of the unity of the Jewish
people."[2] The (Jewish) Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs describes the
Jewish Agency as "a quasi-public, voluntary institution sharing many, often
overlapping, functional jurisdictions with government." [3] Yes, Arabs could
set up a private 'Arab Agency', but it would not have the quasi-governmental
power, for example, to dispose of Jewish property the way the law allows the
Jewish Agency to dispose of Arab property: the state's Custodian of Absentee
Property hands Arab property to the Jewish Agency, but it does not hand
Jewish property to any Arab agency. Jews don't have their property
confiscated as 'present absentees' because Jews, unlike Arabs, enjoy the
'Right of Return'.

      From 'Letter to a Deportee

      "For twenty years, I knew nothing of the Palestinian problem. I was
one year old when my parents arrived among the 50,000 Bulgarian Jews who
decided to immigrate to the new Jewish state. That was in 1948 when Israel
was just born. We settled in Ramle, in a big stone house that had belonged
to an Arab family...In the back of the house was a lemon tree, which almost
collapsed each year under its fruit... One morning, right after the Six-Day
War, a young Arab man turned up at the front door. He said: 'My name is
Bashir el-Kheiri. This house belonged to my family.'

      He was 26. I was 20. It was the first time I had ever met a
Palestinian.

      One day - I shall never forget it - Bashir's brother came to Ramle
with his father. The old man was blind. After entering the gate, he caressed
the rugged stones of the house. Then he asked if the lemon tree was still
there. He was led to the backyard. When he put his hands on the trunk of the
tree he had planted, he did not utter a word. Tears rolled down his cheeks.
My father then gave him a lemon. He was clutching it in his hands when he
left. Bashir's mother told me, years later, that when her husband couldn't
sleep, he used to pace up and down their apartment holding in his hand an
old, shriveled lemon. My father had given the same lemon to him...

      I had always believed that the Arabs of Ramle and Lod had fled from
the Israeli soldiers in 1948, that they had abandoned their houses like
cowards... After the 1967 war, an Israeli who had participated in the
expulsion from Lod and Ramle told me what really happened in July of 1948.
He told me about the cars with loudspeakers driving through Ramle,
instructing the inhabitants to leave. I didn't stop loving my country
because of that, but my love lost its innocence."

      (From "Letter to a Deportee," originally printed in The Jerusalem
Post, January 14, 1988, quoted in Rene Backmann, 'The Letter to Bashir', New
Outlook, May 1988 http://www.vopj.org/personalnarr.htm)


The U.N. Conciliation Commission estimated that about 80 percent of the land
in what is today Israel is property formerly owned by Palestinians that was
confiscated by Jewish organizations like the Jewish Agency.[4] Palestinians
are forbidden by Israeli law from owning it. Of all the land that may be
legally sold in Israel, 67% of it may not legally be sold to Arabs, while
none of it is barred from being sold to Jews. [5] Thus, while Palestinians
may be citizens in Israel, they are second class citizens, which is
precisely what it means to live in a "Jewish state" when one is not Jewish.
Yet another feature of Israel that makes it an apartheid state is that it
aims to separate Jews and Arabs on a personal level. For example, a Jew and
an Arab cannot legally marry each other in Israel; such marriages, if
performed outside the country, are not recognized under Israeli law.

One can either be for a Jewish state or be for full equality of Jews and
non-Jews inside Israel, but one cannot logically be for both. Israel's
Zionist leaders use this logic as a weapon against people (Jew and non-Jew
alike) who want equality and democracy in Israel. If you say you want Israel
to be a truly democratic state in which Jews and non-Jews have equal rights,
then the Zionists accuse you of wanting to abolish the state of Israel,
because Israel is a Jewish state, not an "everybody who lives here" state.
The Zionists have made "supporting the existence of Israel" (as a Jewish
state) a litmus test; anybody who fails it is labeled either an anti-Semite
or a Jewish "self-hater." This puts everyone who believes in universal
concepts of equality on the defensive, and stifles free expression of views
calling for solidarity between Jews and Arabs.

Israel is very different from virtually all other states today. If you are
French or American or Chinese or Nigerian and you say you want your nation
to be one where everybody is equal under the law and collectively constitute
the highest authority in the land, nobody would accuse you of wanting to
abolish France, the United States, or whatever. That is because, no matter
how undemocratic or discriminatory these governments may be, they justify
their existence by claiming to be a state resting on the assent of all their
inhabitants. Nobody, for example, who opposed Jim Crow in the United States
was ever accused of thereby denying the right of the United States to exist.
But those who make analogous demands in Israel are- with good reason- accused
of denying Israel's right to exist.

The right of the 'Jewish state' to exist is indeed incompatible with
universalist values of equality and democracy. Israel in this respect is
similar to apartheid-era South Africa. Just as Israel accuses advocates of
Arab-Jewish equality of wanting to abolish the state of Israel, South Africa
accused advocates of black-white equality of wanting to abolish the South
African state. The reasoning is the same: Arab-Jewish equality challenges
the idea that only Jews are the sovereign authority in Israel, just as
black-white equality challenged South Africa's basis in an exclusively white
sovereignty.

UNDEMOCRATIC FROM THE START

The first person in modern times seriously to call for the creation of a
Jewish state was Theodor Herzl, the founder of the World Zionist
Organization, who wrote The Jewish State in 1896. From its modern origin in
Herzl's book, the concept of a Jewish state rests on a rejection of the
democratic principle that states derive their right to rule from the assent
of the people who live in them.[6] Herzl had to reject this democratic
principle because Jews were not a majority in Palestine. Instead, he
asserted that the Jewish state derived its legitimacy from the need of the
Jewish people for a guardian. That is, he intended a government in
Palestine, where Jews were a minority among Arabs, to be the sovereign power
over all the inhabitants (both Jews and Arabs) and yet act in the name only
of Jews scattered around the world.

The Zionists' break from the idea of democracy has had disastrous
consequences. Today, Israel's leaders are in a real bind. They need the
legitimacy that derives from being perceived as a democracy. But the
presence of large numbers of Arabs inside Israel makes it impossible for
Israel to be both a 'Jewish state' (meaning only Jews are the sovereign
authority) and a democracy (meaning all inhabitants equally are the
sovereign authority.) This is one reason Israeli leaders cannot conceive of
allowing Palestinians to return to the homes from which they were driven by
Jewish military forces in 1948.

JEWS WITH OPPOSITE GOALS

The idea of a Jewish state has historically been backed by Jewish and other
elites, but not by most Jews. In 1903 Theodor Herzl traveled to Russia for
two lengthy meetings with the Czar's interior minister, Wjatscheslaw Plehwe,
the man believed responsible for the notorious massacre of Jews at Kishinev.
According to Herzl's diary (August 10 and 14) Plehwe told him, "You don't
have to justify your movement to me. You are preaching to a convert...The
creation of an independent Jewish state capable of absorbing several million
Jews would suit us best of all." Israeli historian Yoram Hazony explains,
"As Herzl had long suspected, the czarist government, ruling 7 million Jews,
many of whom were increasingly drawn to socialism, was predisposed to
support any scheme that might encourage Jewish emigration."[7]

In the 1920s and '30s a great many Jews were involved in Socialist and
Communist working class organizations fighting to create socialist
revolutions in Europe, not to emigrate to Palestine. For instance, in 1938,
Henryk Erlich, the leader of the Bund - the Polish Jewish working class
organization which swept the large Jewish vote in the last free municipal
elections before the Nazi invasion - declared, "Zionism has always been a
Siamese twin of anti-Semitism and of every kind of national chauvinism."
Working class Polish Jews rejected the Zionists when they saw Zionist
leaders making deals with the most anti-Semitic politicians in Poland for
the evacuation of Poland's Jews to Palestine.

Unlike the Zionists, the Bund made no demand for territory. They fought for
equality for ordinary people as opposed to the establishment of a Jewish
state. They believed in strengthening the trade union movement and working
for unity between Jewish and non-Jewish workers in Poland, and from 1939 to
1945 they organized underground resistance to Nazis in the ghettoes, in
concentration camps and as partisans in the forests.[8]

In contrast to the Bund's role during the Holocaust, the World Zionist
Organization (WZO, headed by Chaim Weizmann) continued to cooperate with the
most reactionary and anti-Semitic elements of European society to gain favor
for its project in Palestine. For example:

·         The head of the WZO's Zionist Rescue Committee in Budapest during
the war, Rudolf Kastner, later a prominent member of Israel's government
under Prime Minister Ben Gurion, collaborated with the Nazis. Kastner was
made a V.I.P. by the Nazis and not required to wear a yellow Star of David
because, in exchange for being allowed to hand pick a small number of
educated Jews to emigrate to Palestine, he helped lure thousands of
Hungarian Jews to their death without a fight by arranging for phony
postcards "from other Jews" to convince them that the trains to the death
camps were merely taking them to be "resettled."[9]

·         The Zionist leader Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli Prime
Minister, in 1941 proposed an alliance with the Nazis against Great Britain,
writing to Nazi leaders: "In the matter of concept, we identify with you. So
why not collaborate?"[10]

'A LOYAL JEWISH ULSTER'

The British and U.S. elites who supported the Palestine Mandate in 1922 and
the creation of Israel in 1948 had no particular regard for Jews; in fact,
they were quite content to stand by while millions of Jews were murdered in
death camps during WWII. When they did support the Mandate, their purposes
were not altruistic but political and strategic. Sir Ronald Storrs, the
first governor of Jerusalem under British rule in the 1920s, explained that
the value of a Jewish sovereignty lay in its "forming for England a 'little
loyal Jewish Ulster' in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism."

Thus Israel's role in the Middle East from its inception has been to act as
a lightning rod for class struggle in the region, provoking Arab hatred and
fomenting ethnic war so that the Arab regimes - all of which sit on a
powder-keg of rebellious workers - can stay in power by directing the anger
of their populations against Israel. To keep this conflict going long-term,
Israel has to be made militarily strong enough to repulse any Arab attack,
which is why the U.S. arms Israel so heavily. U.S. corporate and government
leaders would never be able to muster public support for turning Israel into
a highly-militarized garrison state if they revealed to the American people
their true purpose: to use the Jewish state to control the Middle East's
vast and rebellious working class and its oil.[11]

To function as a lightning rod, Israel must provoke Arab hatred; it cannot
be simply a state where Jews live and prosper in peace along with Arabs the
way, for example, non-Mormons and Mormons live together in Utah, or Jews and
non-Jews in the US. It must be an ethnically divisive state, a state only
'of and for the Jews', a state whose 'very existence' drives Arabs off the
land and incites ethnic war. Some Jews saw this from the beginning of the
state of Israel. Judah Magnes, the first Chancellor of Israel's Hebrew
University, opposed the 'Jewish state' idea because, as he expressed it in
his diary in 1942, "The slogan 'Jewish state' (or commonwealth) is
equivalent, in effect, to a declaration of war by the Jews on the
Arabs."[12] From the elite's perspective, provoking ethnic war is precisely
the function of a Jewish state.

Corporate and government leaders do not care how many Jews die in the ethnic
fighting. As a result, ordinary Jews in public bus stops, restaurants and
dance clubs are now at greater risk in Israel than in any other nation. This
is why, according to a January 2002 poll conducted by Market Watch for the
Israeli Ma'ariv newspaper, 20 percent of adult Israelis say they have
recently considered living in a different country, and 12 percent of Israeli
parents would like their children to grow up outside Israel.[13]

DEALING WITH ANTI-SEMITISM

Zionists claim that the Holocaust demonstrates what they have asserted since
1896 - that non-Jews are innately anti-Semitic and that, to survive in a
hostile world, Jews need a state of their own. But the real history of the
Holocaust demonstrates no such thing. In fact most Germans opposed
anti-Semitism, and working class Germans actively fought the Nazis on the
streets and at the polls before Hitler was handed power by German
industrialists and aristocrats, precisely to crush the growing working class
movement. In the last free election (Nov. 6, 1932) before Hitler's
appointment as Chancellor, the German working class parties (the Social
Democrats and the Communists) - both of which were known for being
outspokenly opposed to anti-Semitism - out-polled the Nazis by 221 to 196
seats in the Reichstag. Most German workers recognized anti-Semitism for
what it was: a strategy by the German elite to divide and attack all working
people.

The Holocaust does not demonstrate that non-Jews are innately anti-Semitic
any more than slavery demonstrates that whites are innately racist against
blacks. If such innate prejudice were a fact, it would be hard to explain
why any incident of racist or anti-Semitic graffiti in American towns today
is met with public revulsion. The appropriate response to racism and
anti-Semitism is to strengthen equality and solidarity among working people
of all races and nationalities, not to erect ethnically pure states based on
tribal and inherently divisive principles. The Holocaust is no more a reason
for Jews to have a state of their own than slavery is a reason for
African-Americans to have a pure 'Black state' of their own.

Most Jews who survived the Holocaust, when given a choice between going to
Israel or the United States, chose the United States because it seemed to
offer what they really wanted - a society where people are equal before the
law and Jews are treated the same as everybody else.

WHAT NOW?

The very concept of ethnically pure states is divisive and destined to stoke
conflict. The so-called 'two state solution' in the Middle East -
establishing a Palestinian state to counter the Jewish state - is a
conceptual and political trap that prevents Arab and Jewish working people
from uniting around their common interests and values. The situation in the
Middle East cannot be solved within this framework; it leads nowhere except
to more destruction and hate and more elite control.

The solution is not to establish another ethnic state but to disestablish
the ones that exist now. Israel, as well as states that are just for Muslims
or any other ethnic group, must cease to exist as states based on apartheid
and ethnic domination. They must be replaced by secular democracies with
equal rights for all, regardless of their ethnic background, and with equal
tolerance for all religions.

Will this be easy to accomplish? Certainly not. Some of the most powerful
elites in the world depend on continued conflict in the Middle East to
maintain their power. To establish a real democracy in Palestine will
require ordinary people joining together to defeat Israeli, Arab, and US
elites. Real democracy will take a revolution. Is this possible? Yes, with
great difficulty. Is it necessary? Absolutely, because there is no other
way. The first step is to think about the problem and its solution in a new
way. It is time we began.

Notes

1.Tom Segev, 1949: The First Israelis, Free Press; ISBN: 0029291801;
(February 1986)

2. http://www.jafi.org.il/mission/eval.htm

3. http://www.jcpa.org/dje/books/projren-ch1.htm

4. Donna E. Arzt, professor of law, Syracuse University, presentation at the
December 7, 1999, meeting of the Sadat Forum at Brookings, cohosted by
Richard Haass, vice-president and director of Foreign Policy Studies at the
Brookings Institution, and Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace
and Development at the University of Maryland.
http://www.bsos.umd.edu/sadat/publications/Forum/12-7-99.htm

5.Alexander Safian, associate director and research director of the
pro-Israel Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
(CAMERA), a Boston-based media-watch organization, Can Arabs Buy Land in
Israel?, http://www.meforum.org/meq/dec97/safian.shtml

6. Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State, Harry Zohn, trans. (New York: Herzl
Press, 1970), pp. 69, 92-3. Cited by Hazony.

7. Yoram Hazony, The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel's Soul, Basic
Books, a New Republic Book, USA, 2001, pp.136-7

8. David Rosenberg, In Defiance of History,
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/intarch/xbund.html

9. Ben Hecht, Perfidy, Milah Press (Jerusalem, New London); ISBN:
0964688638; (April 1997)

10. David Yisraeli: "Le probleme palestinien dans la politique allemande, de
1889-1945", appendix 11. Also see Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of
Dictators,  http://www.marxists.de/middleast/brenner/ch26.htm, noting that
Shamir's organization (NMO) stressed that, "The NMO is closely related to
the totalitarian movements of Europe in its ideology and structure."

11. Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators,
http://www.codoh.com/zionweb/zizad/zizad8.html, citing Ronald Storrs,
Orientations, p.405.

12. cited in The Jewish State, by Yoram Hazony, p. 248

13. "Escaping the Hell of the Holy Land," by Sylvana Foa in The Village
Voice, February 13-19, 2002, http://villagevoice.com/issues/0207/foa.php