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Topic: discussion ? or more Propaganda?

topic by _ 4/7/2002 (16:07)

reply top I know genuine discussion does not seem to be a goal of most of posters here .. Maybe because of the massacres going on now .. But just in case there are some missinformed people about there history around.( even though I think there ignorence is kind of welling ignorence) Let us try to start a discussion .. some one reply to this please. And justify calling ANY PALESTINIAN TODAY a terrorist .. Then justify what people with this kind of history should tell there children in order NOT to fight ISRAELis .. civilians and all! Also a good point would be to explain ANY media person in the us position on calling ISRAEL a democracy. http://www.cairotimes.com/content/region/newhist.html Poison or cure? The work of the 'New Historians' has hit a raw nerve, highlighting the Jewish state's internal contradictions. Andrew Hammond The last thing Benny Morris intended was to undermine the foundations of the Israeli nation. But that's what many Israelis think he did when in 1989 he began rewriting the early history of the modern Jewish state. He is the most celebrated of the group of Jewish historians -- including Tom Segev, Avi Schleim, Ilan Pappe -- who since the mid-80s have debunked the rosy picture of the country's inception that its establishment likes to paint. Using carefully documented evidence, Ben Gurion University-based Morris exposed in The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-49 the myth that over half a million Palestinians fled their homes in what became the state of Israel because the Arab armies and official radio broadcasts told them to. They fled in fact because of military pressure, terrorist acts by Jewish forces, and organized acts of forced expulsion by pre-state and post-state Israeli armed forces. Morris's version of events has become more or less accepted in the Israeli academic community, and he thinks the work of the New Historians has effected a shift in attitudes in the country. 'A few years ago a book came out dealing with the campaigns of the Ninth Battalion of the IDF [Israeli Defense Force] in 1948. The research for it was funded by the IDF's history department and published by the IDF press. It contains two long passages about atrocities committed by the Ninth Battalion against Arab civilians, in one case, and Arab prisoners of war, in other cases...This came out in 1994, and it would have been unthinkable five years before. This is part of the impact of the new historiography.' He goes on: 'Israel over the past decade has gradually been evolving into a non-ideological society. While the collective was a lot more important in early Zionist ideology, privatization, civil rights, the rights of the individual -- these are now becoming more important.' In other words, Israel is 'moving into a post-Zionist phase,' according to Morris. Yet 'post-Zionist' is not a term he would choose to describe himself. 'The term post-Zionism has either been used by people who are not Zionist to trumpet their own conditional views, or by their opponents to say they are not Zionist, which means for critics anti-Zionist, i.e., a bad thing.' So where does Morris stand? 'I wouldn't define myself as a post-Zionist. I suppose I am a Zionist in the sense that I believe the Jewish people should have a state. They have a right to a state, just as any other people do, to self-determination -- perhaps even slightly more, because they've been more persecuted in the West because they didn't have a state.' But does being a Zionist necessarily mean unconditionally endorsing the actions of the Zionist state? 'I wouldn't say I was a very enthusiastic Zionist, because I don't like nation-states for various reasons, and this nation-state has behaved as badly as most nation-states do in situations of crisis. But I wouldn't say I'm a post-Zionist because I think the ideology's main aim of establishing and maintaining a state was correct in the circumstances.' It's because of opinions such as these, from the king of the 'revisionist historians,' that many dovish Israelis say you have to take their writings with a grain of salt. Many Palestinians roll their eyes at the mention of Morris' name. Some critics have said that despite the mass of evidence he himself presents, Morris goes soft in his conclusions about Ben Gurion. It is absolutely clear from the documentary evidence he provides that the 'transfer' of up to 350,000 Arabs living in the Jewish state proposed under Partition obsessed the minds of Zionist leaders for a decade before the 1947-8 fighting. A 40 percent Arab minority threatened the integrity of an exclusively Jewish state. The report of Britain's Peel Commission, published in 1937, officially endorsed uprooting up to 225,000 Palestinians from their homes. The only question was how to effect it: to negotiate a transfer with Arab states once the war, if it came to that, had been won, or to squeeze the Palestinians out by force systematically as soon as fighting had begun. When World War II ended in 1945, and British withdrawal seemed imminent, Zionist leaders made no mention of the transfer idea in public, to avoid both stirring up international opinion and inviting the presence of meddlesome foreign forces to make sure it didn't happen. But once hostilities began in 1948, Morris says only that Ben Gurion was 'tempted' to allow Jewish forces to 'nudge' the local population to flee once the exodus had begun -- though he says explicitly that Ben Gurion didn't want the refugees back once the war was over. 'Pro-Arab [and] Arab commentators and so-called historians have written that there is a disparity between my conclusions and the material I present,' Morris says. 'They say that the material shows Israel extremely responsible for what happened in 1948, the refugee problem and so [on], whereas [my] conclusions are much softer and let Ben Gurion off the hook. On the other hand, others have said Ben Gurion is shown not to be an out-and-out transferist. The material is much more ambiguous. Well, you can't satisfy everybody.' In fact, 'transfer' is part of Israeli political debate to this day. Knesset member Rahavan Zeev Gandi is its main proponent. Gandi has used Morris's work to justify his own expansionist aims, arguing that in doing so, he is merely building on the 'pro-transfer' policies of the founder and father-figure of the state, Ben Gurion. Yasser Arafat has also invoked Morris' name on occasion, but as a call for Israeli atonement of sins. Morris says he tries not to concern himself with how his work is employed by politicians. 'It doesn't interest me as a historian, because as soon as I start thinking about how they will use what I write, that's the moment when I start destroying what I write so that I don't give them ammunition. In my view a historian should try and seek the truth and then write what the material he finds leads him to, and no more than that.' Emmanual Sifan, a renowned professor of Arab history at Hebrew University, argues that while it's true Israeli society is going through a major cultural-political shift at present, that doesn't mean the work of the New Historians, which in so many ways exemplifies that shift, has led to more liberal or sympathetic views of the Palestinians. As far as historical accuracy goes, Morris' work is a 'major breakthrough,' Sifan says, but journalistic writing, and authors such as David Grossman (see page 14), have had far more direct impact. In fact, Sifan would say, the New History has become so much dead wood. '1948 has now played itself out. The debate is now moving into the study of the 1950s, when things are much more murky,' he says. In any case, he comments, apart from Morris, 'much of the work is not very impressive.' And crucially, the New History has yet to make its way into Israel's secondary school system, run by an Education Ministry dominated by the religious right since Begin came to power in 1977. What the revisionists have done, though, is send shivers down the spine of much of the intelligentsia and political establishment, particularly the traditional left -- Labor, Meretz and Peace Now types -- who still cherish a utopian, if tattered, vision of Zionism. Perhaps the most perceptive critique of the phenomenon of the 'New Historians' has come from Daniel Gutweim, professor of Jewish history at Haifa University. According to him, 'The question is not, are these ideas right or wrong? The question is, why have these ideas become so popular? The answer is that Israel is undergoing an immense cultural transformation, a real Kulturkampf.' Gutweim argues that, for the most part unwittingly, the New History is serving the right-wing business class, exemplified in the figure of Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, to further their aim of breaking the traditional communal and socialist mold of the country by 'privatizing Israeli society, even its mentality.' By portraying Israel's past as 'so immoral,' he says, these writers are creating a feeling of distance and disintegration in the country. 'It is a paradoxical alliance between left and right,' he says, 'a coalition of 'the Other,'' in which both sides want to 'drag old Israel down.' Part of the reason for this fear of fragmentation voiced by Gutweim, but shared by many Israelis, is the emergence in recent years of a nationalist movement within Israel's million-strong Arab community. Some of the post-Zionists, such as Ilan Pappe, are openly siding with the Israeli Arabs, supporting their aspirations for full citizenship. The fear of fragmentation is focused on the person of Azmi Beshara, the Arab Knesset member who has been all over the Israeli and Arab media for the last two years arguing that the Palestinians of the state of Israel should be recognized as a national minority; if not, then in order to be a truly democratic state for all its citizens, Israel should shed its exclusively Jewish character. The call to the Arab community to boycott Labor leader Peres in the 1996 elections, Gutweim argues, is clear evidence of an alliance between leftist Israelis and Israeli Arabs -- highly unsettling for the majority of the Jewish population. That Arab abstinence brought Netanyahu to power. What this simply means is that the Arabs of Israel have finally realized their political weight, which for many Jews is a chilling development. 'What Beshara really means is Israeli Arabs must be acknowledged as a national minority beside a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza,' Gutweim says. 'The Jews will also be a national minority then, and these two ethnicities will form a new Israel. This is a recipe for the Balkanization of the Middle East. Bosnia would be paradise in comparison.' Gutweim feels that questioning the basic premise of Israeli statehood -- that the state's Jewish character should be the defining characteristic -- actually creates obstacles to peaceful relations with the land's other claimants. Such questioning 'is harming the policy of truce or understanding with the Palestinians,' he argues. 'After a Ha'aretz interview [with Beshara] earlier this year, every Israeli wonders, 'Why bother with Arafat? There's Beshara.' In the Left we preached day and night for a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It's hard enough with Hamas bombs, and now Beshara is saying 'I'm next in line to get something from you.'' If you include all of the West Bank and Gaza in a notional binational state, you have the 40 percent Palestinian minority that so vexed Zionist leaders 50 years ago. A book published this year by David Ohana, a prominent Jewish historian of Moroccan origin, addresses this fear of fragmentation in Israeli society that Gutweim talks of: islands of unintegrated Russians, ultra-Orthodox religious types, extremist settlers, post-Zionists, new Eastern Jews (those who have recently rediscovered their 'Oriental' roots). The remainder of liberal but religiously-aware Jews Ohana calls 'the last Israelis' -- the title of the book. Yet many would say he's a victim of schism himself. Some Sephardi (Eastern Jewish) intellectuals say the only possible reason Ohana hasn't been offered a job in the Hebrew University's history faculty is because he's not an Ashkenazi, or Western, Jew. Ohana was recently asked in an interview what he would do if the state were to dispense with its Jewish character. 'I don't have an answer to that,' he replied. 'And I don't think there's anyone intelligent who could truthfully answer that question.' It's something of a paradox that Morris -- the symbol of a detested post-Zionist intelligentsia that eschews post-Zionism -- thinks pretty much the same. 'A binational state is not going to work,' he says dismissively, 'because Jews won't agree to that, because the Jews didn't come to Palestine to set up a state jointly with the Arabs. They came here to set up a state for the Jews because the Jews didn't have a state. So it's not going to work.' Vol 2, Iss 20 26 November 1998

reply by _ 4/7/2002 (16:15)

reply top To sum it up .. Israel as a whole .. is an invading entity.. its own survival depends upon waring and expansion against arabs .. NOT JUST PALESTINIANS.. but ARABS.!

reply by Seth Sims 4/7/2002 (17:42)

reply top Peace? No chance Benny Morris February 23, 2002 The rumour that I have undergone a brain transplant is (as far as I can remember) unfounded - or at least premature. But my thinking about the current Middle East crisis and its protagonists has in fact radically changed during the past two years. I imagine that I feel a bit like one of those western fellow travellers rudely awakened by the trundle of Russian tanks crashing through Budapest in 1956. Back in 1993, when I began work on Righteous Victims, a revisionist history of the Zionist-Arab conflict from 1881 until the present, I was cautiously optimistic about the prospects for Middle East peace. I was never a wild optimist; and my gradual study during the mid-1990s of the pre-1948 history of Palestinian-Zionist relations brought home to me the depth and breadth of the problems and antagonisms. But at least the Israelis and Palestinians were talking peace; had agreed to mutual recognition; and had signed the Oslo agreement, a first step that promised gradual Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories, the emergence of a Palestinian state, and a peace treaty between the two peoples. The Palestinians appeared to have given up their decades-old dream and objective of destroying and supplanting the Jewish state, and the Israelis had given up their dream of a 'Greater Israel', stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river. And, given the centrality of Palestinian-Israeli relations in the Arab-Israeli conflict, a final, comprehensive peace settlement between Israel and all of its Arab neighbours seemed within reach. But by the time I had completed the book, my restrained optimism had given way to grave doubts - and within a year had crumbled into a cosmic pessimism. One reason was the Syrians' rejection of the deal offered by the prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in 1993-96 and Ehud Barak in 1999-2000, involving Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for a full-fledged bilateral peace treaty. What appears to have stayed the hands of President Hafez Assad and subsequently his son and successor, Bashar Assad, was not quibbles about a few hundred yards here or there but a basic refusal to make peace with the Jewish state. What counted, in the end, was the presence, on a wall in the Assads' office, of a portrait of Saladin, the legendary 12th-century Kurdish Muslim warrior who had beaten the crusaders, to whom the Arabs often compared the Zionists. I can see the father, on his deathbed, telling his son: 'Whatever you do, don't make peace with the Jews; like the crusaders, they too will vanish.' But my main reason, around which my pessimism gathered and crystallised, was the figure of Yasser Arafat, who has led the Palestinian national movement since the late 1960s and, by virtue of the Oslo accords, governs the cities of the West Bank (Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Tulkarm and Qalqilya) and their environs, and the bulk of the Gaza Strip. Arafat is the symbol of the movement, accurately reflecting his people's miseries and collective aspirations. Unfortunately, he has proven himself a worthy successor to Haj Muhammad Amin al Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who led the Palestinians during the 1930s into their (abortive) rebellion against the British mandate government and during the 1940s into their (again abortive) attempt to prevent the emergence of the Jewish state in 1948, resulting in their catastrophic defeat and the creation of the Palestinian refugee problem. Husseini had been implacable and incompetent (a dangerous mix) - but also a trickster and liar. Nobody had trusted him, neither his Arab colleagues nor the British nor the Zionists. Above all, Husseini had embodied rejectionism - a rejection of any compromise with the Zionist movement. He had rejected two international proposals to partition the country into Jewish and Arab polities, by the British Peel commission in 1937 and by the UN general assembly in November 1947. In between, he spent the war years (1941-45) in Berlin, working for the Nazi foreign ministry and recruiting Bosnian Muslims for the Wehrmacht. Abba Eban, Israel's legendary foreign minister, once quipped that the Palestinians had never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. But no one can fault them for consistency. After Husseini came Arafat, another implacable nationalist and inveterate liar, trusted by no Arab, Israeli or American leader (though there appear to be many Europeans who are taken in). In 1978-79, he failed to join the Israeli-Egyptian Camp David framework, which might have led to Palestinian statehood a decade ago. In 2000, turning his back on the Oslo process, Arafat rejected yet another historic compromise, that offered by Barak at Camp David in July and subsequently improved upon in President Bill Clinton's proposals (endorsed by Barak) in December. Instead, the Palestinians, in September, resorted to arms and launched the current mini-war or intifada, which has so far resulted in some 790 Arab and 270 Israeli deaths, and a deepening of hatred on both sides to the point that the idea of a territorial-political compromise seems to be a pipe dream. Palestinians and their sympathisers have blamed the Israelis and Clinton for what happened: the daily humiliations and restrictions of the continuing Israeli semi-occupation; the wily but transparent Binyamin Netanyahu's foot-dragging during 1996-99; Barak's continued expansion of the settlements in the occupied territories and his standoffish manner toward Arafat; and Clinton's insistence on summoning the Camp David meeting despite Palestinian protestations that they were not quite ready. But all this is really and truly beside the point: Barak, a sincere and courageous leader, offered Arafat a reasonable peace agreement that included Israeli withdrawal from 85-91% of the West Bank and 100% of the Gaza Strip; the uprooting of most of the settlements; Palestinian sovereignty over the Arab neighbourhoods of East Jerusalem; and the establishment of a Palestinian state. As to the Temple Mount (Haram ash-Sharif) in Jerusalem's Old City, Barak proposed Israeli-Palestinian condominium or UN security council control or 'divine sovereignty' with actual Arab control. Regarding the Palestinian refugees, Barak offered a token return to Israel and massive financial compensation to facilitate their rehabilitation in the Arab states and the Palestinian state-to-be. Arafat rejected the offer, insisting on 100% Israeli withdrawal from the territories, sole Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount, and the refugees' 'right of return' to Israel proper. Instead of continuing to negotiate, the Palestinians - with the agile Arafat both riding the tiger and pulling the strings behind the scenes - launched the intifada. Clinton (and Barak) responded by upping the ante to 94-96% of the West Bank (with some territorial compensation from Israel proper) and sovereignty over the surface area of the Temple Mount, with some sort of Israeli control regarding the area below ground, where the Palestinians have recently carried out excavation work without proper archaeological supervision. Again, the Palestinians rejected the proposals, insisting on sole Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount (surely an unjust demand: after all, the Temple Mount and the temples' remains at its core are the most important historical and religious symbol and site of the Jewish people. It is worth mentioning that 'Jerusalem' or its Arab variants do not even appear once in the Koran). Since these rejections - which led directly to Barak's defeat and hardliner Ariel Sharon's election as prime minister - the Israelis and Palestinians have been at each other's throats, and the semi-occupation has continued. The intifada is a strange, sad sort of war, with the underdog, who rejected peace, simultaneously in the role of aggressor and, when the western TV cameras are on, victim. The semi-occupier, with his giant but largely useless army, merely responds, usually with great restraint, given the moral and international political shackles under which he labours. And he loses on CNN because F-16s bombing empty police buildings appear far more savage than Palestinian suicide bombers who take out 10 or 20 Israeli civilians at a go. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has emerged as a virtual kingdom of mendacity, where every official, from President Arafat down, spends his days lying to a succession of western journalists. The reporters routinely give the lies credence equal to or greater than what they hear from straight, or far less mendacious, Israeli officials. One day Arafat charges that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) uses uranium-tipped shells against Palestinian civilians. The next day it's poison gas. Then, for lack of independent corroboration, the charges simply vanish - and the Palestinians go on to the next lie, again garnering headlines in western and Arab newspapers. Daily, Palestinian officials bewail Israeli 'massacres' and 'bombings' of Palestinian civilians - when in fact there have been no massacres and the bombings have invariably been directed at empty PA buildings. The only civilians deliberately targeted and killed in large numbers, indeed massacred, are Israeli - by Palestinian suicide bombers. In response, the army and Shin Bet (the Israeli security service) have tried to hit the guilty with 'targeted killings' of bomb-makers, terrorists and their dispatchers, to me an eminently moral form of reprisal, deterrence and prevention: these are (barbaric) 'soldiers' in a mini-war and, as such, legitimate military targets. Would the critics prefer Israel to respond in kind to a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv? Palestinian leaders routinely laud the suicide bombers as national heroes. In a recent spate of articles, Palestinian journalists, politicians and clerics praised Wafa Idris, a female suicide bomber who detonated her device in Jerusalem's main Jaffa Street, killing an 81-year-old man and injuring about 100. A controversy ensued - not over the morality or political efficacy of the deed but about whether Islam allows women to play such a role. Instead of being informed, accurately, about the Israeli peace offers, the Palestinians have been subjected to a nonstop barrage of anti-Israeli incitement and lies in the PA-controlled media. Arafat has honed the practice of saying one thing to western audiences and quite another to his own Palestinian constituency to a fine art. Lately, with Arab audiences, he has begun to use the term 'the Zionist army' (for the IDF), a throwback to the 1950s and 1960s when Arab leaders routinely spoke of 'the Zionist entity' instead of saying 'Israel', which, they felt, implied some form of recognition of the Jewish state and its legitimacy. At the end of the day, this question of legitimacy - seemingly put to rest by the Israeli-Egyptian and Israeli-Jordanian peace treaties - is at the root of current Israeli despair and my own 'conversion'. For decades, Israeli leaders - notably Golda Meir in 1969 - denied the existence of a 'Palestinian people' and the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations for sovereignty. But during the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionist movement agreed to give up its dream of a 'Greater Israel' and to divide Palestine with the Arabs. During the 1990s, the movement went further - agreeing to partition and recognising the existence of the Pales tinian people as its partner in partition. Unfortunately, the Palestinian national movement, from its inception, has denied the Zionist movement any legitimacy and stuck fast to the vision of a 'Greater Palestine', meaning a Muslim-Arab-populated and Arab-controlled state in all of Palestine, perhaps with some Jews being allowed to stay on as a religious minority. In 1988-93, in a brief flicker on the graph, Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation seemed to have acquiesced in the idea of a compromise. But since 2000 the dominant vision of a 'Greater Palestine' has surged back to the fore (and one wonders whether the pacific asseverations of 1988-1993 were not merely diplomatic camouflage). The Palestinian leadership, and with them most Palestinians, deny Israel's right to exist, deny that Zionism was/is a just enterprise. (I have yet to see even a peace-minded Palestinian leader, as Sari Nusseibeh seems to be, stand up and say: 'Zionism is a legitimate national liberation movement, like our own. And the Jews have a just claim to Palestine, like we do.') Israel may exist, and be too powerful, at present, to destroy; one may recognise its reality. But this is not to endow it with legitimacy. Hence Arafat's repeated denial in recent months of any connection between the Jewish people and the Temple Mount, and, by extension, between the Jewish people and the land of Israel/Palestine. 'What Temple?' he asks. The Jews are simply robbers who came from Europe and decided, for some unfathomable reason, to steal Palestine and displace the Palestinians. He refuses to recognise the history and reality of the 3,000-year-old Jewish connection to the land of Israel. On some symbolic plane, the Temple Mount is a crucial issue. But more practically, the real issue, the real litmus test of Palestinian intentions, is the fate of the refugees, some 3.5-4m strong, encompassing those who fled or were driven out during the 1948 war and were never allowed back to their homes in Is rael, as well as their descendants. I spent the mid-1980s investigating what led to the creation of the refugee problem, publishing The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949 in 1988. My conclusion, which angered many Israelis and undermined Zionist historiography, was that most of the refugees were a product of Zionist military action and, in smaller measure, of Israeli expulsion orders and Arab local leaders' urgings or orders to move out. Critics of Israel subsequently latched on to those findings that highlighted Israeli responsibility while ignoring the fact that the problem was a direct consequence of the war that the Palestinians - and, in their wake, the surrounding Arab states - had launched. And few noted that, in my concluding remarks, I had explained that the creation of the problem was 'almost inevitable', given the Zionist aim of creating a Jewish state in a land largely populated by Arabs and given Arab resistance to the Zionist enterprise. The refugees were the inevitable by-product of an attempt to fit an ungainly square peg into an inhospitable round hole. But whatever my findings, we are now 50 years on - and Israel exists. Like every people, the Jews deserve a state, and justice will not be served by throwing them into the sea. And if the refugees are allowed back, there will be godawful chaos and, in the end, no Israel. Israel is currently populated by 5m Jews and more than 1m Arabs (an increasingly vociferous, pro-Palestinian irredentist time bomb). If the refugees return, an unviable binational entity will emerge and, given the Arabs' far higher birth rates, Israel will quickly cease to be a Jewish state. Add to that the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and you have, almost instantly, an Arab state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river with a Jewish minority. Jews lived as a minority in Muslim countries from the 7th century - and, contrary to Arab propaganda, never much enjoyed the experience. They were always second-class citizens and always discriminated-against infidels; they were often persecuted and not infrequently murdered. Giant pogroms occurred over the centuries. And as late as the 1940s Arab mobs murdered hundreds of Jews in Baghdad, and hundreds more in Libya, Egypt and Morocco. The Jews were expelled from or fled the Arab world during the 1950s and 60s. There is no reason to believe that Jews will want to live (again) as a minority in a (Palestinian) Arab state, especially given the tragic history of Jewish-Palestinian relations. They will either be expelled or emigrate to the west. It is the Palestinian leadership's rejection of the Barak-Clinton peace proposals of July-December 2000, the launching of the intifada, and the demand ever since that Israel accept the 'right of return' that has persuaded me that the Palestinians, at least in this generation, do not intend peace: they do not want, merely, an end to the occupation - that is what was offered back in July-December 2000, and they rejected the deal. They want all of Palestine and as few Jews in it as possible. The right of return is the wedge with which to prise open the Jewish state. Demography - the far higher Arab birth rate - will, over time, do the rest, if Iranian or Iraqi nuclear weapons don't do the trick first. And don't get me wrong. I favour an Israeli withdrawal from the territories - the semi-occupation is corrupting and immoral, and alienates Israel's friends abroad - as part of a bilateral peace agreement; or, if an agreement is unobtainable, a unilateral withdrawal to strategically defensible borders. In fact in 1988 I served time in a military prison for refusing to serve in the West Bank town of Nablus. But I don't believe that the resultant status quo will survive for long. The Palestinians - either the PA itself or various armed factions, with the PA looking on - will continue to harry Israel, with Katyusha rockets and suicide bombers, across the new lines, be they agreed or self-imposed. Ultimately, they will force Israel to reconquer the West Bank and Gaza Strip, probably plunging the Middle East into a new, wide conflagration. I don't believe that Arafat and his colleagues mean or want peace - only a staggered chipping away at the Jewish state - and I don't believe that a permanent two-state solution will emerge. I don't believe that Arafat is constitutionally capable of agreeing, really agreeing, to a solution in which the Palestinians get 22-25% of the land (a West Bank-Gaza state) and Israel the remaining 75-78%, or of signing away the 'right of return'. He is incapable of looking his refugee constituencies in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Gaza in the eye and telling them: 'I have signed away your birthright, your hope, your dream.' And he probably doesn't want to. Ultimately, I believe, the balance of military force or the demography of Palestine, meaning the discrepant national birth rates, will determine the country's future, and either Palestine will become a Jewish state, without a substantial Arab minority, or it will become an Arab state, with a gradually diminishing Jewish minority. Or it will become a nuclear wasteland, a home to neither people. Professor Benny Morris teaches Middle East history at Ben-Gurion University, Beersheba, Israel. His next book, The Road to Jerusalem: Glubb Pasha, the Jews and Palestine, is published by IB Tauris.

reply by Seth Sims 4/7/2002 (18:01)

reply top Morris: 'If you recognize the responsibility, millions will demand their lands in return immediately thereafter. If the notion of the right of return will be recognized, there is also going to be an attempt to utilize that notion, and that will be the end of the State of Israel. [If that happens], there won't be a Jewish State here.' Yediot Aharonot (Y.A.): 'In Taba it was proposed that Israel would recognize its responsibility in creating the refugee problem, but that the refugees will not be absorbed in Israel, except for a very small number on which Israel will decide. Do you think that this is also a bad idea?' Morris: 'The Palestinians told Beilin that they are willing to consider all kinds of formulas regarding refugees, but they lied to him. They will never back away from [the demand for] the right of return. They cannot come to their people in the refugee camps and tell them: 'We gave in on the right of return.' They are unable to do this.' Y.A.: '[But] Sari Nusaiba, head of the PA office of Jerusalem Affairs said it himself.' Morris: 'He is an exception. His statements are putting his life in danger. He is not one of the first rank senior leadership. I never heard Mohammad Dakhlan, Jibril Rajoub, or Abu Allah and their guys saying this. Even if they will sign on such a text at one stage or another, a new generation will emerge in ten or twenty years and will argue that they had no right to give up [the right of return].' Y.A.: 'You are the man who revealed to the Israelis that they have responsibility for the refugee problem. Are you asking them to ignore what you revealed to them?' Morris: 'I revealed to the Israelis the truth of what happened in 1948, the historic facts. But the Arabs are the ones who started the fighting, they started the shootings. So why should I take responsibility? The Arabs started the war, they are responsible.' Y.A.: 'Should we ignore this issue in a permanent agreement?' Morris: 'We need to give some kind of a solution to the Palestinians but we must not recognize the right of return. Arafat and his generation cannot give up on the vision of the greater land of Israel for the Arabs. [This is true, because] this is a holy land, Dar-al Islam. It was once in the hands of the Muslims, and its inconceivable [to them] that infidels like us would receive it. And besides, even if Arafat will sign an agreement, I find it hard to believe, in view of his behavior during the last two years, that he or his heirs will abide by it.' Y.A.: 'Is that because they are Arabs?' Morris: 'Not because they are Arabs, but rather because they don't understand that justice exists on the other side as well. We do understand that justice exists on the other side. Have you ever heard a senior Palestinian official who says that the Jewish demand for the State of Israel is justified? I have never heard that being said...' 'We will not reach a compromise in this generation, and I have a sneaking suspicion that we will never reach a true and permanent agreement. In the heart of every Palestinian exists a desire that the State of Israel will not be here anymore. For many of them this translates into more than just a desire. As far as they are concerned, all of their misfortunes are a consequence of our deeds, and our destruction will bring about their salvation. Their salvation is the whole of Palestine.' Y.A.: 'Do they not understand the reality? Do they not understand that they absorb all these blows as a consequence of their unwillingness to compromise?' Morris: 'Every nation has its own particular way to understand reality, and their reality is very fluid. They feel that demographics will defeat the Jews in one hundred or two hundred yeas, just like the Crusaders. Or [the Palestinians are hoping that] the Arabs will have nuclear weapons. Why should they accept a compromise that is perceived by them as unjust today?' Y.A.: 'And when you hear Palestinian leaders, like Abu Mazen and others, who say that they are willing to accept Israel, and living alongside it, do you not believe them?' Morris: 'Not really. I do believe them when they cheer for bin Laden...' Endnotes: (1) Yediot Ahronot, November 23, 2001.

reply by Seth Sims 4/7/2002 (18:05)

reply top The Israeli Arabs By Mohamed Sid-Ahmed One of the most significant developments of the Intifada has been the extension of the Palestinian protest movement into Israel itself, where its Arab citizens took to the streets to express their outrage at the excessive force used by the Israeli security forces to put down the mass demonstrations sparked off by Sharon's provocative visit to Al-Aqsa Mosque on 28 September. However, notwithstanding their status as Israeli citizens, they were subjected to the same harsh treatment as that meted out to the Palestinians of the West Bank. When the inhabitants of Umm Al-Fahm, a Muslim town close to Israel's border with the West Bank, demonstrated in solidarity with the Palestinian victims of Israeli brutality, the Israeli police acted once again in the most heavy-handed way: ten Israeli Arabs were killed and over 150 wounded in the first few days alone. This has sent shock waves throughout Israel's Arab population, and highlighted the ambivalent nature of their position within Israel. In the aim of avoiding such pro-Palestinian demonstrations inside Israel proper, the subject of territorial exchange between Israel and the Palestinian state was raised during the Camp David summit. According to the proposal, some of the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories would remain under Israeli sovereignty, in return for the transfer of Israeli Arab communities, including the town of Umm Al-Fahm, to Palestinian control. Objecting to the proposal, Israeli experts claimed that Israeli Arabs prefer Israel to the Palestinian Authority. Just before the Intifada, the well-known Israeli commentator Joseph Algazy published an article in Ha'aretz alleging that a survey conducted among 1,000 residents of Umm Al-Fahm, both male and female, from all of the town's clans and large families as well as all segments of the local political spectrum, showed that 83 per cent of respondents opposed the idea of transferring their town to Palestinian jurisdiction. Algazy concludes from this that 'the residents of Umm Al-Fahm have expressed not only their own views and feelings but also the views and feelings of Israel's Arab community in general.' However, his conclusion is refuted by the reaction of Israeli Arabs to the Intifada. In another article published in Le Monde Diplomatique shortly after the Intifada began, Algazy had to admit that two apparently contradictory but actually complementary phenomena have asserted themselves among the Arab citizens of Israel: on the one hand, a tendency towards Palestinisation as evidenced by their manifestation of solidarity with their fellow Palestinians in the occupied territories; and, on the other, a tendency towards Israelisation as evidenced by their demand for greater integration into Israeli society. For more than half a century, the Arabs of Israel have been docile citizens of a state that was imposed on them, that kept them under military rule for almost 20 years and that has deprived them of most of their land through a series of expropriation measures aimed, first and foremost, at preserving the Jewish character of the state of Israel. They have also been heavily discriminated against in the allocation of funds for the development of their own towns and villages, which lag behind in essential services such as health and education. It is by providing such services to the Arabs of Israel that the Islamic movement has been able to become a significant force in places such as Umm Al-Fahm and Nazareth. The recent upsurge of Palestinian nationalism among Israeli Arabs raises the question of which of the two allegiances has greater weight in the Arab Israeli community. In the past, though persecuted and ill-treated by the Jewish population of Israel, the Arabs of Israel were suspected by the rest of the Arab world of loyalty to the Zionist state and were boycotted along with the rest of Israel's citizens. But with the advent of the peace process, the status of Israel's Arab minority was bound to change. Neither side could afford to ignore them any longer or consider them a marginal group doomed to remain forever without a voice in the political discourse of the region. With 13 out of 120 seats in the Knesset, they have become a considerable force to be reckoned with. It is interesting here to trace the development of Palestinian self-affirmation as a political force. The movement originated among the Palestinian Diaspora, as represented by Fatah and the other resistance organisations constituting the PLO, which were all based in Arab countries outside Palestine. When the Madrid peace process was launched, the epicentre shifted to the occupied territories, to representatives chosen from among the notables of Gaza and the West Bank, while the PLO leadership was deliberately sidelined. It is only thanks to the Oslo accords that Arafat and Fatah were integrated into the peace process. The Palestinian Authority was created and Arafat was recognised by all concerned, including Israel, as the person empowered to negotiate in the name of the Palestinian people. There are good reasons to believe that the epicentre is now moving into Israel itself, where the most eloquent spokesman for the Palestinians is the Nazareth-based member of the Knesset, Azmi Bishara, who is using his parliamentary position to articulate Palestinian national aspirations, as well as to promote equal rights and cultural autonomy for the Arab population of Israel. A major source of inspiration for Bishara has been the civil rights movement waged by America's blacks in the '60s under the leadership of Martin Luther King. As he himself admits, 'membership in the Knesset as an Arab Palestinian contains many contradictions that are not exclusive to membership in the Knesset. Probably the Knesset sharpens these contradictions. Just being an Arab citizen of Israel is in itself a contradiction. If you want to avoid contradictions, you must leave the country; this is the only choice.' Bishara adds: 'In the Knesset, the contradictions become more intense because they are political. Any attempt to reconcile them is futile. Rather, you should sharpen and clarify them, not try to blur or hide them. Otherwise you foster a perverse political personality that acts as if it is half Arab and half Israeli; in other words, you become a marginal figure in both societies. I don't think these contradictions should be reconciled, but transformed into a momentum for development rather than into a destructive and perverting force.' By articulating the identity problems of the Palestinian Arab community in Israel, Bishara reveals that the Palestinian body politic is not limited to the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank under PA rule, or, more generally, to the Diaspora Palestinians, including the refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and elsewhere, but extends also to the Palestinians living inside Israel and holding almost 11 per cent of the Knesset's voting power. True, the Arab members of parliament are not united and belong to different parties, but potentially they represent a formidable voting block. The mini-Intifada of Umm Al-Fahm offers a taste of the possibilities inherent in this new rationale. Those Israelis who favour the creation of a Palestinian state, even if this entails a territorial exchange between that state and Israel so that Jewish settlements in the occupied territories would remain under Israeli sovereignty in return for the transfer of Israeli Arab communities to Palestinian control, are driven by the realisation that the cohesiveness, not to say the future survival, of the state of Israel entails the physical separation of Palestinians and Israelis. The alternative formula proposed by the PLO at an earlier stage, which is the establishment of a unified democratic secular state in Palestine, as a substitute for its partition into separate Jewish and Arab states, may prove, after all, to be less utopian than was believed at the time.

reply by ozzie hooper 4/7/2002 (18:37)

reply top THE SHEPHERD (ISRAEL)DECEITFULLY CRYING 'WOLF' WILL ONE DAY BE IGNORED BY HIS OWN FLOCK (WORLD JEWRY)!

reply by TheAZCowBoy 4/7/2002 (20:03)

reply top Re: The legitimacy of the atheist Zionists? Like the ligitimacy of the Nazi's the answer is controversial. One thing for sure, the Nazi's and the Zionists share many common traits, which in the end might help them to join forces and perhaps even unite into 'The almalgamated JewZies of America!' TAC,

reply by John Calvin 4/7/2002 (20:40)

reply top One of the interesting dimensions raised by the above articles is the curious confidence authors have when describing events in the last twenty years, in the context of a discussion about just discovering what actually went on in 1948! Also, the presumption they have that, of course, when we know what really went on in 1948, that will certainly make it possible to know everything for certain today! It really is a relief to read the actual, historical-academical works that are being discussed here, rather than comments, attacks, defenses and debates about the implications of the conclusions of those works. Generally they show that, back then, all the parties to the conflict showed all the usual signs fairly associated with groveling , inept and puny man- a record of failure and defeat more than success and victory shared equally by all! I think it is reasonable to conclude that, generally speaking, the same is true today! A preponderance of the 'discussion' in this, and many other similiar, forums, seems highly pornographic-a kind of a blind and artificially stimulated passion of hatred and revenge.'.Seems almost like sports sometimes, so little regard is given the the human souls who are being killed. Heaven knows there is always 'a good excuse'!