It's not a 'cycle of violence'; it's existential war by Michael Balch, a Univeristy of Iowa associate professor of economics, emeritus. Iowa City Press-Citizen, Sunday, April 29, 2007 In his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" and in his recent appearance at Carver-Hawkeye Arena, President Jimmy Carter has put forward a model of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that fails to explain accurately the observed facts. While this model certainly supports his own policy prescription, it is profoundly unsupported by the historical events he glosses over in a poorly documented diatribe against Israel. The consequence is a prescription that only can perpetuate the lamentable misery of the Palestinian people. The false analogy Carter conceives of the struggle as a "cycle of violence" with a causative bias. According to him, relatively "small" provocations by militant Palestinians are met with "excessive" military responses from Israel, thus priming the next round. While effectively ignoring the historical and still vital roots of this conflict, Carter declares there are but two obstacles to permanent peace: the desire of some Israelis to colonize Palestinian land and subjugate the people, and the rise of Palestinian suicide bombers in response to this. Take down the first obstacle, the logic goes, and the second also will resolve, breaking the cycle. So Carter's "Geneva" solution is for Israel to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders. He is "convinced" this would end the conflict because the terrorist leaders Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and Marwan Barghouti of Fatah have told him they would be satisfied by this. The far deeper truth It is just here that Carter's "cycle of violence" model masks the far deeper truth: Israel has been fighting an existential war brought by its Arab neighbors that long pre-dates its possession of the territories it won in the defensive war of 1967. Yasser Arafat formed the PLO in 1964 with a charter calling for the destruction of Israel, and though later declaring this inoperative for Western ears, his subsequent actions spoke differently. Carter's astonishing inability even now to recognize Arafat's objectives and legacy does not inspire confidence in his ability to assess the strategic intentions of today's Palestinian leaders. Carter does not see that the Oslo "peace process" was a strategic deception, played by Arafat to lull Israel with the hope of peace while pressing forward with the "armed struggle" and his "phased plan" to win all of Palestine, including Israel. This became unavoidably clear to Israelis from the Fatah terrorism of the late 1990s, from Arafat's utter rejection of Ehud Barak's negotiable July 2000 Camp David offer of 95 percent of the West Bank, from Arafat's re-ignition of the Intifada two months later, and from his series of devastating terror attacks within Israel in 2002 culminating with the Passover Massacre in Netanya. Arafat's war continues unabated today despite Israel's total withdrawal from Gaza in August 2005. Declaring perpetual war against Israel, Hamas conducts cross border raids and daily rocket attacks. Carter's blindness Carter does not see any of this as evidence of a strategic intent to wage existential war against Israel while mouthing peace. Nor does this stop him from imputing nefarious strategic intent to Israel's Security Fence, which he sees not as the very effective barrier it has been for reducing deadly terrorist attacks on Israelis, but as an instrument for taking Palestinian lands and imposing a variety of hardships. Nowhere does he address the question of Palestinian responsibility for the barrier's existence. It also is telling, and again astonishing, that Carter extols the Hamas government for honoring the Roadmap for Peace plan while excoriating Israel for honoring it in the breach. But then the Roadmap is the one major document he does not reprint in his book, perhaps because its most significant concept is that no peace negotiations can be fruitful until the Palestinians have first ended their terrorist war against Israel. Carter's laudable desire to provide dignity and self-determination for the Palestinians has led him to make assertions about how this might happen that are not supported by the long history of this conflict. Carter's maximalist Geneva plan is seen by Israel as "land for more war," and offers the Palestinians nothing but the perpetuation of a false hope for victory through deception and armed struggle. Sadly, despite his call on the United States to become an "honest broker," Carter has himself signed on as a blatant partisan.

Yes, an 'existential war'--the other way around by J. Weeks for People for Justice in Palestine, May 2007 Professor Michael Balch, in his Iowa City Press Citizen op ed., "It's not a 'cycle of violence'; it's existential war" (29 Apr. 2007) faults ex-President Carter for "putting forward a model of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that fails to explain accurately the observed facts." Carter's model supports his policy prescriptions, to be sure; but it is "profoundly unsupported by...historical events." In Mr. Balch's reading of history, Israel has been fighting an "existential war" since before 1967. The Oslo peace process (1993-2001) was a deceptive ploy used by Yasser Arafat to lull Israel into a false hope of peace while he plotted her phased destruction. In July 2000, Arafat rejected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's "generous offer" of over 90% of the West Bank; he then launched the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000 to bring Israel to its knees by terrorism. Events have shown conclusively that Arafat was never a true partner for peace. Today's Palestinian government, led by Hamas, is no different. Peace can only come when the Palestinians give up their illusions of destroying Israel. But Carter's support of the "maximalist vision" of the Geneva Accords (an unofficial Israeli-Palestinian initiative for a two state solution signed in 2003) can only encourage their rejectionist stance. Though Carter claims to support peace and reconciliation between the two peoples, his "diatribe" against Israel shows him to be a "blatant partisan." In fact, it is Mr. Balch, not President Carter, who shows a weak grasp of the relevant historical facts. It is Mr. Balch, far more than President Carter, who exhibits blatant partisanship. And it is the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who are facing the true existential war, carried out in phases, with strategic deception and false promises of peace along the way. Mr. Balch repeats what have become the standard, self-justifying myths used by the Israeli government in its vain and brutal attempts to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem by force. His analysis simply does not stand up to rational examination and provides no realistic path to peace. The errors in this op ed are legion and range from the relatively trivial to the devastatingly serious. Yasser Arafat did not found the PLO in 1964 with a mission of destroying Israel. The PLO was founded by the Arab League, led by Egypt. Arafat initially opposed it.1 The 1967 Six Day War was not in any unambiguous sense a "defensive war." The best that can be said of it was that it was a pre-emptive strike, carried out in defiance of US attempts to defuse the conflict between Israel and Nasser's Egypt. Yitzhak Rabin, in a 29 Feb. 1968 interview with LE MONDE, put it thus: "I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions that he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it."2 The Geneva Accord, supported by President Carter, does not call for a return to the 1967 borders. It allows Israel to keep some of its settlements on the West Bank. It is in many ways similar to the ideas discussed at the Camp David Summit (July 2000), which Mr. Balch blames Arafat for rejecting, together with the later Clinton "bridge proposals" of 23 Dec. 2000.3 Did Arafat, as Barak later claimed, show his "true face" by rejecting the "generous offer" at Camp David in July 2000 and unleashing the uprising in Sept 2000? The historical record does not support this claim. Robert Malley, who was closely involved in the Camp David negotiations as part of the American diplomatic team, later wrote: "(W)e often hear about Ehud Barak's unprecedented offer and Yasser Arafat's uncompromising no...The failure to reach a final agreement is attributed, without notable dissent, to Yasser Arafat. As orthodoxies go, this is a dangerous one..."4 In Malley's view, all three sides, Palestinians, Israelis and Americans, made mistakes at Camp David and were in many ways the captive of their domestic political constituencies. Blaming Arafat alone for the summit's failure is, in his view, "shallow." Malley faults Barak for a diplomatic approach which was extremely confusing and not calculated to placate Palestinian mistrust. He sent up several trial balloons but left it unclear what he was really proposing: "The final and largely unnoticed consequence of Barak's approach is that, strictly speaking, there never was an Israeli offer. Determined to preserve Israel's position in the event of failure, and resolved not to let the Palestinians take advantage of one-sided compromises, the Israelis always stopped one, if not several, steps short of a proposal. The ideas stated at Camp David were never stated in writing but were orally conveyed...Nor were the proposals detailed." (Ibid.) The ideas presented at Camp David did not clearly offer the Palestinians an independent sovereign state. Professor Menahem Klein of Bar Ilan University, an advisor to Barak's delegation at Camp David, put it thus: "Israel presented a map to Yasir Abd Rabbo (Palestinian negotiator) and then presented this orally in Stockholm (secret meetings that preceded Camp David) and at Camp David. It was leaked to YEDIOT AHARANOT (Israeli newspaper). It shows Israel controlling a Greater Jerusalem that goes to the Dead Sea and connects with the Jordan Valley, where Israel would have sovereignty over a strip of land west of the River, and thereby keep control over the external borders of the Palestinian state. The map also shows another strip of land in the Jordan Valley that would fall under Palestinian sovereignty but would be leased by Israel for a long period. According to this map, Israel would annex blocs of settlements deep into the West Bank as far as Shilo. Jerusalem would also be connected by annexation of land adjoining the Etzion bloc in the southern West Bank. And Ariel and the bloc of settlements in the North would also be annexed."5 It is hardly surprising that Arafat rejected this bantustan concept, especially since President Clinton told him that he would not be blamed for the summit's failure and that peace talks could continue. Clinton broke his promise and did blame him; a point on which Malley strongly faults his former boss. The idea that Arafat turned to terrorism after Camp David, in pursuit of a plan to destroy Israel, was widely circulated in later years, by Israeli officials and Israel's friends in the US. But it does not make a lot of sense. How exactly would Yasser Arafat, with his small bands of guerrilla fighters, work the destruction of a country defended by one of the strongest military establishments in the world? No one can come up with a plausible hypothesis. Through terrorism he would force Israel to compromise on the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees, and the resulting tide would overwelm Israel demographically. As far fetched as this theory seems, it is the best that anyone can come up with. Never mind that a 2003 poll by the the respected Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research showed that refugees had little interest in returning to Israel. Only 10% would return to Israel, 54% would go back to an independent Palestinian state.6 Again, if, as Mr. Balch and others have argued, Arafat intended to use the Oslo peace process to accomplish the phased destruction of Israel, one wonders why he would have rejected the ideas at Camp David. Why wouldn't he have started the Intifada after, rather than before, Israel's grant of territory? If Arafat actually believed he could destroy Israel by starting riots and a terrorist campaign, he would have been nothing short of a lunatic. He would not have been a very crafty schemer after all, especially after 9/11 made the US, whom he needed as a peace broker with Israel, hypervigilant about terrorism and determined to wipe it out all over the world. Did Arafat instigate the riots which greeted Ariel Sharon's infamous visit to the Haram as-Sharif/Temple Mount area on 28-29 Sept. 2000? There is little evidence that he did, and much evidence that the Intifada was a spontaneous popular movement. Professor Klein believes that it was directed as much against Arafat's leadership as it was against the Israeli occupation. (see article cited above). Joseph Alpher, advisor to Barak, similarly argues that the Intifada "was provoked by the failures of the seven-year interim period rather than by the Camp David impasse."7 Professor Daniel Dor of Tel Aviv University, in his critical examination of Israeli media coverage of the outbreak of the Intifada, notes that there was no consensus in the Israeli intelligence community on Arafat's role in the events: Military Intelligence said he did instigate the riots, but Shin Bet disagreed.8 Arafat's behavior would have been hard to explain had he possessed the nefarious intentions attributed to him. When the riots broke out, he hurriedly called his security aide, Jibril Rajoub, to work out a joint security arrangement with the IDF and the CIA; the kind of security cooperation that had been a feature of the Oslo years.9 Rajoub, the head of Palestinian Preventive Security in the West Bank, was widely liked by Israeli security officials, and considered the most "cooperative" of all the men in the Palestinian security apparatus. They said publicly he had no involvement in terrorism but was working against it, even at the risk of being dubbed a collaborator.10 The Mitchell Commission, sent by the American government to investigate the outbreak of violence and formulate proposals to re-start peace talks, also found no evidence of a deliberate Palestinian conspiracy behind the riots of September 2000: "We have no basis to conclude that there was a deliberate plan by the Palestinian Authority to initiate a campaign of violence at the first opportunity."11 (The Mitchell report emphasized the role of the Israeli security forces in fanning the flames of conflict by firing on unarmed demonstrators in the early days of the Intifada.) As far as the orthodox pro-Israel view is concerned, there is also an inconvenient issue of consistency. Barak later claimed that Arafat tore up the peace process at Camp David in July 2000 and at Taba the following January, despite the Clinton "bridge proposals introduced on 23 Dec. He launched the Intifada in Sept. 2000 and intensified it thereafter in order to bring Israel to its knees. And yet at Taba itself, Mr. Barak authorized his delegation to say, along with their Palestinian counterparts: "(T)he two sides declare that they have never been closer to reaching an agreement and it is thus our shared belief that the remaining gaps could be bridged with the resumption of negotiations following the Israeli elections."12 If Arafat tore up the peace process and began a war aimed at finishing off Israel, then it could not have been true that at Taba in January 2001 the two sides were "never closer to an agreement." Barak's various statements about Camp David do not add up to any consistent story, but are exercises in pure political opportunism mixed with transparent racism. He says, for example, that Arabs are natural born liars, whose culture allows deception. Lie detector tests do not work on them. He also says he hopes for the dying off of the generation that remembers 1948 (having apparently forgotten about the people who still commemorate events of CE 70). There are still some "salmons" around who still want to die in their old homeland, he says.13 No one could say anything similar about Jews and be forgiven for it (and rightly so). In the same interview, Barak says: "Look, during my premiership we established no new settlements and, in fact, dismantled many illegal, unauthorized ones. Immediately after I took office I promised Arafat: No new settlements. The courts would force us to honor the previous government's commitments, and contracts in the pipeline, concerning the expansion of existing settlements (all illegal according to Fourth Geneva Convention, aricle 49; as well as the Hague Conventions and customary international law--JW). The courts would force us to honor existing contracts." Yet interviewer Benny Morris in the same document writes: "(Barak) agrees that he allowed the expansion of existing settlements in part to mollify the Israeli right, which he needed quiescent as he pushed forward toward peace and, ultimately, a withdrawal from the territories." But I thought the courts were tying his hands! If his hands were tied, he need not confess to political pandering to please the settler lobby. One or the other statement must be a lie; both can be lies, but both cannot be true. The fact was that Barak turned over the key Housing Ministry to pro-colonization activists from the National Religious Party. As respected Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar wrote in HA'ARETZ, 26 OCT. 2000: "According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, Sharon (then opposition leader) does not need to join the government. Barak is doing his work better than Sharon did, and even better than Benyamin Netanyahu. In the second quarter of this year there was a 51% rise in new building in the (occupied) territories...All in all, in the first half of 2000, Barak's government has outdone the Netanyahu administration during the same term last year by 44%."14 This was in keeping with the pattern of duplicity seen during the Oslo period (1993-2001), when Israel busily expanded settlements and linked them to a Israel proper by a system of bypass roads. During that period, when Israel claimed to be willing to trade land for peace, the West Bank settler population actually doubled. 15 But neither Barak nor any other major Israeli politician can admit that such policies might be reasonably expected to make Palestinians mistrust the Israelis, especially when they are talking vaguely about "generous offers" of unspecific amounts of land under unspecific conditions. Like President Bush Jr., a man he says he admires and who he expects will be treated much better in the history books than he is in the press today, Barak sees himself as basically infallible. But he does share responsibility for the catastrophe that unfolded. Palestinians know all about Israeli politicians who like to play games with words: like the one we have just illustrated from Barak. They know that the Israelis got the word "the" left out of the land-for-peace UN Resolution 242: Israel would have to give back "territories" captured in 1967, but not "the" territories. Thus it would get to keep some of the land, even though the resolution preamble emphasizes "the inadmissability of the acquisition of territory by war."16 Similarly, the Israelis objected to the phrase "the attributes of sovereignty" in the text of the Road Map (2003) in its description of the so-called Palestinian state. They wanted to omit the words "independent," and "maximum territorial contiguity" and add "certain of" before "the attributes of sovereignty" 17 When Israeli officials are accused of trying to force the Palestinians into a "bantustan," they shriek with fury. But a bantustan was just that: a non-sovereign state, a fake country set up to solve somebody's "demographic problem."18 The Israelis use word games to cover settlement expansion. They'll say, no new settlements--except for 'natural growth'. Or they'll say, "this is not a new settlement. This is a strengthening of an existing one." They take down "illegal outposts" and then they appear again. And then it is revealed that some are built just to be taken down. And then it is revealed that "unauthorized' outposts nevertheless get funding from the government. And so on and so forth. It's a game and we can only pity anyone who takes the various Israeli excuses at face value.19 The truth is that the Palestinians had every reason to mistrust the Israelis. Anyone who puts themselves in their shoes even for a moment can understand this. Deals from the Israelis have the feel of the "treaties" the American government offered the Native Americans. But Israeli and American leaders cannot easily grasp this. The mental world they inhabit often takes on the features of a self-absorbed ethnocentric bubble, where the only people who count are the ones said to "share our values." The Washington-Tel Aviv echo chamber cannot really conceive of the humanity of the Palestinians, despite the frequent repetition of ritual formulas of sympathy for their plight. And the US, on whom the Palestinians must rely on a peace broker, is it a stretch to say that it rather tilts the other way, towards extreme favoritism of Israel? If you were a Palestinian, would you readily trust the AIPAC-WASHINGTON INSTITUTE FOR NEAR EAST POLICY team that Clinton put in charge of the Middle East: the Dennis Rosses and the Martin Indyks? The truth is that Arafat did not halt the peace process. Israel did. After Sharon's election, in Feb. 2001, everyone in the Israeli and American political establishment adopted the mantra that Israel had no "partner for peace." The Sharon government successfully lobbied the Bush Jr. Administration to "bypass" Arafat and promote "government reform" in the Palestine Authority instead. This position was adopted in the President's speech of 24 June 2002, which called for a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but at the same time sawed off the diplomatic branch needed to get there: negotiations between Israel and the one Palestinian leader with both international and (albeit rapidly evaporating) street credibility. Yasser Arafat. Arafat reacted predictably, as any leader would. He engaged in power struggles with the people brought in to sideline him. And in completely hypocritical fashion, US and Israeli leaders called him the spoiler of the peace process. In truth, since Israel was determined to work its own will and never seriously negotiate with the Palestinians, there was nothing to spoil. The whole thesis propounded by Mr. Balch, that Arafat was committed to Israel's destruction through a mix of sham diplomacy and terrorism, has a name in Hebrew. It is called the "konseptzia"; a term first applied to the flawed intellligence used in the run-up to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israeli officials confidently predicted that Egypt would never attack. The shock of the 1973 war caused a major scandal in Israel. But the "konseptzia" about Arafat caused a similar scandal in the summer of 2004, though at a much lower volume. At the time the Intifada began, Amos Malka was Israel's director of Military Intelligence; Amos Gilad, his subordinate, ran the research division. In an interview published on 11 June 2004, Malka told journalist Akiva Eldar of HA'ARETZ that the claim that Arafat was no true partner for peace but was aiming at Israel's destruction, the "konseptzia," was based on doctored intelligence. Gilad, he said, was the chief architect of this propaganda feat: "This theory--which has earned the well-known epithet 'Konseptzia'...in the intelligence community--is believed by most Israelis today...'Arafat is aiming to have Oslo lead to the fulfilment of his strategy that Israel has no right to exist, ' said (Amos Gilad) the man who headed the research division when the Oslo agreement was gasping for breath and dying. 'Arafat is a terrible danger. Nothing will shake him as long as he lives'...Thanks to the position in which he served and his powers of persuasion, Gilad's 'konseptzia' penetrated every home in Israel. But behind the doors of a few homes, different and even opposite assessments have been whispered throughout. Amos Malka, who was head of MI from mid 1998 to the end of 2001 and was Gilad's direct superior, is one of them and his assessment is the opposite of Gilad's. He is joined in this by Maj. Gen (res) Ami Ayalon, who headed up the Shin Bet security service...and by Ephraim Lavie, the research division official responsible for the Palestinian arena...(Malka says) 'I did everything I could. I went several times to the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee and submitted reports to the Chief of Staff. Nowhere did I say that I accepted the conspiracy theory that Oslo was a plot to destroy Israel. To my regret (current defence minister and then Chief of Staff Shaul) Mofaz and Bogey (Moshe Ya'alon, now Chief of Staff) as his deputy ignored what I said. What Gilad said suited them better, and therefore they adopted it...'I say, with full responsibility, that during my entire period as head of Military Intelligence, there was not a single research document that expressed the assessment that Gilad claims to have presented to the prime minister.'...on the eve of the 2001 elections, Gilad began retroactively rewriting the Military Intelligence assessments."20 Malka believed that Arafat was indeed willing to negotiate on the basis of Taba, et. al. The Israeli government was not. When we consider all the above evidence, it becomes impossible to accept the "konseptzia," the demonized view of Arafat, which Mr. Balch uncritically endorses. Similar deceit is found in the theory that Arafat was the evil Svengali directing all the suicide bombings. Journalist B. Michael of YEDIOT AHARONOT newspaper checked the IDF website which posted the supposed "proof." "The entire website (of the IDF) looks as if the IDF spokesman was quite sure that no one would actually bother to look at the documents themselves, and people would be perfectly happy with the learned commentaries that he had prepared for them, supposedly on the basis of the seized documents...Was the Tanzim's terror activity financed by the (Palestinian) Authority? According to the commentary, yes. According to the documents, no. All the 'financing documents' are in fact a collection of bitter complaints about the Authority's tight fist, and the fact that it does not provide the Tanzim with resources, coupled with envious comments about the affluent Hamas and Jihad members...and veiled threats that if this financial drought continues, the members will defect to Jihad and Hamas. Did Arafat approve of money transfers to people involved in suicide attacks? Those who check only the pre-digested texts, are led to believe this was indeed the case. But whoever reads the texts themselves will not find a trace of evidence. All the documents in which Arafat approves miserly payments to Fatah and Tanzim men (a fact which in itself is about as shocking as the discovery that the head of a party approves payments to his party members) precede, by many months sometimes, the first suicide attack by the Tanzim."21 Clearly, Arafat was not an innocent. He had a history of involvement in terrorism against civilians. But the propagandist view of him as some kind of terrorist mastermind during the al-Aqsa Intifada is too much to be believed. Especially after 9/11, he had good reason to eschew terrorism. But he was soon placed under effective house arrest. The overwelming preponderance of the evidence suggests that he lost control of the situation. Authority fragmented, with Fatah factions competing mercilessly with each other and with the Islamic groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The alternative explanation is that Sharon, not Arafat, kept the flames of violence alive. He had always been an opponent of Oslo, a militarist, and a major patron of the settlement project. He could use the growing lawlessness and terrorism in the Palestinian territories to convince the Americans to shun Arafat and kill off Oslo once and for all. He would substitute for an Israeli-Palestinian peace process a policy of Israeli unilateralism, sanctioned by the Americans. The "Konseptzia" was a vital piece of that strategy. It is otherwise hard to explain why, nearly every time the Palestinians came close to an internal agreement to stop violence against Israelis, a "targeted killing" would set things off again. In a lopsided struggle in which they could not hope to match the IDF and in which many Palestinian civilians were themselves killed, the militants would take revenge against the most available target: innocent Israeli civilians. "The evidence strongly suggests that the main, anticipated and intended effect of political liquidations has been to stimulate terrorist attacks. 'Whoever gave a green light to this act of liquidation knew full well that he is thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman's agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, ' Israeli journalist Alex Fishman wrote in Yedioth Aharanot after the Nov. 2001 assassination of a Hamas leader. 'Under that agreement, Hamas was to avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line.' 'After the destruction of the houses in Rafah and Jerusalem, the Palestinians continued to act with restraint', Shulamit Aloni of Israel's Meretz Party wrote in January 2002. 'Sharon and his army minister, apparently fearing that they would have to return to the negotiating table, decided to do something and they liquidated Raed Karmi (a local militia leader). They knew that there would be a response, and that we would pay a price in the blood of citizens.' In July 2002 militant Palestinian organizations, including Hamas, reached a preliminary accord to suspend all attacks inside Israel, perhaps paving the way for a return to the negotiating table. Just ninety minutes before it was to be announced, however, Israeli leaders--fully apprised of the impending declaration--ordered an F-16 to drop a one-ton bomb on a densely populated civilian neighborhood in Gaza, killing, alongside a Hamas leader, fourteen Palestinian civilians, nine of them children, and injuring 140...Predictably, the declaration was scrapped and Palestinian attacks resumed with a vengeance. 'What is the wisdom here/', a Meretz party leader wondered. 'At the very moment that it appeared that we are on the very brink of a chance for reaching something of a ceasefire, or diplomatic activity, we always go back to this experience--just when there is a period of calm, we liquidate."22 Israel's "targeted killings," often defended here, sometimes even raise eyebrows in Washington. "Israel's attack on a Hamas leader could make it harder for the new Palestinian leadership to combat terrorism, President George W. Bush said yesterday. Bush said he was 'troubled' by the Israeli helicopter attack on Abdel Aziz Rantisi in Gaza. Such incidents don't promote Israel's security, he said, and may 'make it more difficult for the Palestinian leadership to fight off terrorist attacks."23 Israel went on to kill both Rantisi and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. The US did nothing. We must conclude either that Sharon and his entourage were foolish and incompetent for trying to thwart terrorism by assassinations, or that they were cynical and irresponsible. Clear and convincing evidence favors the latter answer. Israel would politically neutralize its one viable "partner for peace" by blaming him for the prevailing chaos and violence in the territories and thus estranging him from the Americans. Israel would cultivate an internal power struggle among the Palestinians by getting America to adopt the "dump Arafat" motto. Israel would set impossible preconditions for a resumption of the peace process. The demand to "dismantle all terrorist organizations' was a requirement for the weakened PA to do what the powerful IDF had not been able to do in years of fighting. It was also an invitation to internal Palestinian civil war. But Israel made it clear: a ceasefire agreed between militant factions was not enough; the whole " terrorist infrastructure" had to be rooted out. In Nov 2004, Yasser Arafat died. His successor as Palestinian President, Mahmud Abbas, was acclaimed by both America and Israel as a "partner for peace." A "new era" had supposedly begun, now that the man said to be the main obstacle to peace had passed from the scene. The year 2005 began promisingly. A summit between Sharon and Abbas was hosted by Hosni Mubarak at Sharm al-Sheikh and the two agreed to an informal period of calm, 8 Feb, 2005. Palestinian factions meeting at Cairo in March agreed to maintain a truce until the end of the year. Violence did go down. But the Islamic Jihad faction never joined the truce, and Israel continued what it said were "arrest operations" in the Occupied Territories.24 Nevertheless, Sharon never really re-opened the peace process with Abbas. Instead all attention turned to his plan to disengage unilaterally from Gaza; a step that was carried out in August 2005. Was this a new Sharon? Was this a case of Nixon going to China, as the Western media exultantly reported? It was not. The evidence is that the disengagement was a tactical move only, not a step towards a real two-state solution. The media forgot that Sharon, the architect of the settlement project, had advocated such tactical retreats in the past. It was he who convinced Menahem Begin to abandon the settlements in Sinai as part of the Egypt-Israeli peace process in 1977-8. He did this at the same time that he worked zealously to promote settlement elsewhere: "The Sharon plan for the creation of new Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank...envisioned the creation of a new population corridor cutting across the West Bank, consisting of urban areas and their satellite communities. The successful implementation of this plan would preclude any possibility of withdrawal because it would be impossible to extricate the Jewish communities from the indigenous Arab population regardless of how ingeniously a border could be drawn. In addition, Jerusalem was to be surrounded by a circle of suburban centers and towns, insulating it from the 'threats' of the local population..."25 . In other words, as a government minister in the late 1970's and early 1980's, Sharon promoted a pattern of settlement intended to make a two-state territorial compromise impossible. As Prime Minister twenty years later, he convinced George Bush Jr. that it would be "unrealistic" to ask Israel to give up all the new "population centers" on the West Bank. In an exchange of diplomatic letters in Washington in April 2004, Sharon got Bush's official blessing for Israel to annex part of the West Bank: despite the lack of an agreement with the Palestinians. The Israeli-Palestinian negotiating process was superseded by an Israeli-US process. The President also made feeble attempts to to get Sharon to limit his ambitions. He declared on a European tour that a Palestinian "state in scattered territories will not work." But he never worked out the contradictions in his policy. And after Sharon announced the disengagement from Gaza, America gave him a carte blanche and no longer complained about the failure to meet obligations under the so-called Road Map.26 The real goal of the Gaza disengagement was revealed by Dov Weisglass, Sharon's former chief of staff, in a newspaper interview in October 2004. Israel would give up Gaza in order to consolidate the settlement project in the West Bank. The chaos in the Palestinian territories would continue, because Abbas was very weak. Israel would claim to have done its part and the Palestinian state would be delayed indefinitely. "The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that's necessary so that there will not be a political process with the Palestinians...The disengagement plan makes it possible for Israel to park conveniently in an interim situation that distances us as far as possible from political pressure...For the first time they (the Palestinians) have a slice of land on which they can race from one end to the other in their Ferrari. And the whole world is watching them-them not us. The whole world is asking what they intend to do with this slice of land...The withdrawal from Samaria is a token one. We agreed to it only so it wouldn't be said that we concluded our obligation in Gaza...On the other hand, in regard to the large settlement blocs, we have in our hands a first-ever American statement that they will be part of Israel...(T)here will be no timetable to implement the settlers' nightmare. Because what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did. The significance is the freezing of the peace process. And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress..."27 The US government protested feebly about this statement, but did nothing. And events in the last two years have played out exactly as if Weisglass's words epitomized official policy. Throughout 2005, even though it called him a 'partner for peace', the Sharon government did nothing to reopen substantive talks with Abbas or strengthen him, a moderate, against his Palestinian rivals. Israel had long been playing a double game on the security situation. It demanded that the Palestinian Authority security forces crack down on the militant factions. But at the same time it exuberantly attacked those same security forces. As Israeli commentator Aluf Benn noted in the Spring of 2004: "Palestinian security forces were left in ruins by more than four years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting and many gangs and armed groups have often taken the law into their own hands."28 In 2005, Israel claimed that Abbas was not doing enough to fight terrorism, even though the steps he had taken led to increased internecine violence on the Palestinian street. He was "not doing enough." But at the same time Israel deprived him of the tools to do the job.29 . THE ECONOMIST reported in early 2005 that the Palestinian Authority security forces were "woefully underpowered, with no weapons larger than a Kalashnikov and no transport tougher than small armored cars." ˆIt credited the view of a Palestinian official that 'the PA can no longer stop the Islamist current by military means. These organizations used to be weak but now they are among the mainstream on the Palestinian street.' "30 But the Israeli government, instead of building up Abbas's government, undermined it. The disengagement was unilateral, not worked out with the Palestinians. And Israel even rejected a proposal by the Americans to build up Abbas's police forces. "Israel has rejected a proposal by the United States to supply the Palestinian police officers in the West Bank with weapons to assist them in performing their duties. American officials have told their Israeli interlocutors over the past few days that the Palestinian security forces need weapons to help them maintain order in the territories. In response, the US officials heard a negative reply from Israeli officials: 'First let them take the weapons from the terrorists'."31 How are we to explain this? Did the Americans, represented by "diplomats" like Eliot Abrams, suddenly want Israel to run big security risks? Or did Israel prefer to keep Abbas weak and therefore set the bar impossibly high? He would not be able to roll up the "terrorist infrastructure," but in making the attempt he would bring the territories close to civil war. Either way, Israel would get what it wanted; the right to claim that it had no "partner for peace', even after the demon Arafat was dead. Modern historians working with newly declassified documents have discovered that Israel often behaves this way. It claims it has no 'partner for peace," but it works hard to cultivate the "partnerlessness" condition. Oxford historian Avi Shlaim, an Iraqi-born Jew and former Israeli, has discovered several times in the past when Israel scuppered promising peace initiatives by Arab states. For example, it could have made peace with a pro-American regime in Syria in 1949, whose leader even offered to resettle 300,000 Palestinian refugees. Ben Gurion rejected the deal.32 Similar deals might have been possible with Nasser and with Sadat, who in 1971 offered Israel essentially the same land-for-peace deal it got at Camp David in 1978. Sadat turned to war when he was turned down. 33 Israel sought war in the early 1950's in order to expand its territory. The diary of Moshe Sharett, former foreign minister, published in Israel in the late 1970's, showed its aggressive intentions conclusively: " '...(T)he army considers the present border with Jordan as absolutely unacceptable...the army is planning war in order to occupy the rest of Western Eretz Israel. (26 October 1953, 81) " Again, "We do not need (Moshe Dayan said) a security pact with the US: such a pact will only constitute an obstacle for us. We face no danger at all of an Arab advantage of force for the next 8-10 years. Even if they receive massive military aid from the West, we shall maintain our military superiority thanks to our infinitely greater capacity to assimilate new armaments. The security pact will only handcuff us and deny us the freedom of action we need in the coming years. Reprisal actions which we couldn't carry out if they were tied to a security pact are our vital lymph...they make it possible for us to maintain a high degree of tension among our population and in the army. Without these actions we will have ceased to be a combative people and without the discipline of a combative people we are lost." A troubled Sharett commented about the implications of Dayan's ideas, shared by Ben-Gurion: "This state has not international obligations, no economic problems, the question of peace is non-existent...It must calculate its steps narrow-mindedly and live on its sword. It must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and maintain its moral tension. Towards this end it may, no-it must-invent dangers, and to do so it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge...Above all, let us hope for a new war with the Arab countries, so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space. (Such a slip of the tongue: Ben-Gurion himself said that it would be worth while to pay an Arab a million pounds to start a war.} 26 May 1955, 1021"34 Israel's usual tactic is to stall peace talks by setting unrealistic preconditions and meanwhile to grab more territory on the sly. The Lausanne Conference, the Anderson Plan, the Jarring Plan, the Rogers Plan, the Camp David autonomy talks, the Reagan Plan, the Schultz Plan, the Madrid Conference, the Mitchell Report, the Tenet Understandings, the Road Map for Peace etc.: one could circle the world many times over with the paper from documents representing the peace plans Israel has either rejected outright, postponed or talked to death in the last six decades. In their defence, Israeli leaders always speak about the hostile rhetoric emanating from corners of the Arab world. Never mind all that Israel has done to encourage this hostility and never mind the inability of any Arab state or combination of states to carry out rejectionist threats. Sometimes an Israeli leader will spill the beans. In an interview with MA'ARIV newspaper following his June 1992 election defeat, outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was asked what he would have done had he won the election: "I would have carried out autonomy talks for ten years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria."35 Shlaim's book and many other studies make the issue crystal clear. Stonewalling is Israel's usual game. Today, it has returned to its historic way of doing business. It complains that it lacks a 'partner for peace', while covering up everything it has done to bring this about. It is also very useful to recall in detail the actual historical trajectory of the violence in the Occupied Territories over the last forty years. The historical record shows Israel as primarily responsible for the sharp deterioration of the situation. The truth is that the West Bank was not always such a violent place. The first twenty years of the Occupation saw little violence and a lot of free movement between the newly conquered territory and Israel. As one writer put it, " (After the Six Day War) great masses of Jews and Arabs (came) into close physical contact. The Old City of Jerusalem was visited by hundreds of thousands of Jews for prayers, sightseeing and shopping. Tours of the Biblical sites in the occupied territories, including SInai, became commonplace. Similarly, the Jewish seashore cities were flooded with Arab visitors from the West Bank and other Arab regions, who came there for pleasure, work, or simply out of curiosity. Tens of thousands of Arab working people streamed daily into the Jewish sector, becoming especially prominent in the building industry, agriculture and the hotel business..." 36 Similarly, at a 1977 conference to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the conquest of Jerusalem, Moshe Dayan declared: "We are living in peace. There is less violence in the occupied territories than in Tel Aviv (i.e. crime)"37 What drove the Occupied Territories to the breaking point? The Israeli settlement project, which greatly expanded after the victory of Menahem Begin in 1977, and the police state regime set up to support it. Some wise Israelis tried to warn the government away from this policy. One writer even had a premonition that Israel might drive the Arabs into self-destructive violence. In 1980 famed historian Jacob Talmon, a Zionist and political conservative, wrote a provocative open letter to Prime Minister Begin: "Today's settlers in the territories rely on our army tanks, helicopters and planes. They come to demonstrate our presence...'to show the Arabs who is the boss here...To put the Arabs in their place...Such settling, it seems to me, is tantamount to conducting a kind of war. It will be very difficult to prevent the situation from turning into a head-on collision between two peoples in a land that suffers from 'agrarian famine' (i.e. where there is a shortage of cultivable land). This process resembles the agrarian wars in Ireland, between colonizing English noblemen and Irish tenant farmers, or Prussia's policy concerning the Polish peasantry. It is the same wretched discrimination, extortion, robbery, fraud and repression, on the one hand--and agrarian rebellion and military repression on the other hand...Who is not ashamed when confronted with the wretched sight of Bedouins being driven out, having to move on again and again, from place to place...We must avoid pushing the Arabs into a position where they have suffered so much humiliation that they might as well use all their strength to 'die with the Philistines'(cf. Judges 16:30: where Samson pulls down a the pillars of a house on top of himself, to take his Philistine captors with him)...(W)e have worked hard to convince ourselves that there is no possibility of compromise; that the Arabs are implacably resolved to annihilate us--and that we must therefore act accordingly...I am afraid, Mr. Prime Minister, that this attitude is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy..."38 Talmon and others tried to warn the government against settlement expansion. But the Begin regime and its successors, intent on the "Greater Israel" concept, would not listen. Palestinians saw their land confiscated, their houses demolished, their families humilated by soldiers and settlers, who always enjoyed impunity. People who protested were detained, shot at, beaten, tortured, placed under town confinement, sometimes deported. Settlements multiplied, with the aim of making Israeli withdrawal politically impossible. Finally, in Dec 1987, the Occupied Territories erupted in revolt. This was the first Intifada.39 The first Intifada was not characterized by regular Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians in their own country. On the contrary, the typical actions were strikes, boycotts, street demonstrations, stone-throwing, etc., directed against the IDF occupation forces. The IDF answered with massive repression, including the use of deadly force against unarmed or non-lethally armed (stone throwing) demonstrators. When the outcry against the shooting of stone-throwing Palestinian children got to be too intense, Rabin, the Defence Minister, began to stress "force, might and beatings." "Break their bones," Rabin reportedly said. American TV news showed footage of IDF troops savagely beating handcuffed Palestinian prisoners, to "break their bones."40 There was not a lot of anti-Israel terrorism during the First Intifada, but a lot of IDF attacks on Palestinian civilians. The unequal outcome led to a false sense of security among Israelis. As Jewish-American scholar Don Peretz put it: "While the Intifada had its costs, they were relatively small for most Israelis--in terms of Jewish lives, far smaller than in any of Israel's five or six wars. After nearly two years of confrontation with the inhabitants of the territories, a score of Israelis had lost their lives, fewer than in any month of traffic accidents and fewer than a twentieth of the Arab lives lost. The fact that few had suffered led to acceptance of the situation..."41 The Israeli propaganda establishment tried to claim that Yasser Arafat, in exile in Tunis, was the evil Svengali directing the Intifada. The Israeli government even claimed that intelligence intercepts of PLO communications with the Occupied Territories proved this. But then something embarrassing happened: "Morris Abram, chairman of the Presidents' Conference (of Major Jewish Organizations) wrote an article in the NEW YORK TIMES making this charge (of intelligence intercepts etc.). Within a few weeks, however, Defence Minister (Yitzhak) Rabin acknowledged that the uprising had been spontaneous--led and organized from within the occupied territories, not from abroad."42 There is evidence also that Israel gave covert support to Hamas, in order to divide the Palestinians and weaken the PLO: "Fatah...suspected the Israelis of a plot first to let Hamas gather strength and then to unleash it against the PLO, turning the uprising into a civil war. Evidence of such intentions seemed to pile up every day. The army never interfered with Hamas strike stewards, who forced shopkeepers to close their businesses precisely during the hours when the Unified Command (of the Intifada) allowed them to be open. While blocking the PLO's sources of capital, the Civil Administration made no effort to stem the flow of funds from Jordan to Hamas and even permitted high level emissaries of the Muslim Brotherhood to come from Amman for consultations..."43 Today, much of this history has been forgotten, in the West and in Israel. But its relevance is clear. It was Israel's expansionist policy which caused the Occupied Territories to explode. And it was Israel's brutal response to the Intifada that set the stage for the dreadful epidemic of violence that befell the region after 28 September 2000. In the Middle East, the tactic of suicide bombings was introduced by Hezbollah, in its battle against Israel's domination of southern Lebanon through its self-declared "security zone." The Palestinians used it for the first time in April 1994, in retaliation for Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein's massacre of Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque (Tomb of the Patriarchs) in al-Khalil (Hebron) the preceding February. Arafat did crack down on the Islamist terrorist factions and was often given credit for doing so by both US and Israeli officials. On 18 November 1994, an attack ordered by Arafat against a Hamas gathering at the Palestine Mosque in Gaza City killed thirteen people and nearly sparked a civil war.44 If his conduct was ambiguous, this is not surprising. Arafat had to fear being branded as a collaborator with Israel on the one side and an enabler of terrorism on the other. His position was insecure in the extreme and his inability to deliver on the promise of Oslo, because of Israeli resistance and Islamist subversion, made it desperate. At the time the revolt broke out on 28-9 September 2000, there had not been a suicide bombing in a considerable time. Two years separated the last such attack before the revolt from the first one after.45 It should be noted also that the movement restrictions and the closure policy which Israel has imposed on the Occupied Territories and which have had such a devastating impact on the dependent Palestinian economy were not a response to terrorism. They preceded and did not follow the first suicide bombing. Closure was imposed as long ago as January 1991.46 The most important factor leading to the so-called 'militarization of the Intifada" was not a political calculation by the Palestinian leadership. It was the massive IDF firepower directed against demonstrators. As a respected Israeli journalist points out: "It turns out that during the first few days of the al-Aqsa Intifada, soldiers in the territories fired 1.3 million bullets. In the first three months of the Intifada, the number of Israeli casualties was low, at which time the IDF proudly cited the large number of Palestinian casualties as evidence of the miltary victory and the correctness of the policy of massive use of force."47 According to Human Rights Watch, within the first three weeks of the Intifada, over 120 Palestinians had been killed and 4800 wounded by the Israeli security forces. "Most of the deaths were the result of excessive, and often indiscriminate, use of lethal force by IDF soldiers, police and Border Police against unarmed civilian demonstrators, including children."48 The US-based NGO Physicians for Human Rights conducted an investigation on the scene in October 2000. It declared that the IDF had used "live ammunition and rubber bullets excessively and inappropriately to control demonstrators...PHR's analysis of fatal gunshot wounds in Gaza reveals that approximately 50% were to the head. This high proportion of head wounds suggests that, given broad rules of engagement, soldiers are specifically aiming at people's heads" (i.e. contrary to the claims of the IDF, that it shoots in the air first, then aims at the legs, etc., trying to avoid unnecessary deaths.)49 The truth is that both sides, not just one side practice "terrorism": attacks against civilians and non-combatants in order to score political points. Palestinian terrorism must be condemned unequivocally: Israel's abuses of human rights cannot justify it. But the idea that the IDF is innocent is a lie. Terrorism, in the form of low-scale guerrilla attacks, has been found in every colonial conflict in the post-war period. The Algerians massacred French settlers and planted bombs in cafes and market places. These were reprehensible acts. But the primary moral evil in this case was colonialism, not terrorism. In the same way, the primary moral evil in Virginia in 1831 was slavery, not the atrocities of Nat Turner. Terrorism is usually the weapon of those lacking a conventional military capability, especially when the path to peaceful political change was blocked. In Northern Ireland, the peaceful Civil Rights Movement of the 1960's was met with violence and repression and the IRA, which had been morabund, sprang to life again. Terrorism flourishes among communities of the powerless. Without a disenfranchised underclass to back them, terrorist movements tend to fizzle out (eg. Red Army faction in West Germany). Terrorism by groups of bandits is less easy to conceal than is terrorism by a conventional army. Soldiers can target civilians and claim that the resulting casualties are mere "collateral damage." Rules of engagement can be relaxed, with the knowledge that this will create more innocent casualties. Attacks on civilian areas can be rationalized as a way to put "pressure" on the population, so that they will repress the bad guys in their midst. But this is the very reasoning that Bin Laden used to justify the crimes of 9/11. Not surprisingly, observers all over the world have accused the US and Israel of hypocrisy in their "wars on terrorism." No less than three Israeli Prime Ministers are known to have had a background as terrorists: Menahem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon. Begin's group, the Irgun, attacked civilians at the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem; killing scores of them in cold blood on 9 April 1948; one of many outrages. Shamir's group, the Stern Gang, engaged in many attacks on Arabs and British personnel and assassinated the UN peace mediator Count Folke Bernadotte, a man who had rescued Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, on 17 Sept. 1948. According to his Israeli biographer, Ariel Sharon took special pleasure in killing Arab civilians and was contemptuous of people with moral scruples about the practice. His special commando Unit 101 massacred 69 civilians in the village of Qibya on the night of 14-15 October 1953. Sharon also presided over the massacre in the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps in Sept. 1982.50 These three men's terrorist past did not prevent the US from dealing with them. The ostracism directed against real and alleged Palestinian terrorists therefore represents selective moral vision, tunnel vision and a double standard. The US has dealt with Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein. It has dealt with many anti-Castro Cuban terrorists. The taboo against Palestinian leaders, from Arafat to Khaled Meshal, is both ineffective and hypocritical. Nor is Israeli terrorism just a dark chapter from the past. Research by Israeli and international human rights organizations, on the spot news reports, testimony by actual soldiers: a mountain of evidence forces the conclusion that the Israel Defence Forces and the Police do directly target Palestinian civilians. They use deadly force in circumstances in which in which it is not necessary to protect security forces or the general public. They shoot stone-throwing children; sometimes deliberately provoking them with obscene insults so that they present themselves and can be mowed down (observed by journalist Chris Hedges). They will spray an entire apartment building with gunfire in order to terrorize the inhabitants. Killing of civilians is sometimes openly defended for its "deterent value." Teenage boys have been killed merely because they were considered "of an age to be fighters." Despite a couple of token indictments, human rights organizations say that an atmosphere of impunity prevails for those who kill or grossly abuse the rights of innocents. Where the occupation army is concerned, the rule of law does not exist.51 The IDF will sometimes capture Palestinian civilians and force them to act as "human shields." They are forced to open suspicious packages or knock on the doors of "wanted suspects," and even though the Israeli Supreme Court supposedly banned the practice, it still goes on. An eleven-year old girl was forced to act as a 'human shield' during the IDF operation in Nablus in February 2007. If such incidents get into the newspapers, Israel will make a show of doing something about them. But the overwelming preponderance of the evidence suggests that nothing really changes in the long run.52 There is also evidence of a deliberate policy of grievous injury, such as blinding, to keep kill rates low enough for public relations purposes. Israel also kills indirectly, such as by detaining at checkpoints people in need of emergency medical care. To call that something other than murder is just wrong.53 When we consider all these violent excesses, plus the hunger and deprivation imposed by the closure policy; the humiliation people suffer at checkpoints; the house demoltions for "land clearance" or "security" (very few demolition cases have any link to terrorism; whole neighborhoods have been levelled as collective punishment54); the continued confiscation of land for settlements and the apartheid wall; mass administrative detention and severe restrictions on family visits, and all the other elements of the oppression of the Palestinian people; when we consider all this, it is not surprising that the Palestinians should conclude that their society is being destroyed. When people have to live like this year after year, they cannot be expected to attribute all the devastation of their lives to "collateral damage" in a necessary "war on terrorism." People who see their children harmed are not likely to credit the good intentions of the soldiers who harmed them and write it all off as an accident. They are going to fight back and are likely to embrace immoral means to do so. When they see their civilians being killed, they will accept the killing of enemy civilians. They will embrace the evil of terrorism, especially since they possess no conventional military option against an army as powerful as the IDF, while enemy civilians provide more accessible targets, They may reason that the de-militarized Intifada of the late 1980's and the Oslo Peace process that followed it led nowhere, while Hezbollah did force Israel to withdraw from its "security zone." Like Samson in the Bible, they may imagine that since they as a people are dying anyway, they may as well take a few of the enemy with them. Thus the Palestinian support for terrorism, however deplorable, is not surprising. It does not show that they have bad genes or an aberrant "political culture." It shows only that they have the ordinary weaknesses of human beings in extreme circumstances. Terrorism is wrong because it targets innocent civilians. It is wrong to retaliate for terrorism with terrorism; wrong to kill their kids because they have killed our kids. For all children are innocent and no one is guilty because or where he was born. All this is true, but before we jump to conclusions about Palestinian moral depravity, we should stop to consider our own history. It is easy to be morally circumspect when we are living in peace and security. But in fact, citizens of Western democracies have not always observed the moral standards to which we hold the Palestinians. In the dark days of World War II, British writer Vera Brittain tried to explain to the British people that they had no right to bomb German civilians just because the Germans were bombing British civilians. She was ostracized and nearly lynched. In the circumstances of the time, attacks on German civilian areas seemed to be an inescapable imperative of survival. Vera Brittain took a principled stance against terrorism in all its forms, but her society could not accept it.55 The notion of Israel's moral superiority is pure illusion. Both sides practice terrorism, not just one side. The whole dominant journalistic paradigm about Israel's so-called 'war on terrorism' skews reality and is based on double standards and sophistry. Israeli journalist Amira Hass puts it well: "A Palestinian is a terrorist when he attacks Israeli civilians on both sides of the Green line--in Israel and the territories--and when he attacks Israeli soldiers at the gates of a Palestinian city. A Palestinian is a terrorist when an army unit breaks into his neighborhood with tanks and he shoots a soldier who gets out of a tank for a moment, and he is a terrorist when he is hit by helicopter fire and is holding a rifle. Palestinians are terrorists whether they kill civilians or soldiers...(On the other hand) the Israeli soldier is a (legitimate) fighter when he shoots a missile from a helicopter or a shell from a tank at a group of people who gather in Khan Yunis...The Israeli soldier kills armed people and kills civilians. He kills senior commanders of battalions of murderous terrorists and he kills kindergarten children and the elderly in their homes. More accurately, they are killed by IDF fire. Most accurately, they are killed, claim Palestinian sources."56 In this story, neither side is innocent. The conduct of both has been monstrous beyond description. And yet we must avoid the convenient fallacy of moral equivalence. The Palestinians, unlike the Israelis, have a well-founded fear that their culture is on the brink of dissolution. They are fighting for the survival of what is left of their society, already devastated by the wars of 1948 and 1967. Israel, in contrast, is an accomplished fact, an impregnable nuclear power with a solid military advantage over any possible rival or combination of rivals. It does not need the West Bank. It is not fighting for its survival. It is fighting so that it can decide what to do with the Occupied Territories entirely on its own and can keep as much of the land as possible. This fundamental difference in motive and situation has to color any realistic moral evaluation of the conflict, but it is usually ignored. When we consider the whole period since 1967, it is not unfair to say that Israel has brought most of its suffering on itself. Israel, far stronger than the Palestinians, has done far more than they have to shape the situation that we see today. Israeli civilians, like Palestinian civilians, have fallen victim to fundamentally irresponsible Israeli state policies. Casualty statistics tell a story all their own. Between 29 September 2000 and 30 April 2007, a total of 705 Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians, mostly in suicide bombings and in shooting attacks. 1946 Palestinian non-combatants were killed by Israelis; an additional 584 may have been non-combatants (their combatant status is not known). Suicide bombings are now, thank God, a rarity, though they still occur. But Israel routinely kills Palestinians, typically in situations where we just have to trust the word of the IDF that the killing was justified. On 25 June 2006, Palestinian guerrillas used a secret tunnel to attack the Kerem Shalom border crossing into Gaza, killing some IDF troops and capturing Corporal Gilad Shalit. Israel retaliated by attacking Gaza's only power station, creating, among other things, a water crisis in a region where most of the inhabitants are children under 18. Clearly, not every response to terrorism is morally justified, especially if it mainly targets innocent civilians (which is the reason why we object to terrorism in the first place). It isn't right to punish children and subject them to extreme suffering and deprivation in order to retaliate for an attack on soldiers.57 In the year 2006, at least 660 Palestinians were killed, including 141 minors. At least 332 (more than half) were non-combatants. In contrast, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians declined, to 17 civilians (including one minor) and 6 IDF troops. But in Gaza alone, following Shalit's capture, Israel killed at least 405 Palestinians; at least 205 of them non-combatants, including 88 minors. Qassam rocket attacks fired from Gaza at the town of Sderot have been used to justify any amount of punishment Israel cares to inflict on Gaza. But the Western press often fails to note how inaccurate these homemade rockets are. In the entire period from Sept. 2000 to May 2007, just twelve Israeli civilians and one foreign national have been killed by Qassams. Clearly it is wrong that any Israeli civilians should be harmed. But it is also wrong that in all this time, Israel has steadfastly resisted a comprehensive and unequivocal ceasefire covering both the West Bank and Gaza. And it isn't right that Israel always finds pretexts not to negotiate with the elected Palestinian government. Israel has been trying for years to eliminate the Qassams with missile attacks and large scale raids, but nothing has worked. Unless revenge has value as an end in itself, it seems high time to try a different method, such as peace talks.58 The year 2006 saw a further political deterioration. Sharon had a disabling stroke in January. Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections on 25 January. Polls showed that most Palestinians favored a two-state solution, but voted for Hamas out of frustration with the corrupt and ineffectual Fatah-led government. But the US and Israel imposed a boycott on PA institutions until Hamas agreed to recognize Israel's "right to exist." The boycott worsened what was already a desperate Palestinian economic situation.59 In early 2007, Abbas of Fatah and Meshal of Hamas finally agreed on a unity government formula which, by pledging to honor all past PLO agreements with Israel, granted Israel implicit recognition. The 1993 Declaration of Principles signed by Arafat recognized Israel's "right to exist"; and the unity government was committed to honoring this. But Israel made it clear that this was not good enough. It never explained why such a quibble about words was so important. Meanwhile, the situation on the Palestinian street goes from bad to worse, especially in Gaza, where periodic fighting between Hamas and Fatah threatens to explode into full scale civil war. Total disorder reminiscent of Somalia looms in Gaza today. But Israel, rather than seriously negotiating with Abbas while there is still time, prefers to let things rot. When we consider the whole course of the modern history of Palestine, it is clear which side faces the true "existential threat," carried out in phases, with incidents of "strategic deception" along the way. In 1917 the Palestinians watched their new British masters hand over part of their country to foreign Jewish colonists intent on setting up a separate homeland. The British never asked their permission. Their feelings didn't matter, as Lord Balfour made clear. In 1947, the Palestinians watched the UN approve a resolution to divide their country. Jewish immigrants, who constituted 1/3 of the population, would get 55% of the land, and most of the best land, even though they owned just 7%. The new Jewish zone would have either almost as many Arabs as Jews or a slight Arab majority. The majority of Arabs would become, overnight, foreigners in their own country.60 Israel went on to expel and keep out the vast majority of the indigenous population. Expulsions were ordered as early as December 1947, long before the Arab military threat had materialized. Important towns like Haifa were overrun already in April, their inhabitants expelled with little real fighting. Israel had an army more powerful than all the Arab invaders combined. The largest Arab army, the Jordanian, was under effective British command and under orders not to cross into the Jewish Zone but just to annex the Arab Zone. Israel turned down Anglo-American truce talks that could have prevented the Arab invasion in early May. It wanted to build on its territorial gains. Its worst period in the war was right in the beginning, when it was busy trying to wrest the West Bank from the Jordanians, even though the latter was outside the Jewish Zone. After May, Israel had few obstacles in its path. The so-called " war of independence" was in fact a war of conquest, carried out and later justified under a hyped "existential threat."61 The War of 1948 left Israel with 78% of Palestine, which was largely cleansed of its native population. In 1967 it went on to seize the remaining 22%. It claimed to be willing to trade land for peace. But meanwhile it settled the territories, in order to keep as much land as possible. One of the first rules of international diplomacy is that, if a territory is disputed, each side must maintain the status quo and not take unilateral steps that prejudice the final outcome of negotiations. This is a principle that the US has often re-stated to Israel. But Israel has always violated it. And then it complains that so many people around the world are still hostile to it. In November 1988, Arafat publicly recognized Israel's "right to exist," which had been a US precondition for talks with the PLO insisted on by Israel. Nothing happened. In 1993, in the Declaration of Principles, he agreed that Israel had a right to exist in 78% of historic Palestine. The haggle was about the remaining 22%. Israel insisted on keeping as much as possible, responded to the peace process by rapidly setting as much land as possible, and worked tirelessly to ensure that any land actually granted to the Palestinians would lack real sovereignty. Settlements continue to expand. The settler population increased by 6% in 2006. As always, the Palestinians have to watch helplessly while their country is taken away from them, either in big chunks or a little bit at a time.62 Meanwhile, the "security measures" Israel has imposed, including the "security fence' whose route cannot be explained by security needs but only by the desire for de facto permanent territorial control of the West Bank, have pushed Palestinian society to the breaking point. The whole economy is in collapse and the society is breaking down as well. In a few years time, there may be no more sign of an organized Palestinian society anywhere in historic Palestine. Israel's policies have the effect of forcing people off the land. Many Palestinians will be forced into exile if they want any hope of a normal life. And Israel and its apologists will bring out twisted, highly edited tales of why it had to be this way.63 That is the real 'existential threat." Not some words in the PLO charter or the Hamas charter about the "destruction of Israel"; threats which no one has any power to carry out. And so we see that reality is almost a photographic negative of the account presented by Mr. Balch in his op ed. Let us conclude by touching briefly on the issue of "bias." This always comes up whenever Israel is subject to criticism in the US. No one could say that I was "unbiased." But they might have to reserve judgment on the question of whether the conclusions I reach are based on solid, and to me unwelcome and uncomfortable, information. They should entertain the possibility that people like me actually do not relish the thought of making enemies among the Jewish people, who have made immeasurably rich contributions to civilization and who have been unjustly persecuted down the centuries, culminating in the Holocaust. Is it not possible that at least some of us do not enjoy criticizing Israel but feel we have to because of the imperatives of conscience? Conscience tells us that the Palestinians are human beings who have never been treated fairly. If this statement offends some people, so be it. But we will never stop saying it. And those who would call us racist for saying it only unmask their own hypocrisy. In any event, Carter is not like me. He is considerably more "moderate." He never makes the thoroughgoing critique of Israel that I make. And yet he is still loudly accused of bias and prejudice. Mr. Balch calls President Carter a "blatant partisan." But it is notable that in PALESTINE: PEACE NOT APARTHEID, Carter criticizes the Arab states and the Palestinians many times (eg. pp. 18, 66, 102, 187). He condemns Palestinian terrorism (p. 187). He criticizes Saudi Arabia's human rights record and the American officials who tolerate it (p 102). He says that Israel has a right to exist that the Arabs must recognize (pp.18, 207). He says that Israel has one of the most powerful armies in the world "of necessity" (p.67). He attributes the settlement project to a "fervent and dedicated minority" of Israelis, not to all (p.52). In contrast, Mr. Balch utters not a single word of criticism of Israel. Who then, we may ask, is the "blatant partisan"? Is this a hopeless conflict of competing nationalist narratives, where dialogue between the two sides must inevitably degenerate into an interminable "blame game," so that they never make any realistic progress towards a peace that everyone can live with? At this moment, we can be cheered by the recent news from another part of the world. In Northern Ireland, only weeks ago Ian Paisley, the most extreme Protestant Unionist leader, and Martin McGuiness of Sinn Fein (IRA) shook hands and agreed to work together in a unity government. These are men who certainly do not agree on the history of Northern Ireland. They hate each other and might have killed each other in years past. They still do not agree on the ultimate fate of the province: McGuinness wants a united Ireland and Paisley wants continued union with Great Britain. Sinn Fein has never formally recognized Northern Ireland's "right to exist" (i.e. the legality of the 1922 Partition of the country). The IRA disarmed after, not before, the negotiating process began. But despite all the outstanding differences between the two sides and despite all the risks of a future breakdown of the peace process, progress towards peace is being made. The truth is that we do not have to agree on the interpretation of the history of Palestine in order to acheive a meeting of minds on the best way forward. President Carter's support for the Geneva Plan puts him in the company of a large section of the international diplomatic community, including many progressive Israelis, who for years have been striving for a way out of the current bloody impasse. Americans who denounce Carter necessarily join forces with the Israeli right, which derides Yossi Beilin and other pro-Geneva Israelis as "traitors to the country." As usual, the pro-Israel crowd in the United States ignores the debate in Israel and adopts a right-wing Israeli position of hostility to the peace process as the only conceivable "pro-Israel" position. The Geneva plan is in no meaningful sense a "maximalist" pro-Palestinian proposal. On the contrary, it is arguably slanted in Israel's favor. For example, it is unclear how the principle of territorial exchange would work in practice or how the Palestinians could receive a grant of territory equal in value to the territory they would be giving up. It is unclear how a Palestinian state in a truncated West Bank and in Gaza (already very small territories) could be viable politically or economically, or why we should not fear that the settlement blocs would be the thin edge of a wedge leading to de facto Israeli control of the entire territory. There are many difficulties with the plan from a Palestinian perspective. But Geneva may well be the least bad of the options they face. It is a sad commentary that even a plan which waives the requirements of international law in order to allow Israel to keep major settlements in the West Bank and gives Israel the right to decide unilaterally how far to implement the Palestinian right of return is unacceptable to the pro-Israel crowd in the United States. This rejectionist attitude makes us wonder if there is any plan for territorial compromise that they would accept. Demonizing the Palestinians and their leadership may feel good, but it does not add up to any realistic programme to secure Israel's future. Apparently these people believe, against all the evidence of the last seven years of senseless violence, that the conflict can still be resolved by force and the deadlocked status quo is acceptable. President Carter is one of a few lonely voices in the United States urging all parties to pull back from the brink before it is too late. We can only hope that Americans will listen to him. NOTES 1. Philip Mattar, THE MUFTI OF JERUSALEM, New York: Columbia University Press, 1988 p. 139 2. cited in David Hirst, THE GUN AND THE OLIVE BRANCH: THE ROOTS OF VIOLENCE IN THE MIDDLE EAST, Third Edition, New York, Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003 p. 337 3. For text of the Geneva Accord, cf www.americantaskforce.org/geneva.htm. The preamble references Camp David, the Clinton bridge proposals and Taba. Article Four states the principle of a land swap: "The border between the States of Palestine and Israel shall be based on the June 4, 1967 lines with reciprocal modifications on a 1:1 basis as set forth in attached map 1."The accompanying map indicates Israeli annexation of large settlement blocs such as Ma'aleh Adumim. 4. Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, CAMP DAVID: A TRAGEDY OF ERRORS, in the NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 9 August 2001 5. Menahem Klein, THE ORIGINS OF INTIFADA II AND RESCUING PEACE FOR ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS, lecture, 2 Oct. 2002, af Foundation for Middle East Peace and Middle East Institute, Washington DC. Klein is Senior Scholar at the Jerusalem Institute for Israeli Studies and Professor, Bar Ilan, University. Cf. www.fmep.org/analysis/klein_origins_of_intifada_II.html) 6. http//pcpsr.org/survey/polls/2003/refugeesjune03.html#behavior. Published 18 July 2003. 7. Deborah Sontag, "AND YET SO FAR," in NEW YORK TIMES, 26 July 2001 8. Daniel Dor, INTIFADA HITS THE HEADLINES, Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2004 p.32 9. Ibid. pp.139-40 10. Daniel Dor, THE SUPPRESSION OF GUILT: ISRAELI MEDIA AND THE REOCCUPATION OF THE WEST BANK, London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005, pp.80-81, citing HA'ARETZ veteran journalist Danny Rubinstein. Israel went on to attack Rajoub's headquarters in April 2002. Rubinstein wrote: "Rajoub is the one who paid the highest price for this Intifada. This man--the most active partner in security coordination with Israel, the one who would not let his people participate in terror attacks, the one who kept Hamas militants in jail, has been betrayed by Israel..." (in HA'ARETZ, 7 Apr. 2002) 11. MITCHELL REPORT: cited in Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, "CAMP DAVID AND AFTER: AN EXCHANGE. 2. A Reply to Ehud Barak, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 13 June 2003 12. Ibid. Agha-Malley 13. CAMP DAVID AND AFTER: AN EXCHANGE: 1. Interview with Ehud Barak," NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, 13 June 2002: "Speaking of Arab society, Barak recalls, 'The deputy director of the US. FBI once told me that there are societies in which lie detectors don't work, societies in which lies do not create cognitive dissonance (on which the tests are based)"; "By then (80 years after 1948) most of the generation that experienced the catastrophe of 1948 at first hand will have died; there will be 'very few salmons around who still want to return to their birthplaces to die.' (Barak speaks of a 'salmon syndrome' among the Palestinians...)." Similarly, in his recent speech at Coe College, Cedar Rapids, IA. Barak referred to Israel as a "villa in a jungle" (cf. Coe College magazine, THE COURIER, Spring 2007). The man's racism is irrepressible. 14. cited in Dor, INTIFADA, p. 152. 15.Yehezkel Lein, LAND GRAB: ISRAEL'S SETTLEMENT POLICES IN THE WEST BANK, Report for B'TSELEM: ISRAELI CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, May 2002 p.17. Available at www.btselem.org 16. Avi Shlaim, THE IRON WALL: ISRAEL AND THE ARAB WORLD, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2001 p. 260 17. "Dusting it off perhaps," in THE ECONOMIST, 22 Mar. 2003 p. 23 18. Leonard Thompson, A HISTORY OF SOUTH AFRICA, Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 191-4 19, LEIN. p. 16,: "natural growth"; Geoffrey Aronson, ISRAEL, PALESTINIANS AND THE INTIFADA: CREATING FACTS ON THE WEST BANK, London: Kegan Paul, 1990. p. 98 -"strengthened and thickened" ; Gideon Levy, "End the fake evacuations', in HA'ARETZ, 22 June 2003: "outposts...built only as stage scenery for this play," Akiva Eldar, "US to Israel: 'Leave outposts or relations will be harmed," HA'ARETZ, 9 Mar. 2005: " The Sasson Report also confirms the findings of the State Comptroller in his 2003 report, in which the defence minister and his advisor on settlement affairs are said to have either actively or passively enabled the transfer of mobile homes to new outpost sites"; Ravi Nessman, " 'Outposts Thriving on the West Bank, AP 17 Feb. 2007. In other words, Israel gets away with it, despite the occasional US "warning." 20. Akiva Eldar, "Popular Misconceptions," HA'ARETZ, 11 June 2004; cf. "Israeli general blames advisor for wrong projection on Arafat," AFP 12 June 2004; Uri Avneri, "Israel's Intelligence Scandal," 22 June 2004; David Hirst, "Don't blame Arafat," in the GUARDIAN, 17 July 2004. 21. B. Michael, YEDIOT AHARONOT, 26 April 2002; cf Akiva Eldar, in HA'ARETZ, 23 April, cited in Daniel Dor, SUPPRESSION, p. 89 22. Norman Finkelstein, BEYOND CHUTZPAH, University of California Press, 2005 p. 140 citing Alex Fishman, " A dangerous liquidation," In YEDIOT, 23 Nov. 2001; Bradley Burston, "Shehada 'hit' sends shockwaves back into Israel', in HA'ARETZ, 25 July 2005; inter alia. 23, Aluf Benn, Arnon Regular, "Angry U.S. asks, 'why the attempt on Rantisi?' ," in HA'ARETZ, 11 June 2003. 24. eg. killing of Ibrahim Hashhash, April 2005. "Israel has said that despite the truce declared in February it would continue to target those Palestinians it identified as an imminent threat'. HA'ARETZ, 14 April 2005. But Israel has shown that the definition of "imminent threat" is an elastic one. Though the US in 2003 thought it had an agreement that the assassination practice would be restricted to "ticking bombs," persons on their way to attack civilians, Rantisi was described as a "not a ticking bomb but a whole factory of ticking bombs." But either the "factory" is not an imminent threat or the factory is going to blow up and cease to be operational. Not surprisingly, US officials were less than satisfied with this explanation. (cf. report in note 23 ). Israel has defended its policy of extra-judicial killing by saying that in many cases the suspects cannot be apprehended. Yet many of its so-called "arrest operations" are in fact disguised assassinations. cf. B'Tselem, TAKE NO PRISONERS: THE FATAL SHOOTING OF PALESTINIANS BY ISRAELI SECURITY FORCES IN 'ARREST OPERATIONS', May 2005: Of 89 cases of persons killed in "arrest operations" studied by this group, 17 were not wanted and at least 43 were unarmed or not attempting to use their arms at the time of the arrest. Israel routinely kills people for mere membership or affiliation in an armed Palestinian faction, to say nothing of innocent bystanders, even during so-called "periods of calm." At least some of the terrorist incidents after 2005 have been reprisals for so-called "arrest operations." 25. Uzi Benziman, SHARON: AN ISRAELI CAESAR, New York: Adama Press, 1985 p. 200. Benziman is a HA'ARETZ reporter and editor. That Sharon persuaded Begin to abandon the Sinai settlements: Shlaim, p. 374. 26. cf, "Text of Letters Exchanged between Bush, Sharon," ASSOCIATED PRESS, 14 April 2004. Bush's statement about "scattered territories" was made at Brussels, during his European tour, in February 2005. cf. Judy Keen, "Bush talks tough on Russia, Syria in Brussels address," USA TODAY, 2/22/05. This speech also called on Israel to "freeze" settlement activity, which of course never happened. 27. Ari Shavit, "The Big Freeze," in HA'ARETZ Magazine, 8 Oct. 2004 28. Aluf Benn in HA'ARETZ, 30 Apr. 2004. 29. Sharon told Condoleezza Rice that "Israel cannot accept a situation in which PA Chairman Mahmud Abbas fails to take action against Palestinian terror organizations and works to dismantle them but rather seeks to reach understandings with them. Without proactive Palestinian anti-terror operations, the first stage of the Road Map cannot be implemented." At the same time, "Abbas reportedly told his security chiefs; 'Deliver results or you will have to quit'. He demanded that PA security forces seek out and apprehend the perpetrators (of the latest attack), whom he called 'terrorists'. Arnon Regular et. al, in HA'ARETZ, 2/27/05. 30. ECONOMIST, 1/29-2/4 2005 p. 47. This analysis is corroborated by STRATEGIC ASSESSMENTS INITIATIVE, an independent research group, in its report on the Palestinian security forces, 26 July 2005: "(I)n terms of overall capacity to fulfill core functions and implement government policy, capacity and capability are extremely weak." The report states that IDF military operations have helped to leave "arms stocks depleted and delapidated." Transport is severely restricted. "The net result, when considered alongside imposed travel restrictions, is a severe weakness in terms of the ability to move personnel and material and to respond to emergencies and evacuations. Units have been forced to use taxis in many cases. Again, the situation is largely the result of Israeli operations during the second Intifada, which targeted vehicles and related facilities as well as other elements of physical capacity." "All in all, (IDF) attacks on communication infrastructure have had a debilitating effect, and even now radio communications cover only approximately 25% of the area under PA control...Training capacity was severely eroded as a result of Israel's destruction of Palestinian training facilities..." PA security installations have been regularly targeted in "reprisals" for Islamist terrorist acts, not for their own involvement in terrorism. Report available at www.strategicassessments.org 31. Aluf Benn, "Israel rejects US request to arm Palestinian police', in HA'ARETZ, 29 Apr. 2005 32. Shlaim, THE IRON WALL, p. 46. 33. Ibid. pp 122, 301-303 34. Livia Rokach, ISRAEL'S SACRED TERRORISM: A STUDY BASED ON MOSHE SHARETT'S PERSONAL DIARY AND OTHER DOCUMENTS, Belmont, MA; AAUG Press, 1986 pp. 15, 41 35. Shamir interview with Yosef Harif, MA'ARIV, 26 June 1992; cited in Shlaim, p. 500 36. S.D. Goitein, JEWS AND ARABS: THEIR CONTACTS THROUGH THE AGES, New York: Schocken Books, 1974 p. 225. 37. Geoffrey Aronson, ISRAEL, PALESTINIANS AND THE INTIFADA: CREATING FACTS ON THE WEST BANK, London: Kegan Paul International, 1990 p. 65. 38. Jacob Talmon, "The Homeland is in Danger: An Open Letter to Menahem Begin," in DISSENT, FALL 1980. 39. ARONSON, pp. 223, 224, 229, 245-6. 259-60, 267-75, 336 40. Don Peretz, INTIFADA: THE PALESTINIAN UPRISING, Boulder, Co., San Francisco and London: Westview Press, 1990 pp. 45 "force might and beatings," 47, 49-51, 59-60; 63-64; 148, 158 41. Ibid. p. 157. 42. Ibid. p.174 43. Ze'ev Schiff and Ehud Ya'ari, INTIFADA: THE PALESTINIAN UPRISING, ISRAEL'S THIRD FRONT, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990 pp. 233-4. 44. Charles D. Smith, PALESTINE AND THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT, Bedford: St Martin's, Fourth Edition, 2000, p. 329. Amira Hass, DRINKING THE SEA AT GAZA, Owl Books, 1999, pp. 81-82 45. HA'ARETZ STAFF, "Chronology of Suicide bombings in Israel." The last before the Intifada occurred on 6 November 1998. The first one after that was on 2 November 2000. 46. Amira Hass, "Clarifying the Occupation Lexicon," in HA'ARETZ, 11 June 2003 47. Reuven Pedatzur, "More than a Million Bullets," in HA'ARETZ, 6/29/04 48. HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH: WORLD REPORT 2000: ISRAEL AND THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES, www.hrw.org. 49. PHYSICIANS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS USA: EVALUATION OF THE USE OF FORCE IN ISRAEL, GAZA AND THE WEST BANK, MEDICAL AND FORENSIC INVESTIGATION, 3 NOV. 2000. Available at the PHR website. 50. David Hirst, THE GUN AND THE OLIVE BRANCH, pp. 272, 280. 446-7, 560; Uzi Benziman, SHARON: AN ISRAELI CAESAR, Adama Books, 1985 pp. 53, 56 :"They witnessed him (Sharon) laughing as a junior officer tormented an old Arab and then shot him at close range; they noted his composure as he planned operations designed to kill as many civilians as possible" p.73: "He (Sharon) censured a junior officer in the paratroopers, David Ben Uziel, for failure to kill two elderly Arabs he encountered during a raid." 51. Reuven Pedatzur, "The wrong way to fight terrorism," HA'ARETZ, 12/11/02: killing of civilians defended for its 'deterrent value'; teenage boys killed because said to be 'of military age'; Amira Hass, REPORTING FROM RAMALLAH, Semiotext, 2002: interview with IDF soldier, p.92: "(Age) twelve and up you're allowed to shoot. That's what they tell us." Chris Hedges, "Gaza Diary: Scenes from the Palestinian Uprising," in HARPERS, Oct. 2001: in years as war correspondent "I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice and murder them for sport"; "No Exit": in HARPERS, April 2002: 'punitive firing" used indiscriminately in civilian areas," cf. also B'Tselem's report, TRIGGER HAPPY: UNJUSTIFIED GUNFIRE AND THE IDF'S OPEN FIRE REGULATIONS DURING THE AL-AQSA INTIFADA, March 2002; AFP: "Israeli rights group demands army chief of staff's resignation', 26 Nov. 2004: "Channel Two broadcast a conversation between the officer and other troops recorded on military radio at the time of the shooting, where he said, ' anything that's mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it's a three year old, needs to be killed." Human Rights Watch: PROMOTING IMPUNITY: THE ISRAELI MILITARY"S FAILURE TO INVESTIGATE WRONGDOING'; report, 22 June 2005 52. "Palestinian girl used by Israel as a 'human shield'', REUTERS 3/9/07; Jonathan Lis and Baruch Kra, "Officers defend 'human shield' practice," in HA'ARETZ, 17 Aug. 2002 cf. This news report from October 2005: The IDF said it was suspending round ups of suspects in the West Bank if they were likely to open fire. "The army decision follows last Thursday's High Court of Justice ruling outlawing the use of Palestinians as 'human shields' in any way while arresting wanted activists (not the first such ruling; an injunction was issued against the practice on 18 Aug. 2002 and was defied during the effective period-JW). Senior military sources said that since it was no longer permissible to send Palestinian civilians into houses where wanted people had barricaded themselves, these operations should be suspended in order to avoid unnecessary risks to soldiers lives (which are worth more than those of innocent civilians--JW)...(However High Court) Justice Mishael Cheshin said it would perhaps be permissible to legitimize the practice after the fact, if it transpires that the wanted person was exceptionally dangerous.," Amos Harel, "IDF troops kill Fatah man in gunbattle outside Jenin," in HA'ARETZ 10/9/05. Of course this is all a game. The Court ruling means nothing, round-ups never stopped, and the "neighbor practice" continues. 53. Tanya Reinhard, ISRAEL/PALESTINE: HOW TO END THE WAR OF 1948, New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005 pp. 114-5: 'From Sept.29 to Oct. 25, 2000, Jerusalem's St. John Eye Hospital treated 50 people for eye injuries," an astonishing number; B'TSELEM: 'Impeding Medical Treatment and Firing at Ambulances in the Occupied Territories," March 2002; B'TSELEM PRESS RELEASE; 10/16/01: "DENIAL OF PASSAGE TO KIDNEY PATIENTS." 54. eg. The entire Hawashin neighborhood in Jenin was razed to retaliate for an attack on IDF troops in April 2002. cf. HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH, "JENIN: IDF MILITARY OPERATIONS": http://hrw.org/reports/2002/israel0502-01.htm. On house demolitions in general, cf. B'TSELEM: "THROUGH NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN: PUNITIVE HOUSE DEMOLITIONS IN THE AL-AQSA INTIFADA," Nov. 2004: In the category of so-called "punitive house demolitions": between Oct 2001 and Nov. 2004, the IDF destroyed at least 628 housing units in the Occupied Territories, leaving nearly 4000 people homeless. Almost half (47%- 295 houses) were never home to anyone suspected of attacks on Israelis (at least 1,286 people made homeless). Contrary to the IDF's claims before the High Court, advance warning is rarely given: only in 3 % of the cases. And "punitive" demolitons only account for 15% of the total number of demolitions: most are done in so-called "clearing" operations. Many thousands of innocent people have been made homeless by Israel during the 40 years of the Occupation. The main purpose of house demolitions is to assist in the forcible demographic re-engineering of Palestine; a policy reminiscent of the "racial zoning" and elimination of "black spots" in apartheid South Africa. Cf. Laurine Platzky and Cherryl Walker, THE SURPLUS PEOPLE: FORCED REMOVALS IN SOUTH AFRICA, Johannesburg, Ravan Press, 1985 eg. p. 153: "At the ' black spot' (i.e. Black community remaining in an area reserved for whites) of Umbulwane in Natal, the first notice that tenants got that they were to be removed, apart from the numbers on their door, was the arrival of bulldozers to demolish their houses." These scenes have been repeated in Palestine many times, even in years of peace. 55. A. C. Grayling, AMONG THE DEAD CITIES: THE HISTORY AND LEGACY OF THE WWII BOMBING OF CIVILIANS IN GERMANY AND JAPAN, New York: Walker and Company, 2006 pp. 182-189 56. Amira Hass, "Always a Fighter, Always a Terrorist," in HA'ARETZ, 9 Oct. 2002 57. B'Tselem, ACT OF VENGEANCE: ISRAEL'S BOMBING OF THE GAZA POWER PLANT AND ITS EFFECTS, Status Report, Sept. 2006 58. For all the above figures, cf. www.btselem.org; Though Qassams have been fired since 2000, the first Israeli fatality came in June 2004. "This is the first time a Qassam has led directly to an Israeli fatatlity," Nir Hasson, HA'ARETZ, 6/28/04. Sadly, two Israeli civilians were killed by Qassams in May 2007: May 21 and 27. 59. Graham Usher, "The Hamas Triumph," in THE NATION, 20 Feb. 2006 on the polls. Sara Roy, "A Dubai on the Mediterranean," in LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, 3 Nov. 2005; OXFAM Press Release, 13 Apr. 2007, "Poverty in Palestine: the human cost of the financial boycott"; WORLD FOOD PROGRAM Press Release, "Poor Palestinians unable to purchase enough food," 22 Feb, 2007 60. Report on Palestine, UN SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON PALESTINE, Subcommittee, May 1947, cited in Walid Khalidi, FROM HAVEN TO CONQUEST: READINGS IN ZIONISM AND THE ARAB-ISRAEL CONFLICT UNTIL 1948, Beirut, 1971 pp. 664-714: "an initial Arab majority"; cf. Benny Morris, RIGHTEOUS VICTIMS: A HISTORY OF THE ZIONIST-ARAB CONFLICT 1881-2001, Vintage, 2001 pp. 184-186 61. cf. esp. Simha Flapan, THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL: MYTHS AND REALITIES, New York: Pantheon Books, 1987 ; Ilan Pappe, THE ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINE, London, Oneworld, 2006; "Draft Memorandum by the Director of the Office of United Nations Affairs (Rusk) to the Undersecretary of State (Lovett), Washington D.C. 4 May 1948, in Donald Neff, FALLEN PILLARS, Washington, 2002 pp. 251-2 62. Shahar Ilan, "Interior Ministry: West Bank Settler Population grew by 6% in 2006, in HA'ARETZ, 1/19/07 63. B'Tselem, UNDER THE GUISE OF SECURITY: ROUTING THE SEPARATION BARRIER TO ENABLE THE EXPANSION OF ISRAELI SETTLEMENTS IN THE WEST BANK, Dec. 2005; B'Tselem and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, WHERE SILENCE REIGNS: ISRAEL"S SEPARATION POLICY AND THE FORCED EVICTION OF PALESTINIANS FROM THE CENTER OF HEBRON, May 2007.