Abstract

Comment

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 28 October 2002

Comments

This comment was originally aimed at the essay on the minimalists in the Judaism category, but at the correspondent’s suggestion, I have moved the relevant parts here. The comments explain it.

M J Zionist

I would like to congratulate you on an interesting and thought provoking site. I have read the vast majority of the contents of the Jewish History section of your site and was impressed with its breadth and its novel theories. Having read many articles and books on the archaeology of the Land of Israel, including The Bible Unearthed, much of the material was not entirely new to me. While I enjoyed reading and learning more about the various scholarly views concerning the true history of the People and Land of Israel, I must say that there are a couple of passages that detract from a generally scholarly approach to the subject.

In the sections on the “Minimalists”, the site goes off on a fiery tangent about the State of Israel, the roots of its historical claims and then continues on a tirade about the state’s powerful military and “vaunted” nuclear capabilities. This political invective is completely out of place in what must remain a professional and scholarly debate for these discoveries to have any chance at making inroads into mainstream thought. Furthermore, the evidence presented on the site itself provides Israeli Jews even stronger historical basis for their claim to the land than the Bible ever could.

Mike

You seem interested in shooting the messenger. You realize that I am reporting an angry row between some Jewish scholars and other Jewish and some non-Jewish ones. What I am saying is what is behind it. You seem to be objecting to anyone knowing it. My argument is that scholars should have nothing to do with such politcal posturing. I fear that some intemperate scholars in Israel want to have!

Based on the archaeological and historical record, the Jews of today are the descendents of the the ancient Israelites, themselves part of the native Canaanite culture, part of the original inhabitants of the Land of Israel. While later on relatively small numbers of “returners”, themselves Hebrew Semites from other parts of the Fertile Crescent (Abarnahara), and others were deported into Israel (Samaria) and Yehud, these newcomers were completely blended into and inter-married with the Am Ha Eretz, original Israelites.

The human genome project might answer this when it is completed. So far, I understand that the families called Cohen, assumed of course to be descendents of priests, are remarkably pure bred, but identifiably Mesopotamian in origin, not Palestinian, if I am not mistaken. Other Jewish familes are fairly mixed, as would be expected after a 2000 year long diaspora.

The fact remains that at the minimum there is strong archaeological evidence supporting an Israelite kingdom (the Omrides) as far back as the earliest part of the Ninth Century BCE and this kingdom was simply an outgrowth of the indigenous Canaanite culture. These people were not, as the Bible relates, a conquering people who had become a nation in Egypt and subsequently wandered into the Land as conquerors under the leadership of Moses and Joshua.

The archaeological and historical record goes on to show that a group of these same Israelites/Canaanites set up the Kingdom of Judah to the south in the late Eight Century and were bolstered in numbers by some northern Israelite kinsmen who a few years later fled the oncoming Assyrian army. The fact that these Israelites/Judahites constitute the bulk of the ancestors of today’s Jewish people seems more than ample as a basis for an Israeli/Jewish Zionist claim to the Land of Israel. While there is strong evidence to deny the historicity of the Biblical narrative, the evidence documenting the Jews’ emergence as an indigenous nation in the Land of Israel is beyond dispute, regardless of what the roots of their religion may be.

It is nice to find people who agree on this.

In the interest of fairness and scholarly integrity, which seems to be maintained throughout the rest of the site, I would assert that in the section discussing the basis for the Israeli claim to the land the above points should be noted along with the refuted Biblical basis, or else the whole topic of current Middle Eastern geopolitics be omitted entirely.

I don’t think what you are suggesting is at all appropriate for a site like this. Whether what you are suggesting is a valid claim is for people like you to argue if you need to. I am reporting that it is a dispute that ought to be irrelevant to scholarship, and you are asking me to join in!

For what it is worth, I think that historical claims even if they are plainly valid simply cannot be upheld after the passage of long periods of time. Should the British claim France? They ruled most of it six hundred years ago. Should the French claim Britain? They ruled it 1000 years ago. Perhaps the Welsh should claim Britain. They ruled it 2000 years ago. It illustrates the point I argued. It is not any claim that gives the Israelis rights in Palestine but modern day political and military realities. To pretend that it depends on history or God is purely self-justification. That is what religion is all about.

In your diatribe against the Israeli scholar Broshi, which seems to have its own merit, it is unnecessary to speak of Holocaust martyrs as people, “who are involuntarily fertilizing the grass at Auschwitz”, this is simply disrespectful language and again is not appropriate to a scholarly debate.

Your soft tone seems to hide a distinct bias. I have no diatribe against Broshi. I report what he has said and the meaning of it for people who do not know it. The phrase you pick out was used precisely because it is Broshi who must be offending the memories of these people, and he it should be that you are condemning. By using Nazi propaganda, he is dancing on the graves of innocent Jews. That surely is what is disrespectful. I am a liberal and I find Nazis of any nation more than distasteful.

I hope you are not one, and hope you enjoy the pages that you have not yet read.

I thought about what you said and decided you were right. I have cut out the ranting and moved it to my more obviously polemical pages in my /truth/ directory. It is combined with a critical review of the article by Hershel Shanks that appeared in Ha’aretz in November 1999, itself a reply to Ze’ev Herzog, the previous week. I would guess that you know these pieces.

Thanks for showing an interest. I cannot say that I am sympathetic to Zionists generally, but I am reminded always of the Irish joke about the man asking an Irish yokel the way to Dublin. He replied: “If I were you I wouldn’t start from here.” You’ve got to start from where you are.

For me Israel’s moral right to exist as an independent state derives simply from the fact that Jewish immigrants left other lands and journeyed to the Land of Israel and purchased land from its then current Arab and Turkish owners according to the laws of the governing authority of the time (likewise I would agree that a Franciscan Friar who bought land hundreds of years ago has the identical rights).

Since you want to argue history, I do not dispute that this is true and that even before that many Jews lived alongside their Palestinian Arab neighbours throughout the Ottomon empire, and doubtless even before that. If they lived together that long, relationships must have been reasonably amicable. Moslems traditionally have favoured other patriarchal religions when goodwill has been reciprocated. But buying land within a sovereign state never, so far as I know, entitled the purchaser to take over the state and kick out or degrade the natives. The ability to do it comes from power not from any law. The Franciscan Friars that you mentioned did not lay a claim to sovereignty over the state. How are the Jewish purchasers different? You seem to agree with me in your next few lines.

Subsequently, the Jews’ desire to maintain autonomy and self-determination is a right that can be denied no group of people who agree to live in peace with the others in their midst. There is no possible argument that could possibly justify the forcing another people submit to the rule of another nation.

You say as clearly as possible here that “there is no possible argument that could possibly justify the forcing another people submit to the rule of another nation”, yet this is what the Israelis are doing. Regrettably, Zionists like all fanatics, can only see one side of the argument. They present only one side of the argument to others and get to believe their own propaganda.

The same is true of what you say about autonomy and self-determination. The Arabs have been kicked out of their own house and made to live in a shed in the garden. No rational person can deny they have a grievance, except Israelis and their Zionist supporters. The Palestinians are being denied what you admit is a right to autonomy and self determination, but you are either insincere or blind. Autonomy and self-determination applies only to the Israelis not to the Arabs, in Zionist perception.

Arab leaders were wrong in rejecting the two-state solution in 1947 and in attempting to invade the nascent Israeli state. Likewise, once there is a proper representative government for the Palestinian Arabs, one which seeks to live in peace with all of its neighbors, then there will be no justification for subjugating them either.

I ask you this. If you had been kicked out of your house by the lodgers and been made to live in the garden, and the lodgers had proposed that a fair settlement of the dispute would be that they kept the house and you live in the shed, would you have been ready to accept? There is no need to reply. No one on earth who would agree to this “solution”. The solution was forced on to them, not by any supposed fairness of the Jewish settlers buying Arab farms, but by gangs like the Stern gang and others bombing Arab villages. I am old enough to remember the bombing of the King David Hotel. British soldiers died in this terrorist act. No doubt, for a Zionist, it was not terrorism and it does not match anything similar done recently. Anyone whose mind has not been distorted by propaganda and bigotry cannot accept such subtle differences in terrorism.

So, the Arabs had a two state “solution” forced on to them, and hardly surprisingly there are those among them who think that such unfairness cannot just be accepted. You openly recognize that you are “subjugating” them. Quite so, and they are not willing to be subjugated. Perhaps that is why they are sending suicide bombers to scare the Israelis. They are using the tactics of the Stern Gang, that Israelis can hardly object to, since they started it all.

To state the obvious I am a staunch Zionist (secular) and I am a fervent believer in the two-state solution to the Arab-Israel conflict. However, while I am an ardent supporter of Israel that does not diminish my compassion for the Palestinians nor my belief that they too should be free to live as they choose.

Well, as I said before, we have to start any journey from where we are, not somewhere else. The division of Palestine has been agreed by the Arabs, but the Israelis always want to take more. Do you think it is possible for oppressed people to ever settle amicably while their oppressors are taking ever more of their land? The Israelis are illegally—illegally even within the terms that you say you want the Arabs to accept—setting up homes in the Palestinian state. They are only stopped when they do it without the approval of the Israeli government. That means the Israeli government plainly accepts complicity in this illegality. How would you react if you were an Arab?

In my view, the very thing that makes anyone a political liberal is that they can feel what it must be like to be ill-treated and unfairly treated. You say you are liberal and even libertarian, and that you have compassion for the Palestinians, yet you remain a Zionist. It is hard for me to see how the two attitudes can be compatible, but if they are, the onus is on the Israelis to enable the Palestinians to settle without rubbing their noses in the dust, and this is what the odious Sharon and his mafia ministries have been doing to Arafat. It has not been working and almost certainly cannot. These are human beings, even if they are Arabs and Moslems to westerners, and they have their own pride. The Zionists and US fundamentalist Christians are stirring up a hornets’ nest. Maybe that’s what they want to do.

If you mean what you say, you should be lobbying all Jews everywhere for a full settlement on the basis of the division you say you will accept, and that the Arabs have accepted. Not 95 percent of it!! Arafat is criticised for not accepting 95 percent of it. Why should he? If he did, before long, Sharon will create another provocation and insist on a settlement of 95 percent of the 95 percent. Settle with them fairly, then Israel might get some peace. There will always be some dissidents, but if most people are happy both governments can tackle the malcontents—on both sides.

Thanks for your subsequent praise and the article you sent. It sounds from what you say about politicians that you cannot be a Zionist. Unless you make an exception for Sharon, et al!

Concerning the article you sent. I would have said, from the ideas on my pages, and the Jewish scriptures, that the original Jewish colonists sent by the Persians came from around Harran and Urfa on the border of Turkey and Syria, but they settled among Canaanites who themselves were supposedly Aramaeans from about the same area of Syria/Turkey. If my guess is right that the Jews were a subsect of Zoroastrianism and existed more widely in the Persian empire, I would have said that Syria, Asia Minor and NW Iran were the racial groups from whom modern Jews descended. The article might support this idea.

What is remarkable is the implication that Jews remained separated genetically. I doubt it generally, certainly in the west, over two or more millennia. Anyway, it seemed a limited study. Cavalli-Sforza has perhaps done more broad-based studies that you might be able to get copies of, especially if you have university contacts.

There are several points in your argument that I must dispute. The most important point that must be made is that you have classified and catergorized all Zionists as warmongering, land grabbing, violent settlers. First of all, to do so would be akin to asserting that all Arabs or Muslims are terrorists, it’s pure non-sense. Furthermore, Ariel Sharon, the centre-right Likud, the far-right, the settlers are not the only Zionists. They represent a few of the many number of groups of Zionists. Please do not forget that left-wing, liberal groups like Meretz, the centre-left Labour party, extra-parliamentary groups like Peace Now and the far-left Gush Shalom (the Peace Bloc) all consider themselves to be Zionists as well. Do not fall prey to the misclassification of all Zionists as warmongers, ring-wingers and fanatics. True Zionism stands for one ideal, the right of the Jewish People to live freely in their land. There is nothing that says that other groups of people, including the Palestinian Arabs, do not have a right to live freely as well.

Well, I speak of “Israelis and their Zionist supporters” and “Zionist fanatics”, neither of which imply that all Zionists are warmongering, though, Zionism necessarily means land grabbing. And even if all Zionists were warmongering, I cannot see how it is the same as regarding all Arabs and Moslems as terrorists. As I understand it, Zionism is a political movement among Jews which began fairly liberally when Herzl started it but got taken over by madmen. Now, of course, I accept that some Zionists are not among the madmen but to onlookers like us, they are silent or timid. The Arabs are a race and the Moslems a religion. Neither are a political movement, and so cannot be equated with Zionism. Anyone can choose their politics, but no one can choose their race, and it is hard to choose your religion except where religion has been weakened, as it should be. The Moslem countries do not fall into that category, and as long as they are treated as pariahs, the religion will only strengthen them. So, what you are saying, to me, is something like a man who says: “I am a Nazi, but do not fall into the illusion that all Nazis are like Hitler.” He might be right, but I am not ready to believe him because I have seen what the Nazis have done, and anyone who claims to be one is tarred with that brush. I see Christianity in exactly the same light. I do not doubt that there are exemplary Christians today, but I cannot see how they can bear their historical banner. Anything that can lead to such intolerance, cruelty and murder must be evil at its roots.

Secondly, one cannot judge the actions of Zionism’s founding fathers without understanding their point of view at the time they lived. At the end of the 19th Century Herzl and other Zionists leaders saw no conflict in returning the Jews to their ancient homeland. To them Palestine, with its roughly 250,000 inhabitants (25,000 Jews among them) was essentially empty. No one forsaw any serious conflict in settling a significant portion of the approximately 18-20 million Jews of the world among 225,000 Arabs. To the Zionists there was never going to be a demographic problem because they all assumed that millions of Jews would emmigrate from Russia and Eastern Europe to Land of Israel and they, especially Herzl, thought that they could show the world how they could live harmoniously with another minority population as brothers. Moreover, at the time, unlike today, the Arab birthrate was lower than that of the Jews. One has to remember that at the time there was no sovereign state in Palestine, it was merely some neglected, sparsely-populated area in the Ottoman province of Syria. In fact, with the brief exception of a short-lived Crusader state in the area in the Middle Ages, there was never a sovereign state in the Land of Isral since the destruction fo the Temple by the Romans.

Were the Ottomons not sovereign? You mean the local Arabs never had soverignty. I know that Herzl had the best intentions but he was still ignoring the people who lived there by assuming they would comply with a take over by foreigners who were not even co-religionists. In the event, as I related last time, the madmen were not willing to try to persuade the native Arabs. The bombed them out. That is what started the conflict. With more patience and adequate compensation for any losses, the whole thing could probably have been done peacefully.

As well one cannot retroject today’s intense Arab nationalism back to that time. During the early part of the last century, the idea of Arab nationalism was completely alien to the Middle East and only began to change slightly with the First World War. In fact, the Emir of TransJordan, in correspondance with Chaim Weizmann in the 1920s, expressed hope for a properous future in the Middle East with Jews and Arabs living harmoniously and in prosperity. The founding fathers of Zionism (with the exception of the outcast Jabotinsky) never thought that there would be an issue with the Arabs at all, there had never been Arab nationalism up to that time.

We are making the same point, So who was responsible for the breakdown in relations?

As time went on, no matter what the propaganda to the contrary might state, the fact is that many Arabs from the surrounding countries were attracted to the Palestine by the upsurge in the economic fortunes of the region brought by the Zionist settlers. How else did a population of not much more than 250,000 in the 1880s, who had been not more than than 200,000 in the 1820s, swell to over 750,000 in the matter of 60 years, without a commensurate increase in the population’s birthrate? Obviously the Arabs of the surrounding areas were attracted to the new opportunities in this land that lay neglected for centuries before the arrival of the Zionists.

I cannot say whether you are right or not but I suspect what you say. All popualtions have been rising exponentially in the time that you mention, and the figures that you offer correspond only to less than 1% growth per annum since 1820. That is not a lot, and does not suggest much immigration, even if you are right that there has been some. If I lived there I would emigrate as soon as I could raise the money and get a visa to some other place—whether I were a Jew or an Arab, but then I am either sensible or a coward according to your point of view—perhaps both.

As well, I believe that you meant to finger the Irgun as the Jewish terrorist group. The Stern Gang was invovled in attacking British troops, who were keeping Holocaust survivors from reaching the shores of Israel, they had no beef with the Arabs really, in fact many of the Stern Gang wanted to join forces with the Arabs against the British. Also, many of the Stern Gang’s leadership became ardent peaceniks after the War of Independence. The Irgun on the other hand did retaliate forcefully and violently, not to mention often indiscriminantly, agains the Arabs. And I certainly condem any such actions against innocent civilians as utterly dispicable. That however does not preclude me from being a Zionist. The fact is, the majority of Jews at the time were completely appalled by the Irgun as was practically the entire Zionist Yishuv leadership.

I have no reason to argue with you here. My memory is fallible obviously, and I do not claim to have followed the Arab-Israeli conflict that closely over the years. Irgun, you will be right, and the Stern gang is what we heard most of in the UK. I was a boy at the time, seeing it on the newsreels. The point is you say real Zionists were appalled. What then did they do about it? If they thought the Irgun would bomb them too have they explained this to the leadership of the free world? You are explaining to me that as a liberal Zionist none of it was your fault but where then were you all? You all seemed to think: “Oh well, what is done is done, come and settle, comrades.” For this indifference you reap the wirlwind and blame it on to the victims.

In your previous letter you state on a few occasions that the Zionists expelled the “natives” from their homes. First of all, from the 1880s throught to the mid-1940s no Arabs were expelled at all.

I am referring to what, as you corrected me, was the activities of the Irgun.

During the first stage of Israel’s War of Independence, when the war was confined to warring factions in Israel/Palestine, no Arabs were exiled then either. Arabs only began to flee once the heavy fighting brought by the outside Arab armies began. For detailed analysis of the refugee issue one can consult Benny Morris’s work, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Joan Peter’s, From Time Immemorial, or Aryeh Avneri’s Claim of Dispossesion. All respected scholars (and no not the Israeli nationalist ones) agree that there was no concerted effort by the Jews to drive the Arabs out of their homes. The vast majority of Arab refugees fled the fighting, as people in war zones all over the world do. In some local instances Arabs were forced fom their homes because these areas had been used to relentlessly attack Jews and Jewish settlements, for example in the Jerusalem corridor. In other instances, such as in Haifa, where the Jewish mayor of the town practically begged the Arab residents, who had lived peacefully with their Jewish neighbors, to stay, the Arabs were convinced by their leaders to leave the city so that their armies would have a free hand in bombing it.

Well, Of course, once a war starts, populations have to flee, but the fact that such a war was possible shows that lots of illegal settlers had already entered Israel and they cannot have been without resources. From where I am, starving Jewish refugees shipped from Europe into a country of impoverished Arab farmers. A war starts and the starving Jewish settlers win. You are desperately putting over the viewpoint that you want to uphold, but refugees and half-dead victims of the concentration camps look unlikely victors. They did win, though. So where did their resources come from. We know where they come from now. Were they the same? If they were, you ought to suspect that you are being used as pawns. I think you are.

One also must not ignore the fact that the Arabs’ stated objective in the war was to erradicate Israel and drown all of the Jews in the sea. This only 3 years after the end of World War II. The fact that the Arabs were beaten does not diminish the fact that they were the aggressors in this war and that the ill fate that befell them was of there own making. Had the Arabs never risen up against the Jews, had they excepted the UN partition resolution as the Jews did, there would never have been any Palestinian refugees.

Oh, come on. You are doing the same again. You are making the victims into the aggressors. As I suggested above, in my view, the Jews are no less victims. They were victimized by the Nazis then made the pawns of US global policy, and now the pawns of insane Christian fundamentalists. Stop reading your own propaganda sheets, and think about your true situation and how you got there. You began by saying that the Arabs before the war were on good terms with Jews and Chaim Weizmann, and were not nationalistic, but immediately after the war, by coincidence when a lot of foreigners began taking over their land, they became nationalistic. There is no need to pretend naïevetë. If the whole situation had been completely reversed, the Jews lived there traditionally and shiploads of Arabs came in backed by the US, would you have accepted the UN partition? You will not even give the Arabs a face-saving settlement now.

In your email you state that the partition resolution was forced upon the Palestinian Arabs. This is not correct, or at least it must be said that it was equally forced upon the Jews. The partition resolution and its accompnying map was drawn based on ethno-geographic lines, simply, Israel got the areas where the majority of Jews lived, while Palestine got the areas where the majority of Arabs lived. There is no reason why areas of major Jewish settlement should have been allocated to the Arabs. The Jews have just as much right to live under their own sovereignty as the Arabs do. Under the partition resolution each side got to keep the areas where they lived, unfortunately the Arabs couldn’t accept that.

Look, MJ Z, we are going around in circles. Earlier you tried to persuade me that Jews had bought their land in commercial deals just like the Franciscans, and I refused to accept that gave any entitlement to set up an independent state in those parts of the country that had been bought. We have been through the whole gamut of Irgun and war between the natives and the settlers which the settlers won. That is why the partition was imposed on the Arabs. The Jews won the war and were able to do it by force. It seems typical to me of Israeli, perhaps Zionist, propaganda that the Jews want to project themselves as victims. I have conceded that they are, but not victims of the Arabs. Your argument is that you are justifiably defending yourself against the Arabs, and the Arabs see it precisely the same way, but from their own viewpoint, against you—they are protecting themselves from you! If you cannot see this, then you are not a liberal, and you will never want any agreement at all, short of expulsion of the native population. Maybe that is what you do want, and the Arabs know it full well. You are not happy that the owners of the house the lodgers have appropriated should live in the shed. You want them to live in the field at the back, or even further away if possible.

....

This is a hiatus representing me going out to the pub and having a few bevvies—of cider in my case, the wonderful ferment of the fruit traditionally forbidden from Adam. Bully for Eve, say I. Without her we should never have known the nectar of the gods.

So you might sense a different tone in my words from here. More mellow, maybe, or more impatient, perhaps. Where were we?

Yes, I again stated that the Arabs have a right to self-determination and proper sovereignty and I continue to maintain that. As well, this is not in any way incompatible with Zionism. Again you must distinguish between moderate, true Zionism and fanatical chauvenistic Zionsits. I, along with the vast majority of Zionists and Israelis, don’t for a second think that the Palestinians should be ruled by anyone but themselves. Poll after poll after poll in Israel show that that more than 75% of Israelis think that the Palestinians should have their own state to be free and sovereign. One however, cannot expect the Israelis to reliquish military control of the West Bank until the Palestinians show even a hint of a desire to live together in peace. The first responsibility of a state is to protect its citizens, one cannot expect the government of Israel to provide the Palestinians with freedom only to have them turn around and attack Israel and continue to try and murder Jews, it will never happen.

Look, MJ, if 75% of Israelis think that then why do they not let the Arabs have their state? You are making conditions that are impossible. We are back to the 95% thing. Let them have their state truly, and with assistance. Jews are sophisticated people, and from what I have seen, and from what you say, Arabs are not. So who should take the lead, and should I say, the responsibility? The Jews, now called Israelis, are there and the Arabs have no rights it seems until they agree to be slaves or ciphers. Just use your imagination, if you still have any. Would you find it acceptable? The burden is on you to make it acceptable to the Arabs. How do the Arabs in the fundaments of their struggle differ from the Maccabees in their struggle? Try being human, and not merely Zionist, if it is not beyond you. You keep saying—saying—you have sympathy with the oppressed. Then stop being a Zionist and start being a human being. Actually do it.

However, even Ariel Sharon has stated publically and repeatedly that he favours a Palestinian state once the violence ends. Arafats own advisors (Mohammed Dahlan, Nabil Amr et al) and fellow PLO executives (Abu Mazen, Sari Nusseibeh et al) realize that he, and not Sharon, nor the Likud, is the obstacle to a Palestinian State. Unfortunately, in Arafat’s little dictatorship these men are not allowed to stand up and freely speak their minds.

So they must accept 95%. You are a phony, MJ.

As for offering 95%, 96%, 93% of the territories, this was the openning stand in a negociated process. The fact remains that when Barak openned with his offer of 95% (which was supplemented by a further 2% land swap), the Palestinians could have come back with a request for a 5% land swap to bring them to 100%. This was never done, Arafat simply packed his bags and headed home, even Clinton lay the blame squarely on Arafat’s shoulders. If this was such a bad offer, then why are the Palestinians practically begging to go back to this offer now? As for asking me about which solutions I support, I am a fervent supporter of the compromise worked out by former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon and Al-Quds University President and PLO Representative for Jerusalem Sari Nusseibeh. Their peace plan, which I think will one day be the permanent status agreement (hopefully sooner rather than after more needless bloodshed), was the subject of several articles in Ha’aretz just a couple of months ago. In fact Ami Ayalon was the most welcomed speaker by the crowd at Yitzhak Rabin’s recent memeorial.

You are closer to the details of these things than I am, but distance can be advantageous, so long as you do not soak up propaganda. You are utterly insincere, because if the full settlement was on offer, then to offer only 95% was to invite rejection. Barak knew it was unacceptable, so he was cheating too. Arguably, Barak is a nicer man than Sharon, but since he left the door open for Sharon, they look no different from here.

Let Araft put Sharon on the defensive. Let him stop the suicide-murderers and embrace the Nusseibeh-Ayalon plan. Let him throw the gauntlet down before Sharon. Remember, it’s relatively simple for Arafat to stop the murderers in comparison to Sharon uprooting all of the settlers. Terror can be restarted any time, but once the State of Palestine is established and recognized it will be a fait accompli. The settlements can be removed, or more efficiently, settlers can be moved to sovereign Israel and their homes can be used to resettle Palestinian refugees in the State of Palestine. Remeber that it was Ariel Sharon who removed the settlers from the Sinai in exchange for peace. If the French could uproot their settlers in Algeria, then there’s no reason why the Israelis can’t do the same. Let the Palestinians show the courage of Sadat and they too will get the land they covet.

The whole argument depends on something that seems from here extremely unlikely, and that is that Arafat controls the extremist sects that persist in the bombing. That is plainly your Zionist position to enable the Israelis to keep blasting the Palestinians, but the British, supposedly the fourth greatest power in the world—propaganda itself, but still compelling, Britain is a powerful country—cannot stop bombing here by IRA, and by Orangemen and animal rights campaigners too, and the US could not stop occasional maniacs bombing there. You are asking the impossible of Arafat, and you know it. It is your excuse. You cannot stop bombings, so you blame Arafat for not stopping them. The whole point is to stop the cause of them. Settle with dignity and honesty.

If threre is one point that I feel most strongly about it is that anyone who purports to be liberal, open-minded and just, must logically be sympathetic to Zionism. Remember, Zionism is simply the idea that Jews should be free to live in their own land, period. Arab rights and freedoms are an equally important, but separate issue. Do not lump all Zionist in with fanatical Jews. That would be akin to my throwing all Socialists together with muderderous Communists like Stalin, all Protestants together with the KKK, etc..... Enlightened, intellectuals like Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua see no inconsistency in being liberal and Zionist, neither do I. Please don’t deny my my people the right to be free in our own land. How can one claim to support the Palestinians in their quest for freedom in their own state and not support the same right for the Jews? To me it is incompatible to be a liberal and not a Zionist.

Well, here we have a dissension within Zionists, or did have once. Are you claiming a Jewish land, or The Jewish land as defined by the book of ancient myths called the Jewish scriptures. The communists, if you mean the Russian ones, gave Jews a home. The British offered Jews a home. The Zionists did not want just a home. They wanted Palestine only. Well, now they have got it, but the Jewish God was always perverse, and they have not got what they expected. Israelis are in an uncomfortable hole, but they are digging themselves deeper into it. I agree with you that the thing might have been done sensibly with little trouble had Jews followed the moderation of Theodor Herzl and the liberal Jews who founded Zionism, but we are back to the Irish joke. You missed the turning and now you have got lost. In diplomacy, though, and common sense, you can change direction. It is not just a road to be followed. Compromises can be made and amends too, so that you can say, “Look, let’s start again.” If you are liberal Zionists, I think you have no choice, to retain any credibility, but to reject the madmen who have taken over your movement.

I assume you live in Israel and have heard of Marks and Spencer, a food and clothing shop. If you have heard of it wherever you live, you will know it was founded by Michael Marks, a Polish Jew who settled in Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, my own birth place, and opened a market stall. He could not speak English or understand English money but had to earn a living, so he bought necessary items for households and priced them all at the same price. “Don’t ask the price—it’s a penny.” This was a slogan he had written by an English speaking friend over his stall. Marks’s success is a marvellous lesson to us all.

If Marks left Poland today, he would go to Israel and waste his talents fighting Arabs and perhaps losing his life, or being a policeman or an anonymity in a kibbutz. You know what. I am glad Marks had no Israel to go to. We all benefited by his enterprise. Jews are famous for that. Jews are citizens of the world, and the world needs them. Why do you want to persuade them they should waste their lives on a piece of arid limestone? You call yourself secular, but it is a lie. If you were secular, you would never dream of wanting to go to Israel, or to stay there if you were born there. Your basis is biblical.

Reading List

More can be had on the history of the founding of modern Israel in this reading list given by Dr Matthew Hughes of the University of Salford in a recent review of the first book listed in Reviews in History.

• Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (eds) (with an afterword by Edward Said), The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948, (Cambridge: CUP, 2001), ISBN (paperback) 0-521-79476-5;
• Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem 1947-49 (Cambridge: CUP, 1987);
• Benny Morris, 1948 and After: Israel and the Palestinians, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990);
• Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-1999 (London: John Murray, 2000);
• Ilan Pappé, The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1951, (London & New York: IB Taurus, 1992);
• Ilan Pappé (ed), The Israel/Palestine Question (London & New York: Routledge, 1999);
• Simha Flapan, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities (New York: Pantheon, 1987);
• Avi Shlaim, Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement and the Partition of Palestine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988);
• Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (London, Allen Lane, 2000).
• Neil Caplan, Zionism and the Arabs: Another Look at the New Historiography, Journal of Contemporary History, 36/2, April 2001, 348-9, for Israeli schoolbooks

Avi Shlaim challenges the myth of an Israeli David versus an Arab Goliath in the 1948 war. The Arab coalition “was one of the most divided, disorganised and ramshackle coalitions in the entire history of warfare”.

The fissiparous Arab bloc set Hashemites against anti-Hashemites in the Arab League; Abdullah of Jordan, keen to create a “greater Syria” under his rule, schemed against the Syrians and others; King Faruq of Egypt looked on aghast at Abdullah’s evident ambitions; all the while, the Palestinian leadership, such as it was, worked against itself as different nodes of power jockeyed for position.

Matthew Hughes

The politicians of the Arab League continued their backstage manoeuvres, labyrinthine intrigues and sordid attempts to stab each other in the back—all in the name of the highest pan-Arab ideals.

Avi Shlaim

When one probes the politics of the war and not merely the military operations, the picture that emerges is not the familiar one of Israel standing alone against the combined military might of the entire Arab world but rather one of a remarkable convergence between the interests of Israel and those of Transjordan against the other members of the Arab coalition and especially against the Palestinians. My purpose in writing this survey was not to pass moral judgement on Israel’s conduct in 1948 or to delegitimize Zionism but to suggest that the traditional Zionist narrative of the birth of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war is deeply flawed.

Avi Shlaim

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
Other Resources—Early Christian Docs | Resources for Study | Traditional Bible-History | Traditional Bible World History | Traditional Bible History | about.com biblical history | Apologetics web sites | Advent Ch Fathers | Orion center links | Wikipedia | Traditional Jewish History