Jewish Criticism of Zionism

Middle East Policy Council
www.mepc.org/journal/9012_corrigan.asp

Winter 1990-91, Number 35

JEWISH CRITICISM OF ZIONISM

Edward C. Corrigan

Mr. Corrigan has a law degree from the University of Windsor and a Master's in political science from the University of Western Ontario. He advises the reader: "This article is not intended to be a comprehensive study of Jewish criticism of Zionism but only an introductory survey. The author owes a debt to many people in the Jewish community for assistance and would like to thank David Finkel and especially Harriet Karchmer for her help with the material on Orthodox Jews. The writer, of course, bears all responsibility for the material and any errors or omissions."

The Palestinian uprising or intifada and the Israeli campaign to suppress it have caused considerable anguish for many Jews around the world. A large number of Jews have even begun to reassess their support for Israel and critically analyze the ideology of Zionism which legitimates the Jewish state. One example of this phenomenon is a statement that appeared in The Nation on February 3, 1988. It was endorsed by 18 prominent American Jews.

The advertisement called upon American Jews to "dissociate from Israel." It expressed the concern that "the close identification in the public mind between Israel and Jews -- an equation vigorously fostered by both the Zionist movement and the American Jewish lobby, which has come under its control -- threatens to stigmatize Jews everywhere." The ad called for a two-state solution and for negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization.1

The statement also discussed past discrimination against the Jews and the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust adding:


"How tragic that in our own time the very state established by Jews in the aftermath of this evil has become a place where racialism, religious discrimination, militarism and injustice prevail; and that Israel itself has become a pariah state within the world community. Events taking place today are all too reminiscent of the pogroms from which our own forefathers fled two and three generations ago -- but this time those in authority are Jews and the victims are Moslems and Christian Palestinians."

Those endorsing The Nation statement included Professor Yigal Arens, the son of Moshe Arens; Mark Bruzonsky, former Washington Associate, World Jewish Congress, who now serves as chairperson for the organization; Professor Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor MIT; Rabbi Susan Einbinder, Colgate University; Jane Hunter, publisher of Israeli Foreign Affairs; Jeremy Levin, former CNN Beirut Bureau Chief and former hostage in Lebanon; Professor Don Peretz, Department of Political Science, SUNY; and Henry Schwarzschild, of the American Civil Liberties Union. The subsequent organization they formed, the Jewish Committee on the Middle East (JCOME), has, in the short time that it has existed, attracted well over a thousand signatures endorsing their statement. These include academics at 125 U.S. universities.2

JCOME has challenged pro-Israeli American Jewish leaders to conduct a joint poll to see what American Jews really think about Israel and the Palestinians. To back up their challenge JCOME cited evidence which suggests that there is a divergence of opinion between American Jews and the pronouncements of their "official" leadership. As one example of a difference in opinion JCOME pointed to a poll which showed that 29 percent of American Jews favor negotiations with the PLO.3 However, while this new organization is important, Jewish criticism of Israel's policies and Zionism is not new. They both have deep roots within the Jewish community.

It is clear that the ideology of Zionism has had a profound impact on Jews. Today most Western Jews support its objective of establishing and securing a Jewish state in the territory formerly known as Palestine, even though the majority do not follow its precepts and immigrate to Israel. Historically Zionism was the subject of intense debate. Zionism has always meant different things to different people. It could be interpreted in a religious, political, national or racial light depending upon the circumstances. For some, Zionism was a solution for the age-old problem of anti-Semitism, while for others merely an excuse for getting rid of the Jews. As Hannah Arendt explained, "The Zionist Organization had developed a genius for not answering, or answering ambiguously, all questions of political consequence. Everyone was free to interpret Zionism as he pleased . . . ."4

Zionist leaders have put off indefinitely the attempt to resolve the resulting conflicts and even contradictions generated by different interpretations of Zionism. This explains why the "Jewish state" has no constitution and why many fundamental questions about the nature of Israel remain undefined. The avoidance of a battle over conflicting definitions of what is a Jewish state is one of the reasons why Israel has a vested interest in maintaining the state of war in the Middle East. This interest has been openly acknowledged by a former president of the World Jewish Congress, Nahum Goldmann:


"On the day when peace comes, the leftist movement will undoubtedly be very strong in Israel, and it will be anti-Orthodox. A great cultural battle will then break out which, like Ben Gurion, I want to avoid at this moment: as long as war prevails, that kind of internal struggle would be terribly dangerous. But after the hostilities the first thing to do will be to separate religion and state. Today we confine ourselves to telling the leftists: "Don't make a fuss on this question, you will be obstructing our defence policy, which requires national unity" -- and the leftists, being good patriots, give way. But after the peace they will resume the debate."5

Prior to World War II the majority of Jews were non-Zionist, and a large number were openly hostile to Zionism. As Nahum Goldmann wrote, "When Zionism first appeared on the world scene most Jews opposed it and scoffed at it. Herzl was only supported by a small minority."6 It was not until the full horror of the Holocaust was realized that the great bulk of the Jewish community came to support Zionism.

Jewish history is rich in its diversity of ideas and ethical dissent. Many of the Hebrew prophets were "solitary voices" who criticized their people for betraying the great principles of their faith. The prophet Amos, for example, advanced a new interpretation of the "Chosen People" thesis. He wrote: "From all the families of the earth I have chosen you alone; for that very reason I will punish you for all your iniquities." Amos' concept of "chosen" did "not imply the assurance of victory or prosperity" but rather that of "the burden of more severe punishment for 'normal' unrighteousness."7

Amos was even more revolutionary in reinterpreting the meaning of the "Promised Land." To quote Hans Kohn:


"Through his mouth the Lord proclaimed that the children of Israel were unto Him no better than the children of the Ethiopians. True, God had brought up Israel out of the land of Egypt; but equally He brought the Philistines (then Israel's hereditary enemies) from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir, guiding each one into its land."8

In Amos' view all peoples were entitled to the land they occupied in a spirit of equality and sharing. No one people had special God-given rights.

One of the most critical moments in ancient Jewish history was when Jochanan ben Zakkai, the leading representative of Judaism in his day and the disciple of Hillel, "abandoned the cause of the Jewish state." At the time, the city of Jerusalem was besieged by the Romans and heroically defended by the zealots. Zakkai escaped from the city by a ruse, and with the agreement of the Roman commander, established a Jewish academy at Jabne. Judaism survived while the Jewish state was destroyed.9

In the more recent period, Ahad Ha-am (Hebrew for "One of the People" and the pen name for Asher Ginzberg), one of the greatest Jewish thinkers of this century, was also highly critical of Zionism.10 He drew attention to the fundamental and neglected ethical dilemma of Zionism, namely the presence of the Arabs. In his 1891 report, The Truth from Palestine, he pointed out that "there was little untilled soil in Palestine, except for stony hills and sand dunes." Ahad Ha-am also warned the Jewish settlers against arousing the wrath of the large native Arab population:


"Yet what do our brethren do in Palestine? Just the very opposite! Serfs they were in the lands of the diaspora and suddenly they find themselves in freedom, and this change has awakened in them an inclination to despotism. They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, deprive them of their rights, offend them without cause, and even boast of these deeds; and nobody among us opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination."11

Ahad Ha-am wrote this statement when Zionist settlers formed only a tiny portion of the population of Palestine. He also gave the following warning: "We think. . . that the Arabs are all savages who live like animals and do not understand what is happening around. This is, however, a great error."12

Ahad Ha-am worked tirelessly for an intellectual and spiritual revival of the Jewish people. His belief in Zion was of a spiritual and prophetic nature. In 1913 he attacked the Zionist labor movement's racial boycott of Arab labor:


"Apart from the political danger, I can't put up with the idea that our brethren are morally capable of behaving in such a way to men of another people; and unwittingly the thought comes to my mind: if it is so now, what will be our relation to the others if in truth we shall achieve "at the end of time" power in Eretz Israel? If this be the "Messiah," I do not wish to see his coming."13

Israel Zangwill, one of Herzl's earliest and strongest supporters, eventually turned against the idea of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. Ironically it was Zangwill who coined the phrase "a land without a people for a people without a land." It was this phrase that became the potent rallying call for Zionist settlement in Palestine.14

It was not until 1904 that Zangwill realized that there was a fundamental problem with the Zionist program. In a speech given in New York in that year he explained:


"There is. . . a difficulty from which the Zionist dares not avert his eyes, though he rarely likes to face it. Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United States, having 52 souls to every square mile, and not 25 percent of them Jews; so we must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the tribes in possession as our forefathers did, or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan.. . . This is an infinitely graver difficulty than the stock anti-Zionist taunt that nobody would go to Palestine if we got it. . . ."15

Zangwill and many other leading Zionists split from the movement in 1905 when the Zionist Organization turned down the British offer to settle Jews in Uganda. Incidently, this proposal was supported by Herzl. The dissidents set up the Jewish Territorial Organization to pursue alternative settlement proposals. Zangwill was elected leader of the new body. The organization was, however, dissolved in 1925.16

Sir Edwin Montagu, the only Jewish member of Lloyd George's cabinet when Great Britain first threw its weight behind Zionism in 1917, was also adamantly opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. He attacked the Balfour Declaration and Zionism because he believed they were anti-Semitic. Montagu based his argument on the fact that both Zionism and anti-Semitism were based on the premise that Jews and non-Jews could not co-exist. He was also afraid that a Jewish state would undermine the security of Jews in other countries.17 Montagu's opposition to Zionism was supported by the leading representative bodies of Anglo-Jewry, the Board of Deputies and the Anglo-Jewish Association, and in particular, by Claude Montefibre, David Alexander and Lucien Wolf.18

RELIGIOUS OPPOSITION TO ZIONISM
Much of the fiercest opposition to Zionism came from the Jewish religious community which attacked its secular nationalism. Akiva Orr, who characterizes himself as a Jewish refugee from Israel, describes this conflict between religion and secularism as follows:


"The State of Israel is a secular state: its law, its legislative assembly (the Knesset), and the majority of its population are non-religious. This is hardly surprising as Israel came into existence due to the efforts of a secular political movement motivated by non-religious nationalism, namely political Zionism. In its early days Zionism came into fierce conflict with religious Jewry. The Zionists rejected religious submissiveness; the religious saw the atheist attempt to create a secular Jewish state as blasphemy."19

A nonreligious Jewish identity is antithetical to a religious definition of Jewishness. This fact presents an irreconcilable contradiction between the religious and secular streams in the Jewish community. Theodore Herzl, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and many other leading Zionists were non-believers who actively sought to reformulate the basis for Jewish existence on race and territorial nationalism.20 This process would thereby "normalize" the existence of the Jewish people.21 The anti-religious component of political Zionism explains the vehement opposition of most devout Jews when the movement first emerged.

For religious Jews the restoration of Zion could only be brought about by divine intervention; human attempts to reestablish Israel were heretical. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the religious leader of nineteenth century German Orthodox Jews stated that it was a sin to promote Jewish emigration to Palestine.22 Zionists were called by Rabbi Joseph Hayyim Sonnenfeld of Brisk "ruffians" and "evil men."23 In 1898 Rabbi Sonnenfeld wrote that Zionists have


"asserted view that the whole difference and distinction between Israel and The Nations lies in nationalism, blood and race, and that the faith and the religion are superfluous. . . . Dr. Herzl comes not from the Lord, but from the side of pollution."24

Other leading Jewish religious leaders who opposed Zionism included Moritz Gudemann, Chief Rabbi of Vienna,25 Dr. Herman Adler, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain,26 the Lubbavitscher Rebbe, Rabbi Shulem ben Schneersohn,27 the Holy Gerer Rebbe, the Stas Emes,28 and Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the leader of the American Reform Movement.29 Many more Jewish religious leaders were opposed to Zionism.30

Religious Jews in Palestine and the Orthodox Jewish organization, Agudas Yisroel, founded in 1912, also opposed the political Zionist colonization program in Palestine. They protested, to the British Mandatory Administration, against the Zionist claim to represent the entire Jewish community.31 Nathan Birnbaum, an early Zionist, who is credited with coining the term Zionist, later broke with the movement and became a devoutly Orthodox anti-Zionist Jew. For a brief time he served as one of Aguda's spokesmen.32

On June 30, 1924, Jakob Israel De Han, a member of Aguda's executive committee, was assassinated in Palestine by underground soldiers of the Haganah. He had "violently denounced Zionism in cables to British newspapers and attacked the Balfour declaration" and British colonial officials who were "pro-Zionist " De Han became a martyr to Jerusalem's anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews.33

In time, the Zionists managed to win much of the Orthodox Jewish community to their cause. This was done in part by granting the Orthodox political and economic concessions and by implementing a proportional representation system in central Zionist organizations and in the Israeli Knesset. This type of political mechanism gave the Orthodox Jews an important role in determining the course of Jewish affairs in Zionist institutions.

The various religious parties in Israel today represent Orthodox Jewish opinion that has accommodated itself to the Zionist view. However, the religious orientation of these parties is frequently at odds with the majority secular-national interpretation of "Jewishness" in Israel. This contradiction is the source of much political conflict.34

It can even be said that the Israeli ultra-orthodox religious parties which participate in Israeli politics are still anti-Zionist, despite that involvement. The ultra-Orthodox parties are Shas (the Sephardic religious party), Aguda (the Hasidic) and Degel Hatorah (the Flag of the Torah or the "Lithuanian party"). They are supported by between 250,000 and 300,000 Orthodox Israeli Jews and won 13 Knesset seats in the 1988 election.35

These three religious parties are opposed to the Zionist aim of creating a secular Jewish homeland, and as such are considered by some as anti-Zionist. This view is held despite the fact that they support the continued occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and bargain for financial support from the state. The National Religious party, which won five seats in the 1988 Israeli election, is considered Zionist and over the years has become increasingly nationalistic.36

While much of the Orthodox religious Jewish community was eventually won over to the extent of giving at least nominal support to the state of Israel, significant pockets of resistance remain. The Neturei Karta ("Guardians of the Walls") in their large enclaves in Jerusalem's Mea Sharim Quarter and in Bnai Brak near Tel Aviv, preserve Orthodox Jewry's fierce opposition to Zionism. They refuse to have anything to do with Israeli state authorities.37 The following is an excerpt from a Neturei Karta advertisement that appeared in The New York Times on June 15, 1981:


"Besides the millions of Jews who are non-Zionist, there are many hundreds of thousands of Jews who are fervently anti-Zionist. They are opposed to Zionism and the very existence of the Zionist state because Zionism seeks to change the essence of Judaism and substitute chauvinism and militarism and loyalty to the Zionist state for the lofty and unchangeable principles of the Jewish faith. The Jewish nation was not founded by Zionist politicians but the character of Jewish nationhood was determined on Mount Sinai and the Jewish people as well as every individual Jew are bound to fulfill the Mitzvos (commandments) of the oral and written law of the Torah. Jews are certain that the Jewish redemption will come with the coming of the Moshiach. The establishment of the Zionist state before that time is heretic and indeed blasphemous. Our greatest rabbis have taught us that Zionism is one of the worst calamities that has ever befallen the Jewish people."38

The intensity of the ultra-Orthodox's opposition to political Zionism is fierce. Rabbi Moshe Schonfeld, for example, argues that Zionism is causing a genocide of the Jewish people by destroying the religious and spiritual basis for Jewish existence.39 Rabbi Moshe Leib-Hirsch summarized the extent of Neturei Karta's opposition to Zionism by stating, "We will not accept a Zionist State even if the Arabs do."40

Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar rebbe, until his death in 1979, at the age of 91, was also implacably anti-Zionist and "influenced Orthodox Jewry in the whole of Transylvania." After World War II, and a brief stay in Jerusalem, he emigrated to New York. Many of his followers congregated there and new members joined his flock. Rabbi Teitelbaum opposed Zionism not only on halachic grounds but also because he believed that "Zionism forestalled the Messiah. . . brought the Holocaust and other calamities on the Jewish people." In his view the Jewish state "condemned itself through its own lifestyle and politics." Teitelbaum's 40,000 chassidim are found largely in Williamsburg, New York, and in Jerusalem.41

In January 1986 the non-Zionist Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, representing Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, issued a statement attacking Zionism and Israel's policies towards the Palestinians. It included the following:


"It is our duty to denounce those who invoke the name of the Almighty in vain. It is our holy obligation and our moral responsibility to call on them: Stop using these falsehoods and heresies to justify yourselves and your misdeeds. The Jewish faith, as transmitted by the Almighty to our forefathers has not and will never countenance the zionist and nationalistic doctrines of the state of Israel. These false doctrines are compounded of atheism and anti-religious zionism, ideologies alien to Judaism. Let them not be misrepresented to the world as Jewish."42

Reform Jews in the United States were also opposed to Zionism. Their Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 stated their opposition to the establishment of a Jewish state very clearly: "We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine. . . nor the restoration of the laws concerning the Jewish state."43

With the emergence of the Zionist movement their position even hardened. In 1897, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) declared:


". . . we totally disapprove of any attempt for the establishment of a Jewish state. Such attempts show a misunderstanding of Israel's mission, which from the narrow political and national field has been expanded to the promotion among the whole human race of the broad and universalistic religion first proclaimed by the Jewish prophets. . ."44

It was not until 1937, and after the rise of Hitler, that the CCAR changed its position on the question of Zionism. This reversal, however, also spawned another anti-Zionist Jewish organization.45

In 1943, a group of 92 Reform rabbis, and many other prominent American Jews, created the American Council for Judaism with the express intent of combatting Zionism. Included in the Council's leadership were Rabbi Morris S. Lazaron of Baltimore; Lessing J. Rosenwald, the former chairman of the Sears, Roebuck & Company, who became president of the Council; Rabbi Elmer Berger who became its executive director; Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times; and Sidney Wallach of the American Jewish Committee. Membership in the Council grew to over 15,000. Its members were highly articulate and greatly angered the Zionist leadership, who wanted the American Jewish community to present a united front on the Palestine question.46

Even after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1947 the American Council for Judaism continued to oppose Zionism vocally. The magazine, Issues, was their principal vehicle of communication.47 Issues was joined in its opposition to Zionism by The Menorah Journal edited by Dr. Henry Hurwitz48 and William Zukerman's Jewish Newsletter.49

After Israel's spectacular success in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, however, a change in the policy towards Zionism occurred in the American Council for Judaism. Alfred Lilienthal suggests that "Zionist infiltration" succeeded in "neutralizing" the Council.50 A separate organization was subsequently established in 1969 called American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism (AJAZ). The new group, which is based in New York, continues the original anti-Zionist tradition of the American Council for Judaism. Rabbi Elmer Berger is currently the president of AJAZ and also editor of its publication the AJAZ Report.51

One of the most articulate and vocal critics in Canada today of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians is Rabbi Reuben Slonim. He is a spiritual Zionist in the tradition of Ahad Ha-am. His criticisms of Israel's policies eventually led to a break with his congregation in Toronto. However, he does have a small, but devoted, following among the Canadian Jewish community.52 In 1983 he wrote:


"Today we Jews are losing [the] humanism and universalism of Judaism, all for the sake of Jewish statehood. We love Israel, and so we should, but we are so blinded by that love that we are willing to pay a prohibitive price for it. We condone acts we would declare unconscionable anywhere else in the world: nuclear weapons are wrong but necessary for Israel; apartheid is wrong, but for the sake of Israel's survival we will tolerate it; human rights are critical, but not for the Palestinians; we have a right to a state but Palestinians do not. Our racism towards Arabs would be regarded as anti-Semitism if others spoke of us in the same light. In all things we need to remember that the Jewish people and the Jewish state are but instruments, not ends in themselves; that what is good for the world is good for the Jews, not what is good for the Jews is good for the world; that the ultimate goal of the Jew, if he be truly Jewish, is to serve humanity."53

NON-RELIGIOUS OPPOSITION TO ZIONISM
Not only Orthodox and Reform Jews were opposed to Zionism. In March 1919 United States Congressman Julius Kahn presented an anti-Zionist petition to President Woodrow Wilson as he was leaving for the Paris Peace Conference. The petition was signed by 31 prominent American Jews. These included Henry Morgenthau, Sr., ex-ambassador to Turkey; Simon W. Rosendale, ex-attorney general of New York; Mayor L. H. Kampner of Galveston, Texas; E. M. Baker, from Cleveland and president of the Stock Exchange; R. H. Macy's Jesse I. Straus; New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs; and Judge M. C. Sloss of San Francisco.54 The petition read in part:


". . . we protest against the political segregation of the Jews and the re-establishment in Palestine of a distinctively Jewish State as utterly opposed to the principles of democracy which it is the avowed purpose of the World's Peace Conference to establish.
Whether the Jews be regarded as a "race" or as a "religion," it is contrary to the democratic principles for which the world war was waged to found a nation on either or both of these bases."55

Albert Einstein was also anti-Zionist. He made a presentation to the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry, which was examining the Palestine issue in January 1946 and argued against the creation of a Jewish state. Einstein also later turned down the presidency of the state of Israel.56 In 1950 Einstein published the following statement on the question of Zionism.


"I should much rather see reasonable agreement with the Arabs on the basis of living together in peace than the creation of a Jewish state. Apart from the practical considerations, my awareness of the essential nature of Judaism resists the idea of a Jewish state with borders, an army, and a measure of temporal power no matter how modest. I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain -- especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight without a Jewish state."57

Albert Einstein, Sidney Hook, Hannah Arendt and twenty-five other prominent Jews, in a letter to The New York Times (December 4, 1948), condemned Menachem Begin's and Yitzhak Shamir's Likud party as "fascist" and espousing "an admixture of ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority." The same theme is echoed in William Zukerman's 1934 article in The Nation, "The Menace of Jewish Fascism. "58 This is also the premise of Michael Selzer's book, The Aryanization of the Jewish State.59

For most Western Jews and many other people, the connection of Zionism to fascism and racism is odious and inappropriate. However, this theme is a recurrent motif in the debate on Zionism within the Jewish community. Even David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding father and first prime minister, wrote an article in 1933 entitled, "Jabotinsky in the Footsteps of Hitler."60 Vladimir Jabotinsky was the founder of Revisionist Zionism and the mentor of Menachem Begin.

Professor Richard Arens, the late brother of Moshe Arens, the Israeli defense minister and leading figure in the Likud party, has also equated Israeli policies towards the Palestinians with the Nazi persecution of the Jews.61 Hannah Arendt, when writing about the trial of Adolph Eichmann, pointed out the irony of attacking the Nazis' Nuremberg Laws of 1935 when certain laws in Israel regarding the personal status of Jews were identical to the infamous Nazi code.62 Morris Raphael Cohen, the distinguished philosopher, went so far as to argue that "Zionists fundamentally accept the racial ideology of anti-Semites, but draw different conclusions. Instead of the Teuton, it is the Jew that is the pure or superior race."63

Other leading Jewish intellectuals who opposed Zionism include Louis D. Brandeis (see Menuhin, Jewish Critics of Zionism), Martin Buber (coauthor, with J.L. Magnes and E. Simon, of Towards Union in Palestine: Essay on Zionism and Jewish-Arab Cooperation, 1947), Isaac Deutscher ("The Non-Jewish Jew," in The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, 1968), Simon Dubnow (Nationalism and History: Essays on Old and New Judaism, edited by Koppel S. Pinson, 1961), Morris Jastrow (Zionism and the Future of Palestine, the Fallacies and Dangers of Political Zionism, 1919), Emile Marmorstein ("A Bout of Agony," The Guardian, April 1974), Moshe Menuhin (father of Sir Yehudi Menuhin and author of The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time), Claude Montefiore ("Nation or Religious Community?" reprinted in Selzer, Zionism Reconsidered), Jakob I. Petuchowski (Zion Reconsidered, 1966), and Franz Rosenzweig.64 Hans Kohn, who was one of the world's leading authorities on nationalism, posed the following questions on the issue.


"Might not perhaps the "abnormal" existence of the Jews represent a higher form of historical development than territorial nationalism? Has not the diaspora been an essential part of Jewish existence? Did it not secure Jewish survival better than the state could do?"65

Erich Fromm, the eminent scholar, also was critical of Zionism. He stated that the Arabs in Israel had a much more legitimate claim to citizenship than the Jews. Fromm also wrote:


"The claim of the Jews to the Land of Israel cannot be a realistic political claim. If all nations would suddenly claim territories in which their forefathers lived two thousand years ago, this world would be a madhouse."66

Bruno Kreisky, the former chancellor of Austria, who died in July 1990, was well known for his attempts to bring about reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians. ln a 1974 interview with an Israeli paper he stated: "There is no Jewish race; there are only Jewish religious groups. Israel was only the ancient, religious fatherland of Jews, but not their true fatherland."67 In another interview, conducted in 1985, Kreisky said, "In the struggle between Israel and the Palestinians I am on the side of the underdog -- the Palestinians."68

Present-day Jewish opponents of Zionism who have published books on the subject include Rabbi Elmer Berger (The Jewish Dilemma, 1945), Noam Chomsky (The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, 1983), Marc H. Ellis (Towards a Jewish Theology of Liberation: The Uprising and the Future, 1989), Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht (The Fate of the Jews, 1983), Georges Friedmann (The End of the Jewish People, 1967), Maxim Ghilan (How Israel Lost Its Soul, 1974), Alfred M. Lilienthal (What Price Israel? 1953), Norton Mezvinsky (The Character of the State of Israel, 1972), Cheryl Rubenberg (Israel and the American National Interest, 1986), and Michael Selzer (The Wineskin and the Wizard, 1970). Several collections of articles are also useful in understanding the scope of debate within the Jewish community and especially the strength of opposition in Jewish intellectual circles. These collections are Jewish Critics of Zionism by Moshe Menuhin; Zionism Reconsidered, edited by Michael Selzer; and Zionism: The Dream and the Reality -- A Jewish Critique, edited by Gary V. Smith.

Lilienthal's The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace? is one of the classic expositions of the Jewish anti-Zionist position, and as a historical work it is virtually encyclopedic. Lilienthal, who also edited the newsletter Middle East Perspective (1968-1985), Rabbi Elmer Berger and Noam Chomsky have to be considered the three preeminent American Jewish critics of Zionism.69

Many Jews have opposed Zionism because they believe that there is a moral contradiction in trying to create an exclusionist Jewish nation-state out of a universal religious ethic. They have also opposed Zionism because of what it has done to the Palestinians and how they believed this violence would transform Judaism.

A large number of Socialist and Marxist Jewish scholars are also opposed to Zionism. These include Peter Buch, (Zionism and the Arab Revolution, 1967), Steven Goldfield (Garrison State: Israel's Role in U.S. Global Strategy, 1985), Abraham Leon (The Jewish Question, 1973), the famed Orientalist Maxime Rodinson (Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? 1973), Jon Rothschild (editor of Forbidden Agendas: Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East, 1984; coauthor, with Nathan Weinstock, of The Truth about Israel and Zionism, 1970), and Nathan Weinstock (Zionism: False Messiah, 1979). A rising generation of American leftist Jewish thinkers, including Joel Beinin ("From Land Day to Peace Day.. . and Beyond," in Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation, edited by Zachary Lockman and Joel Beinin, 1989), Lenni Brenner (Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, 1983), David Finkel (editor of the Detroit-based magazine Against the Current, whose "Occupation and Resistance: A Look Inside the Israel-Palestine Crisis," appeared in Changes, July-August, 1982), Norman Finkelstein ("Disinformation and the Palestine Question: The Not-So-Strange Case of Joan Peters' From Time Immemorial," in Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question, edited by Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchens, 1988), Christopher Hitchens (writer of a bimonthly column in The Nation),70 Zachary Lockman ("Original Sin," in Intifada, edited by Lockman and Beinin), Joan Mandel71 and Hilton Obenzinger,72 are also highly critical of Zionism.

There also exists in the Soviet Union an active Jewish anti-Zionist organization. It is headed by General David Dragunski.73 Despite reports to the contrary, this organization is still in existence.74 The West tends to dismiss such bodies, but one should remember that historically there has always been a powerful anti-Zionist Socialist and Communist tradition within the Jewish community.

Many Jewish intellectuals were prominent leaders in the Socialist movement, and in many respects they represent a competing stream of thought in the world Jewish community. Leon Trotsky, for example, attacked Zionism as "reactionary," a "blind alley" and "a bloody trap."75 Rosa Luxemberg also was anti-Zionist and as a result was attacked with the accusation of "self-hatred."76 Ephraim Sevela, a Soviet Jewish emigrant to Israel, has written a book about his disillusionment with Zionism in which he concludes that Israel is not a Jewish homeland.77

The Jewish workers' Bund movement was also anti-Zionist. The Bund was a large and well-organized Jewish socialist, autonomist party that existed in Lithuania, Poland and Russia between 1907-1948. It favored a secular East European Jewish nationalism and rejected a world Jewish national identity.78

Over time Socialist Zionists managed to reduce leftist Jewish opposition to the Zionist program by emphasizing the utopian and socialist aspects of political Zionism. The kibbutz experiment of collective farming and the large role labor played in the early years of the state figured prominently in the campaign to win support from the left for the Jewish state. But with the shift of the political character of Zionism to the right and with Begin's and Shamir's rise to power in Israel, and with the increased repression of the Palestinians, the left has lost much of its enthusiasm for the Zionist experiment.

For many critics of Zionism the parallels between Israel's treatment of the Palestinians and South Africa's handling of its black population are striking. Dennis Goldberg, a white South African and member of the African National Congress, was released from Pretoria prison in 1985 to immigrate to Israel when he agreed to fore-swear violent opposition to apartheid.79 He was also highly critical of Israel's close military and economic ties with the white-supremacist state. Goldberg later emigrated from Israel to Great Britain. Mark A. Bruzonsky80 and Micah L. Sifry81 have made similar comparisons. Israel: An Apartheid State, by expatriate Israeli Uri Davis, also equates Israel with South Africa.82

OPPOSITION IN ISRAEL
It may surprise some, but much of the opposition to Zionism today is centered in Israel. It is there that the realities of Zionism's confrontation with the Palestinians are most painfully apparent. Local Jewish opposition to Zionism also has a long history.

Several important Jewish religious leaders in Palestine were opposed to Zionism and the creation of Israel. Rabbi YosefTzvi Dushinsky, the Chief Rabbi of the Holy Land, and Rabbi Zelig Reuven Bengis were opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. These two rabbis stated their opposition in a presentation on June 16, 1947, before the U.N. Commission on Palestine when it convened hearings in Jerusalem. They feared that "a Jewish state would be a rallying point for anti-Semitism and thus an actual danger to the Jewish people."83

In July 1949 Rabbi Amram Blau and Rabbi Aaron Katzenellenbogen sent a memorandum to the Secretary General of the United Nations on behalf of the Neturei Karta in Jerusalem. They called for the internationalization of Jerusalem and asked for U.N. passports and protection for their community.84

Judah L. Magnes, who was president of Hebrew University in Jerusalem during the Palestine Mandate, was also opposed to the creation of a Jewish state.85 In 1936, Magnes, together with other leading Jewish Palestinian humanists, including Pinhas Rutenberg and Moshe Smilanski, advocated the creation of a bi-national state. The Zionist establishment rejected this proposal. These prominent Jewish intellectuals then founded the Ihud (Union) group to oppose the partition of Palestine.86

Shortly before the creation of Israel, Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, on the behalf of the Ihud Association, made the following statement before the Anglo-American Palestine Commission Inquiry: "We do not favor Palestine as a Jewish country or Palestine as an Arab country, but a bi-national Palestine as the common country of two peoples."87 The Ihud, however, abandoned the idea in 1948 after Magnes' death, and after war had broken out in Palestine.88

Mordechai Avi Shaul was one of these early Jewish humanists who continued to oppose the Jewish state after its creation. In 1935 he helped to establish the League of Civil and Human Rights in Palestine, "whose original purpose was to oppose British oppression of Jews and Arabs under the Mandate." He continued to work for equal rights for Arabs in the Jewish state.89

Reb Binyomin, a prominent writer, strongly criticized actions that occurred during the creation of the Jewish state. In 1953 he wrote:


"After the State of Israel was established, I began receiving news about the terrible things perpetrated both during and after the Israeli-Arab war. I did not recognize my own people for the changes which had occurred in their spirit. The acts of brutality were not the worst because those might have been explained somehow. . . Far more terrible was the benevolent attitude towards these acts on the part of public opinion. I had never imagined that such could be the spiritual and moral countenance of Israel. . ."90

Another old Jewish settler, Nathan Chofshi, who also witnessed the birth of the Jewish state, did not like what he saw. In 1959, in a reply to a rabbi who "parroted" the official version of the Palestinian exodus from Israel, he bore witness to the campaign to expel the Palestinian population. Chofshi also stated the following:


"We came and turned the Arabs into tragic refugees. And still we dare slander and malign them, to besmirch their name; instead of being deeply ashamed of what we did, and trying to undo some of the evil we committed, we justify our terrible acts and even attempt to glorify them."91

In 1962 Moshe Machover founded the Israeli Socialist Organization (known as Matzpen after its publication) with other Israeli leftists. He described Zionism as "the equivalent of what in other places is known as white supremacy. Here [in Israel] there are exact parallels in terms of Jewish supremacy."92 Matzpen, however, splintered into several political factions and together with other small left-wing anti-Zionist Israeli groups the divisions greatly diminished the strength of non-Zionist Jewish forces within Israel. All of these "radical" groups came under political attack from state authorities.93

In 1975 Charles Glass estimated that 5-8 percent of Israel's Jewish population fell into the anti-Zionist category. Most of this opposition was of a "leftist" variety. However, Glass also stated that "they represent 50 percent of the only significant debate in the country."94

Ehud Adiv, Dan Vered, Yehezkel Cohen, David Cooper and Rami Livneh are five Jewish Israelis who have been sent to prison for working against the Jewish state. Livneh was sentenced to ten years in prison for meeting with a Fatah member near Nazareth to discuss political issues. His case was adopted by Amnesty International.95

Adiv, Vered, Cohen and Cooper were members of the Revolutionary Communist Alliance-Red Front. They were critical of Matzpen and some of the other leftist anti-Zionist organizations for their lack of a political program. Their belief in activism led them to participate in an underground Palestinian-Israeli organization. This resulted in their being convicted of helping to form an "espionage and sabotage network." The "Red Front Trial" was a shock to Israeli society which was used to the image of its Jewish youth ready to defend The Nation under all circumstances.96 As Charles Glass commented:


"While the Red Front probably never presented a security danger to the State of Israel, its psychological threat was enormous. Here were Jews born and raised in Israel, Adiv himself from a kibbutz, working with Arabs for the overthrow of the state! Young Israelis could not help but ask why."97

The 1986 disclosure by the former Israeli nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, of Israeli's nuclear arsenal can be seen in a similar light. Israeli authorities launched a massive campaign to discredit Vanunu in the eyes of Israel's Jewish population while his trial was conducted in total secrecy. He was convicted of treason and sentenced to 18 years imprisonment.98 The stiff penalty given Vanunu for revealing what has been an open secret for years is a harsh reminder that the Jewish state is tightening the noose around internal dissent.99

One of the leading Israeli anti-Zionists today is concentration-camp survivor Israel Shahak, who currently heads the Israeli League for Civil and Human Rights. Shahak takes the view that "the State of Israel is a racist state in the full meaning of the term: In this state people are discriminated against, in the most permanent and legal way and in the most important areas of life, only because of their origin."100 He also indicates:


"I would say the only human response to Holocaust is to try not to be like Nazis, in word or in deed. What brought the Holocaust was the racist attitude towards Jews, the division of German society into Jews and non-Jews on grounds of race. This is exactly the same thing that is happening in Israel."101

Many view this type of comparison as inappropriate, but other Israeli Jews have drawn the same parallel. Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the renowned scholar of Judaism and philosophy and the editor of several volumes of the Encyclopedia Hebraica, has expressed similar concerns:


"The big crisis of the Jewish people is that the overwhelming majority of the Jews genuinely desire to be Jewish -- but they have no content for their Judaism other than a piece of colored rag attached to the end of a pole and a military uniform. The consciousness and the desire to be Jewish did not vanish, rather they are transformed today into a Judeo-Nazi mentality."102

Other leading Israeli critics of Zionism and of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians include Professor Danny Amit ("There is a basis for an Israeli-Palestinian strategy of joint struggle," MERIP Reports, May 1983), Uri Avnery (Israel without Zionists, 1968), Yoram Binur (My Enemy, My Self, 1989), Uri Davis ("Journey Out of Zionism," in Journal of Palestine Studies, summer 1970), Boaz Evron ("Holocaust: The Uses of Disaster," in Radical America, fall 1983), the late Simha Flapan (The Birth of Israel, 1987), Isaac Hasson ("Can Israel Be a Democratic State?" in The International Humanist, December 1987), Amnon Kapeliouk (Sabra and Shatilla, 1984), Peretz Kidron ("Truth Whereby Nations Live," in Blaming the Victims, edited by Hitchens and Said), Felicia Langer (With My Own Eyes, 1975), the late Livia Rokach (editor of Israel's Sacred Terrorism, 1980), Ur Shlansky ("Eyewitness in Gaza," in Radical America, fall, 1983), Professor Jacob Talmon ("Self-Determination for Palestinian Arabs: An Open Letter," in Jewish Liberation Journal, November-December 1969), Georges Tamarin (The Israeli Dilemma: Essays on a Warfare State, 1973), and Lea Tsemel ("The Political Prisoners," Arab Studies Quarterly, spring/summer 1985). This list is by no means complete.

Many Israelis have also refused to serve in the army on political grounds. These include Marius Shattner, Irith Yacobi and Reuben Lassman.103 In 1973 Giora Neumann was sentenced to eight months imprisonment for refusing military duty. At his trial Neumann said that he had to be loyal to his values, and that the Israeli military had become a "persecuting army" of occupation which "uproots and exiles people."104

Over 2,000 Israeli reserve soldiers signed a petition requesting not to serve in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The opposition to war among Israeli reserve soldiers formalized itself into an organization called Yesh Gvul ("There is a limit").105 Gideon Spiro, one of its founders, wrote:


"It was the first time in Israel's history that Israeli reserve soldiers said to the government: We are not going to a war which violates all democratic and humanistic norms; which violates all international charters to which Israel is a signatory, especially the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; which contradicts the essence and spirit of the Israeli Declaration of Independence; and which involves the criminal bombing of civilian populations."106

Yesh Gvul is not a pacifist organization and does not question the need for an army for Israel's defense. However, its members argued that they were not prepared to support a war they viewed as illegal, and they were not prepared to hide behind the defense of "we acted under orders" in an attempt to justify that illegality. One hundred and fifty Israelis were court martialed for refusing to serve in Lebanon.107

Yesh Gvul has also been active in opposing Israeli policies towards the Palestinians. Over 600 Israeli reserve soldiers have signed a petition indicating their refusal to serve in the Occupied Territories. At least 37 "refuseniks" have been sent to prison and approximately 100 reservists have been released from service after refusing to help crush Palestinian resistance to the occupation of the territories.108

The board of directors of the state-operated Israeli television network has decided to prohibit reports of Yesh Gvul demonstrations. Israel has only one television network. This decision was seen by many Israelis, including those who were opposed to Yesh Gvul, as an ominous attack on freedom of expression.109

Israel's invasion of Lebanon also prompted Jacobo Timerman, the world-renowned author and human-rights activist, to sharply criticize the actions of Israel. He asked, "Why are the Israelis incapable of recognizing the high degree of criminality in their army's campaign against the Palestinian people?"110 In 1988 Timerman attacked "hypocrisy" in Israel:


"Israel's great hypocrisy consists in disguising her policy of occupation with security arguments similar to those utilized by the Argentine generals to justify their bloody dictatorship. The real objective of Israel's policy is to expel all Palestinians and seize their lands. . . . There is a second hypocrisy shocking in its obscenity: the utilization of the Holocaust to justify alleged Israeli fears of a new extermination. It is used as an excuse for the policy of wiping out the Palestinian identity which has been implemented in Israel for the past 20 years, as if an unproven future danger were sufficient reason to commit crimes against a defenseless nation today."111

The 23 years of occupation that has been imposed on the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza has also left its mark on Israeli society. The occupation has been opposed by many Jews.112 Professor Leibowitz, for example, made the following comment:


"It is both understandable and natural that an enslaved people will fight for its freedom against an occupying power with all the means at its disposal, and without regard for their propriety; this phenomenon is recognized to be part and parcel of the wars of liberation of all peoples. We use the term "terrorism" to describe the acts of the Palestinian people, and call their fighters "terrorists." But our rule over a resistant people could not persist were it not for the use of means which are considered to constitute war crimes throughout the world -- and even plain criminal acts. We do not view these acts as terrorism; they are considered to be policy because they are being implemented by a legal government and a state arm. "Aberrant acts" by necessity become the norm because, far from being a side effect of an occupation regime, they are its essence."113

While Palestinians have been long subjected to restrictions, Jews have largely been free from overt state interference, although the Jewish press is censored. However, there are signs that the tactics which are used to control Palestinian opposition are being extended to Jewish dissent.

In February 1987 Michael Warschawsky, an anti-Zionist Israeli and director of the Alternative Information Center was arrested. The Center was closed down and its files seized. The organization provided information on human-rights violations in the Occupied Territories to the media. The Center was a constant irritant to Israeli authorities, who wanted to present a benevolent image of the occupation to the world and "manage" coverage of the suppression of the Palestinian uprising. Several foreign journalists who witnessed the raid claimed that "what's happening here is similar to the police treatment of foreign correspondents in South Africa."114

Warschawsky was charged with security offenses for assisting proscribed "terrorist" organizations. The charges included "rendering typing services to students and women's organizations" which were claimed to be "front organizations for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine." Other offenses included rendering typing facilities for several Palestinian newspapers that are not even banned by the authorities. The Israeli newspaper Hadshot reported that one of the charges leveled against Warschawsky was that he had helped in "preparing and distributing instructional material related to the interrogation method of Shin Bet [Israeli General Security Services], which teaches potential detainees how to behave when they are arrested and thereby harms the activities of the security services. . . ."115

The information was to help Palestinian detainees resist torture techniques practiced by Israeli security services. In the words of one Israeli: "It is clear why Mikado [Warschawsky] was arrested. . . so that the Jews can say: With our hands on our hearts, we didn't know."116

Warschawsky was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment. However, widespread outrage at the harshness of the sentence caused the authorities to reduce it to eight months after an appeal was heard.117

On February 18, 1988, Derech Hanitzotz/Tariq A-Sharara, a joint Hebrew/Arabic newspaper operation, was shut down by Israeli authorities. The paper was left-wing and extremely critical of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians. Four editors and the publisher, all Jews and three of them women, were arrested: Yakov Ben Efrat, Roni Ben Efrat, Michal Schwartz, Hadas Lahav and Asaf Adiv. It was the first Hebrew-language newspaper to be closed under the security laws.118

Hadas Ladav was released after 12 days of solitary confinement without charges being brought. She reported that the detainees were subjected to "emotional torture,. . . humiliation and.., sexual harassment" from the investigators. Ladav stated after such an ordeal, "one does not leave the same person as one went in."119 There were also reports of more severe types of punishment being inflicted on the remaining prisoners. The dissidents were held without bail and charged with security offenses similar to those leveled at Warschawsky.

The term Palestinian is simply that of a national designation which includes not only Christians and Muslims but also Jews, and other religious and even non-religious groups. The first British governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, reported that virtually all indigenous Palestinian Jews were adamantly opposed to European political Zionism.120 Ilan Halevi, a Jewish Palestinian, is a top-ranking member of the PLO. He is the PLO ambassador to Europe and its representative to the Socialist International.121

It is also interesting to note that the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta religious sect has asked for affiliation with the Palestine National Council. Rabbi Moshe Hirsch has even offered to serve as minister for Jewish Affairs in a Palestinian government-in-exile.122 Rabbi Hirsch argues:


"We are as Palestinian as Yasser Arafat. There are Jewish Palestinians, and there are Muslim Palestinians and Christian Palestinians. In regard to issues relating to the Palestinian people, we also have our interests. If a state is established we would like to have our representation in the government."123

Two little-known facts are that the PLO helped protect the Beirut Jewish community (and also the American embassy) during the Lebanese Civil War,124 and it was the Israelis who destroyed their synagogue during the siege of Beirtut.125 Nor has it been widely publicized that nine Palestinian Jews were among the victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.126

There are also a small number of Palestinian Jews still living within Palestinian society. Esther Ramahi is one such individual. She prefers to live in the squalor of the Jelazoun refugee camp, a few kilometers from Ramallah, with her Moslem Palestinian family rather than with her Jewish daughter and all the comforts of modern Israel.127

Like the Palestinian Jews, many Arab Jews (also called Oriental and Sephardic) were initially opposed to political Zionism. European secular Zionism was a totally alien ideological concept that was in direct conflict with their Jewish religious and their Arab cultural background. Kohavi Shemesh, a former leader of the Black Panthers, an Israeli anti-Zionist Oriental Jewish organization, has stated that, contrary to popular belief, "There wasn't any large-scale anti-Semitism in the Arab countries."128

The long-simmering Arab-Israeli dispute and Israel's military actions in the name of the "Jewish people" have all but virtually destroyed what was once a thriving Jewish-Arab community. Today, only remnants remain. It was, of course, in Israel's interest to strengthen the Jewish foothold in Palestine by ingathering Jews from the Arab world.

Naim Giladi, an Oriental Jew and one of the founders of the Black Panthers, has been working on the subject of Mossad operations in the Jewish-Arab community to "facilitate" Jewish-Arab immigration to Israel.129 One example of this campaign to "encourage" Zionist immigration were the bombs set off in Baghdad in 1950 to terrorize the Iraqi-Jewish community into fleeing their home of 2,500 years.130 This question is also the subject of Marion Woolfson's Prophets in Babylon where she argues, from an anti-Zionist Jewish perspective, that the Jewish Arabs were victims of Zionism.131

RECENT OPPOSITION
One of the more recent manifestations of Jewish anti-Zionism is a public advertisement that contained over 200 names, including that of Harry Cohen, a British member of Parliament. The original ad was published in The Manchester Guardian (October 31, 1987) on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration. More names were added to a subsequent version published in the magazine, Jerusalem. The ad stated that "the state of Israel does not represent all Jewish people, neither legally, morally nor in any other way." The statement also charged that "the Zionist structure of the state of Israel is at the heart of the racism and oppression against the Palestinian people, and should be dismantled."132

In other countries Jews are also expressing concern about Israel's policies towards the Palestinians and about the direction that Zionism is heading. In Canada there are several Jewish organizations that are sharply critical of Israel's policies. One of the most active is Jews for a Just Peace. Yossi Schwartz, an Israeli, has served as spokesman for the organization. The group is part of a small but growing number of Canadian Jews who are voicing their opposition to Israel's treatment of the Palestintans.

At a rally organized by Jews for a Just Peace, held in April 1988 in front of the Israeli Consulate in Toronto, Schwartz denounced Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir as a "terrorist," a "fascist" and an enemy not only to the Palestinians, but to the Jewish people too." He said "the real heroes are Jews who refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories and Lebanon." "Petition for Palestinian Rights -- Against the Israeli Law of Return -- for the Palestinian Right to Return," Jerusalem, May 1988, pp. 3 1 -- 33. Their address do Bradford Resource Centre, 31 Manor Row, Bradford, UK BDI 4PS. The demonstration drew a crowd of "about 300 people, including Arabs... as well as members of the New Jewish Agenda." The demonstration was reported to have been "orderly."133

In France, 155 Jews have endorsed an advertisement calling for the French government to recognize the new Palestinian state declared at the Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers on November 15, 1988. The ad stated: "Now that the right of Israel to exist has been recognized by the Palestine National Council, nothing is against negotiations starting between the representatives of the Israeli and Palestinian peoples." They also declared their support for the "peace forces which are fighting bravely in Israel against those who wish, among other things, to expel the entire Arab population."134

The "father" of the proposal to issue a declaration establishing a Palestinian state is Jerome Segal, an American Jewish peace activist who has long been active in promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace.135 At the present time there are also a number of prominent Jewish journalists who are extremely critical of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians. These include Gerald Ca-plan of the Toronto Star ("Mindless cheerleaders for Israel?" May 13, 1990), Anthony Lewis of The New York Times ("Israel: It's Time to Speak Out about Injustice," October 22, 1989, one of many examples), Nat Hentoff of The Village Voice ("The Silence of American Jews," June 29, 1982; reprinted in Journal of Palestine Studies, summer/fall 1982), and Eric Rouleau of Le Monde.136 However, the diverse nature of Jewish opposition to Zionism, in the West at least, and conflicting approaches to politics makes this opposition relatively incoherent and very difficult to weld into a viable alternative Jewish political force. Zionism clearly dominates the activist and organized elements of the Western Jewish community.

Support for Israel has virtually become a litmus test for loyalty to the Jewish community, and the role of religion has clearly diminished. Anti-Zionist Jews are simply defined outside of the community, and if they become vocal they are attacked as self-hating Jews, and sometimes even as "Kapos" (Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in the concentration camps), for betraying the new belief system.

I. F. Stone, the award-winning American Jewish journalist, who died on June 18, 1989, wrote:


". . . Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist. Jews might fight elsewhere for their very security and existence -- against principles and practices they find themselves defending in Israel."137

At the very least, some of the criticisms that I. F. Stone, Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectuals and religious leaders have leveled at Zionism and at the creation of a "Jewish state" seem to have been borne out.

There is no monolithic Jewish position on Zionism. Many Jews have opposed Zionism in the past, and many still do today, whether it is from a religious, leftist, liberal or humanist perspective. It would not be inappropriate to say that Jewish critics of Zionism and of Israel's policies towards the Palestinians are the ones who are upholding the great Jewish tradition of ethical dissent and moral leadership. It also can be argued that Zionist Jews who place power above morality are, in fact, the historical aberration.


1 "Time to Dissociate from Israel," The Nation, February 13, 1988, p. 19.
2 See "Jewish Committee on the Middle East," The Washington Report on the Middle East, November, 1988, p. 19; The Progressive, February 1989, p. 2; and The Nation, January 29, 1990, p. 119. For more information on JCOME see Mark Bruzonsky, "American Jews and the Intifada," Middle East International, July 8, 1988, pp. 18-19. JCOME's address is P.O. Box 18367, Washington, D.C. 20036, telephone (202) 362-5266.
3 "A Challenge to American Jewish Spokesmen," The Nation, May 21, 1988, p. 732.
4 Hannah Arendt, "Zionism Reconsidered," The Menorah Journal, Autumn 1945, reprinted in Michael Selzer, Zionism Reconsidered: The Rejection of Jewish Normalcy (London: The Macmillan Company, 1970), p. 217.
5 Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox, translated by Steven Cox (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), pp. 71-72.
6 Ibid., p. 77.
7 Cited in Hans Kohn, "Zion and the Jewish National Idea," The Menorah Journal, Autumn-Winter 1958, p. 19.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 32.
11 Ahad Ha-am, The Truth from Palestine (1891), quoted in ibid., p. 33.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., p. 34.
14 Israel Zangwill, "The Return to Palestine," New Liberal Review, 11 December 1901, p. 627, cited in David Gilmour, Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians (London: Sphere Books, 1982), p. 44.
15 Israel Zangwill, The Voice of Jerusalem (London: William Heinemann, 1920), p. 88 quoted in Hani A. Faris, "Israel Zangwill's Challenge to Zionism," Journal of Palestine Studies, Spring 1975, p. 85.
16 Aryeh Rubinstein (ed.), The Return to Zion (Jerusalem: Keter Books, 1974), p. 63.
17 See "Memorandum of Edwin Montagu on the Anti-Semitism of the Present (British) Government: Submitted to the British Cabinet August 1917," reproduced in From Haven to Conquest, Walid Khalidi ed. (Beirut: The Institute for Palestine Studies, 1971), pp. 143-151.
18 Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. 400; See also Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949), p. 163. For an example of Wolf s views see "The Zionist Peril," Jewish Quarterly Review, October 1904, pp. 1-25.
19 Akiva Orr, The unJewish State (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), p. i.
20 Marion Woolfson writes "the Zionists whose claim to the land of Palestine was based on a Divine promise, made some four thousand years ago, were self-proclaimed agnostics." Prophets in Babylon (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), p. 12; See also Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews (New York: Times Books, 1983); and Dan E. Serge, A Crisis in Identity: Israel and Zionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 3; and Orr, p. 9.
21 "[T]o be a people like all other peoples," Hannah Arendt, "Zionism Reconsidered," The Menorah Journal Autumn 1945, reprinted in Selzer, p. 230. See also Orr, p. 6.
22 Emile Marmorstein, Heaven at Bay: The Jewish Kulturkampf in the Holy Land (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 79-80. See also Laqueur, p. 407.
23 Laqueur, p. 410.
24 Marmorstein, pp. 79-80.
25 I. Kolatt, "Anti-Zionism," Encyclopedia of Zionism and Israel, Raphael Patai, ed. (New York: Herzl Press, 1971), p. 48.
26 Ibid.
27 "Statement by the Lubbavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Shulem be Schneersohn, on Zionism (1903)," Selzer, pp. 11-18.
28 "Statement by the Holy Gerer Rebbe, the Stas Emes, on Zionism (1901)," Selzer, pp. 19-22.
29 Rubinstein, p. 60. For more information on Rabbi Wise see Israel Knox, Rabbi in America: The Story of Isaac M. Wise (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1957).
30 For a collection of the sayings of leading rabbis against Zionism see M. Black (ed.), Doten sifte yeshenim (3 vols., New York: 1959), cited in Laqueur, p. 407.
31 Laqueur, pp. 407 and 409.
32 Selzer, pp. xxi and 251. For an example of Nathan Birnbaum's views see "In Bondage to Our Fellow Jews," in Selzer, pp. 1-9.
33 Laqueur, p. 410.
34 See for example Emile Marmorstein, "Religious Opposition to Nationalism," International Affairs (London), July 1953, pp. 348-359; also Namal L. Zucker, "Secularization Conflicts in Israel," Religion and Modernization, Donald E. Smith ed. (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 67-94; Timothy Phelps, "Religious struggle tears Israel," Toronto Star, August 10, 1986, p. B3; Patrick Martin, "Split in Israeli society underlined by rise of religious parties," Globe and Mail, November 5, 1988, p. A5.
35 See Avishai Margali, "Israel: The Rise of the Ultra-Orthodox," The New York Review of Books, November 9, 1989, pp. 38-44.
36 Ibid.
37 Charles Glass, "Jews Against Zionism: Israeli Jewish Anti-Zionism," Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1975/ Winter 1976, p. 58.
38 "Jewish Mass Protests Against Zionism," The New York Times, June 15, 1981. The address of this organization is American Neturei Karta, Friends of Jerusalem, Rabbi E. Schwartz, P.O. Box 1030, New York, NY 10009. For a more recent example of a Neturei Karta's ad, see "One State of Palestine," The New York Times, May 10, 1989, p. A30.
39 See Moshe Schonfeld, Genocide in the Holy Land (Brooklyn, New York: Bnei Yeshivos, 1980).
40 Rabbi Moshe Lieb-Hirsch, Yediot Aharonot, February 21, 1975, p. 8 (English translation: Israleft Biweekly News Service, No. 57, March 1, 1975, p. 11) cited in Glass, p. 58. For more information on the Neturei Karta see Yerachmiel Domb (ed.), The Transformation: The Case of the Neturei Karta, 2nd Edition (NY: Hachomo, 1989). To order, write to P.O. Box 190-231, Brooklyn, NY 11219-0004.
41 "Satu-Mare," Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. 14, p. 909; see also David Birkan, "Diary. . . of a People," Canadian Jewish News, August 14, 1986. For more information on the Satmar see Solomon Poll, The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) and Israel Rubin, Satmar: An Island in the City (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972).
42 Statement of the Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, January 11, 1986 (85 Division Avenue, Brooklyn, New York 11211, tel. (212) 384-6765). Reproduced in The Jewish Guardian, vol. 2, no. 10, Winter 1986, 5746, pp. 4-5. The Guardian's address is Box 2143, Brooklyn, New York 11202.
43 Rubinstein, p. 60.
44 Knox, p. 114, quoted in Alan R. Taylor, The Zionist Mind (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, I974), p. 72.
45 Rubenstein, p. 61.
46 Evan Wilson, Decision on Palestine (Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1979), p. 27. Wilson served on the Palestine desk of the State Department during most of this period. See also Moshe Menuhin, The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time (Beirut: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1969), pp. 325-361. According to Rabbi Elmer Berger, Adolph Ochs, the previous publisher of The New York Times, was anti-Zionist all of his life and the paper's "editorial position in those days was rather consistently anti-Zionist." However, Berger indicated that at the time the Council was formed Sulzberger was anti-Zionist but did not publicly affiliate himself with the organization. Elmer Berger, Memoirs of an Anti-Zionist Jew (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1978), pp. 13-14. For more information on the Council see Thomas A. Kolsky, Jews Against Zionism: The American Council for Judaism, 1942 -- 1948 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, l990).
47 Moshe Menuhin, Jewish Critics of Zionism (Detroit: Association of American Arab University Graduates, 1976), p. 29.
48 Menuhin, The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time, pp. 364-368.
49 Ibid., pp. 362-364.
50 Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II: What Price Peace? (New Brunswick, New Jersey: North American, 1982), p. 872.
51 For more information contact American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism, 347 Fifth Avenue, Suite 900, New York, NY, USA 10016. Tel. (212) 213-9125.
52 See Reuben Slonim, To Kill A Rabbi (Toronto: ECW Press, l987).
53 Reuben Slonim, Grand to be an Orphan (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1983), p. 175.
54 Lilienthal, pp. 768-769.
55 "Jewish Anti-Zionist Petition Presented to President Wilson in 1919," American Jewish Alternatives to Zionism Report No. 52, p. 138. The text of the statement is reproduced here at pp. 135-139.
56 Wilson, p. 72.
57 Albert Einstein, Out of My Later Years (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 263. For a discussion of what Alfred Lilienthal calls the "kidnapping" of Albert Einstein by the Zionists, see Lilienthal, pp. 340-343.
58 William Zukerman, "The Menace of Jewish Fascism," The Nation, April 25, 1934, reprinted in Zionism, the Dream and the Reality: A Jewish Critique, Gary V. Smith ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1974), pp. 91-96.
59 Michael Selzer, The Aryanization of the Jewish State (New York: Black Star Books, 1967).
60 David Ben-Gurion, "Jabotinsky in the Footsteps of Hitler," cited in Noam Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East? (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 89.
61 Rosie DiManno, "Israeli policies like Nazi persecution Arens' brother says," Toronto Star, September l9, 1983 (published only in the Metro edition). See also John Motavalli, "The Arens brothers, agreeing to disagree," The Middle East, March 1983, pp. 19-20.
62 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), pp. 7-8. For an example of her views see, "The Jewish State: Fifty Years After -- Where Have Herzl's Politics Led?" Commentary, May 1946, reproduced in Smith, Zionism: The Dream and the Reality, pp. 67-80.
63 Morris B. Cohen, "Zionism: Tribalism or Liberalism?" in Selzer, Zionism Reconsidered, p. 67.
64 For a hostile appraisal of Rosenzweig see "Franz Rosenzweig as a Critic of Zionism," Conservative Judaism, Fall 1967, cited in Zionism Reconsidered, Selzer ed., p. xx.
65 Kohn, p. 45.
66 Jewish Newsletter (New York), May 19, 1959, cited in Woolfson, p. 13.
67 Bruno Kreisky interview, Ma'ariv, January 20, 1974, quoted in Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II, p. 434.
68 Yishayahu Ben-Porat, "Interview with Bruno Kreisky," Yediot Aharonot, May 24, 1985, reproduced in Jerusalem, January 1986, p. 36.
69 All three of these individuals get "special" mention in Amy Kaufman Goott and Steven J. Rosen (eds.), The Campaign to Discredit Israel (Washington: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, 1983), listed respectively on pp. 118-119, 100-101 and 102. The only other American Jewish critic of Zionism who merited a special heading was Edmund Hanauer, the founder of Search for Justice and Equality in Palestine, P.O. Box 3452, Framingham, MA 0l701. The late Haviv Schieber's Holy Land State Committee also gets special mention under the organization category, pp. 68-69.
70 See for example, "Minority Report," The Nation, August 7-14, 1989, p. 159. Here he discusses Yitzhak Shamir's past dealings with the Nazis and the LEHI (Stern Gang) proposed alliance with the Nazis. For discussion of Hitchens' recent discovery that his mother was Jewish see his article, "On Not Knowing the Half of It, My Jewish Self: Homage to Telegraphist Jacobs," Grand Street, Summer 1988, pp. 121-136.
71 One of the producers of "Gaza Ghetto: Portrait of a Palestinian Family" distributed by Icarus Films, 200 Park Avenue, New York (tel: [212] 674-3375). For a discussion of the making of the film and the attempts to get it shown in the United States see Joan Mandel, "Making A Documentary in Palestine and Taking It Home," Red Bass, No. 12 (1987), pp. 36-39.
72 Co-author with Steve Goldfield, "South Africa: The Israeli Connection," American-Arab Affairs, Fall 1986, pp. 106-129. Both Obenzinger and Goldfield are editors of Palestine Focus, P.O. Box 27462, San Francisco, CA 94127, tel. (415) 861-1552.
73 "Soviet anti-Zionist Jews reject Western claims," London Free Press (Canada), May 17, 1984, C8. For an example of their views see Zionism: Instrument of Imperialist Reaction (Moscow: Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, 1970).
74 See Andrew Rosenthal, "Soviet Anti-Zionist Agency May Go," The New York Times, December 8, 1987, p. A16; and Wolf Blitzer, "Soviet anti-Zionist panel will be disbanded by year's end," Jerusalem Post International Edition, November 26, 1988, p. 5. Their address: Soviet Anti-Zionist Committee, 119270, Moscow, Frunzenskaya, Quay 46 (telephone, 245-6106). It is still headed by Dragunski.
75 Leon Trotsky, On the Jewish Question (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), pp. 28, 18 and 12.
76 Laqueur, p. 253 and p. 435.
77 See Ephraim Sevela, Farewell Israel (South Bend, Indiana: Gateway Editions, 1977).
78 "The Bund," Encyclopaedia Judaica, Vol. IV, p. 1502.
79 "South African rebel outrages Israelis," Toronto Star, March 8, 1985, p. A9.
80 Mark A. Bruzonsky, "Israel is too much like South Africa," Chicago Sun-Times, September 11, 1985, p. 36.
81 Michah L. Sifry, "Israel and South Africa," The Nation, February 13, 1988, p. 194.
82 Uri Davis, Israel: An Apartheid State (London: Zed Press, 1987).
83 Yosef Becher, "Neturei Karta: the anti-Zionist Jews," Middle East International, February 7, 1986. Rabbi Becher is a leading spokesman for the Neturei Karta in the United States.
84 "Memorandum of the Neturei Karta to the Secretary General of the United Nations on the Question of Jerusalem, July 18, 1949," reproduced in The Guardian, April 1974 Nisson 5734, pp. 12-13. Also found in International Affairs (London), July 1952, pp. 358-359.
85 See Dissenter in Zion: From the Writings of Judah L. Magnes, Arthur A. Goren ed., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).
86 Glass, p. 78.
87 Judah Magnes and Martin Buber, "Testimony Before the Anglo-American Inquiry Commission," in Arab-Jewish Unity (Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1976), p. 12.
88 Taylor, p. 107.
89 Glass, p. 78.
90 Kohn, p. 42.
91 Jewish Newsletter, 9 February 1959, cited in Gilmour, p. 74.
92 Glass, pp. 63-64.
93 Ibid., pp. 61-75. For a survey of criticism of Zionism from an Israeli Socialist perspective see Arie Bober ed., The Other Israel: The Radical Case Against Zionism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972).
94 Glass, p. 57.
95 Ibid., p. 72. Also see Noam Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East?, p. 174.
96 Glass, pp. 69-71. See also Kokhavi Shemesh, "Thy Destroyers and Ravagers out of Ye will Come," Matzpen, January 1973, reprinted in Uri Davis and Norton Mezvinsky (eds.), Documents from Israel 1967-1973 (London: Ithaca Press, 1975), pp. 123-126.
97 Glass, p. 71.
98 "Vanunu jailed 18 years for treason," The Globe and Mail, March 28, 1988, p. A11. For a discussion of Vanunu by a Canadian anti-Zionist Jew see Mordecai Briemberg, "Prisoner of conscience," The Globe and Mail, September 30, 1988, p. A7.
99 For example see Peter Pry, Israel's Nuclear Arsenal (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1985).
100 Israel Shahak, "The Racist Nature of Zionism and the Zionistic State of Israel," The Link, Winter 1975-1976, p. 10. For an example of the work of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights see Report on the Violation of Human Rights in the Territories during the Uprising, 1988 (Tel Aviv: The Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, 1988).
101 Glass, p. 77.
102 "Professor Leibowitz Called for Counter Terror: 'Had I been Younger I Would Have Done It My Self,'" Yediot Aharonot, February 13, 1983, cited in Uri Davis, "Israel's Zionist Society: Consequences for Internal Opposition and the Necessity for External Intervention," Judaism or Zionism (London: Zed Books, 1986), p. 200. See also Joe Franklin, "Interview with Yeshayahu Leibowitz," American-Arab Affairs, Fall 1988, pp. 75-77.
103 Glass, p. 69.
104 'The Case of Giora Neumann," Davar, July 12, 1972, as reported in Journal of Palestine Studies, Autumn 1972, pp. 148-149.
105 Gideon Spiro, "The Israeli soldiers who say 'There is a limit,'" Middle East International, 9 September 1988, pp. 18-19. Yesh Gvul's address is P.O. Box 6953, Jerusalem, 91068, Israel.
106 Ibid., p. 18.
107 Ibid., p. 19.
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid., p. 20.
110 Jacobo Timerman, The Longest War: Israel in Lebanon, translated by Miguel Acoca (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 165.
111 Jacobo Timerman, "The Dialectics of Hypocrisies," El Pais (Spain), March 19, 1988, p. 9. Translation.
112 For a more extensive discussion of this question, see Michael Jansen, Dissonance in Zion (London: Zed Books, 1987).
113 Politika, #20, quoted by Yosef Algazi in "Forward: The 21st Year of the Occupation, the Sixth Month of the Uprising," Report on the Violations of Human Rights in the Territories during the Uprising, 1988, p. 5.
114 "We Will Not Be Gagged," News from Within (published by the Alternative Information Center, P.O.B. 165, West Jerusalem, Israel), February 24, 1987, pp. 1-2 and 9; and Gad Lior and Yitzhak Rabiheh, "Israeli 'Democracy' in Practice," Yediot Aharonot, February 17, 1987, translated and reprinted in above, pp. 2-4.
115 Ibid., p. 9.
116 Bardugo, "Speak No Evil," Kol Ha'ir, February 20, 1987, translated in Ibid., p. 8.
117 See Michal Warschawsky, "The Border, The Law and Peace," News from Within, November 29, 1989, reprinted in Against the Current, March/April 1990, pp. 12-13.
118 Lili Galili, "Hadas Lahav: The Shin Bet tried to make me 'crazy,'" Haaretz, May 26, 1988, translated and additional material provided by The Palestine Human Rights Campaign, Chicago, 220 S. State Street, #1308, 1 Quincy Court, Chicago, Illinois, 60604. Tel. (312)987-1830.
119 Ibid.
120 Ronald Storrs, Orientations (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1945), p. 340 cited in Henry Cattan, The Palestine Question (New York: Croom Helm, 1988), p. 34.
121 Brendan Weston, "An Interview with Ilan Ha-levi: Both Jew and PLO Member," The Arab World Review, April 1988, p. 16. For an example of his work see Ilan Halevi, A History of the Jews: Ancient and Modern, translated by A. M. Berrett (London: Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books, 1987).
122 Press release: Tevet 20, 5748, January 10, 1988, from Seven-man Neturei Karta Supreme Council. See also Ed Krales, "Orthodox Jews Oppose Israel," Palestine Focus, July-August, 1987, p. 8.
123 Ibid.
124 The leader of the Lebanese Jewish community is reported to have said: "The Lebanese Jews are grateful to Mr. Arafat. We have no need of any outside protection because no one has touched a hair on our heads. We reject Israeli reports that the community is in any danger. We want no outside protectors, Israeli or otherwise. We simply plan to go on living as we always have, as Lebanese." Quoted in Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection II, p. 782. Also see Paul Martin, "Palestinians send food to Jews besieged in Beirut synagogue," The Times (London), November 4, 1975, p. A5. See also "PLO guarded our embassy U.S. admits," Toronto Star, May 16, 1985, p. A12.
125 "Beirut's Only Synagogue Is Casualty of the Israelis," The New York Times, August 12, 1982, p. A17.
126 "Nine Jews said to be among massacre victims," The Jerusalem Post, September 30, 1982.
127 Ron Jourad, "Bitter conflict on West Bank cuts through family ties," The Globe and Mail, November 22, 1988, p. A9.
128 Israleft Biweekly News Service, November 20, 1972, p. 7, cited in Glass, p. 65.
129 For an example of his work see Naim Giladi, "The Iraqi Jews and Their Coming to Israel," The Black Panther, September 11, 1972, reprinted in Documents from Israel 1967-1973, Davis and Mezvinsky eds., pp. 126-133.
130 Feuerlicht, pp. 230-232.
131 Woolfson, pp. 15-17.
132 "Petition for Palestinian Rights -- Against the Israeli Law of Return -- for the Palestinian Right to Return," Jerusalem, May 1988, pp. 31-33. Their address c/o Bradford Resource Centre, 31 Manor Row, Bradford, UK BDI 4PS.
133 Ancil Kashetsky, "Jews for a Just Peace urges Israeli withdrawal," The Canadian Jewish News, April 28, 1988, p. 34. Jews for a Just Peace's address is P.O. Box 647 Station P, Toronto, Canada, M5S 2Y4.
134 "Appeal by Jews for Peace between Israeli and Palestinian States," Le Monde, December 10, 1988. Reproduced in Jerusalem, December 1988, pp. 15-16. Their address is B. Liberman, Grapp B.P. 15507-75326 Paris, France Cedex 07.
135 Christopher Walker, "Jewish philosopher masterminded plan," The Times (London), November 15, 1988, p. 7. See also Jerome Segal, Creating the Palestinian State (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1989).
136 For an example of his work see Eric Rouleau (with Abu Iyad), My Home, My Land: A Narrative of the Palestinian Struggle, translated by Linda Butler Koseoglu (New York: Times Books, 1981).
137 I.F. Stone, "For a new approach to the Israeli-Arab Conflict," The New York Review of Books, August 3, 1967, reprinted in Smith, p. 210.

Media Bias on Israel-Palestine

Israel and Palestine : Choosing Sides

by Alison Weir

from: If Americans Knew www.ifamericansknew.org

15/9/2004


The most monumental cover-up in media history may be the one I’m about to describe. In my entire experience with American journalism, I have never found anything as extreme, sustained, and omnipresent.

Three and a half years ago, when the current Palestinian uprising began, I started to look into Israel and Palestine. I had never paid much attention to this issue before and so – unlike many people – I knew I was completely uninformed about it. I had no idea that I was pulling a loose piece of thread that would steadily unravel, until nothing would ever be quite as it had been before.

When I listened to news reports on this issue, I noticed that I was hearing a great deal about Israelis and very little about Palestinians. I decided to go to the Internet to see what would turn up, and discovered international reports about Palestinian children being killed daily, often shot in the head, hundreds being injured, eyes being shot out.1 And yet little of all this was appearing in NPR reports, the New York Times, or the San Francisco Chronicle.

There was also little historic background and context in the stories, so this, too, I began to fill in for myself, reading what has turned into a multitude of books on the history and other aspects of the conflict.2 I attended presentations and read international reports.

The more I looked into all this, the more it seemed that I had stumbled onto a cover-up that quite possibly dwarfed anything I had seen before. My former husband had been one of the founders of the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), an institution known for its powerful exposés. He and CIR have won numerous well-deserved awards from Project Censored from the very beginning of its creation. Nevertheless, the duration and violence of the injustice I was discovering, and the extent of its omission and misrepresentation – even in Project Censored itself, seemed unparalleled.

In February and March of 2001 I went to the Palestinian territories as a freelance reporter, traveling alone throughout Gaza and the West Bank. I saw tragedy and devastation far beyond what was being reported in the American media; I saw communities destroyed, ancient orchards razed, croplands plowed under. I saw children who had been shot in the stomach, in the back, in the head. I still see them.

I saw people convulsing and writhing in pain from a mysterious poison gas that had been lobbed at them; they said it felt like there were knives in their stomach.3 I talked to men who had been tortured.4

I watched as a mother wept for her small son, and I took pictures of his spilled blood. I watched a son grieve for his mother, killed on her way home from the market on a day that I was told was the Muslim equivalent of the day before Christmas, or Passover, and I thought of my own son, the same age.

I listened to old people who described the start of this holocaust – over fifty years ago, at the end of an earlier one. They described what it was like when three-quarters of your entire population is ethnically cleansed from their homes and land, children dying along the roadside while aircraft shell the fleeing families. They told of dozens of massacres of entire villages, and I’ve since read accounts by Israeli soldiers, published in Israeli publications, of how they raped the women, and then killed them, of how they used sticks to crush the skulls of children.5 I discovered the message sent by Menachem Begin, later elected Israeli prime minister, to troops following the massacre of Palestinians in one village, Deir Yassin:

“Accept my congratulations on this splendid act of conquest. Convey my regards to all the commanders and soldiers. We shake your hands. We are all proud of the excellent leadership and the fighting spirit in this great attack...Tell the soldiers: you have made history in Israel with your attack and your conquest. Continue this until victory. As in Deir Yassin, so everywhere, we will attack and smite the enemy. God, God, Thou has chosen us for conquest.”6

Censorship At Work

And I saw the cover-up. I saw how one of the most massive and brutal displacements of a people in modern times has largely been swept under th rug; how the continuing and ruthless methods used by a theocratic, exclusionary stat 7 to rid itself of people of the “wrong” religon/ethnicity are covered up. Let me describe how this censorship works.

A few days after the deaths of the little boy and of the mother I mentioned above, there was a suicide bombing in Israel. I went to a hotel in East Jerusalem and saw that the New York Times had published a front-page story about it.8

I wondered if the paper had run similar headlines about, or at least had mentioned, the Palestinian deaths in the days before, and I discovered that they had not. But I noticed that the story about the suicide bombing had at least contained some information about these preceding Palestinian deaths – one phrase each, in the second paragraph. Near the end of the story, full of extensive, graphic descriptions of the Israeli tragedies, I also saw that there were a few paragraphs about Israeli crowds beating random Palestinian Israelis to a pulp – one was almost killed – and chanting “Kill Arabs.”

A few days later I was back in the San Francisco Bay Area, and went to the library to see how the San Francisco Chronicle had covered these events. (I had emailed them on-the-scene reports, incidentally, about both Palestinian deaths.) I noticed that this paper, also, had neglected these deaths at the time. It had, however, carried the New York Times report about the suicide bombing that had followed. When I looked at the S.F. Chronicle’s version of this report, however, I was astounded: someone had surgically excised the sentences near the top of the story telling of the Israeli killing of a nine-year-old Palestinian boy and a mother of three. The person had also deleted all information about the Israeli mob violence.

Since that time I’ve monitored the media closely, and investigated numerous similar incidents, in an attempt to discover the nuts and bolts of obfuscation on Israel.

Not long ago Admiral Thomas Moorer, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, passed away. For many years Moorer, a four-star admiral and World War II hero, had strongly condemned Israel’s 1967 attack on the USS Liberty9, a virtually unarmed US Navy intelligence ship. Israeli forces had killed 34 American servicemen and injured 172; stretcher-bearers were machine-gunned and lifeboats were shot out of the water. In addition, Moorer had been outraged at the U.S. government’s abandonment of this crew. Following the attack, crew members, surrounded by blood and body parts, had been ordered by the government not to speak to anyone about what had just been done to them, and were dispersed to new postings around the world. One critically injured crewman who had been evacuated to a hospital in Germany woke up to find military policemen on either side of him, and an identity band on his wrist with someone else’s name on it.10

Moorer had long called for an investigation of all this. Last fall, in fact, he had chaired an independent commission on this incident, reading a report on Capitol Hill that said, among other things: “Israel committed acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States.”11 Another admiral – who had been the head of the Navy’s legal branch – read a just-released affidavit by the officer who had been the chief attorney to the quickie Naval court of inquiry set up by Admiral John S. McCain, Jr. (Sen. John McCain’s father) to look into the attack. This affidavit revealed that there had been a cover-up at the presidential level – that Pres. Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had ordered the court to find, despite all evidence to the contrary, Israel innocent of culpability.12

The story of the commission’s unprecedented findings died after one day of coverage. Despite an excellent AP report on it, a search of 300 newspapers only turned up 10 that had printed it.

A few months later Moorer died. The first quick AP obituary that came out about him contained one sentence about the Israeli attack. It was minimal, but present. Within a few hours a longer obit came out, containing a great deal of additional information about Moorer. But the sentence on the Israeli attack had been taken out.

I have phoned AP many times, asking them why information on the USS Liberty was removed from the obituary, and who removed it. Each time, the person I reached agreed that the Liberty information was important, and told me they would get back to me. I’m still waiting.

I’ll discuss just four more telling examples. While such groups as Amnesty International have condemned Israel for its routine torture of Palestinian prisoners for decades13, coverage of such abuse virtually never appears in American media.

In October of 200214 I received email reports of a Palestinian farmer who had been brutally tortured by Israeli settlers. I felt this was an important story, and decided to check it out. I phoned the American on the scene who had sent out the report and asked for more information. He filled in the gruesome details, sent me photos, and gave me the name and address of the hospital where the victim was being treated. I then phoned the S.F. Chronicle and gave the foreign desk all the information I had gathered. I suggested that they send one of their correspondents in the area to cover it, since although Chronicle reporters always reside in Israel, they do occasionally visit the Palestinian Territories.

No word, however, ever appeared of this incident in the Chronicle.15 In fact, a search of the Chronicle looking for the words “torture” and “Israel” in lead paragraphs turned up only one article in the past 10 years: an editorial in 1999 that opined: “Israel’s Supreme Court was courageous, idealistic and absolutely right to outlaw torture as an interrogation technique by the Shin Bet security force.”16 Unfortunately, Israeli torture did not end after this decision.17

Earlier this year, American media reported prominently on a prisoner swap in which an Israeli businessman imprisoned by Lebanon was traded for three Lebanese resistance leaders and a few hundred Palestinians (who had been scheduled for release within a few months anyway). Earlier news stories had reported that the Israeli had been tortured in Lebanon, but, happily, upon his release the man stated that he had been treated well by his captors.18

On the other hand, I learned through Al-Jazeera that one of the Lebanese leaders just released had, two days before, testified for 10 hours in an Israeli court describing gruesome sexual abuse by Israeli prison guards, his claims validated by a member of the International Red Cross.19 (Incidentally, I subsequently saw that accounts of this abuse had been reported in the foreign press for years20).

I was in Washington DC at the time, and noticed that there had been no mention of any of this in the Washington Post, despite extensive coverage of the swap. I then did a search of the Post website, typing in “ Mustafa Dirani” and “torture,” and was surprised to find a full, detailed report on it by Peter Enav of AP.21 In other words, the Washington Post had the information on Dirani, the story was on their website, but they had not printed a word of it in the newspaper. (And you only found it on the website if you knew to look for it.)

I phoned the Post and was referred to the editor responsible for foreign news. I asked why the paper had not contained information about Dirani’s testimony and corroborating statements by others. He replied that they were waiting to look into it further, and would probably cover it sometime in the future. I pointed out that alleged torture of an Israeli – since proved to be false – had been printed, and asked, unsuccessfully, for an explanation of this double standard in news coverage. To date, this projected coverage has still not come.

In fact, index searches revealed that while many newspapers had covered the prisoner swap extensively, and a number of newspapers around the country had carried the report of Dirani’s abuse buried on their websites somewhere, I could find only nine newspapers that had printed these serious allegations of Israeli torture of a major Lebanese figure – interestingly, most of them local papers.

Moreover, in my searches I also came across the fact that Dirani’s young nephew Ghassan had been imprisoned by Israel for ten years. Israel had never contended that Ghassan was even political, much less a member of any resistance groups; he was simply held as a bargaining chip. At some point he had apparently suffered a complete mental breakdown, and was transferred to a psychiatric prison. Finally, he was released to his family in Lebanon, his mind, reportedly, gone. All of this, also, was unmentioned in American coverage of the prisoner swap.22

In June 2002, Foreign Service Journal published what should have been an explosive exposé on Israel’s torture of American citizens.23 Yet, when I went to the journal’s website, I could not find the article. In fact, there was no mention that the issue even contained such a piece. I phoned the editor, and discovered that they had decided it was too controversial to put on their website. Today, the website does mention the article (in an extremely expurgated fashion; minus the word torture, for example), but there is still no link to the actual report.24 In addition, I have not been able to find a single American news source that even mentioned this thoroughly documented report.

Finally, in the midst of the unfolding scandal about torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners at Abu-Ghraib, two international human rights organizations released findings that 374 Palestinian teenagers imprisoned by Israel were being treated with similar cruelty. There was a short AP story on the report. It was sent to Britain, Europe, Africa, India, and Asia. It was not, however, sent to American newspapers. Phone calls to AP asking why it was deemed newsworthy in the rest of the world but not in the United States went unanswered.


Media Studies

Soon after my visit to the occupied territories I founded an organization called If Americans Kne 25 to monitor the media and to provide Americans with accurate information on this topic. Two years ago, prompted by such anecdotal evidence of massive omission, If Americans Knew began conducting statistical case studies on coverage of Israel and Palestine. We chose categories that would be universally acknowledged as significant and as immune as possible from subjective interpretation. We recorded the number of deaths of both Palestinians and Israelis mentioned in headlines, then compared the percentages of overall deaths that were covered.26

Our findings are staggering.

We discovered, for example, that the San Francisco Chronicle had prominently covered 150 percent of Israeli children’s deaths—i.e., many of the deaths were the subject of more than one headline in the paper—and five percent of Palestinian ones. In other words, Palestinian deaths were rarely accorded headline coverage even once.

In the first three and a half months of the current Palestinian uprising against Israel’s continuing confiscation of Palestinian land and suppression of human rights, Israeli forces killed 84 Palestinian children. The largest single cause of their deaths was gunfire to the head.27 During this period, not one Israeli child was killed. Not one suicide bombing against Israelis occurred.28

Of these 84 Palestinian children, only one received headline coverage in the Chronicle – Mohammed al-Durra, the little boy whose murder while he was cowering with his father was recorded for all the world to see by a French TV crew.

Was the Chronicle alone in such unbalanced news coverage?

No. A study of National Public Radio that Seth Ackerman29 conducted for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) showed that NPR had reported on 89 percent of Israeli children’s deaths and 20 percent of Palestinian ones. In other words, NPR, which has been accused of being “pro-Palestinian,” reported Israeli deaths at a rate four and a half times greater than Palestinian deaths.

Two studies we conducted of the San Jose Mercury News – for a total of twelve months of data – also revealed enormous distortion in coverage. For example, we discovered that front-page headline coverage of all deaths (adults and children) had so emphasized Israeli deaths over Palestinian ones that the newspaper had, in effect, reversed reality – and then widened the gap. While 313 Israelis and 884 Palestinians had been killed during this period, Mercury News front-page headlines had reported on 225 Israeli deaths, and only 34 Palestinian ones – 72 percent of Israeli deaths and 4 percent of Palestinian ones.30

What do these case studies tell us about American coverage in general? A great deal.

Let us imagine what would have happened if a newspaper’s headlines had reported the World Series backwards – that the score had been reversed, the winning team declared the loser. The paper would have been the laughingstock of the country; late-night comics around the nation would have had a field day.

Yet, here was an equivalent error in a situation involving life and death, literally, and virtually no one noticed. Why? The logical conclusion is that the entire environment of news most people were accessing – television, radio, magazines – communicated similar inversion.

As a result, the public is staggeringly misinformed. During the current intifada, Palestinian children were being killed – often shot in the head – day after day, week after week, month after month, before a single Israeli child’s death. Yet a survey taken later that year showed that 93 percent of the respondents either had no idea which children had died first, or believed them to be Israeli. 31And this despite ample coverage of the conflict in general: the Chronicle, for example, ran over 250 stories on Israel and Palestine during this period.

Also omitted was information on US tax money to Israel: well over $10 million per day – more than to all of sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean put together.32 Our study showed that in six months of extensive reporting on Israel, the Chronicle had never even once reported the total amount of US money being sent to Israel.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg of omission on this issue.

Let us look at Project Censored, itself – a highly respected media-monitoring institution intent on bringing attention to critical information not covered by the corporate media. Each year it screens thousands of articles in hundreds of journals, drawing on the participation of a long list of experts. It has helped publicize profoundly valuable information on a wide variety of topics, with particular sensitivity to injustice, racism, and the plight of oppressed populations.

Yet, it has largely missed one of the longest and most egregious cases of oppression of the 20th (and now 21st ) century.

Over fifty years ago, the massive dispossession of almost an entire indigenous population was carried out by a colonial population pursuing ethnic “purity”33 – a purity Muslim and Christian Palestinians did not fit into. Israeli writer Yshar Snmilasky described this beginning: “We came, shot, burned, blew up, pushed and exiled... will the walls not scream in the ears of those who will live in this village?”34

In 1967 this nation then overran the small remnants of land left to the indigenous population, and placed the inhabitants under brutal military occupation. In 1982 this apartheid nation35 invaded yet another country in its quest to prevent the original inhabitants of what was now Israel from returning to their land. Some 20,000 men, women, and children in Lebanon were killed, and hundreds of thousands injured – through the illegal use of American-made weapons. One American physician wrote at the time that she had never before seen “such hideous injuries.” In one day, 1,000 mangled limbs were amputated.36

In 1987 there was more violence, when the virtually unarmed indigenous population in the occupied territories attempted to rise up against their occupiers and died at the rate of 7 per every one Israeli death. The Palestinian death rate would have been higher, but the occupation forces chose a less reported form of violence to subdue the rebels – soldiers held them down and broke their bones. In the first three days of this new strategy, 197 people were treated for fractures at one hospital in Gaza alone.37 The policy was implemented by Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli leader later known as a “peace-maker” before being assassinated by a Jewish extremist. One episode was caught on film, and can be viewed in various documentaries.38 The Israeli cameraman was later killed by Israeli forces.39

Through this entire period there was an ongoing campaign to break the indigenous people’s spirit. Tens of thousands were incarcerated without recourse to judge and jury. Tens of thousands were tortured, humiliated, maimed. Homes were destroyed by the thousands, cropland plowed under and replaced with concrete colonies from which the ancestral owners of the land were to be eternally excluded. Families were ripped apart, sons deported, schools closed.40

And in its first 20 years, Project Censored made no mention of any of this – of this profoundly covered-up conflict, of these people, of this oppression. The longest-standing military occupation of modern times – unmentioned. The largest refugee population in today’s world (an estimated 8 million), and the longest dispossessed – unmentioned.

Actually, Project Censored carried one story on Israel during this period – an exposé of its support of oppression in Central America. Then finally, in 2001, in Project Censored’s 25th anniversary edition, there was notice of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians – it was mentioned in the introduction and in a story about ethnically specific bioweapons.41

Astoundingly, the first time that a topic pertaining to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians made it onto the Project Censored list was just last year. After including a story about U.S. tax money to Colombia in the previous volume – the #3 choice of that year – Project Censored decided to also cover U.S. tax money to Israel – a vastly larger amount, that has been dispensed far longer. This story was #24. Since many reports about Project Censored list only the top ten stories, this low rating meant that this story went widely unmentioned.

Such long neglect of this issue is startling, particularly given the subject matter that Project Censored regularly addressed, and the numerous powerful exposés on Israel related to these subjects that were ignored by the mainstream press – stories that seemed right up the Project Censored alley.

For example, Project Censored has done an excellent job of covering nuclear power and proliferation. Yet, through all these years there was no mention – ever – of Israel’s possession of hundreds of nuclear weapons; no mention of the young technician who blew the whistle on their nuclear weapons program, and was then kidnapped by Israel, brought back for a kangaroo trial under grotesque conditions and held in solitary confinement in a cell two meters by three meters for over 12 of his 18 years of incarceration.42

Similarly, Project Censored promoted important articles about Iran-Contra and on the oil embargo that shot oil prices through the roof and threw thousands out of work. Yet, there was no mention of the fundamental role played by Israel in both events.43

Projected Censored highlighted a moving and powerful report on the “Death of a Nation: The Tragedy of Transkei” in South Africa, yet there was no such article about the death of Palestine, and the various strategies being implemented to expel its remaining inhabitants.44

While Project Censored contained valuable information on “The Most Powerful Secret Lobby in Washington” (the Business Roundtable), there was no mention of the pro-Israel lobby that has been at the forefront of influencing US foreign policy in the Middle East for over half a century.45

If space permitted, this list would go on and on.

Even last year, after Project Censored had begun to discover Palestine, the book’s top censored story of the year, which exposed the neoconservatives’ role behind the attack on Iraq, astonishingly omitted any mention whatsoever of these neoconservatives’ close, long-term ties to Israel and the documented record of their work on its behalf.46 Similarly, there was no mention of what should have been an award-winning exposé on Israeli torture of American citizens that came out the same year.

Finally, this year, a story revealing that top U.S. governmental officials have been investigated by U.S. intelligence agencies for decades for spying for a foreign government – a story that should have produced reverberations throughout the country, resulting in Congressional inquiries and calls for special prosecutors47 – was not only unmentioned by the mainstream media, it was missed by Project Censored and its array of experts as well. The foreign government was Israel.

In other words, while the corporate media was ignoring the slaughter, torture, and dispossession of Palestinians, while it was ignoring a presidential cover-up that dwarfed Watergate in its significance, while it was ignoring the attempts of abandoned vets to get recourse from their government, while it was ignoring multitudes of stories of potentially world-shaking importance about Israel and its actions, Project Censored was, too.

I don’t know why or how this has been happening, but I suspect that Project Censored’s omission of this issue is largely a reflection of what has been going on throughout much of the progressive press – and community – for many years. A search of the Center for Investigative Reporting’s website, for example, reveals only two stories, 25 years apart, about Israel or Palestine – both by the same author.

When we approached CIR and Media Alliance, another organization known for its ethical actions against censorship, to join us in activities regarding our Chronicle and Mercury-News studies, the reaction was disappointing. CIR, we were told, was in the midst of negotiating with the Chronicle on some future projects. (We also later noticed that David Yarnold, Executive Editor of the Mercury-News, is on the CIR advisory board.) When we contacted Media Alliance about co-sponsoring a forum on our studies, a project that we had thought would mesh well with the organization’s progressive philosophy, our phone calls went unreturned.

When we asked Peace Action why their brochures about nuclear weapons omitted any mention of Israel’s large arsenal of such weapons, we were told that discussing Israel would interfere with the group’s ability to lobby Congressman Tom Lantos (one of Israel’s most fervent Capitol Hill supporters and a major promoter of both Iraq wars).

These are not isolated incidents.

All of the above organizations – and many others with equally dubious records on Palestine – have produced profoundly important, often courageous, work. Why has there so often been a “blind spot” on Israel?

I suspect that the causes are complicated and multi-factorial. I suspect that I and others like me – who remained ignorant and negligent on this issue for so long – bear much of the guilt. I suspect that others whose emotional ties to Israel served as blinders on this subject share in our culpability. I suspect that still others who knew the truth and refused to speak of it, or who participated in its cover-up, bear a significant portion of this awful responsibility. I suspect that the career damage48 and death threats49 that often result when one begins to speak out on this issue played a part.

Whatever the cause, it is time that we all, finally and resoundingly, move forward. It is time that we bring to an end what we have all helped to perpetuate.

Perhaps one of the places we can start is by recognizing and disseminating the immense body of work created through the years by journalists diligently digging up the still mostly-buried facts on Israel and Palestine. Many of these people are nearing the end of their careers, and it is time we thanked them, and joined in their efforts.

I propose a special Lifetime Most Censored Award, and that among the first to receive it be the following writers whose extraordinary work has continually been censored out of American discourse on the Middle East: (in alphabetical order) Richard Curtiss, for his massive research into all aspects of Israel and Palestine, in particular on U.S. aid to Israel and Israeli PACs; James Ennes, for being the first to gather and expose the story of the USS Liberty and its cover-up; Andrew Killgore, for his numerous writings and his historic role, with Richard Curtiss, in founding and keeping alive the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs and the American Educational Trust book publishing; Paul Findley, for ground-shaking research on the Israel lobby and the injustice being done to Palestinians and Muslims; Stephen Green, for his meticulous investigative reporting on Israeli spying and arms procurement; Alfred Lillienthal, for his early and principled exposes of Israel; and, especially, Donald Neff, for his brilliant and comprehensive books on all aspects of Israel, Palestine, and the core injustice at the center of the Middle East.

In memoriam awards should go to Edward Said, who broke through this censorship, and to Grace Halsell and Elmer Berger, who sadly did not. I am at a loss to describe the tribute that should go to 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, whose life and death, as well as whose words, have been largely erased or distorted in media discourse on Israel and Palestine – including by some publications once considered progressive, such as Mother Jones.50

Next, I hope future editions of Project Censored will include work by some of the other superb writers and reporters on this topic today: Ali Abunimah, Naseer Aruri, Dennis Bernstein, Jerri Bird, Jeff Blankfort, Lenni Brenner, Alexander Cockburn, Kathleen Christison, Norman Finkelstein, Delinda Hanley, Rashid Khalidi, Janet McMahon, Rachelle Marshall, Nur Masalha, Nigel Parry, Jason Vest, Ahmed Yousef, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Charlie Reese, and the many others deserving of recognition. I apologize for those I’m forgetting to mention and I hope others will add to this list. ( I have not included here foreign journalists of note, because it is my understanding that Project Censored concentrates on censorship inside the U.S.)

Finally, we must help to end the censorship of the ongoing reports by Palestinian and international journalists, including Israeli ones, who report at great risk from inside the Palestinian territories (in the past four years twelve journalists have been killed there and 295 wounded51), as well as by writers from such organizations as Christian Peacemaker Teams and the International Solidarity Movement, and, especially, from among the Palestinian population itself, who are daily sending out searing first-hand accounts from the very center of the violence.

May they all survive.


------------------------------------------

Endnotes


1. A few of the best online sources include Al Jazeera; Reports by Robert Fisk and Phil Reeves in the London Independent; The UK Guardian; The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs; The Palestinian Red Crescent Society; and B’Tselem. Regarding eye injuries, an example is: “By May 2001, there were already two hundred people treated for eye wounds at St. John Eye Hospital in Jerusalem alone.” Tanya Reinhart, Israel/Palestine, Seven Stories Press, New York, p. 115

2. Some of the best books I have read are listed at the end of the article and online at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/materials.html#books

3. For more information about the nerve gas being used, see Brooks, James, “The Israeli Poison Gas Attacks: A preliminary investigation”, Media Monitors Network, January 8, 2003, http://www.mediamonitors.net/jamesbrooks2.html

4. There are numerous human rights reports on Israeli torture, see for example, “Israel Increases Its Use of Torture Practices Among Palestinian Prisoners”, A Report Issued by the Palestinian Prisoner Society, June 21, 2002, http://www.ppsmo.org/e-website/Reports/Israeli%20Tourture%20July%202002.htm

5. Davar, June 9, 1979: Testimony of an Israeli soldier who participated in the massacre at al Duwayma Village on Oct. 29, 1948: “[they] killed between 80 to 100 Arabs, women and children. To kill the children they fractured their heads with sticks. There was not one house without corpses. The men and women of the villages were pushed into houses without food or water. Then the saboteurs came to dynamite the houses. One commander ordered a soldier to bring two women into a house he was about to blow up ... Another soldier prided himself upon having raped an Arab woman before shooting her to death. Another Arab woman with her newborn baby was made to clean the place for a couple of days, and then they shot her and the baby. Educated and welll-mannered commanders who were considered “good guys”... became base murderers, and this not in the storm of battle, but as a method of expulsion and extermination. The fewer the Arabs who remained, the better.” For additional information on Israel’s beginnings: Masalha, Nur, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, The Institute for Palestine Studies: Washington D.C., 1992.

6. Ball, George W. and Douglas B. Ball, The Passionate Attachment: America’s Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present, W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1992, p. 29.

7. See for example, Amir S Cheshin., Bill Hutman, and Avi Melamed, Separate and Unequal: The Inside Story of Israeli Rule in East Jerusalem, Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1999, and David McDowall, Palestine and Israel, University of California Press, 1989, pp. 123-145

8. Deborah Sontag, “Suicide Bomber Kills 3 Israelis,” New York Times, March 5, 2001; it’s interesting to see how this situation was reported elsewhere; for example, the Houston Chronicle carried Sontag’s story under the headline: “Palestinian suicide bomber kills 3 Israelis: Attack gladdens West Bank mourners as conflict grows”

9. For more information about the attack on the Liberty, visit http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ussliberty.html

10. Assault on the Liberty (Random House 1980; Ballantine 1986; Reintree Press 2002), http://www.ussliberty.org/

11. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ul-commfindings.html

12. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/ul-boston.html; http://www.freewebs.com/gidusko/boston

13. Neve Gordon & Ruchama Marton, Torture: Human Rights, Medical Ethics and the Case of Israel, Zed Books, London; See for example, Amnesty International Report, “Israel and the Occupied Territories: Mass detention in cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions”, May 23, 2002, http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde150742002

14. http://www.flashpoints.net/index-2002-10-30.html

15. For first-hand reports, visit http://www.palsolidarity.org, http://www.hearpalestine.org, or http://www.cpt.org/hebron/hebron.php

16. San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 10, 1999, A20

17. See for example, Amnesty International Report, “Israel and the Occupied Territories: Mass detention in cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions”, May 23, 2002, http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde150742002

18. http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/01/29/prisoner.exchange

19. “Hizb Allah leader says Israel tortured him”, Al Jazeera, January 27, 2004, http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/EC01FA53-F114-44AF-89F9-75903CB8008F.htm; Gutman, Matthew and Tovah Lazaroff, “Dirani to Testify on Rape Charges,” Jerusalem Post, Jan 27, 2004

20. For example: “Facility 1391: Israel’s Secret Prison,” UK Guardian, Nov. 14, 2003 http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1084796,00.html; “Lebanese group calls on ICRC to prevent Israeli torture in jails,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur, March 13, 2000

21. Enav, Peter, Associated Press, “Militant says he was abused by Israel”, Jan. 27, 2004.

22. “Israel Surrenders A Bargaining Chip,” Washington Post, April 6, 2000, p. 1

23. Jerri Bird, “Arab-Americans in Israel: What ‘Special Relationship’?”, June 2002, http://www.partnersforpeace.org/inmedia/db200206010/

24. http://www.afsa.org/fsj/2002.cfm

25. If Americans Knew is dedicated to providing full and accurate information to the American public on topics of importance that are underreported or misreported in the American media. Our primary area of focus at this time is Israel/Palestine.

26. All four of our studies completed so far can be found online at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/report_cards.html

27. Information about Israeli and Palestinian children killed in the conflict is available online at http://www.rememberthesechildren.org/

28. http://www.btselem.org/

29. Ackerman, Seth, “The Illusion of Balance: NPR’s coverage of Mideast deaths doesn’t match reality”, Extra!, November/December 2001, http://www.fair.org/extra/0111/npr-mideast.html

30. The second study is online at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/merc2/report.html

31. Retro Poll of September/October 2002, online at http://www.retropoll.org/results_poll_01.htm

32. Richard Curtiss, “The Cost of Israel to US Taxpayers, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs,, Dec. ’97, pp 43-45, http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/1297/9712043.html

33. There are numerous excellent histories that cover this period; two are Sharing the Land of Canaan, Mazin B. Qumsiyeh, Pluto Press, and Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948, The Institute for Palestine Studies: Washington D.C., 1992. A book list can be found at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/materials.html#books

34. http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0794/9407072.htm

35. Desmond Tutu & Ian Urbina,“Against Israeli Apartheid,” International Herald Tribune, 07/02

36. Mallison, Sally V. and W. Thomas, Armed Conflict in Lebanon 1982: Humanitarian Law in a Real World Setting, American Eduational Trust.

37. McDowall, David, Palestine and Israel: The Uprising and Beyond, University of California Press (1989): “Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, shifted away from firearms, telling his soldiers to use ‘might, power, and beatings’... Soldiers armed with cudgels beat up those they could lay their hands on regardless of whether they were demonstrators or not, breaking into homes by day and night, dragging men and women, young and old, from their beds to beat them. At Gaza’s Shifa Hospital 200 people were treated during the first five days of the new policy, most of them suffering from broken elbows and knees. Three had fractured skulls...A government official explained: ‘A detainee sent to prison will be freed in 18 days... but if soldiers break his hand, he won’t be able to throw stones for a month and a half.”

38. For example, “People and the Land”, Director: Tom Hayes; “Palestine is Still the Issue”, Director: John Pilger.

39. Personal conversation with filmmaker Tom Hayes, Director of “People and the Land.”

40. http://www.hrw.org/un/chr59/israelot.htm; http://www.dci-pal.org/reports/dcireports.html; http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/israel_and_occupied_territories/reports.do

41. “Human Genome Project Opens the Door to Ethnically Specific Bioweapons,” #16

42. Mordechai Vanunu, see Mark Gaffney, Dimona, the third temple? : the story behind the Vanunu revelation, Amana Books, : Brattleboro, VT, 1989

43. Green, Stephen, Living by the Sword, pp. 193-218; http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0591/9105011.htm; Neff, Donald, Fifty Years of Israel, pp. 279-287, http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/1097/9710070.html , Donald Neff, “Nixon Administration Ignores Saudi Warnings, Bringing On Oil Boycott,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Oct/Nov, 1997, pp. 70-72

44. http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/032486/860324012.html; http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0689/8906021.htm

45. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/pg-blankfort.html; http://www.wrmea.com/aipac; http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/0198/9801065.htm

46. Numerous excellent articles can be found at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/neocons.html, Israeli media by the way, have covered this aspect openly, eg: Ha’aretz, Friday April 04, 2003: “The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history...”

47. Green, Stephen, “Serving Two Flags”, CounterPunch, Feb. 28-29, 2004, http://www.counterpunch.org/green02282004.html

48. Paul Findley, They Dare to Speak Out, Lawrence Hill Books, Chicago, 1989, pp. 295-314; Democracy Now, Thursday, April 24, 2003, “San Francisco Chronicle Fires Reporter for Attending Peace Protest,” http://www.veteransforpeace.org/sf_chronicle_fires_042403.htm

49. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/about_us/death_threat.html

50. Phan Nguyen, “Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie: Specious Journalism in Defense of Killers,” CounterPunch, Sept. 20, 2003 http://www.counterpunch.org/nguyen09202003.html In contrast, Harper’s magazine ran a number of Corrie’s letters. These can be read in full at http://www.ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/rachelsletters.html

51. Palestine Monitor, “Palestinian Intifada Fact Sheet”, http://www.palestinemonitor.org/new_web/factsheet_intifada.htm#Statistics%20for%20the%20Palestinian%20Intifada