Happily, I am in a position to provide the missing information. Shocking as it may sound, the headquarters of the Elders of Anti-Zion is located in Jerusalem.
THE RE’UTH organization is a group of amateurs and only deals with superficial symptoms. Unlike them, I have undertaken to conduct an in-depth investigation.
Who are the secret agents of the conspiracy that is now threatening the legitimacy of Israel? Who are the people who supply all the anti-Israel groups throughout the world with deadly ammunition against us?    
Here is a preliminary list of the most dangerous conspirators:
At the head of the list there appears, of course, Avigdor Ivett Lieberman, who used his cunning to attain the position of Foreign Minister of Israel.
In less than a year and a half, Lieberman has managed to undermine the legitimacy of Israel beyond repair in many countries.
His success in getting appointed as foreign minister is, by itself, a staggering achievement for someone with his background. He is perceived throughout the world as an unbridled racist, compared to whom France’s Jean-Marie le Pen and Austria’s Joerg Haider look like pious democrats. Since being appointed to his position, many of his international colleagues refuse to be seen in his company. They avoid him like the plague.  
Since then, Lieberman has succeeded in getting Israel hated in many countries.  He has called the Swedes and the Norwegians anti-Semites. He has insulted the Turks, when his obedient deputy publicly humiliated the Turkish ambassador by seating him at a lower level than himself. He has told the President of Egypt to “go to hell”. It seems that he sits in his office every morning, spinning the globe and asking himself: “Which new country can I insult today?”
Now there is hardly any country in the world prepared to receive him, except under duress. His activity as Foreign Minister is limited mostly to the four countries connected with his origins: Moldova, Belarus. Ukraine and Kazakhstan. No Israeli foreign minister could possibly have done more to damage the legitimacy of his country.
BUT LIEBERMAN is up against a very serious contender: the Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak.
During the last few days he has achieved the impossible: turning the Lebanese army, too, into an enemy.
To appreciate the magnitude of this achievement, one has to remember that only four years ago, Israel practically issued an ultimatum demanding that the Lebanese army be deployed on the border with Israel. It was one of Israel’s conditions for ending Lebanon War II. Only the Lebanese army, the master strategists in Jerusalem decreed, could ensure quiet on the border. They treated the UN force, UNIFIL, with thinly veiled contempt.
This week, the Lebanese army opened fire on Israeli troops, killing a battalion commander. How could this happen? In several places there are tiny enclaves between the Israeli border fence and the recognized international border. As far as sovereignty is concerned, these enclaves belong to Israel. The land itself, however, is worked by Lebanese villagers. The Israeli army decided to “trim” the trees in these areas in order to facilitate observation.
The Lebanese announced in advance that they were opposed. UNIFIL asked Israel to wait for the return of its commander from abroad, so as to enable him to mediate. The Israeli army refused to wait and sent a bulldozer. When the arm of the monster reached over the fence, and after warning shouts, the Lebanese soldiers opened fire.
Would a normal person have endangered his relations with the Lebanese army for some branches of a tree? Certainly not. What better proof that Barak is acting under the orders of the Elders of anti-Zion?
But this is only the latest instance. It is overshadowed by the Gaza War (“Cast Lead”). There is no need to reiterate the details of that operation: the wholesale killing of civilians, including hundreds of women and children; the demolition of buildings, including schools and mosques; the use of cruel weapons, such as white phosphorus; the denial of medical aid to the wounded; the blocking of escape routes; and so on and so forth.
“Cast Lead” caused a world-wide shock. In many countries, anti-Israeli groups sprang up like mushrooms after the rain. Far-away Gaza became the center of world attention.  
For Barak that was not enough. He persuaded the government to boycott the inquiry commission appointed by the UN, headed by a Zionist Jewish judge. The commission did its work nevertheless, and its findings detailed accusations of Israeli war crimes. Instead of investigating, admitting, apologizing and paying compensation, Barak started a campaign of personal defamation against the judge, which only magnified the damage to Israel. Belatedly, the Israeli army started investigations of its own, which recently confirmed the main findings of the Goldstone report. What does this say about Barak?
But even this was not enough for him. It was the Gaza flotilla incident which revealed his full capacity for delegitimizing Israel. If the ships had been allowed to deliver their small, symbolic cargo to Gaza, the matter would have been forgotten in a day or two. Barak’s military operation achieved the opposite: for months now the world has been in uproar, the Gaza blockade has remained at the center of world attention, our important relationship with Turkey has been irreparably damaged.
When the UN requested Israel to cooperate with an international investigation, Barak reacted with contempt. And instead of appointing at least a State Board of Inquiry with full powers, the Israeli government announced a powerless commission, lacking any credibility and without serious terms of reference. And after all the damage had already been caused, the Israeli government agreed this week to cooperate with the UN commission after all. It’s the classic story of the servant who brought his master rotten fish from the market. When told to choose between eating the fish himself, being flogged or being banished from the town, he chose eating the fish, but could not finish them. When he was being soundly flogged, he could not bear it anymore and therefore chose banishment. So he ate the rotten fish, was flogged and was banished.  
Without a doubt, the Elders of anti-Zion should confer on Barak the title of “hero of delegitimization”.
THE THIRD place on the list is certainly due to the Minister of the Interior, Eli Yishai.
Everybody knows that Israel is the State of the Holocaust Survivors, a state that embodies the basic values of the Jewish people. That is the centerpiece of our Hasbarah (literally “Explaining” – in reality propaganda).
The eminent proof for this pretension should have been our attitude towards pitiful refugees, the survivors of massacres who have reached our country and ask for asylum,
If so, why does the Minister of the Interior do everything in his power to prove the very opposite?
For years now, the ministry has been mistreating the refugees from Africa and other places. The Darfur survivors, who risk their lives to reach Israel through the Sinai desert, are caught in the streets by special manhunt-squads of the ministry, thrown into prison and then deported.
This week, the government decided to expel 400 refugee children who were born in Israel, speak Hebrew and have never known any other homeland. This evokes tragic memories of the 1930s, when Jewish refugees from Germany could find no asylum anywhere and were returned to the Nazi hell.
True, Israel is not the only country in the world that ill-treats “illegal immigrants”. Many countries, from the US to France, do the same. But Israel claims to be The Jewish State, and mistreatment of refugee children is a mortal blow to the basis of its legitimacy.
THE LIST is long.
The other central pillar of the legitimacy of Israel is the claim that we are “The Only Democracy in the Middle East”.
If so, what can we say about the Jerusalem judge who condemned a man whose new Israeli lady “friend” willingly had sex with him after a few minutes’ acquaintance, and found him guilty of rape only because he had hidden from her that he was – God forbid! – an Arab?
What can we say about the Minister of Police who is loudly supporting a policeman who put his revolver to the head of a thief and shot him at point-blank range, while the man was sitting in his car and trying to escape, because he was an Arab?
All these doings – and many more – are contributing every day to the worldwide conspiracy that is aiming at the delegitimization of the State of Israel. But who is the head of the plotters?
All the evidence points in one direction: the man who appointed all these agents to their positions, where they are doing irreparable damage: Binyamin Netanyahu. A master conspirator who hides behind the fa?ade of an incompetent politician.
AS IS well-known, the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” were concocted by the secret police of the Russian Czar, based on a 19th century tract originally written against Napoleon III.
The “Protocols of the Elders of Anti-Zion” are being composed these days by Binyamin Netanyahu and his cronies.

This was a doubtful theory to start with. In order to take part in such an offensive, the Iraqi army would have to assemble, cross the desert and deploy in Jordan, a lengthy and complex logistical operation that would give the Israeli army ample time to hit the Iraqis long before they reached the bank of the Jordan. As for the Syrians, it would be much easier for them to attack Israel on the Golan Heights than to move their army south and attack from the east. And Jordan has always been a secret – but loyal – partner of Israel (except for the short episode of the Six-day War.)
In recent years, the theory has become manifestly ridiculous. The Americans have invaded Iraq and defeated and disbanded Saddam Hussein’s glorious army, which turned out to be a paper tiger. The Kingdom of Jordan has signed an official peace treaty with Israel. Syria is using every opportunity to demonstrate its longing for peace, if Israel would only return the Golan Heights. In short, Israel has nothing to fear from its Eastern neighbors.
True, situations can change. Regimes change, alliances change. But it is impossible to imagine a situation in which three terrifying armies cross the Jordan into Canaan, like the children of Israel in the Biblical story.
Moreover, the idea of a ground attack, like the Nazi blitzkrieg in World War II, belongs to history. In any future war, long-range missiles will play a dominant role. One could imagine the Israeli soldiers in the Jordan valley reclining on deckchairs and observing the missiles flying over their heads in both directions.
So how did this silly idea gain new life? 
IT MAY be useful to go 43 years back in time, in order to understand how this bogeyman was born.
Only six weeks after the Six-day War, the “Allon plan” was launched. Yigal Allon, then Minister of Labor, submitted it to the government. It was not adopted officially, but it did exercise a major influence on the Israeli leadership.
No authorized map of the plan was ever published, but the main points became known. Allon proposed to annex to Israel the Jordan Valley and the western shore of the Dead Sea.  What was left of the West Bank would become enclaves surrounded by Israeli territory, except for a narrow corridor near Jericho which would connect the West Bank with the Jordanian kingdom. Allon also proposed annexing to Israel certain areas in the West Bank, the North of Sinai (“the Rafah Opening”) and the South of the Gaza Strip (“the Katif Bloc’).
He did not care whether the West Bank would be returned to Jordan or became a separate Palestinian entity. Once I attacked him from the Knesset rostrum and accused him of obstructing the establishment of the Palestinian state, which I advocated, and when I returned to my seat, he sent me a note: “I am for a Palestinian state in the West Bank. So how am I less of a dove than you?”
The plan was put forward as a military imperative, but its motives were quite different.
In those days I met with Allon fairly regularly, so I had the opportunity to follow his line of thought. He had been one of the outstanding commanders of the 1948 war and was considered a military expert, but above all he was a leading member of the Kibbutz movement, which at the time exercised a lot of influence in the country.
Immediately after the seizure of the West Bank, the people of the Kibbutz movement spread out across the ground, looking for areas that would be suitable for intensive modern agriculture. Naturally, they were attracted to the Jordan Valley. From their point of view, this was an ideal place for new kibbutzim. It has plenty of water, the terrain is flat and eminently suited to modern agricultural machinery. And, most important, it was sparsely populated. All these advantages were lacking in other West Bank regions: their population was dense, the topography mountainous and the water scarce.
In my opinion, the entire Allon plan was a fruit of agricultural greed, and the military theory was nothing but an expedient security pretext. And, indeed, the immediate result was the setting up of a great number of kibbutzim and moshavim (cooperative villages) in the valley.
Years passed before the limits of the Allon Plan were burst open and settlements were established all over the West Bank.
THE ALLON PLAN gave birth to the bogeyman of the “Eastern Front”’ and since then it has terrorized those who seek peace. Like a ghost, it comes and goes, materializes and vanishes, once in one form, once in another.
Ariel Sharon demanded the annexation of the “widened valley”. The valley itself, a part of the Great Syrian-African Rift Valley, is 120 km long (from the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea) but only about 15 km wide. Sharon demanded almost obsessively the addition to it of the “back of the mountain”, meaning the eastern slope of the central West Bank mountain range, which would have widened it substantially.
When Sharon adopted the Separation Wall project, it was supposed to separate the West Bank not only from Israel proper, but also from the Jordan Valley. This would have enabled what was called the “Allon Plan plus”. The wall would have encircled the entire West Bank, without the Jericho corridor. This plan has not been implemented to date, both because of international opposition and because of lack of funds.
Since the Oslo agreement, almost all successive Israeli governments have insisted that the Jordan Valley must remain in Israeli hands in any future peace agreement. This demand appeared in many guises: sometimes the words were “security border”, sometimes “warning stations”, sometimes “military installations”, sometimes “long-term lease”, depending on the creative talents of successive Prime Ministers. The common denominator: the valley should remain under Israeli control.
NOW COMES Netanyahu and resurrects the verbal duo “Eastern Front”.
What Eastern Front? What threats are there from our eastern neighbors? Where is Saddam Hussein? Where is Hafez al-Assad? Is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad going to send the armored columns of the Revolutionary Guards rolling towards the Jordan crossings?
Well, it goes like this: the Americans are going to leave Iraq some day. Then a new Saddam Hussein will arise, this time a Shiite, and ally himself with Shiite Iran and the treacherous Turks, and how can you rely on the Jordanian king who abhors Netanyahu? Terrible stuff may happen if we don’t keep watch on the bank of the Jordan!
This is manifestly ludicrous. So what is the real aim?
The entire world is now busy with the American demand for starting “direct talks” between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. One might be tempted to think that world peace depends on turning the “proximity talks” into “direct talks”. Never have so many words of sanctimonious hypocrisy been poured out on such a trivial subject.
The “proximity talks” have been going on for several months now. It would be wrong to say that their results have been close to zero. They were zero. Absolute zero. So what will happen if the two parties sit together in one room? One can predict with absolute certainty: Another zero. In the absence of an American determination to impose a solution, there will be no solution.
So why does Barack Obama insist? There is one explanation: throughout the Middle East, his policies have failed. He is in urgent need of an impressive achievement. He promised to leave Iraq, and the situation there makes it impossible. The war in Afghanistan is going from bad to worse, a general leaves and a general arrives, and victory is further away than ever. One can already imagine the last American climbing into the last helicopter on the roof of the American embassy in Kabul.
Remains the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Here, too, Obama is facing failure. He hoped to achieve much without investing anything at all, and was easily defeated by the Israel lobby. To hide the shame, he needs something that can be presented to the ignorant public as a great American victory. The renewal of “direct talks” is meant to be such a victory.
Netanyahu, on his part, is quite satisfied with the situation as it is. Israel is calling for direct talks, the Palestinians refuse. Israel is extending its hand for peace, the Palestinians turn away. Mahmoud Abbas demands that Israel extend the freeze on the settlements and declares in advance that the negotiations will be based on the 1967 borders.
But the Americans are exerting tremendous pressure on Abbas, and Netanyahu fears that Abbas will give in. Therefore he declares that he cannot freeze the settlements, because in that case – God forbid! – his coalition would disintegrate. And if that does not suffice, here comes the Eastern Front. The Israeli government is giving notice to the Palestinians that it will not give up the Jordan Valley.
In order to emphasize the point, Netanyahu has started to remove the remaining Palestinian population in the valley, a few thousand. Villages are being eradicated, starting this week with Farasiya, where all the dwellings and the water installations were destroyed. This is ethnic cleansing pure and simple, much like the similar operation now going on against the Bedouins in the Negev.
What Netanyahu is saying, in so many words, is: Abbas should think twice before he enters “direct talks”.
THE JORDAN Valley descends to the lowest point on the surface of the earth, the Dead Sea, 400 meters below mean sea level.
The revival of the Eastern Front may indicate the lowest point of Netanyahu’s policy, with the intent of putting to death once and for all any remaining chance for peace.

So much is obvious, because the Israeli public always prefers solving a problem by force than doing anything that might be interpreted as weakness. The rescue of the hostages at Entebbe in 1976 is considered one of the most glorious exploits in the history of Israel, even though there was only a hair’s breadth between success and failure. It was a gamble with the lives of the 105 hostages and the soldiers, and it was successful.
In other cases, though, the gamble did not succeed. Not in Munich in 1972, when they gambled with the lives of the athletes, and lost. Not in Ma’alot in 1974, when they gambled with the lives of the schoolchildren, and lost. Not in the attempt to free the captured soldier Nachschon Wachsman in 1994, when they gambled with his life, and lost.
If there had been any chance of freeing Shalit by force, they would have risked his life, and probably lost. Fortunately for him, there has been no such chance. So far.
Actually, this is quite remarkable. Our security services have hundreds of secret collaborators in the Gaza Strip, in addition to high tech surveillance. Yet it seems that no reliable information about Shalit’s whereabouts has been obtained.
How has Hamas succeeded in this? Among other measures, by not allowing any contact with the captive – no meetings with the International Red Cross or foreign dignitaries, just two short videos, almost no letters. They simply cannot be pressurized. They refuse all requests of this nature.
This problem could possibly be overcome if our government had been ready to give assurances that no attempt would be made to free him by force, in return for a Hamas undertaking to let him meet with the Red Cross. To be credible, such an undertaking would probably need a guarantee by a third party, such as the US.
Absent such an arrangement, all the sanctimonious speeches by foreign statesmen about “letting the Red Cross meet with the soldier” are just so many empty words.
NO LESS hypocritical are the demands of foreign personalities to “free the kidnapped soldier”.
Such demands are music to the Israeli ear, but completely disregard the fact that the subject has to be an exchange of prisoners.
Gilad Shalit is alive and breathing, a young man whose fate arouses strong human emotions. But so are the Palestinian prisoners. They are alive and breathing, and their fate, too, arouses strong human emotions. They include young people, whose lives are being wasted in prison. They include political leaders, who are being punished for simply belonging to one or another organization. They include people who, in Israeli parlance, “have blood on their hands”, and who, in Palestinian parlance, are national heroes who have sacrificed their own freedom for their people’s liberation.
The price demanded by Hamas may seem exorbitant – a thousand for one. But Israel has already paid such a price for other prisoners in the past, and that has become the standard ratio. Hamas could not accept less without losing face.
The thousand Palestinian prisoners have families – fathers, mothers, husbands, wives and children, brothers and sisters. Exactly like Gilad Shalit. They, too, cry out, demand, exert pressure. Hamas cannot ignore them.
THE WHOLE affair is shocking evidence of the inability of our government – both the previous and the present one – to take decisions and even to think logically.
Hamas already fixed the price four years ago, according to past precedents. Their demand has not changed since then.
From the first moment, there was a need to make a decision.
No doubt, such an agreement would strengthen Hamas. It would underline its legitimacy as an important Palestinian factor. It would be seen as confirming the mantra that “Israel understands only the language of force”.
Therefore, it comes down to a simple question: Yes or No?
Yes means a blow to Mahmoud Abbas, whose conciliatory ways have not led to the release of one single important Palestinian prisoner. (The US has vetoed any such agreement, since it would strengthen Hamas, which it designates as a “terrorist organization”, and weaken Abbas, whom the Americans consider as their man.)
NO means life-imprisonment for Shalit, with perpetual danger to his life.
For four years now, our leaders have been unable to decide, much as they are unable to decide upon any other important matter concerning our future. (For example: Two states or one apartheid state? Peace or settlements? Making a peace agreement with Abbas or negotiating with Hamas?)
IN ORDER to wriggle out of the necessity to make a decision, various tricks have been employed. Among others, the assertion that the purpose of the Gaza blockade was to free Shalit.
That was from the beginning a mendacious pretext. The blockade was imposed in order to compel the Gaza population to overthrow the regime of Hamas, which had won the Palestinian elections. The Shalit connection served only for spin.
Now the blockade has been partially lifted. That is a huge victory for the aid flotilla – a victory the planners of the flotilla did not dare to hope for in their wildest dreams. As a result of the stupid decision to attack the Turkish ship, international pressure made this step unavoidable.
Among other pretexts, the government declared that “anyhow the blockade did not help in freeing Shalit”.
Shalit’s parents cried out. They really believed that there was a connection between the blockade and the fate of their son. But it is obvious that, when deciding to give in to international pressure and lift the blockade partially, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak did not even think about Shalit.
I stress the word “partially”. True, it is a huge victory for all those of us who said from the beginning that the blockade was immoral, illegal and unwise. The decision to let everything into the Strip except arms constitutes a big change.
But the main problem in Gaza is poverty induced by unemployment. Practically all enterprises in the Gaza Strip have been shut down by the blockade. Not only could they not obtain raw materials, but, no less important, they could not export their products to the West Bank, Israel or the world at large. It seems that this situation has not changed. Even if the remaining enterprises receive raw materials now, they cannot export their products – textiles, fruit, flowers and all the rest. Israeli suppliers will now make millions selling their wares in the Gaza Strip, but the Gazans will not be able to sell their products in Israel.
Anyhow, this does not concern the fate of Shalit.
THE SHALIT family is in terrible distress. One can understand them, but sympathy does not prohibit disagreement.
They are wrong when they object to the lifting of the blockade. They are wrong when they demand that Hamas prisoners in Israel not be allowed family visits. (And not only because the families residing in Gaza are not allowed into Israel anyhow.)
One cannot have it both ways. When Noam Shalit, the father, demands that a thousand Hamas prisoners be released to free his son – he cannot at the same time take part in persecuting Hamas prisoners. He cannot demand humane treatment for his son – and at the same time justify the inhumane treatment of the Gaza population. This double standard bewilders the public and undermines the campaign for freeing Gilad.
The message must be simple, clear and straightforward, and addressed to Binyamin Netanyahu: to make the decision to implement the prisoner swap at once. Gilad will return home, and all Israelis will be jubilant. The Palestinian prisoners will also return to their homes, and there, too, everyone will be jubilant.
THE INABILITY of Netanyahu to make decisions and stand behind them reveals the full extent of his incompetence as a leader.
Instead, we have a specialist in marketing (which happens to be his original profession), a person who wakes up in the morning with polls and goes to sleep at night with polls. The pollsters tell him that freeing Gilad Shalit would be popular in Israel, but freeing the Palestinians would be unpopular. At night, in bed, he agonizes about it: Which would be better? How many votes would be gained, how many votes would be lost?
That is frightening. If he cannot make a straightforward decision about the fate of Shalit, how can he make decisions about the problems that affect the fate of all of us, not for one year but for generations to come? 

The siege of Gaza is a USA project conceived and fine tuned by the Israeli leadership as part of the campaign to destabilize Hamas rule in the strip. Hamas, instead of acting in accord with the type-cast terrorist has proven its ability to maintain a semblance of normality in horrific conditions and is doing a credible job of trying to maintain quiet on the border, thus confounding the cheap Israeli and US propaganda regarding its innate terrorist nature. The Hamas leadership even insists on periodical statements to the effect that they would be ready to participate in a Palestinian coalition government moving in the direction of a two-state solution.
A Government of Extremists with No Opposition
Israel has become more and more indispensable in maintaining the tattered US hegemony in the region. Iran refuses to buckle under, Iraq is still occupied and working on the results of the election four months ago, Syria is doing exceedingly well on the diplomatic front and has even improved its relations with Lebanon which seems to be doing just fine with a national unity government centered on…Hezballah.  And the bulwark of the Northern tier, Turkey, is discovering the possibilities of life outside of  NATO, including independent diplomacy. The practical alignment of (Sunni) Hamas with other independent forces in the region is of added significance in that it disproves the idea that opposition to the US is  a Shi’ite affair.
By any objective analysis, Israel’s attack on Turkish sovereignty in international waters involved dangers for Israel that were obvious to any serious or responsible leader. The Israeli leadership committed almost every cardinal sin in the book and this includes disregard for the potential of serious damage to its own interests.  The elite in this country are painfully aware that the leadership made very conceivable mistake possible and would like to erect some kind of barriers against the Netanyahu-Barak proclivity to employ indiscriminate force in regional security problems. To counter waves of internal criticism,  the government exploited use of the local media to whip the citizenry into a state of boiling hysteria. But it  could not obscure the obvious fact that mismanagement, gross negligence and adventurist psycho-neurosis had plunged Israel into a serious political crisis.  The elites in Israel have traditionally attempted to purge the bureaucracy of its natural desire to cover up its shlumeil-like lack of any semblance of responsibility for its glaring inefficiency and serious malfunctions even in terms of its own declared policies by the institution of high level blue ribbon investigations. 
But the government, seeking to prevent any serious investigation into the flotilla disaster headed off anything serious like a judicial investigation by conveying the message that it still had undiminished US confidence and that the Obama and friends were working with Israel on urgent management control regarding the danger of a genuine international investigation. Though the punditry had long insisted that the US could soften Israel on the settlement issue and push Israel towards serious negotiation with the Palestinians when and if the ruling coalition was transformed with the cooption of Livneh’s Kadima Party, Washington ignored the opportunity to bring about a more congenial and rational  coalition. Instead they backed Netanyahu and Barak and the existing extreme right wing government to the hilt. Israel’s blunders are quicky forgiven in Washington. Thus, DC saves Israel from international censure and saves the ruling coalition by cutting the ground out from any local opposition as if Netanyahu-Barak are the last two main pillars of Washington’s influence and clout in the region. One concludes that the Israeli government can get away with any level of stupidity and malfeasance as long as it keeps Obama in its corner. Obama can understand that Israel has its own “oil leaks” and this is no reason to turn your back on allies…
Liars Fear the Truth Like the Devil Fears the Cross
Israel does not hesitate to use all available footage and information – its own and that stolen from the 600 passengers on board the Marmara to concoct its own version of events. By so doing, Israel launched a futile propaganda war. Would any reasonable observer be impressed by tainted materials arbitrarily selected and edited by the Israeli side after the illegal confiscation of all the material that was in the hands of the passengers on the ship. One is intrigued by the constant Israeli refrain that 1) we do not have anything to hide and 2) that Israel will not allow under any circumstances whatsoever any investigation of the Israeli soldiers. No Israeli soldier was killed. Ten passengers were killed and scores more wounded and Israel claims that it almost an act of blatant anti-Semitism to investigate how this happened.
All we want is the truth. NATO has joined its voice to that of the UN and the European Council with its deep regrets regarding loss of lives and casualties. But more important all these august international bodies are demanding “a prompt, impartial, credible and transparent investigation into the incident.”
Israel is busy establishing its own partial, credibility-lacking and opaque investigation. The Israeli leadership is busy pretending that the US has a formula for Israel whereby a toothless low level local investigation can be presented as one meeting the above objective internationally established criteria. It is no wonder that Washington is trying to dodge the issue. It is almost inconceivable that Obama and company will try and pass off an Israeli panel as an impartial investigation. Even a genius like Joe Biden will have a difficulty squaring this circle: an impartial Israeli investigation.  But really. 
In the midst of all this there is a steady, considerable increase of activity on the left. There is more Jewish-Arab cooperation.  The connection between the occupation and US policy in the region was never clearer. We all need and deserve something better than Obama wandering around a minefield of mines laid by the United States.

In every army, not just the Israeli, commandoes are considered the elite of the elite. Their dangerousness to civilians stems among other things from the blind obedience that characterizes them: “we received an order and we carried it out, we did not ask questions,” as one of the soldiers of the Shayetet who participated in the pirate action put it. Those “top quality” soldiers are carefully chosen by the army by means of a battery of tests, including psychological examinations and personal interviews, in order to ensure that nobody who thinks too much, or who is influenced by all kinds of “soft” ideas like human rights or empathy for human suffering, gets into the unit. The army needs them to be cruel people who will unblinkingly execute any order. The results have been felt by the passengers of the Mavi Marmara: nine killed and about fifty wounded (whom the army has prevented from being interviewed up to the time of the writing of these lines).
What really happened? Armed Israeli soldiers acted like a violent band of pirates and attacked a civilian ship in the open sea, outside of Israel’s territorial waters.
In the course of the violent attack by the Israeli commandoes, who were backed by warships and helicopters, dozens of people were killed and wounded, as we have seen.
What do the Israeli media do, guided by the IDF Spokesman? They turn the tables. The IDF Spokesman distributed pictures showing unarmed civilians trying to defend themselves against the Israeli attackers with whatever was available to them: water hoses, plates, knives, etc. And thus, though a linguistic sleight-of-hand, the armed soldiers who were storming a ship that was not theirs become victims, and the civilian passengers who were defending themselves became attackers.
What we are witnessing here is the nazification of the language. In Germany the Jewish victims were converted into a gang of bloodsuckers. Here Israel’s best journalists are enlisted into service to demonize of the passengers who were defending themselves.
Below are a few examples from the most popular newspapers in Israel, starting with Yediot Aharonot, the highest-circulation newspaper in Israel:
Eitan Haber, who in the past served as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s office manager, described the defenders as “contemptible.” His colleague Nahum Barnea, winner of the Israel Prize for journalism, described them as “violent thugs.” Alex Fishman, the newspaper’s military correspondent, described them as “rioters.” The settler-journalist Yoaz Hendel wrote that they were “hooligans.”
Amnon Abramovitz, the political commentator for Channel 2, the most-watched in Israel, described the victims’ self-defence as a “provocation,” in an article in the same newspaper.
The picture was no different in Maariv, the second-highest circulation newspaper in the country. The newspaper’s senior correspondent Ben Caspit described the defenders as “savages.” Ben Dror Yemini, who has become a propagandist like Goebbels (but without his talent) against the Left, described them as “angels of hate.” And it was the same on all the television channels.
Not content with that, they went on to paint a picture according to which the invading soldiers who killed and wounded dozens of human beings were “lynch victims” – no less!
And in order to add colour to the army’s lies, photos were published of knives that were found on the ship as proof that the passengers had stored “cold weapons” on board with premeditation. And what do we see in those photos? Kitchen knives of the type that can be found in every home, and of course also in every passenger ship that carries hundreds of passengers. The passengers ate, and cut vegetables, bread and other food items with knives – how strange!
If I had been one of the passengers, and as it happens I nearly did join them, I would have been a member of the defending party.
In fact the actions of the defenders on deck were consistent with Israeli law, which permits self-defence against intruders, up to and including shooting them to death.
That is the famous “Dromi law,” named after the farmer Shai Dromi, who killed a Bedouin citizen and wounded his friend when, according to him, they had broken into his farm at night. In order to prevent Dromi from being convicted, right-wingers in the Knesset passed a law while the trial was still under way, which permits the shooting of intruders. The racist initiators of that law thought that it would only apply to Jews killing Arabs. It surely did not occur to them that it could apply to Turks defending themselves against invading Israeli soldiers – without killing anyone.
And in order to complete the farce, the commander of the Navy, together with the Chief of Staff and the Minister of Defence, stated in a news conference that took place after the slaughter of the passengers by the soldiers of Shayetet 13 that the soldiers had “acted courageously” and “with high morality,” because, after all, only nine people were killed. It is as if the commander of the Navy were saying that the passengers should say “thank you” to the soldiers for not having killed all of them. Really nice of them. I once heard a similar formulation from a neo-Nazi in Germany who said that the Nazis could have murdered a lot more Jews but because they exhibited self-restraint, many Jews remained alive. Such compassion!
Let us apply honest thinking to the matter: the brave and heroic ones were the passengers who defended themselves against armed and cruel Israeli invaders, trying to use everything that was within their reach in a struggle in which they did not have a chance, and many of them offered up their lives on the altar of humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza.
I am far from sharing the world-view of the participants in the flotilla who are members of the Islamic organization IHH, [2] but it has happened more than once that people who belong to different organizations that represent diametrically opposed opinions on many issues share an identical position on a certain issue. On the issue of opposition to the siege of Gaza, I am in the same boat with all the participants in the flotilla, whether they be Islamists, Jews, Christians or secular.
The coverage of the massacre on the Mavi Marmara once again presented us with the familiar picture of the television channels united in one voice. Using mendacious laundered language, they all turned into the long arm of the army. Also the leader of the Opposition, Tzipi Livni, cast off her parliamentary role and became a government spokeswoman in interviews with the foreign media – a natural continuation of her role as Foreign Minister during the Gaza War.
There are those who have drawn a parallel with the illegal immigrant-ship Exodus, which set sail for Palestine with over four thousand Holocaust Survivors in 1947. They were stopped by the British army and returned to Europe. The Exodus became an Israeli legend, and the Mavi Marmara too will probably join the canon of Palestinian legend. There are indeed a number of similarities.
In both cases a colonial army intercepted a passenger ship in order to prevent it from reaching its destination. Fifty British soldiers boarded the Exodus, and the passengers rose up and fought against them, exactly like the passengers on the Mavi Marmara. The British soldiers opened fire and killed three passengers out of a total of over four thousand. The Israeli soldiers proved to be more cruel, killing nine out of six hundred.
The Israeli soldiers obeyed orders. Not one of them asked, “wait a moment, why do we have to attack a civilian ship that is transporting humanitarian supplies to Gaza?”
As I said, soldiers in commando units are unmatched when it comes to obedience and implementing orders. That is one of the reasons why I advise young people who have not yet enlisted to avoid military service in general and so-called “elite units” like Shayetet 13 in particular; for they face a clear and immediate danger of being converted into licensed murderers. Civilian service is always preferable to military service, and if they must serve in the army, better to serve in units in the rear, inside the Green Line, in jobs that do not require the use of weapons.
If any future flotillas set sail from Turkey, the Turkish government should provide them with an escort of warships and fighter planes. A warning shot fired across the bow of an Israeli warship should make it clear to Israel that it is not worthwhile to behave like a pirate state.
The blockade is causing serious suffering to a million and a half innocent Palestinians, including thousands of children and old people who are suffering from malnutrition and disease and death because of the lack of medicines. It must be lifted.
The Hamas movement was nurtured and cultivated for years by the Israeli Occupation. The Hamas regime is certainly not a kindred spirit of mine, but it exists and it is necessary to talk to it. It is a terror entity no less than Israel is a terror entity. Those two terror entities have to talk to each other in order to find a political solution, and until it is found they must not wage the struggle on the backs of women, children and old people.
A year and a half ago I entered Gaza with a flotilla that brought medicines and other humanitarian aid. Other members of the group of which I was a member were concerned about what kind of reception I would receive as an Israeli. In fact I received a friendly reception. Clearly, they were eager to meet peace-loving Israelis who would treat them like human beings with rights. It was not only the people on the street who were happy to meet an Israeli who opposed the blockade; also political activists and government ministers.
Instead of killing, liquidating, intercepting and suchlike terms from the lexicon of the Occupation, we must change the diskette and talk peace, even with Hamas.
Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent.
Notes
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shayetet_13  
2. http://www.ihh.org.tr/anasayfa/en/  

Anti-Zionist organizations try to minimize talk about Zionism, for fear of alienating themselves from the public. Many people on the Left think that there is no point in talking about Zionism.  They hope that some well-meaning Zionists will make peace in the absence of any alternative. The problem is that the meaning of Zionism and its objective has always been and still is the conquest of the Land. Therefore, Zionism constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to peace with the Palestinians, to the extent that it depends on Israel alone.
The Essence of Zionism: Conquest of the Land
The conquest of the Land was not a slogan of right-wing Zionism alone, but also of left-wing and allegedly moderate Zionism. In many senses, its importance was greater for the latter than it was for general and right-wing Zionism, because it created an ideological shield: it represented Zionism as a socialist and egalitarian movement that tried with all its might to achieve cooperation and peace with the Arab population.
After all, there was the left-wing Zionism of Hashomer Hatzair which proposed a bi-national state.  There was the Brit Shalom (true, a rather small group) which proposed restrictions on Jewish immigration by agreement with the other people. And after 1967 the main party in the Yishuv (Mapai-Labor) proposed a territorial compromise with the Palestinians . However, it should be recalled that Hashomer Hatzair’s support for a bi-national state during the Mandate was subject to three “small” conditions:
1) the bi-national state would come into existence only after a Jewish majority was achieved in the country;
2) the British Mandatory regime would continue for 20 more years; and
3) if the Palestinians did not agree to that, the powers would have the right to impose it on them by force.
Brit Shalom, undoubtedly the most progressive group of Zionists, proposed a regime of equality between Jews and Arabs under the British Mandate, when Jews constituted about 12 per cent of the population of the country. They also agreed to limitations on Jewish immigration once the Jews achieved demographic parity with the Arabs. Because of their positions (which the Arabs, of course, could not accept), they were condemned within the Yishuv, including by Hashomer Hatzair, as traitors to Zionism. And in any case they were a minority within a minority of the Jewish public.
But the main function of left-wing Zionism was to convince the progressive-liberal-socialist part of the public that Zionism was a just ideology, and that Israel was surrounded by enemies not willing to recognize that fact. In the face of such “rejection-ism,” Israel had to defend itself. This approach succeeded beyond expectation. And that is evidently one of the reasons why even the liberal public in this country feels it has no choice but to reconcile itself to 62 years of conquest. The Israel public would not even dream of demonstrating against a slaughter along the lines of the Cast Lead operation in Gaza.
The Zionism of Buber
One of the gurus of so-called moderate and humanist Zionism, who exercised a profound influence on the Zionist Left, was Martin Buber. His approach, which is discussed below, reveals the essence of that Zionism, and reveals perhaps more about it than he himself intended. In a book by Ehud ben-Ezer  published in 1986 and based, inter aliya, on Buber’s conversations and writings, Buber tell the following story: “They say that one day Nordau came to Herzl in a fright and cried: ‘I heard that there are Arab inhabitants in Palestine. If this is true, justice is not on our side.’ If these remarks are true, this statement reveals a marvelous naivety. Life by its very nature is bound up with iniquity. Anaximander even thought, apparently, that the very fact of our personal existence signifies injustice against ‘universal beings,’ and that we owe penance to all other creatures. In any case there is no life without the destruction of life. If we observe carefully, we will see that at every given moment everyone is robbing ‘living space’ from someone else.” Therefore, Buber rationalizes, “in the period of our settlement enterprise, which was in effect a conquest by peaceful means, the best among us did not intend to remain innocent in their own eyes in that war for our existence, since we came to ensure a place for our own coming generations, we were forced to reduce the space for the future generations of the Arab people.” [1]
Presumably any civilized person would be shocked upon reading those words that were spoken by Buber, who had the aura of a great humanist. At the core, one can even detect here signs of fascism – that is to say, the rationalization of injustice by the strong against the weak.
Buber also provides a philosophical rationalization for force and injustice! After all, if indeed “life, by its very essence, involves injustice,” then nobody is right and nobody is wrong. In general, Buber is describing a human jungle in which “there is no life without the destruction of life”!
Buber does not stop at generalities, but gets very specific. After all, he is responding to the claim that this country was not empty when the Jews began to settle here. He points out that every moment everyone is robbing someone else of their “living space.” And lest there be any doubt whatsoever who he is talking about, he adds that “we were forced to reduce the space for the future generations of the Arab people.” But he elevates the Zionist enterprise above all else when he calls for “the best among us” not to remain “innocent in their own eyes” in this war for our national existence. He is evidently addressing the not insignificant numbers of Israelis who could not accept the Nakba (the eviction of 700,000 Arabs during the 1948 war) with equanimity. Buber also repeats the widespread self-righteous Zionist claim of “conquest by peaceful means.” It is as if he had never heard of the Nakba.
This story reveals a double phenomenon: even at the dawn of its day, the Zionists knew that Zangwill’s tale about the land being empty of inhabitants was groundless. But above all, Buber’s words clarify the essence of Zionism: the conquest of the Land. And his words about the conquest of “living space” are chilling indeed. Did Buber not know that he was using a Nazi ideological expression?
Buber’s words directly raise the question suggested by the title of this article: is peace or reconciliation with the Palestinians possible at all? After all, it is “the denial of living space from the future generations of Palestinians” that we are talking about here.
Buber – and for this we owe him a debt of gratitude – did not evade the central problem of Zionism, which is: the imperative to conquer the Land. Indeed Zionist ideology would have no meaning without the conquest of the Land. All the issues in the debates about Zionism and Jewish history that have preoccupied and still preoccupy so many people – are the Jews a people or a religious community, can they be truly absorbed into countries outside of Israel, did God bequeath the land to them, etc., etc., including discourse on the Holocaust – boil down in the end to a discussion of the conquest of the Land.  There is no serious debate with the Palestinians about Jewish history – whichever version, and I doubt that this history interests them. There is only one subject at the heart of the conflict: the coming of the Jews to Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century, their ultimate conquest of the land, and the expulsion of most of the Palestinians in 1948.
But Buber was not alone. The founders and early leaders of Mapai (the Labor Party) who came to Palestine a few years before and after the First World War never hid their intentions. Berl Katznelson, probably the most revered labor leader of all, said, in 1927: . “The Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquests.” And in the same breathe added: “It is not by chance that I use military terms when speaking of settlements.” In 1922 Ben Gurion had already said the same thing: “We are conquerors of the land facing an iron wall, and we have to break through it.”
Benny Morris the historian was also raised in the tradition of moderate Zionism.  He was a “post-Zionist” who did a great deal to expose the injustices of the conquest and expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. One can not accuse him of evading the basic problems of Zionism – the conquest of the country by the Jews and the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land.
In an interview with Ari Shavit, which provoked a storm at the time, Morris declared: “There would have been no Jewish state without the uprooting of those 700,000 Palestinians … and so it was necessary to uproot them … to clear the hinterland and to clear the border areas.” He also stated that “there are circumstances in history in which there is justification for ethnic cleansing.” And he then added: “Not to have completed the transfer (in 1948 by Ben-Gurion) was a mistake.”
Morris does not stop with the past, but also reflects on the future: “If Israel faces a situation of existential threat as in 1948, it could be that it will be forced to act as it acted then.” And at the end, in a less tactful way than that of Buber, but with the same meaning, he says with simplicity: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Another example of an undaunted peace-loving member of the Zionist Left is Ze’ev Sternhell, who also endorses the conquest of the Land. Accordingly he wrote: “The conquest of the land up to 1948 was necessary and vital, and so it was just, because it was necessary for the realization the right of the Jews to independence and self-determination.” (Where we got the right to determine that the Jews were entitled to self-determination and authorized to expel the residents of the country he does not tell us.)
Realization of the imperative to conquer the Land, or to establish control over it, was the basic objective of every Zionist: from the Right to the Left, from Herzl and Nordau, Jabotinsky and Weizmann, Ben-Gurion and Begin and from Martin Buber all the way to Ze’ev Sternhell.
But no pretext in the world can justify the expulsion of a people from its native land. That is Zionism’s original sin against the Palestinian people, and no philosopher like Buber or historian like Morris or Sternhell can explain this away.
There is not a single Palestinian who would agree to peace and reconciliation with Israel without, at least, an end to the Occupation of 1967 and a solution to the refugee problem. And even such a solution is a huge concession on the part of the Palestinians.
The Israeli public is not willing to choose peace and reconciliation on that basis – not even the most moderate among them. Their Zionist faith prevents them from taking responsibility for the refugee problem. And as for the return of the lands that were occupied in 1967, they rely on their governments to find ways to avoid doing that, just as they have done in the past sixty-two years. The sad conclusion is that, to the extent that it depends on Israel the chances for peace are very small. It only remains to add that in the long run the continuation of the status quo is of great danger to Israel itself.
1. Martin Buber, quoted in Unease in Zion. Ed., Ehud Ben Ezer. Am Oved. Tel Aviv 1986. pp.61-2 (Hebrew).
*Translated by George  Malent

Back to Goldstone. The important investigation about him, which was accompanied by harsh descriptions of actions taken by the racist regime in South Africa, were received by us with applause. Thousands of talk backers suddenly “remembered” their long-standing opposition to the Apartheid regime, and (Israel’s) Ministry of Foreign Affairs ordered its representatives throughout the world to make liberal use of these discoveries about Goldstone, “who spoke badly about Israel.” Suddenly, the natural inheritors of the apartheid regime in the Israeli establishment were conducting a successful public relations campaign, and everyone was covered in disgusting righteousness. Hypocrisy has been celebrating here for numerous years, and already from the days of Golda (Meir – AIC) righteousness was transformed from science to an art.
I am not searching for reasons to defend Goldstone, despite the fact that his report about Israeli aggression toward Gaza (“Operation Cast Lead”) was actually successful and perhaps even too moderate on the backdrop of the real occurrences in Gaza. The past of the man does not negate the accuracy of his statements in the report. Judge Goldstone was justlike legal figures by us who permitted the deportation of Arabs and Israeli building on the former’s land, in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention to which Israel is obligated; precisely as Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan pardoned Jews who killed Arabs in cold blood; just as Israeli establishment figures are responsible for extra-judicial killings, and are okay with the “collateral damage” of killing children and women who happened to be in the area of the targeted murders. Goldstone’s record as part of the racist regime in South Africa was never a secret, and no one threw these things in his face when he was considered a good Zionist and supporter of Israel. Throughout the years he was a welcomed visitor here, and the (Israeli) establishment viewed him as a friend and completely dismissed the black whom he sent to their deaths. In real time, when the racists were in power, only a few Israelis consistently attacked the South African regime, and even fewer found it necessary to defend the black liberation movements in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was in prison and our media perceived him as a terrorist. As one occupied throughout the years with the holy work of struggling against racism and who received threats from the South African Embassy in the Apartheid days, I am completely aware of Israelis’ abysmal apathy toward the behavior of the racist whites, students of the Nazis, who were then rulers of the boycotted state.
There was also a political background to Israel’s imperviousness. Israel was the closest ally of Pretoria in those bad days and was considered the leading collaborator of the Apartheid state that was boycotted throughout the world. The cooperation was extensive – political, military, intelligence and even nuclear. In 1978 the international media reported that Israel and South Africa together conducted a nuclear explosion in the Atlantic Ocean. According to reliable international sources, it was the late Ezer Weizman, amongst the strongest and most open supporters of the white racist regime, who led the experiment.
When I published this in my column “Small World” in (the now defunct newspaper – AIC) Haolam Haze, it was blackened out by the censor, even though it was a permitted quote from foreign sources. The Histradut: Hebrew Workers’ Union in Eretz Israel also collaborated with these people of injustice, and the Workers’ Company maintained an active office there. Its existence was denied (after I published this information) in an emotional letter by the late Yeruham Mashal, then Chairperson of the Histradut. However, he stopped his denials when in my column I noted the names of representatives of the Workers’ Company who maintained wide-ranging relations with the horrible white regime.
The Histradut was almost kicked out of the International Trade Union Confederation in Geneva, but afterwards still maintained economic relations to the best of its abilities. In 1976 the South African Prime Minister, John Vorster, was invited to visit Israel by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin and Shimon Peres were the active architects of cooperation between the two countries and Menachem Begin, whose party was always pro-South African, simply followed in their path. The primary area of cooperation was in intelligence. The messengers of the dark apparatus of South Africa, called BOSS, trained in Israel, together with murderers from the murderous secret police DINA from Pinochet’s days in Chile and the infamous SAWAK of the Iranian Shah. I dealt with all of these subjects over numerous years as a journalist, and often I encountered apathy bordering on contempt in meeting places of journalists, including in the cafeteria of the Knesset. The “obsession” of people like me with subjects of human rights throughout the world was not more popular than today’s writing about the crimes of the Israeli establishment in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The line in these subjects was consistent: at the height of the killing spree of the military dictatorship in Argentina against left-wing activists (including numerous Jews), Yedioth Ahronot (the same newspaper that is now shocked at the actions of Goldstone in South Africa) sent journalist Mira Avrech to the state that murdered 30,000 prisoners of conscience after horrific torture. A large number of them were murdered after being thrown out of Argentinian military planes. Avrech, a close friend of Shimon Peres, published words praising the generals and vilifying the martyred. The black freedom fighters in South Africa were also defined as terrorists and communists by the Israeli press.
An entire institution supported racist South Africa, mostly in secret, and the journalists who kept silent do not deserve to join the attackers of Goldstone. I certainly agree that the man is contemptible, and it is possible that he is also a hypocrite, but only one who objected to racism in South Africa in the days of Apartheid has a moral right to use this weapon against the former judge. Israel’s elites, former friends of South Africa, business people who made millions, arms dealers who received services there on the way to market their bloody merchandise to gangs throughout Africa, architects of Israel’s nuclear deterrent power who did not shy away from close cooperation with people who were imprisoned during World War II due to their enthusiastic support of the Nazis. They are not ashamed to now talk of the massacre in Soweto in 1976, the year in which the South African Prime Minister polluted the air of our city with his official visit with Rabin. Israel is conducting its “public relations” campaign against Goldstone with very dirty hands indeed.
This article originally appeared in the weekly Jerusalem newspaper Kol Hair and reproduced in Hagada Hasmalit, a left-radical forum in the Hebrew language. Translated to English by the Alternative Information Center (AIC).

That Maddow-Paul set-to on MSNBC was tragic-comic. As CounterPunch co-editor Jeffrey St Clair remarked, “Maddow and Paul agree on probably 90 per cent of the BIG issues confronting us, from ending the drug and Afghan war, to ending bail outs & aid to Israel. But because of their own peculiar prejudices, his doctrinaire libertarian, hers PC progressive, neither of them can talk about anything other than a non-issue such as the Civil Rights Act of 19 — SIXTY-FOUR. It’s like a Dadaist play.”
Start with Rand. Like many libertarians he is never happier than in dashing back through the corridors of history to distant, sometimes obscure champions in the fight for liberty, as construed by libertarians. On the night of the MSNC face-off it was William Lloyd Garrison, founder of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1832. When Paul rolled out his name in response to one of her early questions about his posture on the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Maddow blinked in astonishment as though he was mustering to his side the shade of the Venerable Bede. If she’d asked him about his posture on the rights of juries to nullify, to act according to the dictates of conscience and to set the law aside, he’d probably have brought up Edward Bushell and the landmark case against William Penn and William Mead in 1670.
Libertarians are like that. On some big and important things they’re admirable and staunch. Many of them, on some big and important things, are rancid. Half of Rand Paul’s positions are disgusting, like his end-of-week defense of BP. Other libertarians decry him from being evasive on O’Reilly’s Show about opposing war with Iran. Libertarians in the dust and heat of the political arena have no grasp of scale or priority. At heart many of them are nutty, martyrs to their truths, like fourth-century Christian schismatics. Ardent to refute charges that they favor the untrammeled sway of the market, the rejection of all federal intrusion, they dash to Von Mises and kindred heroes with all the childish enthusiasm of Gabriel Betteredge invoking Robinson Crusoe in The Moonstone. They have no sense of timing. Rand Paul, after five minutes of jabbing from Maddow, could have easily swerved the conversation towards issues more congenial to the MSNBC audience than his theoretical take on the Civil Rights Act. He could have denounced the farce of financial “reform”, of Bush’s and Obama’s wars, of constitutional abuses. These are all libertarian positions. But no. He couldn’t stop himself shoving his foot in his mouth. He seems dumb.
It’s the easiest thing in the world for a grandstanding liberal to push a libertarian into a corner. Then they’ll get praise for their unflinching courage, like Morris Dees’ South Poverty Law Center putting another “hate group” in the Index and waiting for the contributions to roll in.
Here’s Maddow, brandishing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as though this is the only matter worth considering in the forthcoming race between Rand Paul and the Democrat, an awful neo-liberal prosecutor, Kentucky’s current attorney general, Jack “I’m a Tough Son-of-a-Bitch” Conway. Between Conway and Paul, which one in the U.S. Senate would more likely be a wild card – which is the best we can hope for these days – likely to filibuster against a bankers’ bailout, against reaffirmation of the Patriot Act, against suppression of the CIA’s full torture history? Paul, one would have to bet, and these are the votes that count, where one uncompromising stand by an outsider can make a difference, unlike the gyrations and last-ditch sell-outs of Blowhard Bernie Sanders, no doubt a hero to Maddow and Goodman. Liberals love grandstanding about what are, in practice, distractions. You think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is going to come up for review in the U.S. Senate?
If Rand Paul hadn’t been so preoccupied with winding up for what he plainly thought was his knock-out punch, concerning Maddow’s posture on the right to bear arms in every restaurant in America from Joe’s Diner to Le Cirque, he could have turned the tables easily enough, just by saying that this ritual flourishing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act doesn’t have too much to do with what has happened to blacks since that glorious day, from an appalling school system, to blighted housing, constricted employment possibilities, shriveled share of the national income and most recently the great transfer in US history of money and assets from African Americans to rich white people by the mortgage speculators, given free rein by Democrats and Republicans.
The truth this year is that liberalism is in awful crisis, symbolized by BP’s broken oil pipe spouting maybe 70,000 barrels a day into the Gulf of Mexico, not on Rand Paul’s say-so but on that of Obama and Interior Secretary Salazar. Obama to Salazar: helluva a job, Kenny! (As a evidence of Rand Paul’s utter insanity he says Obama is being too tough on BP.) Forty–six years after the Civil Rights Act, with its noble liberal principles one can smell not just the nuttiness and often straight-up racism of the Teabaggers but the un-nutty, methodical corruption of liberalism in fifty thousand concrete instances, most of them well known to ordinary Americans.
Nuclear Disarmament: Not What He Promised
It’s been an active year so far  in the rhetoric of nuclear disarmament. First the “nuclear posture statement” of the Obama administration put out in early April. Then the non-proliferation meetings, then the START negotiations. What do they add up to, in terms of significant reduction of the threat of nuclear Armageddon? The answer is: nothing.
Looking back on it, could there ever have been a glimmer of hope that the United States would adopt a “no first use” policy on nuclear weapons; concede that there is zero reason to maintain a full arsenal of strategic missiles and a fleet of bombers, on full alert to repel a Russian invasion of Europe; and start winding down the nuclear-industrial-scientific complex? Not really. It would be like expecting the single-payer approach to healthcare reform or strenuous regulation of the banking industry.
But for those who cheered President Obama’s commitment, made in Prague a year ago and at the UN in September, that “we will reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy,” the Defense Department’s Nuclear Posture Review, released on April 6, was a savage disappointment. The administration did not merely reassert the essential premises of US nuclear strategy but used the publication of the review and the subsequent Nuclear Security Summit in Washington as occasions to intensify the threats against North Korea and Iran. In the case of North Korea, Obama doomed any positive advances and reminded its leaders that America’s preferred method of negotiation takes the form of eight nuclear submarines in the North Pacific within a twelve-minute range of Pyongyang. The crucial sentence in the review, insistently repeated by Obama, states that “the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.” This is great news for the Holy See, Venezuela and Yemen, which along with 180-plus other nations have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And no, the president was not threatening to attack Israel, which has nuclear weapons but has not signed the NPT.
The US position is that the biggest nuclear threat in the world today comes from those who do not have nuclear weapons, or whose nuclear armory is diminutive to the point of invisibility, and that global security is properly vested in the hands of those who have substantial nuclear arsenals, starting with the only country that has actually dropped nuclear bombs—and indeed lost them (eleven in the case of the United States since 1945).
Here’s how the ongoing commitment to “first use” is expressed in the review: “In the case of countries not covered by this assurance—states that possess nuclear weapons and states not in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations—there remains a narrow range of contingencies in which U.S. nuclear weapons may still play a role in deterring a conventional or CBW [chemical or biological weapons] attack against the United States or its allies and partners. The United States is therefore not prepared at the present time to adopt a universal policy that deterring nuclear attack is the sole purpose of nuclear weapons.”
The US strategic nuclear triad will remain on action stations, ready to destroy the planet. The review concluded that “the current alert posture of U.S. strategic forces—with heavy bombers off full-time alert, nearly all ICBMs on alert, and a significant number of SSBNs at sea at any given time—should be maintained for the present.” Forward-deployed US nuclear weapons in Europe will remain. Though Article VI of the NPT famously commits its signatories to “negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament,” heading toward a “Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control,” the United States remains dedicated to “NATO’s unique nuclear sharing arrangements under which non-nuclear members participate in nuclear planning and possess specially configured aircraft capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”
As of 2005, the United States was providing about 180 tactical B61 nuclear bombs for use by Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey under these NATO agreements. Articles I and II of the NPT prohibit the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-nuclear states. So why should countries under threat be asked to surrender the nuclear option when states under no such risk are supplied with nuclear bombs or missiles?
The deals extorted by the nuclear-industrial-scientific- complex are starkly on display: “The U.S. nuclear stockpile must be supported by a modern physical infrastructure—comprised of the national security laboratories and a complex of supporting facilities.… Increased funding is needed for the Chemistry and Metallurgy -Research Replacement Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory to replace the existing 50-year old facility, and to develop a new Uranium Processing Facility…in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”
What does this bode for START negotiations? The Russians, who are being asked to reduce their nuclear-force levels, point not only to NATO’s ongoing aggressive moves to establish bases surrounding their country but to the fact that this rehabbing of the US processing facilities is enhancing its capacity to produce plutonium and thus swiftly multiply its nuclear arsenal with a change in regime and hence of nuclear posture.
The cause of nuclear disarmament has sustained a very serious, albeit predictable defeat. The news will only get worse. Ahead lies the impending redraft of NATO’s strategic concept, last reformulated in 1999: “The fundamental purpose of the nuclear forces of the Allies is political…to fulfill an essential role by ensuring uncertainty in the mind of any aggressor.… The supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies is provided by the strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance.”
Ironic, is it not, to read these invocations of “security” amid the impending bankruptcies of Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland and the destruction of the euro, and as the unemployment lines grow steadily across the United States and Europe, oh-so-safe beneath the nuclear umbrella?
America’s Fastest Growing Cult: the Confederate Flag
In our latest newsletter, read Kevin Alexander Gray on the folks who REALLY think the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a big mistake. Kevin, who set fire to a confederate flag on the South Carolina Statehouse grounds a few years back, has written a marvelous piece about the comeback of the Confederacy, memorialized in parks, graveyards, front yard flags, gubernatorial tributes, “confederate history months” and a hundred other ways of saying that in the Civil War the wrong side won.
“The perfect moral compass of a climber and a lickspittle” – that’s how Norman Finkelstein describes her in our latest newsletter, looking back on how Elena Kagan covered for Alan Dershowitz during the plagiarism face off. How did she seem at Princeton? Fellow-class member Fritz Neal remembers. Also, Carl Ginsburg on how Wall Street is making billions, betting on national collapse.
Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com.
* First published here.

COLONEL TIRZEH is not just anybody. He is a symbol.
For years I kept meeting him in the halls of the Supreme Court. He had become almost a fixture: the star witness, the expert and the moving spirit in scores of hearings dealing with the Separation and Annexation Wall.
He knows everything. Every kilometer of the Wall and the Fence. Every hill, every stone. He always carries with him a large bundle of maps which he lays before the judges, earnestly explaining why the Wall must pass here and not there, why the security of the state demands that the Palestinian villages be separated from their land, why leaving an olive grove in the hands of its owner would expose Israeli soldiers to mortal danger.
Generally, the judges are persuaded.  After all, he is the expert. He is the man who knows. How can they take upon themselves the responsibility for changing the route of the Wall, if this could result in Jews being killed?
There are exceptions. At Bil’in village, the court was convinced that the Fence could be moved a few hundred meters without causing the security of the state to collapse and heaps of Jewish bodies to litter the landscape.
So the Supreme Court accepted the plea of the villagers and decided to move the Fence and — nothing. The Fence has remained where it was. The government and the military just ignored the court order.
In vain did the President of the Supreme Court admonish them that her decisions “are not recommendations”. Like dozens of other court decisions concerning the settlers, this one, too, is gathering dust.
The case of Bil’in is especially conspicuous, and not only because protesters – Palestinians, Israelis and others – have been killed and injured there. It is conspicuous because the motive trying to hide behind the Fence is so striking.
Not Zionism. Not security or defense from the terrorists. Not the dreams of generations. Not the vision of Theodor Herzl, whose 150th birthday is being celebrated now.
Just money. Lots of money.
The area lying between the present Fence and the alternative path has been earmarked for the Orthodox settlement Modi’in-Illit. Giant corporations are to build many hundreds of “housing units” there, a business worth many millions.
Everywhere, the areas stolen from the Palestinians immediately turn into real estate. They pass though mysterious channels into the jaws of land sharks. The sharks then build huge housing projects and sell the “housing units” for a fortune.
HOW IS this done? The public is now receiving a lesson in the form of the Holyland affair, a lesson in installments – every day new details emerge and new suspects turn up.
On the site of an old and modest hotel by this name, a giant housing project has sprung up – a line of high-rise apartment buildings and a skyscraper. This ugly monster dominates the landscape – but the part of the project which can be seen from afar is only a fraction of the whole. The other bits have already received the blessing of all the relevant municipal and government authorities.
How? The investigation is still going on. Almost every day, new suspects are being arrested. Almost everybody who has had anything to do with the authorization of the project, up to the highest level, is suspect – ministers, senior government officials, the former mayor, members of the municipal council, and municipal officials. At present, the investigators are trying to trace the bribe money all over the world.
Holyland is located in West Jerusalem (in what before 1948 was the Arab neighborhood of Katamon).
The question naturally arising: if things are done this way in the West of the city, what is happening in the East? If those politicians and officials dare to steal and take bribes in West Jerusalem – what do they allow themselves in East Jerusalem, whose inhabitants have no representation in either the municipality or the government?
ONLY A few minutes drive separate Holyland from the village of al-Walaja.
One could write volumes about this small village, which for more than 60 years has served as a target of abuse.
Briefly: the original village was occupied and annexed to Israel in the 1948 war. The inhabitants were expelled and founded a new village on the part of their land which remained on the other side of the Green Line. The new village was occupied in the 1967 war and annexed to Jerusalem, which was annexed to Israel. According to Israeli law, the houses are illegal. The inhabitants live in their own houses, on their own land, but are officially considered illegal residents who can be evicted at any time.
Now the land sharks are ogling this succulent piece of land, which is worth a lot of money for building projects. They follow the proven Zionist routine. First of all, the Arab name of the place is replaced with a pure Hebrew one, preferably from the Bible. Much as nearby Jebel-Abu-Ghneim became Har Homa, before the eyesore monster housing project was erected there, thus al-Walaja has now become Giv’at Yael. Clearly a place called Hill of Yael must belong to the Jewish people, and it is a divine duty to build another settlement there.
So what if this necessitates the moving of the Wall? One can always find a used army officer who will justify this on security grounds.
FOR YEARS now I have been suggesting that this side of the settlement enterprise should be examined more closely.
The public debate was always about lofty ideals. The divine promise as against the human vision. Greater Israel as against the Two-State solution. Zionist values as against the value of peace. Fascism as against humanism.
And somebody was laughing all the way to the bank.
The settlements are growing rapidly all the time. All over the West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements spring up like toxic mushrooms, poisoning the prospects of peace. In this matter there was never any difference between Golda Meir and Menachem Begin, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, Shimon Peres and Binyamin Netanyahu.
Among the settlers there is a hard core of ideological zealots. But many of the builders are just clever businessmen, whose only god is Mammon. They easily make friends with the leaders of Likud and the chiefs of Labor, not to mention the Kadima crowd.
The massive settlements in East Jerusalem – those already existing and those still planned – are proceeding along the same lines as the monster on Holyland hill, and they need the same permits from the same municipal and government authorities. Jerusalem, after all, has been united. Therefore, the same dark cloud is hanging over them.
What is needed is a judicial board of inquiry to investigate all the permits issued in Jerusalem in recent years, certainly from the beginning of Ehud Olmert’s term as mayor. Olmert fought like a tiger for the establishment of Har Homa and the other large settlements in East Jerusalem. All for the sake of Zionism and Jewish rule over the Holy City. Now he is Suspect No. 1.
Everything must be investigated from the beginning. And every new project must be stopped until its propriety has been established beyond any doubt.
THESE THINGS are grave enough in themselves, and they are even more serious when they are located at the center of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Israel-US crisis.
For the sake of the Israeli housing projects in East Jerusalem, the Netanyahu government is endangering our lifeline to the US. The extreme-right mayor declares that he doesn’t give a damn for government orders and will continue to build all over, whatever Netanyahu may or may not say. The Palestinians understandably refuse to negotiate with the Israeli government while building activities in East Jerusalem go on.
Shall we endanger the future of Israel for generations, just so that land sharks can make more millions?
Do the patriots who are sharing out East Jerusalem include elected and appointed officials hoping for large bribes from the builders?
Is there a connection between the rampant corruption, of which the Holyland affair is only the tip of the iceberg, and historic national decisions?
In short, will we allow the future of the holy land be sacrificed on the unholy altar of the profits of corruption? 

We were surrounded by a large group of respectable personalities – the heads of neighboring villages and officials of the parties that belong to the PLO – as well as the inhabitants of the village. I could speak to him only from the rostrum. I entreated him to strengthen the cooperation between the Palestinian leadership and the Israeli peace camp, a cooperation that has weakened since the assassinations of Yasser Arafat and Faisal Husseini.
IT IS impossible not to like Fayyad. He radiates decency, seriousness and a sense of responsibility. He invites trust. None of the filth of corruption has stuck to him. He is no party functionary. Only after much hesitation did he join a small party (“the Third Way”). In the confrontation between Fatah and Hamas, he does not belong to either of the two rival blocs. He looks like a bank manager – and that is what he indeed was: a senior official of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
The 58-year old Fayyad is the very opposite of Yasser Arafat, who first appointed him as Finance Minister. The Ra’is radiated authority, the Prime Minister radiates diffidence. Arafat was an extrovert, Fayyad is an introvert. Arafat was a man of dramatic gestures, Fayyad does not know what a gesture is.
But the biggest difference between the two lies in their methods. Arafat did not put all his eggs into one basket, he used many baskets. He was ready to use – simultaneously or alternatively – diplomacy and the armed struggle, popular action and secret channels, moderate and radical groups. He believed that the Palestinian people were much too weak to dispense with any instrument.
Fayyad, on the other hand, puts all his – and the Palestinians’ – eggs in one basket. He chose a single strategy and sticks to it. That is a personal and national gamble – and bold and dangerous indeed.
FAYYAD BELIEVES, so it seems, that the Palestinians’ only chance to achieve their national goals is by non-violent means, in close cooperation with the US.
His plan is to build the Palestinian national institutions and create a robust economic base, and, by the end of 2011, to declare the State of Palestine.
This is reminiscent of the classic Zionist strategy under David Ben-Gurion. In Zionist parlance, this was called “creating facts on the ground”.
Fayyad’s plan is based on the assumption that the US will recognize the Palestinian state and impose on Israel the well-known peace terms: two states, return to the 1967 borders with small and agreed-upon land swaps, East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, evacuation of all settlements which are not included in the land swap, the return of a symbolic number of refugees to Israeli territory and the settlement of the others in Palestine and elsewhere.
THAT LOOKS like a sensible strategy, but it raises many questions.
First question: Can the Palestinians really rely on the US to play their part?
In the last few weeks, the chances of this happening have improved. After his impressive victories in the domestic and foreign arenas, President Obama is demonstrating a new self-confidence in Israeli-Palestinian matters. He may now be ready to impose on both parties an American peace plan that includes those elements.
The US has made it clear that this is not a side-show, but a strategy based on a sober assessment of American national interests, supported by the military leadership.
But the decisive battle has not yet been joined. One can expect a Battle of Titans between the two most powerful lobbies in Washington: the military lobby and the pro-Israel lobby. The White House versus the Congress. Fayyad’s gamble is based on the hope that Barack Obama, with the help of General David Petraeus, will win this struggle.
It’s a reasonable gamble, but a risky one.
SECOND QUESTION: Is it possible to build a Palestinian “state-to-be” under Israeli occupation?
As of now, Fayyad is succeeding. There is indeed some prosperity in the West Bank, which, however, benefits mainly a certain class. The Netanyahu government supports this effort, under the illusion that ”economic peace” can serve as a substitute for real peace.
But this entire effort stands on feet of clay. The occupation authorities can wipe everything out at one stroke. We have witnessed this already in the May 2002 “Defensive Wall” operation, when the Israeli army destroyed at one stroke everything the Palestinians had built following the Oslo agreement. I have seen with my own eyes the destroyed offices of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, the crushed computers, the heaps of ragged documents scattered over the floors of the Ministries of Education and Health, the broken walls of the Mukata’a.
If the Israeli government so decides, all the well-ordered government offices of Fayyad, all the new enterprises and economic initiatives, will go up in smoke.
Fayyad relies on the American security net. And indeed, it is questionable whether Netanyahu can do in 2010, in the Obama era, what Ariel Sharon did in 2002 under George W. Bush.
An important component of the new situation is “Dayton’s army”. The US general Keith Dayton is training the Palestinian security forces. Anyone who has seen them knows that this is for all practical purposes a regular army. (At the Land Day demonstration, the Palestinian soldiers, with their helmets and khaki uniforms, were deployed on the hill, while the Israeli soldiers, similarly attired, were deployed below. That was in Area C, which according to the Oslo agreements is under Israeli military control. Both armies used the same American jeeps, just differently colored.)
No doubt Fayyad is aware that there is only a narrow divide between his strategy and collaboration with the occupation.
THIRD QUESTION: What will happen if the Palestinians declare their state at the end of 2011?
Many Palestinians are sceptical. After all, the Palestinian National Council already declared an independent Palestinian state in 1988. On that festive occasion, the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, written by the poet Mahmoud Darwish, was read out. It had an uncanny resemblance to the Israeli Declaration of Independence. Dozens of countries recognized this state, and the PLO representatives there enjoy the official status of ambassadors. But did this improve the situation of the Palestinians?
The main question is whether the US will recognize the Palestinian state on the day of its foundation, and whether the UN Security Council will follow suit.
In May, 1948, the USA accorded to the new State of Israel de facto but not de jure recognition. Stalin forestalled them by recognizing Israel de jure right away.
If Fayyad’s hope comes true and the US recognizes the State of Palestine, the Palestinians’ situation will change dramatically. Almost certainly, the Israeli government will have no choice but to sign a peace agreement that will be practically dictated by the Americans. Israel will have to give up almost the entire West Bank.
FOURTH QUESTION: Will this apply to Gaza?
Probably yes. Contrary to the demonic image created by Israeli and American propaganda, Hamas wants a Palestinian state, not an Islamic emirate. Like our own Orthodox, who aim at a Jewish state ruled by religious law and the rabbis, they know how to compromise with reality. Hamas’ aims are not restricted to the small enclave they now control. They want to play a major role in the future State of Palestine.
The official position of Hamas is that they will accept an agreement signed by the Palestinian authority if it is ratified by the Palestinian people in a referendum or by an act of parliament. It should be noted that even now, Hamas treats the Fayyad experiment with relative indulgence.
Fayyad is a man of compromise. He would have reached a modus vivendi with Hamas long ago, if the US had not imposed a total veto.
The Palestinian split is, to a large extent, made in the US and Israel. Israel has contributed to it by disrupting all physical contact between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip – in gross violation of the Oslo agreement, which defines the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as one integral territory. Israel undertook to open four “safe passages” between the two territories. They were not opened for a single day.
The Americans have a primitive model of the world, inherited from the days of the Wild West: everywhere there are Good Guys and Bad Guys. In Palestine, the Good Guys are the Palestinian Authority people, the Bad Guys are Hamas. Fayyad will have to work hard to convince Washington to adopt a stance a little bit more nuanced.
WHAT WILL happen if Fayyad’s gamble proves to be an historic mistake? If the pro-Israel lobby wins against the statesmen and the generals? Or if some world crisis diverts the attention of the White House into another direction?
If Fayyad fails, every Palestinian will draw the self-evident conclusion: there is no chance whatsoever for a peaceful solution. A bloody intifada will follow, Hamas will take control of the Palestinian people – until they, too, are be supplanted by far more radical forces.
Salam Fayyad can indeed say: After me, the deluge.