He wants Palestinians to give up a huge part of East Jerusalem. He might think he is being magnanimous when he says Palestinians can have “all Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem,” but the corollary to this is that Israel gets to keep all of neighborhoods it ethnically cleansed with 200,000 colonists. And while Friedman does not specifically mention it, his map is based on the so-called “generous offer” made by Ehud Barak to Yassir Arafat at the Camp David summit mediated by President Clinton that left Israel with the banks of the river Jordan, which gives Israel control over the regional water supply and control over all the land borders of the West Bank. Did I mention that Israel would also maintain control over West Bank air space, just as they have maintained control over Gaza air space since the “unilateral withdrawal” that Friedman spoke of?

What “concession” does Friedman propose Israel make in exchange for this prime territory in East Jerusalem and the West Bank? A “land swap.” Does this mean that on Friedman’s map Palestinians will get control of Nazerath and other towns in northern Israel that are inhabited by Palestinians, complete with Palestinian-only roads linking them to the West Bank? Would Palestinian neighborhoods in Haifa come under Palestinian control? Would the Dimona nuclear weapons facility be considered a fair exchange for the borders and airspace of the West Bank? Of course not. The swap that Friedman thinks is fair is one in which Israel can select the land it most covets and can offer the land it least values, which would be some isolated and uninhabitable tract in the Negev desert.

Friedman thinks that his map, which is nothing but a list of additional concessions, should be carried by every Palestinian engaging in non-violent civil disobedience. Will it shield them from bullets, or prevent them from getting thrown in prison? Would Rachel Corrie still be alive if only she had that map in her hands?

Friedman says his plan will revive the “Israeli peace camp.” The problem is that there never was much of a genuine peace camp in Israel. Israel is, for the most part, divided into a “cash in our chips” camp and a “double or nothing” camp. The double or nothing camp has been for establishing more settlements, housing developments, and security facilities in the remaining Palestinian lands. And they keep striving for more, even though it requires continuing the violence. The cash in the chips camp wants to stop acquiring more of these “facts on the ground,” but wants to keep whatever has already been acquired. They want peace provided they can continue to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. Part of the problem is that the “silent majority” in Israel that Friedman writes about has elected a string of governments from the double or nothing camp that has established more and more facts on the ground that the cash in the chips camp wants to cling to. Friedman’s map is a prime example of the cash in the chips mentality. It is easy to say you want peace if it means preserving a status quo that is very favorable to you.

The problem is that there are no longer enough “chips” left for the Palestinians to establish anything more than a farce of a state. The entity that Friedman and others envision for the Palestinians would not have control of its own borders, its air space, its coast line, or its water resources. It would have no military. It would be dis-contiguous and gerrymandered, ridden with enclaves of heavily armed and hostile religious and racist fanatics and crisscrossed by roads that could be used by the fanatics but not the Palestinians. How is that a state? And without a Palestinian state, how is there a two-state solution?

The point of Friedman’s preposterous proposal is not to suggest to the Palestinians a strategy for ending their tribulations, but rather to help Israel’s supporters among his readers relieve themselves of any feeling of moral culpability, as after all, the onus is on the Palestinians to carry his map.

The NEJM demands that letters to the journal contain material that has not been submitted or published elsewhere, so I had to refrain from submitting my longer piece anywhere until the NEMJ made a decision on my letter. When my letter did not appear after a couple of weeks I inquired, and was told that the article would soon appear in the printed version of the Journal, and that no letters about the article could be published until after the print version came out. The printed version finally appeared on June 16.

However, on July 1,1 was notified by the NEMJ that they would not publish my letter due to “space constraints.” The four letters that they did publish in response to the article were at most only mildly critical and missed the glaring short-comings of the report. In other words, NEMJ sat on my letter and effectively stifled my critique of what can only be described as industry propaganda for almost three months until public attention had moved on to other matters. However, with attention once again focused on the still-out of control Fukushima reactors on the first anniversary of the accident, my expose on how the media and academia have joined together to downplay the dangers of nuclear power is a poignant as ever.

*****

Since the nuclear disaster in Fukushima started in March, the media has been full of misinformation about the dangers posed by the nuclear accidents and the damage caused by past accidents such as those at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Whether it is Jay Lehr on Fox News¹  or George Monbiot on Democracy Now,² the story line is the same: there were only dozens of deaths from the Chernobyl and none from TMI, the health consequences for the general population are negligible, and all things considered nuclear power is among the safest forms of energy. In some cases the lines are spoken by industry hacks whose true motive is to protect profits, while other times the spokesperson is a global warming tunnel visionist who has lost sight of the fact that we as humans have ingeniously devised a multitude of ways to mess up our planet, including nuclear wars and disasters.

Lehr and Monbiot both made reference to a 2005 report commissioned by the United Nations that included the participation of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the World Health Organization (WHO) and several other UN-linked agencies. Oddly enough, the official press release by the UN announcing publication of the report starts off with the following sentence:  “A total of up to four thousand people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (NPP) accident nearly 20 years ago, an international team of more than 100 scientists has concluded.”

The reference to 50 deaths pertained to those “directly attributed” to radiation from the disaster. Moreover, this report represents the most conservative of studies from credible sources, with other estimates reaching as high as almost one million Chernobyl deaths.

Lehr works for a public policy think-tank and Monbiot is a journalist. Perhaps we should expect writers from those professions to misleadingly cite sources in order to promote a preset agenda in the hope that no one will check their sources. However, it comes as a shock that medical doctors writing in a prestigious medical journal like the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) would resort to the same practice. On April 20 the NEJM published an article by six doctors entitled: “Short-term and Long-term Health Risks of Nuclear-Power-Plant Accidents.”  I will not presume to know what the motives of the authors were or what led them to their erroneous conclusions, but I do feel the need to point out the errors that somehow the NEJM’s peer review process failed to notice.

The authors prominently cite two International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) studies in downplaying the deaths from Chernobyl. The authors state that “[a]lthough the Three Mile Island accident has not yet led to identifiable health effects, the Chernobyl accident resulted in 28 deaths related to radiation exposure in the year after the accident. The long-term effects of the Chernobyl accident are still being characterized, as we discuss in more detail below.” What is the reader intended to take from this statement? First of all, that the TMI accident in its totality did not cause any health effects that have been identified, which is itself a problematic statement. Secondly, that the total deaths from Chernobyl were the 28 in the first year plus whatever would be discussed later in the paper. As it turns out, the rest of the paper only mentions fatalities one other time, and that is that 11 of 13 plant and emergency workers that underwent bone marrow transplants died, and it is not clear whether or not these eleven are included in the above mentioned 28 fatalities. So the reader is left with the impression that the studies that the NEJM authors are citing conclude that the Chernobyl accident in its totality produced only a few dozen fatalities.

However, just as with Lehr and Monbiot, the NEJM authors start with the most conservative studies and then are misleading in their citations. They ignore the existence of high-profile studies that draw very different conclusions, omit the more damning parts of the studies they do cite, and then quote statements that were not intended to portray the totality of the accidents as if they were bottom line conclusions.

For instance, in making the assertion that Chernobyl caused 28 deaths in the first year, the NEJM authors cited an IAEA report that actually said: “The accident caused the deaths within a few days or weeks of 30 ChNPP employees and firemen (including 28 deaths that were due to radiation exposure).”

Notice that the IAEA statement is limited to power plant employees and fireman, whereas the authors imply the entire population. In fact, that IAEA study focused on the “600 emergency workers who were on the site of the Chernobyl power plant during the night of the accident,” and not the exposed population at large or the hundreds of thousands of “liquidators” who worked to contain the plant over the next couple years. Moreover, the IAEA study did not preclude the possibility that some of the liquidators or general public could have been killed due to radiation exposure in the first year, not to mention subsequent years. While the authors only mention a handful of cancer deaths in subsequent years, the second IAEA study acknowledges that among the one million or so most exposed, several thousand Chernobyl-caused cancer deaths would be “very difficult to detect.” The study states the following:

The projections indicate that, among the most exposed populations (liquidators, evacuees and residents of the so-called ‘strict control zones’) total cancer mortality might increase by up to a few per cent owing to Chernobyl related radiation exposure. Such an increase could mean eventually up to several thousand fatal cancers in addition to perhaps one hundred thousand cancer deaths expected in these populations from all other causes. An increase of this magnitude would be very difficult to detect, even with very careful long term epidemiological studies.

Clearly, the content of these two IAEA studies was not accurately reflected in the NEJM article. Moreover, the IAEA is not necessarily the best source of information. It was never intended to protect the public from the dangers of nuclear power plants. That is not part of its mission. The statute of the IAEA states that:

[t]he Agency shall seek to accelerate and enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world.  It shall ensure, so far as it is able, that assistance provided by it or at its request or under its supervision or control is not used in such a way as to further any military purpose.

Thus, the IAEA was created to PROMOTE nuclear power (while checking the proliferation of nuclear weapons). It therefore cannot be assumed to be an unbiased or authoritative source of information on the health risks of nuclear power.

The NEJM article is misleading or inaccurate in other instances. For instance, its discussion is weighted too much towards whole body radiation, which is really only relevant to the emergency workers. The article acknowledges that it is not whole body radiation, but rather internal contamination that is “the primary mechanism through which large populations around a reactor accident can be exposed to radiation.” So why emphasize whole body radiation if it is not the mechanism through which populations are endangered?

They then launched into a long discussion about acute radiation sickness, which is largely a red herring since the threat to the general public is mainly from cancer. The NEJM article further obfuscates the issue with a table that compares the effective doses of radiation that a resident near a nuclear accident is exposed to with what someone is exposed to from something mundane like an airplane ride or a chest x-ray. This is like comparing the force of a cool breeze to the force of a knife slicing the jugular. The knife is lethal because it allows a very small amount of force to be concentrated on a vulnerable target. Similarly, the risk to Fukushima residents is not radiation spread out over their entire body, but rather radioisotopes like iodine 131 being concentrated by biological processes into a vulnerable target like the thyroid.

The NEJM authors mislead in other ways. They write “After Chernobyl, approximately 5 million people in the region may have had excess radiation exposure, primarily through internal contamination.” They cite the second IAEA study. The reader is likely to assume that up to 5 million people in the countries in Europe and Asia where the fallout from Chernobyl may have reached could have been exposed to excess radiation (i.e. radiation in excess of normal), and that this is the limit of exposure to internal radiation.

However, the IAEA study is only referring to the contamination region designated by the former USSR (a small area in the corners of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia) and does not imply that excess radiation exposure (internal or otherwise) was limited to this area. In fact, they do not use the word “excess,” but rather specify a particular level of radioactive cesium. The actual wording of the IAEA report was as follows:

More than five million people live in areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine that are classified as ‘contaminated’ with radionuclides due to the Chernobyl accident (above 37 kBq m-2 of 137Cs).

On the same page, the report also states that “The cloud from the burning reactor spread numerous types of radioactive materials, especially iodine and caesium (sic) radionuclides, over much of Europe.” It added that radioactive cesium-137 “is still measurable in soils and some foods in many parts of Europe.”  Thus, there certainly were people outside of this narrow region of 5 million inhabitants who also were exposed to Chernobyl radiation through their environment and food. Indeed, the authors discuss the move by Polish authorities to administer potassium iodide to 10 million Polish children. Obviously Polish officials feared radiation exposure to these people.

Furthermore, there is major omission in the authors’ discussion of radiation. They discuss beta and gamma radiation, but do not mention alpha radiation. They then go on to dismiss the danger of plutonium contamination, which is dangerous precisely because it is an alpha emitter. They state that “Radioisotopes with a … very long half-life (e.g., 24,400 years for plutonium-239) … do not cause substantial internal or external contamination in reactor accidents.” The authors are either lying or ignorant. The danger from plutonium-239 has nothing to do with its half-life (long half-lives indicate slower radioactive decay). Plutonium, if ingested internally, is dangerous because the large and heavy alpha particles it emits are the most damaging to DNA and the most likely to cause cancer. In fact, Plutonium is the most lethal substance known to mankind.

As mentioned above, the IAEA cannot be thought of as an authoritative, unbiased source of health information given its explicit mission of promoting nuclear power. The same can be said for other sources cited by the authors, including the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. At the same time, the authors ignored prominent studies produced independently of the nuclear industry and affiliated governmental bodies that indicate that there were indeed serious public health consequences from the Chernobyl and Three Mile Island accident.

Significantly, the authors failed to mention the seminal work on the consequences of radiation exposure from Chernobyl done by Yablokov, Nesterenko and Nesterenko of the Russian National Academy of Sciences.³ This team of scientists from Russia and Belarus studied health data, radiological surveys and 5,000 scientific reports from 1986 to 2004, mostly in Slavic languages, and estimated that the Chernobyl accident caused the deaths of 985,000 people worldwide. Given the prominence of this report and the fact that its findings are completely at odds with the conclusions reached by the IAEA and other sources cited by the authors, it was intellectually dishonest not to mention the report if only to dismiss it.

Indeed, the Yablokov et al report is hardly the only major study to contrast starkly with the minimalist portrayal of the health consequences from nuclear accidents. Regarding Three Mile Island, there is the June 1991 Columbia University Health Study (Susser-Hatch) of the health impacts from the TMI accident published its findings in the American Journal of Public Health and subsequent work by Dr. Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina. These studies point to increased incidences of cancer in areas close to the reactor or downwind from it.

Another example of minimizing potential health impacts of a nuclear plant accident is this statement in connection with the accident at Fukushima:

Although the radioactivity in seawater close to the plant may be transiently higher than usual by several orders of magnitude, it diffuses rapidly with distance and decays over time, according to half-life, both before and after ingestion by marine life.

Japan has a massive fishing industry because, along with rice, fish is the staple of the Japanese diet. Any release of radiation into coastal fishing grounds will wind up being concentrated through biological processes as it works its way up the food chain and eventually to the Japanese dinner table. The narrow restrictions on commercial fishing near the Fukushima coast may be obeyed by fisherman, but many of the fish they seek are migratory, and there is no way of preventing these fish or their food sources from passing through contaminated water. Moreover, the claim that the radioactivity “decays over time” glosses over exactly how much time. While some of the radioisotopes being spilled into the ocean have half-lives of days, others have half-lives of years and even millennia. The impact on health from releases into the ocean cannot be so lightly dismissed.

Although it will take some time for the dust (or fallout) to settle, it may well turn out that the Fukushima disaster is the worst nuclear accident of all-time, surpassing Chernobyl. The contamination from the Chernobyl accident led to the establishment of a 30-kilometer wide “zone of alienation” to which people are not allowed to return. The current evacuation zone around the Fukushima plant is of comparable size, and with the Fukushima reactors continuing to release contamination for the foreseeable future, the only question is how large will be Japan’s “zone of alienation.” And while greater Tokyo has so far been largely spared due to the prevailing winds blowing so much of the contamination into the Pacific, winds will be changing with the upcoming monsoon season and the summer typhoons. [Note: countless radioactive “hot spots” have since been detected all over greater Tokyo, particularly in places where rain water accumulates.]

It is this proximity to Tokyo, one of the world’s most densely populated metropolises, that could make Fukushima the worst industrial calamity in history. An increase in cancer mortality even of the “difficult to detect” scale referred to by the IAEA study described above could condemn several tens of thousands of people. And that is far from being the worst case. The NEJM authors and others who propagate myths about the minimal casualties from Chernobyl and other accidents feed into a mindset that is leading to disastrous policy decisions. The only way to correct course is to identify the myths and the mythmakers.

1. Jay Lehr said that at Chernobyl “the bottom line was that 50 people died in the explosion from radiation from fire…”
2. George Monbiot stated that “so far the death toll from Chernobyl amongst both workers and local people is 43.”
3. Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko, “Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment“,  2010, Nature – 400. Also available at: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1181

Japan has the most efficient mass transportation system in the world. I lived in Tokyo for ten years, and three times a year during the New Years, Golden Week, and o-bon holidays I would see the capital empty out within a day or so and then fill back up after the holidays. The train system runs on electricity and is still working, albeit at reduced capacity due to the electric grid being weakened by its dependence on the failed nuclear plants. The nightmare scenario would be if there is a major release of radioactive poisons over the next couple of days while the winds, which typically would be blowing out over the ocean, will be blowing south into the 25-million residents of greater Tokyo. This shift in the winds is a result of the storm system that is dumping snow on the tsunami-ravaged Iwate and Miyagi coasts.

What Kan needs to do is to calculate how many people the transportation system can move and at what rate the less effected regions can absorb them, and then encourage people to evacuate accordingly. He should ask people living in western Japan and Hokkaido to immediately invite relatives and friends from the at-risk areas to stay with them, in particular pregnant women, small children, and the aged. Then if the situation deteriorates further, he should encourage more people to leave. Then if the worst case scenario develops, the task of evacuating the rest of the population of the region will be manageable. However, Kan won’t do this because it would require admitting that the risk is greater than the industry wants to let people know.

I have been following Kan’s career for 25 years, and I can’t express how disappointing it is for him to be putting the interests of the nuclear power industry before the needs of the people. The industry has in anterest in denying the existence of risk whenever there is a chance that they could still luck out and avert a catastrophe. Here is the logic: If there is a 50-50 chance of a meltdown, for instance, they will say there is no risk and then cross their fingers. If there is no meltdown, then they can maintain the myth that there was no risk in the first place, and this will allow them to continue as an industry and protect their financial investments. On the other hand, if they admit there is a 50-50 chance and take appropriate measures, such as a mass evacuation, and then it turns out the worst was averted, they will never again be able to claim that nuclear power is safe and reliable, and their industry may well be finished. Either way, if the meltdown does happen, they still are finished as an industry. The problem is that if there is a meltdown and people have not been evacuated then there could be hundreds of thousands of needless deaths from cancer and other diseases. It is clear from the course of events over the past few days that the industry is denying dangers only to be proven wrong. What is worse, too many academics who have based their careers on training people for the industry are participating in the denial and the group-think.

At the end of Kan’s speech he fielded a single question. The reporter asked him about the situation at a particular reactor. Kan said he would not talk about particular reactors, and instead told the reporter to ask not the Chief Cabinet Secretary or the relevant government agency, but the Tokyo Electric Power Corporation. The government needs to be on top of the situation. He can’t rely on an industry that has an incentive to deny the existence of risk. Why would Kan defer to the industry unless he has subordinated the well being of the people to the financial interests of the industry.

This is the same Kan who became Japan’s most popular politician in the 1990s after he got down on his hands and knees as Health and Welfare Minister and begged to forgiveness of the families of hemophiliacs who had died after receiving AIDS tainted blood. Kan admitted that the Ministry in a previous administration had been slow to screen blood products because they did not want to import American blood testing systems. The Ministry wanted to keep out the American products so that Japanese companies would have time to develop their own screening devices.

Following Kan’s speech, the state-run NHK television reported that 446,000 people have been evacuated from all areas effected by the earthquake and subsequent disasters. Each holiday season tens of millions of people travel. This transportation system, hamstrung as it is by the weakened electrical grid, must be put to use. Unless a larger-scale evacuation takes place, I am afraid that some future prime minister will have to get down on his or her hands and knees and beg the forgiveness of the entire Japanese nation.

In referring to the ongoing crisis, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said “Let me be clear. I condemn unequivocally and in the strongest possible terms the ongoing rocket and mortar attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militants. But I also condemn the excessive use of force by Israel.”¹ What’s wrong with this statement? First let’s look at the content. Obviously, the condemnation of Hamas was unequivocal and in the strongest possible terms, where as the condemnation of Israel included no such emphasis. Also, the Hamas rockets were labeled “attacks” whereas the Israeli bombs (where were not specifically mentions) were simply referred to as “use of force.” More importantly, Ban only condemned the “excessive” use of force by Israel, thus implicitly legitimizing violence by Israel up until the point it become “excessive,” which of course is a subjective call.

Moreover, we must consider the context of the statement. The immediate context of course is the increasingly brutal siege that Gaza has been subject to ever since Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank elected Hamas in the 2006 parliamentary elections. Israel controls Gaza’s coastline and air space and together with Egypt has sealed its borders. Aside from humanitarian aid from the UN that Israel intermittently allows to enter the strip, Gaza’s only lifeline to the world are tiny hand-dug tunnels through which daily necessities and, yes, small arms are carried through on hand and knee. Meanwhile, Israel seized Gaza along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem 41 years ago and has set about stealing the areas it finds desirable for colonial settlers and turning the rest into ghettos. Israel’s supplies of goods flow freely and its weaponry, which includes a large nuclear arsenal, is underwritten by the Unites States to the tune of three billion dollars per year.

Why is it that when Israel is the occupier, when Israel is in clear violation of international law, when Israel has broken more United Nations resolutions than any other country in history, does the head of that very organization issue a statement that condemns all violent resistance by the occupied while legitimizing the violence of the occupier so long as it does not become “excessive?” It is Israel that has broken into the home of the Palestinians and is stealing all that is valuable from them, yet Ban Ki-moon invokes only the intruder’s right to self-defense. This goes beyond being a double standard and completely turns the concept of self-defense on its head.

I single out Ban Ki-moon not so much because he is the world’s top diplomat but because his statements are symptomatic of a warped and simplistic notion of “balance.” Condemning both sides, even if the condemnation is equal (which it is not in Ban’s case), feels good as it implies that one is speaking from a morally lofty position, but it is lazy and in this case destructive. It is lazy because it avoids the hard work of understanding and explaining the situation, and it is destructive because it perpetuates misperceptions and double standards. We don’t have to endorse the firing of rockets out of Gaza, but we must reserve our condemnation exclusively for the Israeli side as its military occupation and siege of Palestinian land makes it singly responsible.

I personally doubt that the firing of rockets is a wise strategy. As these rockets from time to time kill people in Israel they enable intellectually lazy people to “condemn both sides” and give the Israeli propaganda machine a platform from which to spin the most far-fetched lies, such as when Tzipi Livni told the BBC on December 31 that “Hamas kills Israeli citizens on a daily basis.”² Still, who am I to assume that were I subjected to 41 years of occupation and siege, completely forsaken by the “world community,” with no recourse to any authority willing to impose international law on my tormentors, that I would continue to remain patient and passive? Who among us can point to anything in our personal experience as evidence that we could restrain ourselves in the face of the desperate situation that the Gazans find themselves in? If we cannot, then we have no right to “condemn” their actions.

The second pitfall we must avoid is participating in the vilification of Hamas. This does not mean we have to be in denial about its history. Hamas was formed by the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood in 1987 in order to violently confront the Israeli occupation (the Brotherhood had until then deferred from violent confrontation). It’s charter (a non-binding document) is a bizarre and anachronistic call to arms. In its early literature it called for an Islamic state stretching from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. Until a year before winning parliamentary elections in January 2006 it carried out suicide bombings in Israel and against Israeli targets in the occupied territories.

However, starting in March 2005 it observed a unilateral cease fire which it maintained, despite sanctions and assassinations, until the June 9 2006 Israeli Navy shelling of a beach picnic that killed an extended family — women, children, and elderly.³ During the four and a half months between its election and the beach attack, 77 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli military in Gaza alone, according to the Israeli peace group B’tselem.⁴ The Palestinian territories were subjected to economic sanctions. During that period Hamas did not attack Israelis. The two and a half years since then have been similar. B’tselem statistics shows that during the January 2006-November 2008 period, throughout Israel/Palestine 1504 Palestinians were killed by Israelis while 67 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, with the vast majority of Israeli fatalities NOT attributable to Hamas. Of the Palestinians, 282 were children, while five of the Israelis were children, and none of them killed by Hamas.

So we have a wide-spread misperception of Hamas as being a fanatic terrorist organization while the reality has been that they have refrained from violence for the past four years under all but the most extreme circumstances, even while being themselves continually under attack. It is this misperception of Hamas as being pathological extremists that paved the way for the current onslaught as it provides Tzipi Livni and the rest of the Israeli propaganda machine a convenient bogeyman while crying crocodile tears for the countless civilian casualties which they claim they try so hard to avoid. We need to stop sacrificing Hamas at the alter of false balance. Hamas was legitimately elected. Its current place on lists of terrorist organizations is due to political pressure and is in no way a reflection of its behavior in recent years. It is far less corrupt than the Palestinian Authority and far less violent than the Israeli government. We don’t have to become Islamists ourselves, we don’t have to agree with all its decisions, but we must recognize its legitimacy.

Finally, I would like to address some double standards that we should be aware of. One that we are probably all aware of is the notion of self-defense. Israel claims that because rockets are fired at it from Gaza its entire military operation is an act of self-defense. Leaving aside the issues of who under international law can claim self-defense (which would favor the Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation) and leaving aside the fact that is was Israel that broke the cease fire in November (the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last month that it was Israel’s November 4 incursion into Gaza that violated the cease fire that had been holding for five months),⁵ how is it that the Palestinian’s right to self-defense is not recognized when they are being starved via a blockade all throughout the recent cease fire.

But what is rarely if ever pointed out is the double standard regarding who is a civilian. In the media discourse on the conflict, it is a given that anyone associated with Hamas, even if as a policeman or government official, is not a civilian. Someone who has ever had any military training with Hamas (or any other group) is a “gunman” regardless of whether he is outside bearing arms or eating dinner at home with his family. He is considered a fair target for Israeli missiles to summarily execute. Considering the massive imbalance between the number of Israelis who have been kill by Palestinians over the years and the number of alleged Hamas “gunman” who have been killed (not to mention imprisoned), it is obvious that the overwhelming majority of these “gunman” have no Israeli blood on their hands. Yet this is never questioned. Meanwhile, Israeli society is highly militarized and has nearly universal conscription and reserve service for Jews that starts with three years of active duty service starting at age 18 (or 21 months in the case of women) and continues with reserve duty units until the age of 40 (or 26 for women).⁶ Yet active or reserve duty Israeli military are treated as civilian if they are at home eating dinner with their family. If an apartment building where a Palestinian “gunman” resides is flattened, the press typically treats the “gunman” as a fair target even if it laments the “collateral damage” suffered by his dead neighbors. On the other hand, news coverage of an attack on an Israeli disco frequented by young adults of mandatory service age would never mention the fact that many or most of the victims were members of the Israeli military. They would all be treated as civilians. I must emphasize that I am not trying to rationalize such attacks, merely pointing out the double standard.

Another double standard that is absolutely central to the underlying problem of the conflict but is not dealt with at all in the media is the double standard about who is allowed to come to Israel to live. People who fled their homes in 1948 in what is now Israel and their descendants are not allowed to return to their homes, yet the Israeli “Law of Return” allows any Jew in America or elsewhere the right to immigrate to and live in Israel.⁷ Not only that, but Jews from around the world are free to settle in the West Bank and East Jerusalem even as current residents are pushed steadily pushed out of their homes and off their land for bureaucratic and “security reasons.” This underscores the nature of Zionism as practiced by the Israeli state as an ethnic cleansing project whereby one ethic group is pushed off the land through violence and intimidation to be replaced by another. It is not my intent to be insulting to people who consider themselves supporters of Israel, but decades of immunizing Israel from any form of criticism and demonizing Palestinian political forces has led to such insensitivity and a warping of morality that decent, well-intentioned people wind up supporting an ethnic cleansing project.

There is also the double-standard in insisting that Hamas and all Palestinians recognize Israel’s “right to exist” while Israel effectively prevents a Palestinian state from existing. As a matter of fact, the “right to exist” itself does not exist in international law. The concept of a “right to exist” has always been used primarily with regards to Israel. Google “right to exist” and see for yourself. Nobody tried to invoke the Soviet Union’s or Yugoslavia’s right to exist. Our own government does not recognize the right of this or that country to exist. This is not to be confused with diplomatic recognition, which governments of independent states extend to each other. Rather, it is a simple recognition of a government as representing a given country at a given time. Yet Hamas, which is political organization and not an independent state, is expected to give recognition of an undefined right to exist to an occupying power that will not even specify within what borders it intends to exist. Meanwhile, no other country on earth, let alone a political organization, is subjected to violent coercion in order to get it to recognize this non-existent right of a hostile state.

The last double standard I want to look at does not contrast attitudes towards Israel with those towards Palestine but rather Israel with the United States. These two countries are similar in so many ways. Both were founded by immigrants who steadily pushed the indigenous people off the land, both have become affluent and extremely militarized, and both have an exceptionalist view of themselves. However, we Americans are free to criticize our own country for illegally occupying foreign lands, unleashing violence and torture on their populations, and exploiting their resources. However, if we Americans make those same criticisms of the Israeli government we are called anti-Semitic. It doesn’t make one anti-Semitic to speak the truth, and if anyone is anti-Semitic it is those who insist that Israel’s Jews should be allowed to follow a different set of rules, as if all this violence is somehow in their blood! No, militarism and exceptionalism are self-destructive forces, both in Israel and the United States. If anything threatens Israel’s continued existence, it is these self-destructive tendencies. Anyone truly interested in what is best for the people in both countries must speak out against their delusional leaders.

1. Video embedded in “Gaza attacks continue as UN calls for ceasefire,” Guardian, January 1, 2009.
2. Youtube video of BBC interview with Tzipi Livni, Dec 31, 2008.
3. “Beach strike shakes Hamas cease-fire” CNN, June 9, 2006.
4. B’tselem website.
5. “UNRWA chief: Gaza on brink of humanitarian catastrophe” Reuters article appearing in Haaretz, November 21, 2008.
6. NYSTROM Division of Herff Jones, Inc., Serving the Country: Military Service around the World.
7. Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Website.