After so many years of setting the tone, bribing UK politicians and controlling the BBC they (Zionists) are used to being untouchable.
— Gilad Atzmon, “Britain Must de-Zionize Itself Immediately,” Nov. 17, 2009, MWC News).

This week the British people listened to the Daily Mail’s Peter Oborne present, on Channel 4, his devastating account of the Jewish lobby’s control of their government.¹ Now we know that virtually all the principal politicians in the UK of both parties, like their brothers across the lake in our House and Senate, take “contributions” from the Israeli lobby machine ensuring that the Anglo-American mid-east policies follow the dictates of the Israeli government. Gilad Atzmon responded to this report in his article “Britain must de-Zionise itself immediately,” noting that this control has been in place for so many years the lobby feels “untouchable.”

How many years are “many” one might ask? In 1941, the High Commissioner of Palestine, Harold MacMichael, Senior Palestine Mandate officer for the British Mandate forces in Palestine, sent the following “Top Secret” “Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence” to the Secretary of State, dated October 16th, a report prepared by The Palestine Police, Criminal Investigation Department:

The memorandum illustrates – indeed, brings into full limelight – the fact that the Mandatory is faced potentially with as grave a danger in Palestine from Jewish violence as it ever faced from Arab violence, a danger infinitely less easy to meet by the methods of repression which have been employed against Arabs. In the first place, the Jews … have the moral and political support … of considerable sections of public opinion both in the United Kingdom and the United States of America … all the influence and political ability of the Zionists would be brought to bear to show that the Jews in Palestine were the victims of aggression, and that a substantial body of opinion abroad would be persuaded of the truth of the contention.

Quite obviously, MacMichael understands that the Mandatory has little power at home over the zealous actions of the Zionists as they manipulate public and political opinion even as they expand their terrorism against the British Mandate government in Palestine. This is an untenable position to be in, responsible for government control and security of those under its authority, i.e., Palestinians as well as Jews, and knowing that the Jews are set on driving the British out of Palestine, and knowing that the home government can offer little help.

The Zionists and their “gangs,” a euphemism for well equipped and well trained military forces, launched a full scale terrorist rebellion against the British by robbing banks, indiscriminate killing of British police, and the assassination of British minister-resident Lord Moyne in 1944. By the end of World War II things got even worse: “The Haganah carried out anti-British military operations – liberation of interned immigrants from the Atlit camp; the bombing of the country’s railroad network; sabotage raids on radar installations and bases of the British police mobile force; sabotage of British vessels … and the destruction of all road and railroad bridges on the borders.” All of this terrorism was conducted against the Mandate Government while the home government remained silent under the pall of Israeli Zionist propaganda (Meir Pa’il, “From Hashomer to the Israel Defense Forces: Armed Jewish Defense in Palestine,” World War II).

But recording the acts of terrorism does not do justice to the conditions the Mandate government faced. MacMichael describes the reality of the forces aligned against the police in Palestine.

A second matter which deeply impressed me is the almost Nazi control exercised by the official Jewish organizations over the Jewish community, willy nilly, through the administration of funds from abroad, the issue of labor certificates in connection with the immigration quota, the forced contributions to funds and the power of the Histadruth. … The community is under the closed oligarchy of the Jewish official organizations which control Zionist policy and circumscribe the lives of the Jewish community in all directions…

Perhaps one of the most frightening observations MacMichael makes comes at the very end of his dispatch: “As matters now stand it seems to me inevitable that the Zionist Juggernaut which has been created with such intensity of zeal for a Jewish national state will be the cause of very serious trouble in the Near East.” Prophetic words indeed.

The memorandum provided by the Palestine Police Department includes approximately 500 pages of seized documents from the Jewish Agency and related organizations. These documents reveal the intention of the Zionists that controlled operations in Palestine as they worked to force into existence a Jewish State. “We regard it as our duty to caution you against any attempt to decide on an anti-Zionist solution … We regard it as a duty to utter another warning. Do not postpone the political solution for ten years … The Jews are a nation. The land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel. The Jewish State will be established. It is better that it should be established with your help and for your benefit, than against you” (The Jewish Resistance Movement, March 25th, 1946).

The Mandate Criminal Investigation Department was headed by Richard Catling. Catling’s memorandum begins with an understanding of the “intricate Jewish political, social and economic structure in Palestine.” A series of appendices chart these structures marking in passing that “… the Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1937 understood ‘The Agency (Jewish) is obviously not a governing body; it can only advise and cooperate in a certain wide field.’ But allied as it is with the Vaad Leumi, and commanding the allegiance of the great majority of the Jews in Palestine, it unquestionably exercises, both in Jerusalem and in London, a considerable influence on the conduct of government.” Catling’s frustration with the actual control of the Jews over British policy in Palestine glares through this document: “This powerful and efficient organization amounts in fact, to a government existing side by side with the Mandatory Government…”

The Zionist controlled Jewish Agency actively undermined the legal authority in Palestine even as it operated to undermine support for that government in Britain, placing UK forces in harms way as they attempted to fulfill their authorized responsibilities in Palestine. It also demonstrates the determination of the Agency’s leadership in undermining the very nation that gave it a means of establishing a “homeland” in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration. The wording of that declaration is rarely presented in its full form: “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The declaration did not intend to establish a Jewish State. Indeed, the wording, “national home,” was used intentionally instead of “state.” Additionally, the first draft referred to the principle ‘that Palestine should be’ reconstituted ‘as the national home of the Jewish people.’ In the final text, the word ‘that’ was replaced with ‘in’ to avoid committing all of Palestine to the Jews only.

Now perhaps we can answer the question, “How many years has the British government been under the control of the Zionist influence?” Three score and ten, the biblical age. Perhaps it’s time that Britain is reborn, free from the shackles that bind it to this corrupt power that flouts international law, wantonly commits crimes against humanity, and in brazen arrogance tells the Nations United to shove its demands to comply with the civilized communities of the world.

Note: Sir Richard C. Catling’s files have been released to this writer by the chief Archivist of the Rhodes House Library of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University. Some of the material presented above comes from the “Introduction” of a yet to be published book due out this coming spring.

1. The documentary can be viewed here.

Genocide is always and everywhere a political occurrence.

– Irving Louis Horowitz, Genocide

As you’re reading this I’m sure your eyes are beginning to roll, indicating how peeved you’re probably getting over yet another tirade on the subject of health-care-overhaul. Fear not. To prevent this article from joining the all-embracing tautology of other recent health care polemics, a juxtaposition of statistics will suffice: according to the U.S. Census Bureau, 20 percent of the general population under the age of sixty-five is without health care coverage; one out of three, if not more, American Indians and Alaskan Natives, under the age of sixty-five, is either uninsured or dependent on the deficient services provided through the IHS (Indian Health Service).

As claimed by the Office of Minority Health, an adjunct of the Department of Health and Human Services, as of 2008 there were an estimated 4.9 million people who classified as American Indian and Alaskan Native alone or American Indian and Alaskan Native integrated with one or more other races [sic]: comprising only 1.6 percent of the U.S. population. The IHS, according to the Office of Minority Health, provides services to only 39 percent of American Indians and Alaskan Natives — that is approximately 1.9 million individuals out of 4.9 million who qualify for IHS services. This laggard expanse of services comes at a time when American Indians and Alaskan Natives are plighted by appalling conditions and afflictions such as:

• infant death rates 40 percent higher than the rates that exist for whites;
• death rates from alcoholism and tuberculosis approximately 650 percent higher than overall U.S. rates;
• a male population twice as likely as white men to have liver and IBD cancers;
• a male population 1.8 times more likely as white men to contract stomach cancer and, twice as likely to die from stomach cancer;
• a female population 2.4 times more likely as white females to contract, and die from, liver and IBD cancers;
• a female population 40 percent more prone than white females to get kidney/renal/pelvis cancers;
• 31 percent of the population will die before the age of 45; “…the overall adjusted death rate for American Indians is 35 percent greater than the U.S. rate…” (The age-adjusted death rate for those living in the Aberdeen area — a region that harbors most of the Lakota-Sioux reservations in South Dakota, has risen beyond 1,000 percent);¹
• higher rates of diabetes and obesity than the general population;
• an unemployment rate of 49 percent — approximately five times the national rate.

What no one is talking about right now is how the most blighted class of people in this country, the most marginalized group of people in the history of the U.S., will be affected by the proposed health-care-reform-bill. But perhaps that is because this bill may not actually provide any measures to ameliorate these abysmal conditions at all. And that may be the case because no one has ever really talked about the historical and ongoing destruction of this country’s native population honestly and publicly enough.

There are many bones to pick with the judicatory infrastructure of the United States of America concerning the failed restitution of history’s most victimized and terrorized peoples. For now, let us focus on bringing an ailing population back to good health through a program hatched for the absolute benefit of a class it is designed to provide services for, alongside being unequivocally structured according to how the said class determines it to be.

What I am asking, and what we should all be asking is: Why is it so difficult to provide fair and equal health care to an entire group of people that comprise less than two percent of the general American population? And: Will the administration’s health-care-reform-bill ensure fair and equal care be provided for American Indians and Alaskan Natives? And more importantly: If so, will the provisions enumerated for American Indians and Alaskan Natives, included in the health care proposal, be drafted along the former and latter parties’ terms, unescorted by any equivocal provisos and/or tendentious legislative furnishings?

Health care as a euphemism for the euphemism that is assimilation

Health care for American Indians and Alaskan Natives is essentially the extenuation of assimilation programs, sanctioned and directed by the IHS under the auspices of the Department of Health and Humans Services (DHHS).

In 1921 a piece of legislation known as the Snyder Act warranted legislative authority for a federal health program designed to provide services to American Indians and Alaskan Natives. According to literature on the IHS website, the act authorized funds “for the relief of distress and conservation of health…[and]…for the employment of…physicians…for Indian Tribes throughout the United States.”

However, even prior to the ratification of the Snyder Act of 1921, the United States government was well involved with juridical “health care” measures (i.e. expedients) designated for the remaining native population. Holly T. Kuschell-Haworth wrote for DePaul Journal of Health Care Law in the summer of 1999:

The Origins of Federal Native American Health Care Attention to Native American health care began in the nineteenth century when contagious diseases, such as smallpox, threatened the once substantial populations of Native American people. The Federal government’s earliest goals were to prevent disease and to speed Native American assimilation into the general population by promoting Native American dependence on Western medicine and by decreasing the influence of traditional Indian healers. In 1849, responsibility for Native American health was transferred from the War Department to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The BIA oversaw the use of congressional appropriations for the establishment of health programs for Native Americans. Responsibility for Native American health has since endured many organizational transfers, and now resides with the Indian Health Service (IHS), an operating division of the Department of Health and Humans Services (DHHS).²

In 1976, the United States passed the Indian Health Care Improvement Act. This piece of legislation detailed the U.S.’ responsibilities, citing: “Congress hereby declares that it is the policy of this Nation, in fulfillment of its special responsibilities and legal obligations to the American Indian people, to meet the national goal of providing the highest possible health status to Indians and to provide existing Indian health services with all resources necessary to effect that policy.” (I’ve added the italics to emphasize the obscene irony of these words with respect to the real, physical effects of the referenced promulgation).

Aside from the year the Ramones released their first album, 1976 also happened to be the year the U.S. government admitted to running a covert program of involuntary sterilization, affecting about 40 percent of all American Indian women of childbearing age.³ Article II of the United Nations 1948 Convention on Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide explicitly proscribes involuntary sterilization as a means of “preventing births among” a targeted population. Nonetheless, the IHS — an adjunct of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) at the time, authorized and administered the illicit sterilizations. The putative termination of the program resulted in the transfer of the IHS to the Public Health Service. There were no indictments or punishments for those reprehensibly involved.

Furthermore, it was revealed in 1990 that the IHS was inoculating Alaska Inuit children with Hepatitis-B vaccine — after the WHO placed an interdiction on this particular vaccine for having a strong correlation with HIV-Syndrome, which is, in essence, directly linked with AIDS. In 1992, a “field test” of Hepatitis-A vaccine, also HIV-correlated, was controlled on reservations in the northern Plains region.⁴

The IHS fails as it continues to expand assimilationist health care

Founded in 1955, the IHS is a federally administered health care program, accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. It was designed to provide services for North America’s members of the 546 federally recognized indigenous tribes. Those who receive IHS services reside mainly on reservations and rural communities within thirty-six states, mostly contained in the Western U.S. and Alaska.

IHS dependents are not eligible for access to the bulk of hospitals and medical practitioners ubiquitous throughout the U.S. They are restricted to services provided by the clinics and hospitals that contract with the IHS only. Moreover, the majority of IHS facilities are located within “contract health service delivery areas” comprising reservations, the counties circumscribing the reservations, and the adjacent counties. The IHS itself approximates that 43 percent of American Indians and Alaskan Natives live outside the parameters of “contract health service delivery areas.” And according to Bonnie Duran, writing for the American Journal of Public Health in 2005: “…more than 60 percent of members of US tribes reside outside their home reservations at least part of the year, but only 1 percent of the IHS budget is earmarked for urban Indian health care [urban clinics service, in toto, nearly 600,000 individuals].”⁵

In the 1950s the U.S. passed a sequence of “termination” statutes by which, in the words of American Indian scholar, author and activist Ward Churchill, “the federal government unilaterally dissolved more than a hundred indigenous nations and their reservation areas.” Furthermore, concomitant ruling was enforced to “encourage” the relocation of sizable “numbers of Indians from the remaining reservations to selected urban centers;” a colonial tactic designed to obviate any recrudescence of social solidarity within native communities.⁶ These legislative instruments were prorogued (suspended but not dissolved) in the 70s, but by the 90s the federal relocation program had succeeded in pushing more than half of all U.S. indigenous peoples out of reservations and into city ghettos, under the ostensible objective of “assimilation.” Would you care to be prodded out of your home and marshaled into an economically depressed area of one of America’s major cities? I didn’t think so.

Owing to the fact that the preponderance of IHS facilities are located not in city ghettos but on and around reservations, concurrent with the actuality that virtually half the native population resides nowhere near service areas on account of former federally mandated relocation programs, not only substantiates the concern that adequate health care is not being provided to America’s indigenous, but that these conditions are federally ignored, and met with silence and depraved indifference.

As regards financial deficiencies, IHS is bracketed for budgetary purposes as a discretionary program. In other words, there is no federal guarantee that there will ever be adequate pecuniary allocations (funding) for the IHS. On the other hand, for the general public, being predominantly Eurocentric, white-American, Medicare and Medicaid are federal prerogatives. And those who are eligible are guaranteed plenary (full) access to their programs. To adduce another excerpt from Bonnie Duran’s piece in the American Journal of Public Health in 2005: “For reservation-based populations, the level of per capita funding is less than half of what is provided to those on Medicaid and in prison.”⁷

In 2005 the General Accountability Office (GAO) controlled a study that revealed a number of IHS facilities with zero funding to contract for “non-urgent care.” The same GAO study discovered that eleven out of thirteen facilities surveyed had zero to limited ability to treat chronic pain. Seven out of thirteen facilities had zero to limited ability to perform cancer screenings.⁸ Let me remind the reader that these findings pertain to a specific group of people who are, at the very least, twice as likely as white folks to contract, and die from, preventable cancers.

As if that isn’t bad enough, despite the claim that Congress still allocates funds for the IHS (in lieu of the expiration of the Indian Health Care Improvement Act in 2000), the IHS only receives 50-75 percent of the requisite funding needed to operate.¹ Regardless of the increase of federal appropriations over the years, the amount of real money doled out has decreased. To put it another way, the IHS is virtually bankrupt. The amount of federal allocations may have increased, but the amount of actual capital put into the system has considerably decreased.

Meanwhile, the Pima of Arizona suffer the highest diabetes rates in the world. And in 2007 their tuberculosis rate was 5.9 compared to 1.1 for whites.⁹

The 1.8 million-acre San Carlos Apache Reservation, home to a community of 13,000, is one of the poorest reservations in the States. Writing for Congressional Quarterly, Peter Katel quotes Tribal Chairwoman, Kathleen W. Kitcheyan, lamenting: “We suffer from a poverty level of 69 percent, which must be unimaginable to many people in this country, who would equate a situation such as this to one found only in Third World countries.”⁹

Less than a tenth of the recent bonuses awarded to certain peoples by certain businesses, generated by the taxpayer bailout could have sufficiently extended IHS services and advanced aid to improve these inimical conditions greatly. It is the very least this country could have done on behalf of long overdue reparations.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter which end of the political spectrum one is ensconced in — negligent and damaging policy written by U.S. lawmakers is negligent and damaging policy. If one leans further to the right, obdurate ethnocentrism (the whole “…I’ve seen one Indian, I’ve seen ‘em all…” mentality) often accompanies those at the helm. If one leans further to the left, liberal and “humanitarian” agendas often obfuscate the implications attached to policy destined for nothing short of the same old hegemonic ends. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.” It does not matter whether one is right, center, or left.

The syndicated creation of disease and destitution

Would it surprise you if I told you that most of these despairing conditions could have been prevented? Well, it’s true — they could have been prevented. More than one half of the nation’s uranium deposits, one-fourth of its low-sulfur bituminous coal reserves, one-fifth of its oil and natural gas, alongside substantial deposits of copper and other ores are confined within the margins of reservations.¹⁰ These resources are lucrative, to say the least. They are also lethal once taken from out of the ground and/or processed on site. Nonetheless, it is peculiar to find the most impoverished demographic in the U.S. residing directly above a copious amount of the world’s most profitable resources. As claimed by Ward Churchill, in his essay “The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,| the natural resource base of the Navajo alone is far greater than that of Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, and Monaco, combined.¹¹

Through a series of ratified acts (e.g., Indian Reorganization Act, 1934), the U.S. defined itself as the primary governing body of Indian reservations, establishing a system of tribal council governments for each reservation, whose main responsibilities (under the rubric of “economic planning”) include: minerals-lease negotiations, contracting with external corporations, long-term agricultural leasing, water-rights negotiations, land transfers, and more. History has shown that such “economic planning” is nothing but a damaging strategy for an exploitative U.S. bylaw apparatus.

After decades of uranium mining on American Indian territory, many lives have been ruined. Uranium tailings, fifty to sixty feet high litter the defunct mining sites situated on reservation lands releasing radon, actinides (responsible for long-term radioactivity), and other debris into the topsoil and groundwater of the surrounding regions. There is no such thing as “safe doses” of radiation. The debris that sullies the climes of Indian country is replete with alpha-emitting substances often resulting in cancers and other degenerative diseases. Remember that most IHS facilities cannot afford to offer cancer screenings.

Dr. Gordon Edwards, writing for Perception magazine in 1992, explained that leftover uranium tailings contain about 85 percent of the original radioactivity found in the ore. They emit at least 10,000 times the amount of radon gas (able to travel a thousand miles in just a few days) as the undisturbed ore. In the Southwestern U.S., schools were once built using uranium tailings as construction material.¹²

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) estimates radon emissions from uranium tailings in the Southwestern U.S. will result in over 3,000 cancer deaths per century over the entire North American continent. Other researchers posit that this assertion is underestimated by at least a factor of ten.¹²

By the 1950s cases of lung cancer, pulmonary fibrosis, pneumoconiosis, silicosis, tuberculosis, birth defects, kidney damage, and more, began to show up in populations near uranium mining sites. By 1978, the GAO had recorded 140 million tons of “on site tailings piles at twenty-two abandoned and sixteen operational mills.” There are more than 1,100 abandoned uranium mines in the Navajo Nation alone. Continued production results in the creation of six to ten tons of tailings annually, alongside small cell carcinoma for the Navajo miners.¹³

Yucca Mountain, situated on Shoshone Nation land, is a proposed nuclear waste repository site. Left with thousands of tons of nuclear waste per annum, U.S. nuclear power facilities are desperately seeking a place to store their ever-increasing stockpiles of deadly wastes. America’s best idea thus far is to stuff it all inside a mountain, on land that does not belong to the U.S.

Backed by the Ruby Valley Treaty and the Nevada Enabling Act, Yucca Mountain and its surrounding region are not U.S. territory, therefore not for federal use. Not surprisingly, this injunction is flouted by military nuclear weapons testing on Shoshone land, during which 700-ton explosives are detonated. Moreover, nearly 70 percent of the nation’s gold mining occurs upon Shoshone Nation land, despite the fact that gold ore is commonly found throughout the U.S. What’s wrong with industrial gold mining, you may ask. Well, for one, it’s stupid.

Gold mining is a highly nocuous vocation. Not only does it threaten the health and livelihood of miners and occupants of the surrounding communities, but it is deleterious to its own and surrounding landbases, ultimately threatening the natural ecology of the region.

Tons of rock must be extracted from the earth to extricate an ounce of gold. The processing of the metal involves (depending on its metallurgical makeup) the application of a diluted cyanide solution (sodium cyanide), sulfuric acid, mercury, and other noxious and fatal substances, alongside being water intensive (drawing intensively from a diminished water-table).

There are literally thousands of other examples I could provide to illustrate how the U.S. and its corporate collaborators create poor health conditions and abject poverty among an already marginalized population for their own profitable gains and neocolonial, hegemonic aspirations. And matters are made desperately worse by the incompetence of the IHS.

Seeking solutions

Rectifying a longtime problem, one as grisly as the diminution of America’s indigenous, followed by destructive protocol delegated by U.S. decree, is indeed a difficult task at hand. As regards restoring a broken and virtually bankrupt IHS, some lawmakers are pushing for the reauthorization of the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act.

On October 14th, Rep. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., sent a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller urging “the inclusion of reauthorization of the IHCI Act as part of comprehensive health insurance reform,” nmpolitics.net reports. In the words of Heinrich, “Our country desperately needs health insurance reform — but our pursuit of reform cannot leave Native Americans behind,” he said. “I represent tens of thousands of Native Americans in central New Mexico, and my constituents have made it clear that they cannot wait any longer for health care reform in Indian country.”

According to New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone: “Less is spent on providing health care to American Indians per capita than any other sub-population. In fact, we spend more to provide health care to federal inmates than we do for American Indians.” As reported at racewire.org, Pallone is appealing for an amendment to the current health care bill that would add changes to services for American Indians to “any health care reform that happens in Congress.”

Many wonder, though, would reauthorizing the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act, with a few additional furnishings, really ameliorate the problem at hand? Obviously, U.S. legislation has not worked thus far and, moreso, it has been the driving impetus behind the historical disintegration of this country’s indigenous.

If anything is to suffice, health care services for Native Americans must be developed in accord with Native Americans’ requirements and wishes. Services must incorporate the indigenous traditions and practices of each tribe, alongside the option to access conventional methods of treatment.

More capital should be injected into the system. There are absolutely no excuses to do otherwise. The money is there — it’s just being misspent, primarily on an already-bloated defense budget. Allocations for environmental clean-up costs must be put in place, too. And clean-up projects must be enforced with full speed ahead. This would — with the adequate sanitation gear — provide a massive amount of new employment as well.

A concerted effort, from all angles, on behalf of U.S. policy-makers, must culminate in an unprecedented level of reparations that not only rectify centuries of genocidal maltreatment, but also recognize, with respect, indigenous sovereignties. This includes the withdrawal of all unwanted military and corporate activity/occupation from Indian country. In the end, the health of one’s landbase is commensurate with the health of one’s community.

1. Goldsmith, M.F. (1996). First Americans face their latest challenge: Indian health care meets state Medicaid reform. JAMA, 275, 1786; also see Voss, Richard W., Victor Douville, Alex Little Soldier, and Gayla Twiss, Tribal and shamanic-based social work practice: a Lakota perspective, Social Work, Vol. 44, 1999.
2. Kuschell-Haworth, Holly T., “Jumping Through Hoops: Traditional Healers and the Indian Health Care Improvement Act,” DePaul Journal of Health Care Law, 1999.
3. Dillingham, Brint, “Indian Women and HIS Sterilization Practices,” American Indian Journal, vol. 3, no. 1 (1977), pp. 27-28. For more info on this, see Churchill, Ward, “In the Matter of Julius Streicher: Applying Nuremberg Precedents in the United States,” From A Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985-1995 (Boston: South End Press, 1996).
4. Andrea Smith, “The HIV-Correlation to Hepatitis-A and B Vaccines,” WARN Newsletter (Chicago: Women of All Red Nations, summer 1992).
5. Duran, Bonnie M., American Journal of Public Health, May2005, Vol. 95 Issue 5, pp. 758-758.
6. Churchill, Ward, “Since Predator Came: A Survey of Native North America Since 1492, From A Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985-1995 (Boston: South End Press, 1996), p. 26. Also, see House Concurrent Resolution 108 of August 1953, which promulgated a policy of “unilaterally dissolving specific native nations.” This resulted in the “suspension of federal services to and recognition of the existence of”: the Menominee on June 17, 1954 (ch. 303, 68 Stat. 250); the Klamath on Aug. 13, 1954 (ch. 732, 68 Stat. 718, codified at 25 U.S.C. § 564 et seq.); the “Tribes of Western Oregon” on Aug. 13, 1954 (ch. 733, 68 Stat. 724, codified at 25 U.S.C. § 691 et seq.); and more. In total, 109 nations were statutorily “terminated” in the 1950s. Some were restored and federally recognized in the 1970s. Also, see the Relocation Act (PL 959) of 1956; for more info on the latter “Act,” see Fixico, Donald L., Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986).
7. Duran, Bonnie M., op. cit.
8. James, Cara, Karyn Schwartz, and Julia Berndt, “A Profile of American Indians and Alaska Natives and Their Health Coverage, Race, Ethnicity and Health Care,” Kaiser Family Foundation, September 2009, p. 6.
9. Katel, Peter, (2006, April 28), “American Indians,” CQ Researcher, 16, 361-384.
10. Churchill, Ward, “Native North America: The Political Economy of Radioactive Colonialism,” From A Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985-1995 (Boston: South End Press, 1996), p. 147; also see Garrity, Michael, “The U.S. Colonial Empireis as Close as the Nearest Reservation,” Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, ed. Holly Sklar (Boston: South End Press, 1980), pp. 238-68.
11. Churchill, Ward, “Native North America…,” From A Native Son…, p. 150; also see U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, The Navajo Nation: An American Colony (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976).
12. Edwards, Dr. Gordon, President of Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, “Uranium: The Deadliest Metal,” Perception Magazine, v. 10 n. 2, 1992.
13. Quartaroli, MaryLynn, “Leetso,” the Yellow Monster: Uranium Mining on the Colorado.

Sri Lanka’s first aborigines with continuous lineage are the Tamil people. It is not precisely known when they came to the island, but perhaps as many as 5000 years ago. Archaeologists date the first humans in Sri Lanka to some 34,000 years. Scientists call them Balangoda people, the name of the location where artifacts were found. These hunting-gathering cave dwellers have no current lineage.

Tamils were also known as proto-Elamites or Ela. These people in Sri Lanka call themselves Eelam Tamils, meaning “earthly people”. Tamils speak a Dravidian language, which has no ties to other language families. It was, perhaps, associated with Scythians and Urals. The Dravidian language and Tamils originated, perhaps, from Sumer and Ur: the “cradle of the first civilization”, now Iran. The Sumer and Tamils formed the first language of proto-grams on clay tablets. Tamil inscriptions and literature are at least 2500 years old. Today, 100 to 200 million people speak Tamil.¹

The Christian Bible refers to Elam as “maritime nations in various lands, each with a separate language”. (Genesis 10) In the myth of Noah’s Ark, Elam was thought to be a descendant of one of Noah’s three sons on the ark. (Genesis 5-9) Tamils were the first to use the wheel for transportation. They traveled to India and the island Sri Lanka, which had been connected to India. The first known manuscripts in India were written in Tamil. Other Tamil inscriptions have been found in Egypt and Thailand.

About 2500 years ago, the first Sinhalese came to Sri Lanka from India. This was hundreds of years after Tamils were settled in the kingdom in the north at Jaffna (Yazhpanam). Sinhalese is, perhaps, a term originating from King Vijayan, who was expelled from the kingdom of Sinhapura in India and arrived in Sri Lanka 543 BC. He and his people engaged in combat with the Tamil aborigines. They established the Kandi and Kottai kingdoms in the central and southern areas.

The Sinhalese are among many ethnic groups who speak an Indo-Aryan language, Pali, believed to have developed in Sindh, Gujarat and Bengal areas about 3000 years ago. They early became practitioners of Buddhism, an off-shot of Hinduism, which is the religion that most Tamils adopted. Buddhism was created by the prince, Siddhartha Gautama, in the 6th century BC. Most Sinhalese adopted Buddhism but some were converted to Christianity, which was first introduced by traders from Syria, in the 1st or 2nd century after Christ.

The Sinhalese and Tamils have distinct ethnic backgrounds, languages and religions. The vast majority of both peoples has always lived in separate regions of Sri Lanka and they have often been at war. The Sinhalese adopted the chauvinistic attitude that their language and religion were the only true ones and they must reign throughout Sri Lanka. All other religions were alien. This notion seems to have originated, or been fortified, by the historical poem Mahavamsa (“Great Chronicle”) written in Pali by the Buddhist monk Mahatera Mahanama. It covers nearly one thousand years of Sinhalese kingdom history in Sri Lanka.

Sinhalese maintain that Sri Lanka must be a Buddhist nation because, they claim, it has been so throughout history—although they count the beginning of national history with Mahanama’s account of the first Sinhalese kingdom of Vijaya, in 543 BC. The fact that Tamil Eelams had kingdoms in Sri Lanka for many hundreds of years is ignored.

When the first Europeans, Portuguese traders, landed in Sri Lanka, in 1505, they encountered three native kingdoms: two Sinhalese kingdoms at Kottai and Kandi, and the Tamils in Jaffna peninsula. Although the Portuguese were traders, they brought fire power and eventually seized power militarily from the Kottai kingdom. Despite their superior weaponry, it took them decades to defeat the kingdoms at Jaffna and Kandi, yet resistance remained throughout Portuguese occupation. The Portuguese named the island Ceilão, which the English later transliterated as Ceylon.

In 1658, Dutch invaders arrived. The Dutch United East India Company sided with the Kandi resistance to defeat the Portuguese. But when the natives realized the Dutch sought total control, the Kandians organized guerilla warfare. In 1766, the Dutch took sovereignty over the entire coastline but not the entire island where some Tamils and Sinhalese remained independent.

In 1795, the British landed and kicked out the Dutch within a year. They realized there were two separate nations of natives. In June 1796, the British Colonial Secretary, Sir Hugh Cleghorn wrote to his government:

“Two different nations, from a very ancient period, have divided between them the possession of the Island: the Sinhalese inhabiting the interior in its southern and western parts from the river Wallouwe to Chilaw, and the Malabars (Tamils) who possess the northern and eastern districts. These two nations differ entirely in their religion, language and manners.”

It took the Brits a generation to defeat resisting natives. In 1811, they defeated Bandara Vanniyan and his guerrilla resisters in the Tamil Vanni territory. In 1815, the British finally captured the last of the Kandyan kingdom.

The European invaders were only interested in the riches they could steal. They converted the peasant based agricultural economy into an export one. The island was rich in cinnamon and other spices, coconuts and graphite. English colonialists converted much of the land into tea, coffee and rubber plantations.

Religion was used by the colonialists to dominate and pacify the natives. The Portuguese spread Catholicism in an organized manner. Some Tamils and some Sinhalese converted or were forced to convert. Both the Dutch and English continued the process with their Protestant missionaries, yet most natives held onto their beliefs in either Buddhism or Hinduism. Islamism was also introduced by Arab traders.

“Sri Lanka as British-ruled Ceylon was subjected to a classic divide-and-rule,” wrote John Pilger.

The English had to have their tea so they created tea plantations in the mountainous regions, especially in the center of the country where Sinhalese lived. But Sinhalese would not work them so the Brits “brought Tamils from India as virtual slave labor while building an educated Tamil middle-class to run the colony,” continued Pilger.² Only a few indigenous Tamils, however, ran anything, but some educated ones took the opportunity to sit on top of the bottom castes.

A hierarchy of “races”, classes and castes was perpetrated among native ethnic groups and new arrivals. In the mid-1800s, English and German scholars adopted an ideology of superiority first based on language and then on race. The English viewed Sinhalese as cousins in the large Aryan family. Brits (and Germans) were the “superior” white Aryans; the Sinhalese lesser Indo-Aryans, and Tamils were the colonized proletariat, the “black inferior race.” This fit in nicely with the Sinhalese elite notion of superiority, based on their precious book of mythology, Mahavamsa. In the 1870s, a German scholar, Max Muller, writing about language origins, especially Indo-Aryan, first coined the term “Aryan race”—something he later regretted.³

Europeans took it for granted that Greek and Latin were superior languages, and they saw affinities with Sanskrit, from which Sinhalese is derived. Given this identity, it was easier for the colonialists to drive a wedge deeper between the indigenous peoples, and all the more so by allowing Sinhalese to own land without having to work the British tea and rubber plantations in the center of the country. The Brits left the aboriginal Tamils stay in their homeland in the north and east, but brought between 800,000 and 1.5 million Tamils from India to work the fields; nearly one-fourth died in route. It is estimated that 70,000 Tamil Nadu died on route in the 1840s. Their story parallels that of Africans forced into slavery and brought to the Americas.

Ironically, it was protestant missionaries who contributed greatly to the development of political awareness among Tamils in the north and east, and led to a revival of the Hindu faith as a reaction against Christian domination. We find many examples of this in modern history, such as the increasing interest among Arabs in practicing strict Islamic customs, including separate gender rules, as a reaction to the invasions and occupations of Western imperialism in the Middle-East. Something similar is occurring in Palestine in response to the apartheid enforced by Zionist Jews.

Led by revivalist Arumuga Navalar in the mid-1800s, Tamils in the north and east built their own schools, temples, associations and presses. Literacy was used to spread Hinduism and its principles. Tamils published their own literature and newspapers to counter the ideology-religion of the missionaries. Tamils thought confidently of themselves as a community, thus lending to the legitimacy of their later assertion of the necessity to be treated equally with the Sinhalese or be granted—or take—their own autonomy as Eelam Tamils.

For some of the time that Britain ruled the island different colonial governors recognized equality of the native peoples, yet played one against the other. In 1833, the British mandated the administrative unification of the country while incorporating the different native administrative structures that existed earlier. The new legislative council was composed of three Europeans and one representative from the Sinhalese, the Ceylon Tamils and the Burghers—a Euro-Asian minority, Creole descendants of European colonialists who spoke a mixture of Indo-Portuguese. They had been converted to Protestantism.

Tamil laborers brought from India had no say nor did the few Arab Muslims. Racist Sinhalese massacred many in 1915. In 1930, another hard-working minority, Malayali plantation workers, were attacked by Sinhalese and most fled back to Kerala.

In 1921, the colonialists altered the legislative council so that Sinhalese acquired 13 seats to three for the Tamils. From here on out, Tamils developed a communal consciousness as a minority. In 1931, the Brits changed the rules again by incorporating the notion of universal franchise—one man one vote including for castes. Most Sinhalese opposed this progressive measure, seeking to maintain classes and castes while agreeing to part of the rule allowing them, as the majority, to have a decisive say over the minority Tamils. The issue of representative power-sharing, and not the structure of government, was used by nationalists of both communities to create an escalating inter-ethnic rivalry, which has been the dominant trend since.

Britain’s vacillating ruling strategy throughout their 150 year domination led to sporadic episodes of violence between Sinhalese and Tamils, often expressed as religious conflicts between Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims. More often than not, it was Buddhists who first attacked other ethnic peoples who held other faiths. The Brits often held police on the sidelines.

In the 1930s, and especially during World War II, Sinhalese and Tamils spoke out for independence. Various left-wing parties and coalitions arose, and some conservative groupings as well. Many natives hoped for a German victory over the hated English colonialists.

Tamils struggled to have their language placed on equal terms with Sinhalese, and replace English as the official language. Some Sinhalese leaders agreed but many did not. In 1939, a Tamil leader, G.G. Ponnambalam, spoke against the common Sinhalese notion, taken from the Mahavamsa, that their language should be the only official language and Buddhism the only official religion. Angry at the speech, Sinhalese mobs bashed and killed many Tamils. This time the British stopped the riots, but the roots to the upcoming 26-year long civil war had been laid.

Once WW II ended, the British Empire realized it had to give in to so many native peoples struggling for sovereignty. India won dominion status in 1947, a slight reform until full independence in 1950. The civil disobedience movement led by Mahatma Gandhi had succeeded yet he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist on January 30, 1948. Gandhi sought unity among all Indians, but most Muslims wanted their own State after colonialism. Many Muslims were killed in riots; many lost their homes. Gandhi believed it morally correct for India to compensate them with finances. Many Hindu nationalists opposed this, and it led to his murder.

Great numbers of Hindus in India discriminated against non-Hindus just as Buddhist Sinhalese discriminate against Hindus and Muslims. The percentage of Tamils in Sri Lanka has been reduced from 30% to 12.6%. Tens of thousands have been murdered before and during the recent war, and as many as one million have fled the country, part of a massive Diaspora, like the Jews.⁴

1. This condensed history is gleaned from many sources: author Maravanpulavu K. Sachithananthan; Latin American Friendship Association, Tamilnadu, India; Wikipedia: many articles about Tamil Eelam, Sri Lanka and their histories, religions and languages; Tamilnation.org and many other sections in this comprehensive Tamil self-determination website. I am uncertain about the exactitude of origins, who came first, specific dates, or how to determine linguistic lineages. The record is unclear. But what is clear is that Sinhalese have judged and treated Tamils as inferior beings.
2. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” New Statesman, May 13, 2009.
3. See chapter 13. “Understanding the Aryan Theory,” by Marisa Angell, a Usamerican Jew. The chapter is part of Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka, edited by Mithran Tiruchelvam and Dattathreya C.S., published by International Center for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1998.
4. Current population statistics of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka—so named since 1978—show a population of 21 million people. 74% (15 million) Sinhalese; 12.6% (2.5 million) Tamil; 7.4% (1.5 million) Moors; 5.2% (1 million) Indian Tamil. 93% of Sinhalese are Buddhists, and the remainder Christian. 60% Tamils are Hindus, 28% are Muslim and 12% Christian.

As with much of Obama’s rhetoric, it is difficult to discern whether the President’s Cairo speech was sincere or a cynical maneuver intended to provide cover under which the status quo would be maintained. In any case, expectations were raised even higher when Obama followed up the Cairo speech by appointing the venerable George Mitchell as his chief negotiator and demanding that Israel immediately freeze all settlement building as a condition precedent to a resurrected “peace process” leading to the creation of a contiguous and viable Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As remarkable as Obama’s Cairo speech was, no less remarkable was the speed of Obama’s retreat from its lofty rhetoric when confronted with political realities.

Under the leadership of newly re-cycled right wing hardliner Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel predictably responded to Obama’s demand by raising its middle finger to Israel’s only remaining benefactor, by authorizing the construction of 455 new Jewish-only housing units in and around Jerusalem and announcing that some 3000 units under construction would be completed regardless of any hypothetical moratorium.

Even the cynical Netanyahu must have been amazed at the ease with which the Obama government backed down from his settlement freeze demand in a series of remarkable genuflections notable mostly for the unctuousness with which they were delivered. To gain a full picture of the scope of Obama’s capitulation to the Israel Lobby, we must consider the timeliness of Judge Richard Goldstone’s report on war crimes committed during Israel’s most recent massacre in Gaza, during Operation Lead Cast in January 2009.

Goldstone’s 575-page report meticulously documenting Israel’s various crimes was released on September 15, 2009, just as the Netanyahu government was concocting new ways to placate its settler-based constituency by expressing its contempt for Obama’s peace initiative. Thus, by virtue of its timing, the public release of the Goldstone report provided a perfect opportunity for Obama to play hardball with Bibi.

Obama could have threatened to simply allow (or even support) Judge Goldstone’s recommendation – that the report be referred to the United Nations Security Council and possibly to the International Criminal Court should Israel refuse to undertake a genuine investigation of its findings – to be implemented unless Israel agreed to a freeze of all settlement activity, including Jerusalem. Given the importance to Israel of preserving its reputation as a civilized member of the “international community” (meaning, the West), such a strategy might well have succeeded, and would have allowed the Obama administration to avoid the more serious political implications of resorting to the most obvious exercise of America’s leverage – cutting off loan guarantees that are used to subsidize Israel’s illegal settlement building, a threat that would surely provoke a full-blown rebellion from AIPAC-infested U.S. Congress.

Instead, Obama immediately dispatched UN Ambassador Susan Rice to vacuously express Obama’s “serious concerns” over the “unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable” work of the Goldstone commission, without of course identifying any specific flaws in the report’s findings, logic or conclusions. Worse yet, by means of some behind-the-scenes arm-twisting, Obama forced the hapless Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to in effect adopt the Likud-endorsed, grotesquely Orwellian formulation that to hold Israel accountable for its war crimes would deal a “fatal blow” to the peace process.

“Israel will not be able to take further steps and take risks for peace if it is denied the right of self-defense”, said Netanyahu on October 1, affirming that the right to commit crimes against humanity with absolute impunity is an essential weapon in Israel’s peace arsenal. Threatened by the Netanyahu-Obama axis with who-knows-what dire consequences if he failed to fall into line, Abbas was forced to agree, and withdrew the Palestinian Authority’s demand that the Goldstone report be sent to the UN General Assembly for possible action.

This was the first of the self-inflicted wounds visited upon Obama’s feckless peace initiative, which, like its equally feckless predecessors, depends on identifying and propping up a Palestinian “partner for peace” to participate in chimerical negotiations: On the day following Abbas’ announcement, the “Arab street” erupted in protests, marches and statements of condemnation, not only from his Hamas rivals, but from human rights groups, intellectuals and media pundits all over the world (except of course the United States). Abbas quickly reversed course and re-affirmed the PA’s commitment to having the Goldstone report referred to the UN Security Council. It was too little, too late, to salvage Abbas’ credibility.

The second and fatal blow – to Abbas’ viability with his own people and thus to Obama’s Cairo agenda – was landed when in late October, Obama’s loathsome Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, told reporters that Netanyahu’s patently meaningless offer to “restrain some” (as opposed to “freeze all”) settlement activities in the West Bank amounted to an “unprecedented restriction” on Israel’s colonization project. (Clinton’s assertion was true in the trivial sense that notwithstanding numerous commitments to freeze settlement activities, most recently at George W. Bush’s 2007 Annapolis conference and before that in the 2003 Road Map agreement, in practice Israel has never significantly “restrained” its settlement activities at any time; however, insofar as it in effect congratulated Netanyahu for Israel’s bad faith in rejecting the most basic request issued by her own boss, Clinton’s statement was thoroughly false in a deeper sense.)

The Clinton episode was the last straw for Mr. Abbas, who promptly announced that he would withdraw his candidacy for the coming presidential election in the Palestinian Authority. It is not readily apparent who will replace Abbas, assuming he is serious about his decision to cede the leadership role to someone more willing to play the patsy role in the absurd charade known as the American-sponsored “peace process.” What is clear, however, is that Obama’s inability to back up his Cairo rhetoric with even the semblance of spine in dealing with Israel’s intransigent leadership has consigned the latest Middle East peace initiative to failure, exactly like the similar initiatives of every American President since Jimmy Carter.

Obama’s gamesmanship vis-à-vis Mahmoud Abbas nicely illustrates the paradox of Israel’s relationship to Palestinian leadership generally:

Israel complains (in the words of Ehud Barak) that it cannot negotiate because it has no Palestinian “partner for peace.” But to the extent that any hand-picked Palestinian leader is acceptable as a “partner” – to that extent the Palestinian leader invariably lacks credibility with his own people, and for that reason cannot legitimately represent the popular Palestinian position in any negotiation. Thus, the hand-picked Palestinian leader cannot negotiate because he has no real power, and Israel is once again able to complain about having no partner for peace.

This cycle suits Israel fine, because postponement of the “peace process” means preservation of the status quo, and preserving the status quo serves (apparent) Israeli interests for one reason: the status quo allows, or more accurately consists in, the constant, never-ending, incremental construction of yet more Jewish-only settlements on stolen land, and the consequent incremental dispossession of Palestinian populations and their increasing isolation in ever-shrinking disconnected ghettos.

(Just as the space of the occupation is less a container within which events unfold than the medium for the events themselves (see Eyal Weizman, The Hollow Land), so the temporality of the occupation should be understood as part of its implementation: The occupation’s end (via agreement on final status) is constantly, interminably, forever deferred, and in the meantime, everything that occurs (the building of settlements and “outposts”, military “incursions” and “operations”, agreements, understandings, cease fires, checkpoints, barriers, suspensions of law and rights in the name of security, etc.) is characterized as temporary, conditional, of “interim status”, allowing the nearly imperceptible creation of “facts on the ground” that incrementally but permanently alter reality, rendering any possible agreement or negotiated solution moot.)

Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institute, an advisor to George Mitchell, recently remarked that with Abbas exiting the scene, “we are entering a new era.” In this new era, the challenge for the next Palestinian leader will be to resist the “peace process” altogether, based on a clear understanding that the United States cannot, now or ever, play a constructive role in bringing about a just outcome to the conflict.

As Sara Roy has demonstrated, the function of the “peace process” is to permanently remove the conflict from the framework of international law, as expressed in the well-established international consensus regarding its resolution based on UN Resolution 242, a consensus consistently blocked over the past 30 years by Israel and the United States. This removal is accomplished by creating and sustaining the illusion of a genuine “negotiation” of land for peace, but the concept of negotiation assumes the existence of two more or less equal parties, each of whom runs the risk of palpable loss should negotiations fail.

This assumption does not apply in this case, because all the power is on one side, and the relationship between the parties is that of domination: The Palestinians have nothing to give that Israel can’t take by force, and Israel has nothing to lose should negotiations fail. The only real restraint on Israel’s actions in the occupied territories is its public image in the United States Congress, which provides the money, the weapons and the legal cover for Israel’s ongoing colonization project. There are limits to gullibility, even inside the Beltway, and the day when Israel is no longer able to portray itself as the victim rather than the aggressor will be the day Israel will agree to negotiate in good faith. That is why the Goldstone report is so very dangerous from the Israeli government’s perspective.

At this point, the only possible outcome of the peace process – certain to be resurrected in some form by the Obama administration – is to force the Palestinian leadership accept national existence within a network of isolated, walled-in enclaves and call it a “state”, while lacking that most basic characteristic of any genuine state, namely, sovereignty (over borders, defense, airspace, resources, etc.). The longer the Palestinians resist that outcome, the greater the pressure on Israel to conform to its public image in the United States as a liberal democracy – by offering equal political rights, including the right to vote, to the 4 million Arabs under its rule.

As the sun sets on the two-state solution, that pressure is already well on its way to becoming intolerable – in Israel, with the growing domination of the political scene by extreme right-wing ethnic nationalists like Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, in the United States with the rise of AIPAC alternatives such as the J-Street organization, and in the rest of the world with the inability of functionaries like Barack Obama to bury the Goldstone report and with it, the truth.

What seems as an American peace initiative putting pressure on Israel to halt its expansion into the West Bank is in fact an agenda that is promoted by Zionists within the US Administration who realise like the late Sharon, that the only chance for the Jewish state to survive the next decade, is to shrink into a little Jewish shtetle (ghetto). The Two state solution is indeed the last effort to keep Zionism alive.

Netanyahu is far from being stupid. He understands it all. He knows that his Zionist Revisionist father’s dream of ‘greater Eretz Yisrael’ is unattainable.

Haaretz reported that the Israeli PM admitted in Washington that he was committed to ‘two states living side by side’. However, he stressed that the “the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes from which they were expelled, would not be on the table.” Seemingly, an Israeli hawkish PM is voluntarily confronting the Israeli original sin namely the expulsion of the vast majority of the Palestinians people. However, the fact that he insists that it won’t be ‘on the table’ can only mean that it is on the table already. “They”, continues Netanyahu, “must abandon the fantasy of flooding Israel with refugees, give up irredentist claims to the Negev and Galilee, and declare unequivocally that the conflict is finally over”.

Clearly, Netanyahu expresses here a wish that is shared by most if not all Israelis. They all dream to open their eyes in the morning just to find out that all Goyim, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims just left the region.

I am here to advise Netanyahu and every Israeli who is willing to listen that this is not going to happen. As much as being flooded by ‘refugee’ Palestinians is a deep Israeli nightmare, it is far from being a Palestinian fantasy. It is actually a reality waiting to happen. Israel has lost its opportunity to reconcile with its neighbours. It failed to settle its conflict with the indigenous people of the land. The fate of Israel will be determined by ‘facts on the ground’ namely demography. In terms of reconciliation, Israel has past the no return Zone. Its fate is doomed. One Palestine from the river to the sea is not any more a matter of ‘if’ but rather a question of ‘when’.

Unlike most Israelis who dismiss the Palestinian cause, Netanyahu admitted today that Palestinians were indeed expelled. For the first time Palestinians’ “irredentist claims” are being addressed by an Israeli PM. And yet, Netanyahu should stop deluding himself and his people. It is not just the Negev and Galilee. It is actually every piece of land between the river and the sea: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Be’er Sheva and every village, orchard, field, river and tree in between. The only question that is left open is how long will it take for the Shekel to drop? How long will it take before Israelis grasp that they dwell on stolen land? How long will it take before the Israelis realise that the battle is lost? How long will it take for the Israelis to internalise the obvious fact that they have once again managed to get on the wrong side of their Neighbours?

I understand him.

He feels betrayed. And the traitor is Barack Obama.

A year ago, when Obama was elected, he aroused high hopes in the Muslim world, among the Palestinian people as well as in the Israeli peace camp.

At long last an American president who understood that he had to put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not only for the sake of the two peoples, but mainly for the US national interests. This conflict is largely responsible for the tidal waves of anti-American hatred that sweep the Muslim masses from ocean to ocean.

Everybody believed that a new era had begun. Instead of the Clash of Civilizations, the Axis of Evil and all the other idiotic but fateful slogans of the Bush era, a new approach of understanding and reconciliation, mutual respect and practical solutions.

Nobody expected Obama to exchange the unconditional pro-Israeli line for a one-sided pro-Palestinian attitude. But everybody thought that the US would henceforth adopt a more even-handed approach and push the two sides towards the Two-State Solution. And, no less important, that the continuous stream of hypocritical and sanctimonious blabbering would be displaced by a determined, vigorous, non-provocative but purposeful policy.

As high as the hopes were then, so deep is the disappointment now. Nothing of all these has come about. Worse: the Obama administration has shown by its actions and omissions that it is not really different from the administration of George W. Bush.

From the first moment it was clear that the decisive test would come in the battle of the settlements.

It may seem that this is a marginal matter. If peace is to be achieved within two years, as Obama’s people assure us, why worry about another few houses in the settlements that will be dismantled anyway? So there will be a few thousand settlers more to resettle. Big deal.

But the freezing of the settlements has an importance far beyond its practical effect. To return to the metaphor of the Palestinian lawyer: “We are negotiating the division of a pizza, and in the meantime, Israel is eating the pizza.”

The American insistence on freezing the settlements in the entire West Bank and East Jerusalem was the flag of Obama’s new policy. As in a Western movie, Obama drew a line in the sand and declared: up to here and no further! A real cowboy cannot withdraw from such a line without being seen as yellow.

That is precisely what has now happened. Obama has erased the line he himself drew in the sand. He has given up the clear demand for a total freeze. Binyamin Netanyahu and his people announced proudly — and loudly — that a compromise had been reached, not, God forbid, with the Palestinians (who are they?) but with the Americans. They have allowed Netanyahu to build here and build there, for the sake of “Normal Life”, “Natural Increase”, “Completing Unfinished Projects” and other transparent pretexts of this kind. There will not be, of course, any restrictions in Jerusalem, the Undivided Eternal Capital of Israel. In short, the settlement activity will continue in full swing.

To add insult to injury, Hillary Clinton troubled herself to come to Jerusalem in person in order to shower Netanyahu with unctuous flattery. There is no precedent to the sacrifices he is making for peace, she fawned.

That was too much even for Abbas, whose patience and self-restraint are legendary. He has drawn the consequences.

“To understand all is to forgive all,” the French say. But in this case, some things are hard to forgive.

Certainly, one can understand Obama. He is engaged in a fight for his political life on the social front, the battle for health insurance. Unemployment continues to rise. The news from Iraq is bad, Afghanistan is quickly turning into a second Vietnam. Even before the award ceremony, the Nobel Peace Prize looks like a joke.

Perhaps he feels that the time is not ripe for provoking the almighty pro-Israel lobby. He is a politician, and politics is the art of the possible. It would be possible to forgive him for this, if he admitted frankly that he is unable to realize his good intentions in this area for the time being.

But it is impossible to forgive what is actually happening. Not the scandalous American treatment of the Goldstone report. Not the loathsome behavior of Hillary in Jerusalem. Not the mendacious talk about the “restraint” of the settlement activities. The more so as all this goes on with total disregard of the Palestinians, as if they were merely extras in a musical.

Not only has Obama given up his claim to a complete change in US policy, but he is actually continuing the policy of Bush. And since Obama pretends to be the opposite of Bush, this is double treachery.

Abbas reacted with the only weapon he has at his command: the announcement that he will leave public life.

The American policy in the “Wider Middle East” can be compared to a recipe in a cookbook: “Take five eggs, mix with flour and sugar…

In real life: Take a local notable, give him the paraphernalia of government, conduct “free elections”, train his security forces, turn him into a subcontractor.

This is not an original recipe. Many colonial and occupation regimes have used it in the past. What is so special about its use by the Americans is the “democratic” props for the play. Even if a cynical world does not believe a word of it, there is the audience back home to think about.

That is how it was done in the past in Vietnam. How Hamid Karzai was chosen in Afghanistan and Nouri Maliki in Iraq. How Fouad Siniora has been kept in Lebanon. How Muhammad Dahlan was to be installed in the Gaza Strip (but was at the decisive moment forestalled by Hamas.) In most of the Arab countries, there is no need for this recipe, since the established regimes already satisfy the requirements.

Abbas was supposed to fill this role. He bears the title of President, he was elected fairly, an American general is training his security forces. True, in the following parliamentary elections his party was soundly beaten, but the Americans just ignored the results and the Israelis imprisoned the undesirable Parliamentarians. The show must go on.

But Abbas is not satisfied with being the egg in the American recipe.

I first met him 26 years ago. After the first Lebanon War, when we (Matti Peled, Ya’acov Arnon and I) went to Tunis to meet Yasser Arafat, we saw Abbas first. That was the case every time we came to Tunis after that. Peace with Israel was the “desk” of Abbas.

Conversations with him were always to the point. We did not become friends, as with Arafat. The two were of very different temperament. Arafat was an extrovert, a warm person who liked personal gestures and physical contact with the people he talked with. Abbas is a self-contained introvert who prefers to keep people at a distance.

From the political point of view, there is no real difference. Abbas is continuing the line laid down by Arafat in 1974: a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The difference is in the method. Arafat believed in his ability to influence Israeli public opinion. Abbas limits himself to dealings with rulers. Arafat believed that he had to keep in his arsenal all possible means of struggle: negotiations, diplomatic activity, armed struggle, public relations, devious maneuvers. Abbas puts everything in one basket: peace negotiations.

Abbas does not want to become a Palestinian Marshal Petain. He does not want to head a local Vichy regime. He knows that he is on a slippery slope and has decided to stop before it is too late.

I think, therefore, that his intention to leave the stage is serious. I believe his assertion that it is not just a bargaining ploy. He may change his decision, but only if he is convinced that the rules of the game have changed.

Obama was completely surprised. That has never happened before: an American client, totally dependent on Washington, suddenly rebels and poses conditions. That is exactly what Abbas has done now, when he recognized that Obama is unwilling to fulfill the most basic condition: to freeze the settlements.

From the American point of view, there is no replacement. There are certainly some capable people in the Palestinian leadership, as well as corrupt ones and collaborators. But there is no one who is capable of rallying around him all the West Bank population. The first name that comes up is always Marwan Barghouti, but he is in prison and the Israeli government has already announced that he will not be released even if elected. Also, it is not clear whether he is willing to play that role in the present conditions. Without Abbas, the entire American recipe comes apart.

Netanyahu, too, was utterly surprised. He wants phony negotiations, devoid of substance, as a camouflage for the deepening of the occupation and enlarging of the settlements. A “Peace process” as a substitute for peace. Without a recognized Palestinian leader, with whom can he “negotiate”?

In Jerusalem, there is still hope that Abbas’ announcement is merely a ploy, that it would be enough to throw him some crumbs in order to change his mind. It seems that they do not really know the man. His self-respect will not allow him to go back, unless Obama awards him a serious political achievement.

From Abbas’ point of view, the announcement of his retirement is the doomsday weapon.

The Ileana Ros-Lehtinen/AIPAC driven House Resolution 867 boiled down to a call for censorship of the Goldstone Report without “any endorsement or further consideration” from the Obama Administration, rife with inaccuracies and undermines support for the universality of human rights.

It is no surprise that Congress is trying to cover their culpable asses for during the 23 days of Israeli assault on Gaza, “Washington provided F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles, and a wide array of munitions, including white phosphorus and DIME. The weapons required for the Israeli assault were decided upon in June 2008, and the transfer of 1,000 bunker-buster GPS-guided Small Diameter Guided Bomb Units 39 (GBU-39) were approved by Congress in September. The GBU 39 bombs were delivered to Israel in November (prior to any claims of Hamas cease fire violation!) for use in the initial air raids on Gaza.

One of the few who have been to Gaza, Congressman Baird D-WA, wrote,

H.Res. 867 is very serious business. If, as Goldstone asserts and the evidence I have seen supports, there were in fact gross violations of international law and human rights on all sides, we cannot in good conscience support H.Res. 867.

This is about much more than just another imposed political litmus test that we are all too often asked to perform. This is about whether we as individuals and this Congress as an institution find it acceptable to drop white phosphorous on civilian targets, to rocket civilian communities, to destroy hospitals and schools, to use civilians as human shields, and to deliberately destroy nonmilitary factories, industries and basic water, electrical and sanitation infrastructure. This is about whether it is acceptable to restrict the movement, opportunities and hopes of more than a million people every single day.

At the end of the day, this is also about our own domestic security. If we are seen internationally as condoning violations of human rights and international law, if our money and our weaponry play a leading role in those violations, and if we reflexively obstruct the findings of someone with the credentials, history and integrity of Justice Goldstone, it can only diminish our international standing and our own security.

In a 71-page report released March 25, 2009, by Human Rights Watch, Israel’s repeated firing of US-made white phosphorus shells over densely populated areas of Gaza was indiscriminate and is evidence of war crimes.

“Rain of Fire: Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza,” provides eye witness accounts of the devastating effects that white phosphorus munitions had on civilians and civilian property in Gaza.

“Human Rights Watch researchers found spent shells, canister liners, and dozens of burnt felt wedges containing white phosphorus on city streets, apartment roofs, residential courtyards, and at a United Nations school in Gaza immediately after hostilities ended in January.

“Militaries officially use white phosphorus to obscure their operations on the ground by creating thick smoke. It has also been used as an incendiary weapon, though such use constitutes a war crime.

“In Gaza, the Israeli military didn’t just use white phosphorus in open areas as a screen for its troops,” said Fred Abrahams, senior emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report.

“It fired white phosphorus repeatedly over densely populated areas, even when its troops weren’t in the area and safer smoke shells were available. As a result, civilians needlessly suffered and died.”

During the 23 days of attack on Gaza, the UN Security Council, Amnesty International, International Red Cross, and global voices of protest rose up and demanded a ceasefire, but both houses of Congress overwhelmingly endorsed resolutions to support a continuation of Israel’s so called “self defense” and its collective punishment upon Gaza.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walked on coals poured out of righteous rage in Morocco after her moronic praise for Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “reasonable compromise” in which he “proposed a moratorium on new housing units in the West Bank, but would allow building or finishing about 3,000 more units and would exclude East Jerusalem from any building limits.”

All the settlements are illegal under international law and the precedent of US failure to act was well established by 1973, when Ariel Sharon bragged to Winston Churchill III, “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlement, right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years time, neither the United Nations, nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”

Back in 2005, top U.S. law enforcement officials attended a briefing organized by the Council for the National Interest regarding how charities “such as B’nai B’rith and Hadassah were in direct control of the World Zionist Organization and directly linked to a massive money-laundering operation…and the settlements are an indirect generator of terrorism against the United States.”¹

It is the American government’s hypocrisy in collusion with Israel’s negation of international law, UN resolutions, and denial of equal human rights for Palestinians which are at the root of the instability in the Middle East.

Beginning in the 1990’s and even more so after 9/11, US politicians blind allegiance to Israel has been furthered by the claim that both states are threatened by Arab terrorist groups and rogue states bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

Many Americans see Israel as an ally and Iran and Syria as our mutual enemies. The “war on terror” has become a tactic to infuse fear while it ignores that much of the anger in the Arab world is in response to Israel’s 40+ years of military occupation of Palestine and The Wall where ever it is built on legally owned Palestinian property which is “financed with U.S. aid at a cost of $1.5 million per mile. The Israeli wall prevents residents from receiving health care and emergency medical services. In other areas, the barrier separates farmers from their olive groves which have been their families’ sole livelihood for generations.”²

On February 1, 2007, Senator Clinton spoke at an AIPAC Conference, “Both Israelis and Americans know so well, a democracy is far more than just holding elections. Democracy has to spring from an active and open citizenry dedicated to tolerance, to respect for differences, to the rule of law, to policies that lift us up not tear us down as fellow human beings, and to the value of human life…

“We also know that the dangers posed to Israel have been compounded by the rise to power of Hamas…Hamas…leaders have refused to disarm, to reject violence, or even to recognize the right of Israel to exist.”

The Palestinian Authority first agreed in 1988 to recognize Israel and reaffirmed this in 1993 during the Oslo Accords. Hamas has repeatedly issued olive branches of recognition to Israel, but Israel ignores all offers to make peace through justice.

On November 15, 2005, Senator Hillary Clinton stood on the Jerusalem side of The Wall and was quoted in Ha’aretz, expressing support for The Wall because it “is against terrorists” and “not against the Palestinian people.”

After I read Senator Clinton’s inaccurate and insensitive remarks in Ha’aretz, I immediately contacted her through her website. My email bounced back to me, for I am no longer a New York constituent, but I was born and lived my first three years in The Village and came of age in Levittown, Long Island.

I snail mailed Hillary a respectful letter informing her that even a little one such as me, knew all about the many gaps and lack of ’security’ along The Wall that every taxi driver and ANY would be ‘terrorist’ also knew about in order to travel from the West Bank to Jerusalem without having to stop for SECURITY.

I also reminded her that we were in the midst of the UN Decade of Creating a Culture of NONVIOLENCE for all the children of the world. The only response I received from Senator Clinton was to be put on the DNC’s mailing list soliciting funds.

As a Senator, Clinton repeatedly said, “I’ve been a strong supporter of Israel’s right to build a security barrier to keep terrorists out. I have spoken out against the International Court of Justice for questioning Israel’s right to build that fence of security.”

International Law states occupation is to be temporary and maintain the status quo and that the occupiers are not to transfer their population into occupied territory. And what RIGHT has anyone to put a fence up on somebody else’s property?

As a Senator, Hillary said: “I went to see the fence with my own eyes. During a trip to Gilo, a Jerusalem neighborhood, I was greeted by Col. Danny Tirza, who was overseeing the construction of the security fence.

“Col. Tirza’s explanation in his graphic depiction of what was part of the daily life of people living in that one neighborhood, gave me an even greater appreciation for the imperative of the fence and the need to do everything possible to protect Israel against these continuing attacks.”

The truth is that in 2000, before the construction of The Wall began, there were less ‘attacks’ than in 2008 and the Orwellian spun ‘neighborhoods’ are all ILLEGAL colonies for everyone exist on legally owned Palestinian land, NOT on Israeli owned land!

I have seen “the fence” too and it divides Palestinians from Palestinians with 25 to 30 foot high concrete slabs or wire equipped with razor barbs, trenches, sniper towers, military roads, electronic surveillance, remote controlled infantry and buffer zones that stretch over 100 miles wide and deny Palestinians access to their legally owned land, their families, jobs, and resources.

The Wall has eviscerated the sister cities of Bethlehem and Jerusalem and will soon completely separate Bethlehem from her sister villages of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala. Bethlehem’s significance to and historic ties with Palestinian East Jerusalem and its economic demise caused by The Wall heralded the beginning of what the BBC reported on November 5, 2009:

Palestinians might have to abandon the goal of an independent state if Israel continues to expand Jewish settlements, Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator said, “It may be time for President Abbas to tell his people the truth, that with the continuation of settlement activities, the two-state solution is no longer an option.”

Mr. Erekat also dismissed Netanyahu’s, ‘generous offer’ saying it only opened the door to more settlements in the next two years and that “Israel has the choice, settlements or peace.”

Erekat also said Palestinians made a mistake in the last round of talks by agreeing to negotiate without insisting that Israel settlement building be stopped, and added this time things would be different, meaning the alternative for Palestinians is to “refocus their attention on the one-state solution where Muslims, Christians and Jews can live as equals” as they would in true democracies.

After Clinton met with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit, he called for a resumption of talks, “We have to concentrate on the end game and we must not waste time adhering to this issue or that as a start for the negotiations.”

Senator Clinton once said, “It is not enough for us to say the right things; we’ve got to be smart and tough enough to do the right things that will protect American and Israeli interests now and forever.”

Tough and smart would comprehend that America’s best interests and Israel’s security demand justice for Palestine: end the occupation and ensure equal human rights for all. And integrity would have no fear of international law.

1. Grant F. Smith, Foreign Agents: The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal, (2007, Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, Washington D.C.) p. 158.
2. Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, p. 43, Jan/Feb. 2007.

Al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and the Taliban’s Mullah Muhammad Omar — Washington’s principal enemy leaders in the Afghan war — are not only alive, free and still taunting the White House after all these years, but appear to believe they now have the upper hand in Afghanistan.

Bin-Laden’s purpose has always been to draw the United States ever deeper into armed conflict with Islamic society in order to degrade America’s image, undermine its economy, and gain recruits. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan played directly into al-Qaeda’s hands, as will Washington’s effort to widen the Afghan conflict, especially as it stabs into Pakistan and alienates its masses of people in the process.

So far the two wars launched by President George W. Bush have cost the U.S. the antagonism of much of the Muslim world, serious erosions of its own democracy and reputation, and over a trillion dollars. Even if the wars end soon, says Nobel Prize economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, the overall expenditure — including everything from long term care for severely injured troops to interest on the war debt — will exceed $3 trillion, enough to end world poverty and hunger.

Speaking about Afghanistan this summer, President Barack Obama declared: “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” Many war opponents argue that it is indeed a war of choice, and that international police work would have been far more successful and just.

We’ll discuss this later in the article, along with the fact that the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, and for that matter the Sept. 11, 2001, tragedy, need not have occurred had Washington taken less warlike actions in the key year of 1978, as well as 2001 and 2003. The fact that the U.S. has intervened deeply and for long periods over the past 31 years in a civil war in poverty-stricken, virtually pre-industrial Afghanistan, is probably not understood by many Americans.

Upon assuming office, President Obama instructed the Pentagon to devise a winning strategy for Afghanistan. Within weeks the White House agreed to a new war plan submitted by Gen. Stanley McChrystal that was supposed to lead to a U.S. victory. In March, Obama expanded the Afghan war when he heeded a Pentagon request and ordered 21,000 more U.S. troops to join the battle.

Several months later, however, McChrystal reported that the situation has deteriorated to the point where the war — ever more clearly displaying its neocolonial aspect — “will likely result in failure” within a year unless his forces increase by a minimum of 45,000 troops and a maximum of 80,000.

Obama has been engaged in “rethinking” war strategy since receiving the general’s verdict several weeks ago. He is expected to soon decide whether to deploy a larger number of additional troops to join 68,000 American fighters already scheduled for Afghanistan and about 50,000 NATO soldiers. This total presumably includes the 13,000 troops Obama also deployed without informing the American people, until the Washington Post broke the story in mid-October.

The White House is investigating two options for continuing the conflict — both of which would intensify the war and spread it more deeply into Pakistan. As briefly summarized by The Economist Oct. 17 they are “manpower-intensive counter-insurgency (COIN), which aims to win over the Afghan population and build a stable government; and counter-terrorism, which seeks to deal narrowly with threats to the West, mainly through air strikes or raids by Special Forces.”

McChrystal, who appears to be supported by top Pentagon brass, backs COIN, which includes a counter-terrorism aspect as well as “winning the hearts and minds” of the Afghan people, an effort that utterly failed when tried in Vietnam, and will fail in Afghanistan. Vice President Joseph Biden and some other administration advisers back the lower intensity counter-terrorism option without greatly expanding the number of troops or engaging in “nation building.”

If McChrystal’s minimum request is accepted it means a combined U.S.-NATO force of over 160,000 troops, not including scores of thousands of “contractors” doing duties previously performed by soldiers until recent years.

Scott Ritter, the former UN chief weapons inspector who testified before the war that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, had this to say about McChrystal’s request for more troops in a Truthdig.com article Oct. 29:

McChrystal operates under the illusion that American military power can provide a shield from behind which Afghanistan can remake itself into a viable modern society. He has deluded himself and others into believing that the people of Afghanistan want to be part of such a grand social experiment, and furthermore that they will tolerate the United States being in charge. The reality of Afghan history, culture and society argue otherwise. The Taliban, once a defeated entity in the months following the initial American military incursion into Afghanistan, are resurgent and growing stronger every day. The principle source of the Taliban’s popularity is the resentment of the Afghan people toward the American occupation and the corrupt proxy government of Hamid Karzai. There is nothing an additional 40,000 American troops will be able to do to change that basic equation.

At this stage the U.S, NATO and their Afghan forces enjoy at least a 12-1 advantage in troop strength against the opposing forces, not to mention air power, drone attacks and an enormous technological, logistics and communications advantage. This increases to 20-1 if McChrystal’s minimum kicks in — and that’s evidently still not enough to defeat the insurgency. The latest word from the White House and Pentagon is that the new strategy may devolve to holding Afghanistan’s 10 largest cities and leaving the countryside to fend for itself, except for air strikes.

Our guess is that Obama will view the issue politically, as well as militarily, and being an inveterate centrist will try to merge both positions, increasing the number of troops but fewer than McChrystal desires. No one knows for sure, but he is intentionally creating suspense to magnify the importance of his eventual plan.

The Washington Post reported Oct. 26 that Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently conducted theoretical war games to examine “the likely outcome of inserting 44,000 more troops into the country to conduct a full-scale counterinsurgency effort aimed at building a stable Afghan government that can control most of the country. It also examined adding 10,000 to 15,000 more soldiers and Marines as part of an approach that the military has dubbed ‘counterterrorism plus.’”

Complicating the situation, Washington’s hand-picked Afghan leader, President Hamid Karzai, is presiding over a thoroughly corrupt government and an alienated population. His brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, is a drug lord and wheeler-dealer extraordinaire, who has been on the CIA’s payroll since the beginning of the war, along with innumerable warlords and disreputable officials. The UN has ascertained that last August’s elections were so fraudulent, mainly by far from Karzai’s side, the a run-off election was set for Nov. 7 between the incumbent and his independent rival, Abdullah Abdullah, M.D., who won 30.5% of the vote.

On Nov. 1, Abdullah — who had long been associated with the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance, for which he was a deputy foreign minister at one time — announced his withdrawal from the second round voting. He attributed his decision to the refusal by the government and election commission to accept his recommendations for changing balloting rules to prevent foul play.

The Obama Administration has been far more critical of Karzai than Bush, and it is said to have preferred a Karzai-Abdullah power-sharing arrangement to Karzai alone. Since Abdullah withdrew without calling for an election boycott or public demonstrations on his own behalf, he may yet end up associated with the new government in some fashion.

Even though the election affair has not transpired precisely the way Washington wished, it will have little impact on White House war plans. President Obama, who heretofore identified Afghanistan as the main danger, not Iraq, now says the danger has spread to Pakistan as well — an unanticipated but logical result of the Bush wars. The tribal areas of Pakistan are the target of increased U.S. air power, missile attacks, pilotless drones, and Special Forces engagements.

The Obama Administration is exerting heavy pressure on the Islamabad government of President Asif Ali Zardari, and investing another $7.5 billion in new aid, to intensify efforts to crush al-Qaeda, the Pakistan Taliban (which was only formed in 2007) and other groups in the mountainous western section of the country. This has created increasing anti-American sentiment among the masses of people in Pakistan who think Zardari is a virtual puppet of Washington. In a public opinion poll last August, some 60% of the Pakistani people view the U.S. as the greatest threat to their country compared to India or al-Qaeda.

In order to prevail in Afghanistan — or in Af-Pak, as the two-front war is described — President Obama evidently is considering a major compromise with the Taliban. Associated Press reported Oct. 9 that “President Obama is prepared to accept some Taliban involvement in Afghanistan’s political future,” both locally and in the central government. In addition the White House and Pentagon will seek to bribe the Taliban to stop attacking U.S. troops, as was done with the Sunni resistance in Iraq, by inducing former opponents to get on Washington’s payroll. The Pentagon is putting aside $1.3 billion to pay Taliban effectives who wish to “reintegrate into Afghan society.”

Most Americans have little understanding of what’s going on in Afghanistan, and no knowledge of the complex events that led up to President Bush’s bombardment and invasion in October 2001, weeks after the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The fact is that today’s war in Afghanistan is one of several disastrous consequences of U.S. interference in Afghanistan starting in 1978.

Land-locked, rugged, Texas-sized with a population of about 29 million, and strategically located where the rich geopolitical resources of the Middle East and Central Asia converge, Afghanistan gained independence from colonial Great Britain in 1919. A monarchy was established in this desperately poor country until overthrown by a military coup in 1973. Another coup took place in April 1978, this time led by left forces and military officers determined to enact reforms to “bring Afghanistan into the 20th century.”

The resulting ruling group, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), set about introducing modernizing reforms, including laws conferring equality upon the country’s oppressed women, and improving the lot of working people and subsistence farmers. The law granting rights to women was observed in Kabul and some big cities, but usually ignored elsewhere in territory controlled by the warlords and Islamic fundamentalists.

The PDPA’s immediate establishment of closer relations with the neighboring Soviet Union set off alarm bells in Washington, which feared Moscow would gain an important pawn in the Cold War geopolitical chess game. Within months President Jimmy Carter and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski decided to subvert the new leftist regime by “secretly” aiding right-wing warlords and ultra-orthodox religious groups who were beginning an armed struggle to overthrow the PDPA government.

The planning was fully operational by mid-1979. Working with the Pakistani intelligence agency over the years, the CIA poured a minimum of $8 billion into the coffers of warlords and fundamentalist fighting groups. By early 1979, CIA operatives started training the mujahedeen (the collective name of the Muslim fighters) at camps it set up in Pakistan, then in Afghanistan itself. The U.S. also supplied them with sophisticated arms (such as Stinger antiaircraft missiles), military advisers, and logistical information for the next decade.

Writing in Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia, journalist-author Ahmed Rashid said the training camps “became virtual universities for future Islamic radicalism.” In the words of William Blum in his book, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, “The war had been a rallying point for Muslim zealots from throughout the world…. Thousands of veterans of the war… dispersed to many lands to inflame and train a new generation of terrorists ready to drink the cup of martyrdom.”

Among the recipients of U.S. largess and support in the mid-1980s was Osama bin-Laden and his new group of mostly foreign fighters in Afghanistan that by 1988 was formally titled al-Qaeda. (The name means, “the Base,” a reference to their training camp.) Bin Laden — the scion of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family — also received support from Pakistan and from sources in Saudi Arabia.

By the summer of 1979, the right wing rebel forces were becoming a serious threat to the Kabul regime, which eventually requested that Moscow send troops to defend the regime. One year and nine months after the PDPA took power, the Red Army began arriving in December 1979. (We specify the exact time period because the Western mass media often suggest that deep U.S. involvement began after, not at least a half year or more before, the arrival of Soviet troops, and rarely mention their presence was requested by the Kabul government.

As Brzezinski bragged many years later, Washington’s plan from the beginning was to create conditions that would oblige the Soviet Union to become militarily involved in Afghanistan’s civil war, and suffer the same fate as the U.S. in Vietnam in the earlier 1970s. It worked. In time the Red Army found itself sinking in the quagmire that earned Afghanistan the title “Graveyard of Empires.”

For the next several years following the arrival of Soviet troops, the White House — now occupied by the rightist Reagan administration — continued to build up the rebel forces, many of which had fought each other before the 1978 coup. In time they were joined by up to 40,000 jihadist recruits from over 40 countries in the Muslim world. During the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan began to cynically describe the warlords and fundamentalist armies as “freedom fighters.”

Moscow began to withdraw in 1987 and completed the project by early 1989. The left wing government held on until it was brutally crushed in 1992. The subsequent four years of civil war between the various rebel forces — in which up to 65,000 people were killed in Kabul — resulted in a Taliban victory in 1996. The earlier reforms were quickly abolished, particularly those freeing women, and a draconian form of Islam was imposed throughout the country. The Taliban — which is a national organization as opposed to international al-Qaeda, was formed in 1994 by Mullah Omar and consisted of the most orthodox Afghan jihadists. The name Taliban means “religious students.”

The consequences of the Carter/Reagan intervention in Afghanistan made it possible for 19 Al-Qaeda operatives armed with box cutters to hijack four airliners to attack symbols of U.S. military and financial power in Washington and New York in the late summer of 2001.

The political reasons behind 9/11 included opposition to America’s support for the suppression of the Palestinians; anger over the 1991-2003 U.S.-UN sanctions that caused over a million Muslim deaths in Iraq, half of them children; Washington’s manipulative intervention in Middle East since the end of World War II; and the Pentagon’s stationing of troops in Muslim countries, particularly Saudi Arabia.

Even after the 9/11 tragedy, the 2001 U.S. invasion of Afghanistan need never have occurred. It was a result of Bush’s bizarre decision to define the attack as a declaration of war against the United States instead of a gross criminal act by a small non-state organization of perhaps up to 1,000 active adherents only partially based in Afghanistan and largely composed of non-Afghans.

The rational alternative — worldwide police work, sanctions, homeland defense and other stringent measures — would certainly have been more successful against al-Qaeda, and far less costly for the United States, than eight years of fruitless war. Bush spurned this alternative not because war was a “necessity,” as the Obama Administration alleges, but to pursue neoconservative imperialist objectives for obtaining hegemony in the region under Bush’s banner of an endless “global war on terrorism.”

Further, just before the invasion, Taliban leader Omar told the U.S. he would turn over bin-Laden to a third country if Washington didn’t attack Afghanistan, as Bush was about to do. Mullah Omar had one condition: he asked the White House to provide evidence that the al-Qaeda leader was actually guilty. Bush’s response: “There’s no need to negotiate…. There’s no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he’s guilty.”

As the American attack started, CIA teams were already on the ground in Afghanistan, once again paying off their old retainers, the warlords, with thick packages of $100 bills to intensify the civil war against the Taliban in concert with the invading Americans. At least $70 million was distributed in the first months of the war, mostly to the Northern Alliance, the big loser for power in Kabul in the ’90s.

Bush followed the Afghan adventure with a second war of choice in March 2003 — the transparently unjust and illegal invasion of Iraq. It turned into a costly stalemate but 120,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, and the Iraqi people continue to suffer mass privation and pain.

Afghanistan is not Washington’s “good war,” though it is now characterized in that fashion not only by the Republican right wing but by President Obama and many Democrats who were critical of “Bush’s” Iraq war. These are often the same “peace” Democrats who supported their own party’s unjust three-month bombardment of Yugoslavia (Serbia) in 1999. Obama was viewed as a peace candidate in the elections because he was critical of the Iraq war, though he nonetheless always voted as a senator to fund both wars, and made it clear he wanted to fight in Afghanistan.

Now that a Democratic president is directing the war, Bush’s campaign against Afghanistan for regime-change and long-term U.S. occupation has become a new type of “humanitarian intervention.” This has gravely weakened the American antiwar movement, which is largely based on Democratic voters, but may not be permanent. Many Democrats of the Vietnam era eventually turned on President Lyndon Johnson after two or three years to the extent that he could not run for reelection. Then, again, that was during a decade-long period of mass movements for social change in America, as opposed to the conservative reaction that has basically continued for some 30 years.

In our view, as we wrote in 2001 just after the invasion: “If any brutal right-wing regime deserved to be overthrown by its own people, the Taliban is the perfect choice. But for the imperial superpower to arrogate the task to itself, with its planes, missiles, self-interest and hypocrisy, bodes ill for the long-suffering Afghan masses and the region in general. Indeed, this projection of U.S. military power deeper into strategically important Central Asia brings Washington closer to its goal of hegemony over the neighboring Islamic former Soviet republics, now discovered to be awash in oil and gas reserves.”

Afghanistan is now Obama’s war. Speaking to a military audience recently, he sounded rather like his predecessor when he declared that fighting the war was necessary because “those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again.” So far, Obama’s troop buildup has inspired more attacks from the Taliban and other oppositional forces in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the situation can only get worse in proportion to the number of U.S. troops sent to the region.

What is Washington’s actual mission in the Af-Pak war? In a statement May 19, Gen. David Petraeus, who heads the U.S. Central Command, declared that “The mission is to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become a sanctuary for al-Qaeda and other transnational extremists.”

This evidently is why President Obama is widening the war in Afghanistan and western Pakistan. But is this necessary? The White House acknowledges that there are at most 100 members of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan at this point, but indicates that more have been driven across the border to Pakistan, without specifying how many.

Is it up to 500 perhaps? Could it be high as 1,000 adherents to al-Qaeda and other “transnational” extremists? For some reason the Pentagon doesn’t say, though it certainly must have a good estimate. In Afghanistan there are many thousands who are associated with the Taliban and similar groups, but these organizations operate strictly within their own borders, as does the Pakistani Taliban, and in no way have threatened to attack the United States.

Does it really require the killing of many hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, trillions of American dollars, and the fixated attention of our entire society to deny al-Qaeda a possible safe haven where they can plot to attack the United States? Wouldn’t it be better and far less costly to rely upon international police work, high technology surveillance, tight homeland security, sanctions if absolutely needed, and other means short of war, fair and foul, at Washington’s disposal?

Can it plausibly be denied that this would have been the better alternative in 2001, given the disastrous failure of Bush’s wars? In our opinion the answer is of course not, and it’s the better alternative in 2009 as well. What’s to prevent the Obama Administration from accepting this non-military alternative today, now that the neoconservatives are out of power? Two reasons present themselves: politics and international policy.

In terms of politics: Obama and the Democratic Party would rather wage these self-defeating wars than to be accused by the know-nothings of “cutting and running,” of being “weak on defense,” and of “lacking patriotism.” They fear these right-wing attacks will cost them elections in today’s highly conservative America, so instead of fighting back politically they bend the knee further to militarism and war.

In terms of international policy: Since the end of World War II — and particularly after the implosion of the USSR and the socialist camp two decades ago — the U.S. has functioned as the world’s dominating hegemon based on its willingness to use overwhelming military strength to extend its economic and political parameters throughout the world. A large number of Americans have been duped into believing it’s all being done to spread democracy and to keep people safe from the terrorists.

What has this gotten America lately? The U.S. is a declining superpower in deep economic difficulties. The recession, foreclosures and unemployment are crushing tens of millions of American families. Even without a recession, economic inequality is rampant; government social services are primitive; the civil infrastructure is becoming a shambles; the healthcare system remains a wreck, although a relative improvement may be forthcoming; and our political system, where the choices are confined to the right and center, needs an overhaul.

Meanwhile Washington’s wasting a trillion dollars a year on past, present and future wars “to save the world” (the $680 billion Pentagon budget Obama just signed is only part of it).

Antiwar critic Andrew Bacevich, a fairly conservative former Army officer and currently a professor and author of several important books on the military and U.S. policy, wrote an article in Commonweal Aug. 15 that contained a couple of paragraphs that fit in here:

“If the United States today has a saving mission, it is to save itself. Speaking in the midst of another unnecessary war back in 1967, Martin Luther King got it exactly right: ‘Come home, America.’ The prophet of that era urged his countrymen to take on ‘the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.’

“Dr. King’s list of evils may need a bit of tweaking — in our own day, the sins requiring expiation number more than three. Yet in his insistence that we first heal ourselves, King remains today the prophet we ignore at our peril. That Barack Obama should fail to realize this qualifies as not only ironic but inexplicable.”

We profoundly agree with this quote except for “inexplicable.” Obama has a number of attractive qualities, but he is a centrist in a political party of the center/center-right — an improvement over the competing mass party of the right/neocon-right/far-right, but hardly the politician to lead the struggle Bacevich suggests. Just getting him to avoid widening the unnecessary Af-Pak war any further, much less ending it, is daunting enough.

A majority of the American people want an end to the war, including a large majority of Democratic Party voters — and Obama says he is susceptible to public pressure. The problem is that the Democrats, who constitute the base of the U.S. peace constituency, left the movement in droves after their party won the elections. They don’t want to publicly protest Obama’s actions when he is under continual Republican attack on everything but the war.

This could change as the war continues and casualties mount, but it will have to be a major change with millions of people out in the streets demanding peace. Until then, the informal coalition of Republicans who vigorously uphold the war and “peace” Democrats who won’t stand against it will provide the White House with the public support it needs to continue the war indefinitely.

The U.S. decision to support the Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan in 1978 ultimately changed history in ways very costly to the peoples of the region and the United States. We dread to imagine the unintended consequences that will emerge from President Obama’s continuing display of American imperial hubris in the Af-Pak war.

How the monarch now follows through on decentralization will greatly determine to the extent he is able to achieve his most cherished goals: sustainable socio-economic development of the Kingdom achieved through participatory democracy; and a resolution of the Western Saharan conflict by way of meeting the self-determined needs of people in the region as part of the Kingdom.

There are four major paths to a nation’s decentralization that have been applied around the world. Morocco’s decentralization roadmap is highly innovative in that it combines three of the four approaches. The three arrangements incorporated in Morocco’s plan are devolution, deconcentration, and delegation, or what the King often refers to as the participatory democratic method (Morocco’s roadmap does not incorporate privatization, and instead intends to use public funds to implement the plan).

In the past, decentralization in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Canada, and China applied more heavily the devolution model, which emphasizes greater authority and capacities among local government. In Tanzania, under the still revered President Julius Nyerere, delegation occurred in which groups of people living as a community exercised self-government in all matters which concerned their own affairs. And India and Sri Lanka utilized deconcentration, whereby government and community groups collaborate to promote development.

Morocco’s incorporation of the three approaches would create a progressive system whereby provincial and local government, and communities and their organizations, exercise decision-making authority, newly built skills, and other capacities, including financial, to carry out greater developmental responsibilities. Furthermore, His Majesty emphasizes that ultimate determination of specific kinds of projects should rest with local communities, or the beneficiary groups. Local beneficiaries are the “engine and objective” and are to “take charge” of programs, with government and civil support.

The King of Morocco should now use his upcoming November 6th speech to build on the existing roadmap by offering more specifics on the reforms and initiatives that will carry out decentralization. Here are some suggestions:

First, local civil and government technicians (across Moroccan ministries) require training in facilitating participatory methods that assist communities in analyzing their challenges and determining project solutions (in job creation, clean drinking water, school construction, etc.). This necessitates, for example, new development studies and training programs at universities (including here at Morocco’s flagship Al Akhawayn University), well beyond the few recently created in the country. Morocco’s goal to train 10,000 new social workers and the same number of engineers per year should include in their curriculum building skills in managing project development and participatory democracy. Since universities play an indispensable role toward decentralization, the King ought to announce his intention to establish the first university in Western Sahara.

Second, His Majesty should take this opportunity to highlight important lessons from Morocco’s National Initiative for Human Development and suggest how they may guide the implementation of decentralization. Scores of Moroccans benefitted from the Initiative, and it raised the public’s consciousness about sustainable development, creating fertile ground for decentralization. However, as the King himself suggested, the Initiative has been too centrally managed, which contradicts its original intention of promoting local self-reliance. Far more non-government facilitators of community planning of Initiative projects are needed. The Ministry of Interior, charged with internal national security, has been in too much control and results unfortunately show. Therefore, although the King’s ongoing role in the decentralization process is essential, central government should not be the primary caretaker, but rather a new “third-party” agency inside the royal cabinet is probably necessary.

Finally, there are too many cases where local officials of the Ministry of Interior have stirred distrust and division, particularly in rural areas where most of Morocco’s poverty exists, impeding collaborative development. Decentralization should reform their traditional functions, and subsume them to local Communes, which are governed by elected representatives directly involved in meeting human needs. Reforming the Ministry of Interior is inevitable if genuine decentralization is to occur, and the King now stating so will increase public awareness and confidence. After all, as he recognizes, it is the people, minimally encumbered, who are to grab hold of their own development.

Ururú was the oldest member of this close-knit, tiny group and an integral part of it.

Altair Algayer, head of FUNAI’s (Brazilian government Indian affairs department) team which protects the Akuntsu’s land said, ‘She was a fighter, strong, and resisted until the last moment.’ In addition, the oldest-surviving Akuntsu, Ururú’s brother Konibú, is seriously ill.

Ururú witnessed the genocide of her people and the destruction of their rainforest home, as cattle ranchers and their gunmen moved on to indigenous lands in Rondônia state. Rondônia was opened up by government colonisation projects and the infamous BR 364 highway in the 1960s and 70s.

With Ururú dies a large part of the historical memory of this people. While we shall perhaps never know the full horrors inflicted on the Akuntsu in the last half century, today’s survivors say their family members were killed when ranchers bulldozed their houses and opened fire on them. The two surviving men, Konibú and Pupak, have marks on their bodies where bullets entered as they fled.

FUNAI found the remains of houses which had been destroyed by ranchers who were clearing the forest for cattle pasture. The ranchers attempted to hide evidence of the crime, but wooden poles, arrows, axes and broken pottery were discovered.

When the Akuntsu were contacted by FUNAI in 1995 they numbered seven. The youngest, Konibú’s daughter, died in January 2000 when a tree fell on her house.

Today they live in a territory officially recognised by the Brazilian government, where FUNAI protects their land from invasion by surrounding ranchers.

Survival’s Director Stephen Corry said today, ‘With Ururú’s death we are seeing the final stages of a 21st century genocide. Unlike mass killings in Nazi Germany or Rwanda, the genocides of indigenous people are played out in hidden corners of the world, and escape public scrutiny and condemnation. Although their numbers are small, the result is just as final. Only when this persecution is seen as akin to slavery or apartheid will tribal peoples begin to be safe.’

The story of the Akuntsu, their neighbours the Kanoê, and the elusive ‘Man of the Hole’ is graphically told in a new film, Corumbiara. The Akuntsu also feature in Survival’s short film, Uncontacted Tribes.

Three Israel-related events this year have stayed in the headlines, reflecting the importance of Israel in Canadian political and cultural life.

First, Canadian Ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was recently honoured at Canada Park — built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law — as one of hundreds of donors who helped establish the park on the ruins of three Palestinian villages. Just north of Jerusalem, it was founded in the early 1970s following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in the 1967 war. It is hugely popular for walks and picnics with the Israeli public, who are by and large unaware that they are in Palestinian territory that is officially a closed military zone. Former Israeli parliamentarian Uri Avnery has described the park’s creation as an act of complicity in “ethnic cleansing” and Canada’s involvement as “cover to a war crime”. About 5,000 Palestinians were expelled from the area during the war. A plaque bearing Allen’s name is attached to a stone wall constructed from the rubble of Palestinian homes razed by the Israeli army. The Jewish National Fund, treated as a charity for tax purposes, establishes and manages such parks on behalf of Jewish people worldwide. Canada Park is believed to be the only example, outside East Jerusalem, of the JNF becoming directly involved in managing land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Then there is the wildly popular exhibition, “Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World,” at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), a joint project with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), funded by the Toronto Tanenbaum family dynasty who coincidentally were instrumental in the creation of Canada Park. This exhibition provided a fitting gala premier for the museum’s ultra-modern wing designed by Israeli-American Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind, whose parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, also designed the Berlin Jewish Museum, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck, Germany, and the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. The Dead Sea Scrolls, regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and including what is purported to be the oldest known version of the Old Testament (150BC-70CE), were found by a Bedouin shepherd in caves near Qumran, near the Dead Sea, and later by the Palestine Archaeological Museum (also known as the Rockefeller Museum) in a joint expedition with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the Ecole Biblique Française between 1947-1956. The Scrolls were displayed at the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem until 1967, when they were seized and relocated to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. Since 1967, additional (illegal) excavations and findings by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) took place in Qumran and the surrounding area, and artefacts continue to be (illegally) appropriated by Israel, under the auspices of the IAA.

Under international law and in accordance with Canada’s and Israel’s obligations as signatories to the 1954 UNESCO protocol for the “Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict”, Israel is not entitled to these artefacts. The repatriation of the Scrolls and millions of other artefacts to Palestine remains a key issue for those seeking peace and justice in the Middle East. In 2005, Canada signed other UNESCO conventions and protocols specifically aimed at preventing the removal and the exhibition of illegally removed artefacts from occupied territories, and adopted domestic Canadian legislation — the Cultural Property Export and Import Act — which makes it a criminal offense to import cultural property in violation of the conventions. The ROM, for its own part, is a member of the Canadian Museums Association whose Ethics Guidelines states that “museums must guard against any direct or indirect participation in the illicit traffic in cultural and natural objects that are: stolen, illegally imported or exported from another state, including those that are occupied or war-stricken.” The 1954 Convention clearly requires Canada to “take into custody cultural property imported into its territory either directly or indirectly from any occupied territory” and “return, at the close of hostilities, to the competent authorities of the territory previously occupied, cultural property which is in its territory.”

Israel not only continues to illegally excavate in occupied Palestinian territory but dismisses international law altogether (despite its UNESCO pledges), using archeology and discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls to reinforce the Zionist national narrative and the colonial project upon which the state was founded. Supposedly a science removed from political, religious, or ideological bias, archeology under the IAA is the very antithesis of this, being rooted in Biblical mythology. Artefacts like the Scrolls are, according to Amos Elon, “almost titles of real estate, like deeds of possession to a contested country”. Like British, French, and German imperialist functionaries before them, Israeli archeologists sift through the many layers of historical evidence in search of what will prove their belief that they are indeed God’s Chosen People, ignoring or rather destroying the intervening layers and interpreting finds to suit their needs. The thousands of years of non-Jewish Arab civilisation don’t matter. Historian Keith Whitelam says in The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, the modern state of Israel has “cast its shadow of influence backwards to claim previous periods as its ‘prehistory’.” The IAA is just as much a steamroller, flattening indigenous Palestine, as the Israeli Defence Forces, in their policy of archeological apartheid. Committee Against Israeli Apapartheid (CAIA) activist Ali Mustafa writes that Israeli archeology is explicitly categorised by the IAA as either Jewish/Israeli or Arab/Muslim in a process whereby ancient artefacts that supposedly belong to the Biblical era are actively sought after, while supposedly encouraging Palestinians to do the same concerning later Islamic periods. Following the Oslo peace process, Israel claimed it was prepared to assign jurisdiction of all “Arab” and “Muslim” archeological sites in the West Bank over to the PA; however, the offer was flatly refused, and the PA instead demanded control over all sites, as well as an immediate return of artefacts seized since 1967. The logic is simple: conflate all Palestinian history as Islamic (openly disregarding Christian and secular influences), and apply these reductive and simplistic binary terms to all artefacts ignoring the region’s shared past and overlapping cultural heritage. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the Scrolls should be seized by ROM and the Canadian government under their international obligations and held or handed over to UNESCO until their ownership is determined, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation concluded in June that “the museum feels the scrolls are legally held and both the federal and provincial government have expressed their support of the exhibition.”

The third event is the Toronto International Film Festival’s “City to city Spotlight on Tel Aviv”, in cooperation with the Israeli Embassy and the Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation. Along with the ROM exhibition, this PR scheme was to be the centre- piece of Israeli Consul Gissin’s special Canadian “Brand Israel” campaign, dreamed up in 2008 on his arrival in Toronto, using the same mass marketing techniques of “The Israel Project”, launched in 2002 in the US, to present a more “benign” vision of Israel to the Canadian public. The Israel Project uses “grassroots” encounter groups to hone their propaganda efforts. Canadian partners in the Project’s Canadian spin-off included Sidney Greenberg of Astral Mediaand David Asper of Canwest Global Communications, arguably the most powerful media magnates in Canada, who are funding a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel.

“Brand Israel” is intended to take the focus off Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. In The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, Frank Luntz explains: “Americans want a team to cheer for. Let the public know GOOD things about Israel … The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ’security’, and ‘peace’”. Fleshing out how to rebrand Israeli atrocities, Gissin made it clear that his mission was to “make Israel relevant” to Canadians and use Toronto as a test market for the Israel brand during his term. The lessons learned from Toronto would inform the worldwide launch of Brand Israel in the coming years, Gissin said. Official Brand Israel logos and advertising can be found across Toronto in bus shelters, on billboards, on radio and TV. Gissin said the ad blitz would be “an attack on all the senses.” The idea was to see “how to introduce a brand into Toronto” with emphasis on “grassroots” exposure, to promote Tel Aviv as a city of peace, untouched by the wars Israel has waged since 1948, despite the fact that many Palestinian communities were destroyed and Jaffa annexed to make way for the emergence of modern-day Tel Aviv.

But all is not well in the Land of Nod. The Canadian government regularly opines it is assiduously monitoring anti-Semitism despite the absence of anti-Jewish sentiment and despite the pro- Jewish nature of the media in this most laid-back, multicultural of nations. But Canadian “grassroots” are not limited to pro-Israeli marketing groups. Despite mainstream media subservience to Canada’s vigorous and large pro-Israeli lobby, some people have had enough. Zionist propaganda efforts in this “so friendly” country have increasingly met with resistance, and all the Israeli consuls in the world cannot undo the damage that Israeli war crimes have done and continue to do, as the siege in Gaza and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements continue.

There are now strong citizen groups fighting Canada’s official support of every Israeli government whim. There are many Jewish anti-Zionist groups, such as Jews for a Just Peace, Jewish Voices for Peace, Not in Our Name, Women in Solidarity with Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAZ). Nonspecific Jewish groups include Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), Palestine House, Canada Palestine Association, and the above-mentioned CAIA, which has grown rapidly with centres in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Anti-Zionist activists have been holding vigils regularly at the Toronto Israeli Consulate for eight years now. They are organising the sixth Anti-Apartheid Week to be held soon on more than 25 university campuses across the country, and demonstrations and fundraising events on behalf of Palestinians are held regularly. IJAZ has launched a campaign “Divest from Israel: Support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel”, which includes stickering Israeli products in stores, requesting stores to de-shelve Israeli products, targetting businesses, organisations or government officials that support Israel, “organise a public tachlit service, a ritual that symbolises the casting away of our misdeeds, to spiritually divest from Zionist narratives and mythology and to atone for the ways that we have fallen short in countering them.”

Allen’s support for Canada Park, implicitly condoning Israel’s ruthless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, has landed him in hot water. He had to deny any personal contribution to Canada Park, an External Affairs spokesperson insisting that he had not made a personal donation and that his name had been included as a benefactor when his parents gave their contribution. Uri Davis, an Israeli scholar and human rights activist who has co-authored a book on the JNF calls Canada Park “a crime against humanity that has been financed by and implicates not only the Canadian government but every taxpayer in Canada.” Canada Park is particularly sensitive for Israel because it lies outside the country’s internationally-recognised borders. The Palestinian inhabitants’ expulsion, Eitan Bronstein, director of the Israeli NGO Zochrot (Remembering), said, was a premeditated act of ethnic cleansing of villagers who put up no resistance.”We have photographs of the Israeli army carrying out the expulsions,” he tells tourists, holding up a series of laminated cards. According to Zochrot, 86 Palestinian villages lie buried underneath JNF parks. Zochrot activists regularly select a destroyed village, taking Palestinian refugees with them as they place a handmade sign detailing the village’s name in Arabic and Hebrew. Within days, the signs are removed. Bronstein said he believes signs erected by official bodies may have a greater impact in opening Israeli minds. “In a recent newspaper interview, a senior JNF official admitted that it would be hard to stop our campaign,” he said. “Slowly we believe Israelis can be made to appreciate that their state exists at the expense of another people. Only then are Israelis likely to be ready to think about making peace.”

With Zochrot’s efforts in mind, Uri Davis joined in an application to the Canadian tax authorities to overturn the JNF’s charitable status and said attempts to rename Canada Park “Ayalon Park” over the past decade suggested that the Canadian authorities were already concerned about the prospect of the country’s involvement in the park coming under scrutiny. In April, before the ROM exhibition opened, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and executives at the ROM were sent letters of protest from senior officials of the Palestinian Authority, including PA President Mahmoud Abbas, declaring that the scrolls were in fact illegally seized by Israel following its occupation and annexation of the West Bank in 1967 and calling for their repatriation. The ROM exhibition inspired a campaign of protest led by the CJPME trying to get ROM officials to adjust the display of the artifacts to reflect the fact that the Scrolls were confiscated from East Jerusalem during Israel’s 1967 invasion and occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, to use “West Bank (Israeli-occupied)” and East and West Jerusalem with 1948 Armistice borders on maps. CJPME’s Thomas Woodley said, “We would like there to be a balanced narrative. The ROM is presenting the scrolls entirely from the Israeli perspective. There’s no discussion about what happened between their discovery and their exhibition today.”

ROM met with CJPME members and initially agreed to make changes and even distribute an additional leaflet to be inserted into the museum’s brochure. Friday pickets were held throughout the summer to inform the public about the theft of the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, a visit by Al-Ahram Weekly to the exhibition revealed that no such changes were made, and the history of their discovery in Jordan and seizure in 1967 was finessed. ROM’s PR spokesperson Marilynn Friedman declined to answer questions about why ROM reneged on promises to accommodate CJPME’s concerns.Woodley said ROM director Thorsell was receptive, and assumes that the IAA vetoed any changes that would detract from the Zionist narrative. Tens of thousands of innocent schoolchildren are being respectfully shepherded through subterranean, darkened halls, and left with the impression that the ancient “Israelis” inhabited the kingdom of “Judea”, that their “descendants” heroically prevented the “pillaging of the Scrolls by Bedouin” and are the rightful owners. The mythical kingdoms of 10th-3rd century BC Palestine — for which there is no conclusive evidence — are carefully delineated and explained in commentaries as if they are actual history. A dazzling success story for the most part for Gissin’s “Brand Israel”.

The dust-up, however, continues to provide a platform for activists to educate Canadians and empowers demonstrators at the nearby Israeli consulate. It has provided a 6-month platform for re-rebranding Israel as the centre of 21st-century apartheid. And no amount of slick PR can undo the fact that merely by continuing to exist, despite all odds, Palestinians endure as testimony to the injustice of “The Israel Project” in all its manifestations. Palestinians only have survival itself as proof of the crimes committed against them, choosing to maintain traditional dress, religious faith (both Christian and Islamic), and the historical memory of the Nakba as their most meaningful and durable expressions of resistance. Though former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir notoriously declared that “there is no such thing as Palestinians,” Palestinian academic Edward Said more accurately explained that, “In the case of a political identity that’s being threatened, culture is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration.” The battle being waged over the Scrolls is not so much about any particular ethnic, religious, or even cultural-based claim, but more importantly a means of opposing Zionist colonial discourse.

Finally, TIFF’s cozying up to the Israeli propaganda machine blew up into a global scandal, as a spontaneous movement of protest among a few filmmakers turned into an international incident, bringing 1,500 signatures from prominent Israeli public figures and the likes of Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Guy Maddin, Walter Bernstein, and Harry Belafonte to the now historic “Toronto Declaration”. Leading Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, the catalyst for the declaration, refused to screen his latest film Covered in protest. Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla withdrew his feature film debut Heliopolis, as did Ahmed Maher (The Traveller). The protesters were denounced in the mainstream media, called “opportunists, hypocrites, fascists, censors, storm- troopers, apartheid-supporters, intolerant totalitarians, a mob of homophobic anti-Semitic terrorist regime supporters” acting “effectively [as] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s local fifth column” by Canadian film producer Robert Lantos. Yet the protest overshadowed the festival itself and was a godsend for educating the wider public, which could not help but hear about the unprecedented protest, despite mainstream media indifference or hostility. Greyson condemned the opportunism of TIFF for its complicity with the Israeli consulate’s “Brand Israel” campaign. “I’m reminded of last year, when the opening night party for Passchendaele featured real soldiers posing on a Canadian Armed Forces tank. Many of us were disturbed by this uncritical collaboration with the Canadian army, currently fighting in Afghanistan. So I have to ask: who is politicising TIFF? Why hasn’t TIFF explicitly explained and repudiated the perceived Brand Israel connection, beyond vague disavowals? What’s the extent of Israeli sponsorship, beyond airfare, receptions, and the Mayor’s presence? Why an exclusive programme of Israeli state-sponsored features, when shorts could have provided critical alternative voices?”

Opponents of Greyson wrote to York University, demanding that he be investigated, fired, even deported. In a delightful irony, the popular 2nd Toronto Palestinian Film Festival opened just a few weeks after TIFF closed. “It feels like the days of the first anti-apartheid struggle back in the 1970s,” enthused one activist. BDS is already a buzzword among politically-aware Canadians. Of course, there was much momentum back then from the successful anti-Vietnam War movement, the Zionist control of mainstream was less stifling, and there was much stronger political awareness in those Cold War years. But the anti-apartheid movement eventually brought everyone on board, even the notorious Margaret Thatcher, who seeing the writing on the wall, joined in. This anti-apartheid struggle phase two is picking up steam, even among Israel’s best friends. In presenting the Toronto Declaration, Greyson explained that he had just returned from South Africa, where he visited the Hector Pieterson Museum, dedicated to the memory of the 1976 Soweto massacre, where over 500 school children and anti-apartheid activists were killed by security forces. Among other things, the museum documents how this event became a turning point for the world, “a line in the sand, a moment when we ostriches finally woke up and expressed our outrage against South Africa’s apartheid regime. During my visit to the museum, the 2008 words of former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni echoed in my head: ‘Israel practices a brutal form of apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.’” Greyson was overwhelmed by the outpouring of protest at TIFF and predicted that “Gaza represents a similar turning point to Soweto, a similar line in the sand. A moment when it’s imperative to speak out against the outrages of the Occupation.”

Now imagine this novel being written by a collective of Italian fiction writers. Sound far-fetched? Impossible to pull off? Just plain impossible?

Let me introduce Manituana. It is a story set in the Mohawk nation in the 1770s. Joseph Brant, Mohawk war chief and his family, friends and enemies are the primary characters. The Royal Court of England and a group of London ruffians who “dress up” as Indians play supporting roles. Brant, facing threats from aggressive Indian-hating settlers intent on carving up the land of the Mohawks and other member tribes of the Iroquois Confederation and the defection of member tribes and individual members to the side of the American rebels against the Crown of England, undertakes a journey to negotiate the crown’s support for his people in return for their support against the rebels. Included in his entourage is the great warrior Philip Lacroix or Ronaterihonte, the son of Englishman William Johnson and Mohawk shaman Molly Brant, Peter Johnson, and the captured Ethan Allen, one of the first of the American rebels to attack the Confederation’s lands. After gaining the Crown’s support and witnessing the meaningless and corrupt antics of the Court, the entourage heads back to America to engage the rebels in battle on the side of London. From thereon, this is a story of war, flight, and the death and misery that accompany these phenomena.

Manituana is a true fourth world novel. It pits the original peoples of a nation against those who come to colonize it. It is the story of the multiple indigenous nations that existed on the American continent before the Europeans came and destroyed them. It is the story of India and the British Raj and it is the tale of the Algerian people and the French Republic’s colonization of that land. it is also the story of Israel and its ethnic transformation of Palestine into a Western settler state. In short, it is the tale of every people that has seen its land taken over by a European people as intent on making it their own as its original inhabitant are on preventing such an occurrence. This is also the story of America’s indigenous people being manipulated by the European colonists for the Europeans’ own ends. We see a mirror of this situation in today’s manipulations of the indigenous peoples in the lands the west wants as its own today: the Shia vs. Sunni conflict in Iraq and the manipulation of tribal conflicts in Afghanistan are but two examples that come immediately to mind. Manituana evokes the dangerous conceit of men who believe it is their destiny to rule the world.

When one considers that this novel was composed by a collective, they might hesitate. The project sounds unworkable, after all. This group of five Italian writers in Bologna who call themselves Wu Ming has written two previous novels as a collective and produced individual works, as well. Both previous novels by Wu Ming received critical acclaim and one, titled Q, reached the bestseller lists. Manituana also reached into the top ten on Italian bestseller lists. As interesting as their works, the collective currently consists of Roberto Bui (Wu Ming 1), Giovanni Cattabriga (Wu Ming 2), Federico Guglielmi (Wu Ming 4), and Riccardo Pedrini (Wu Ming 5). They consider themselves part of the New Italian Epic movement in Italian literature and come out of the politically-inclined prankster traditions of the avant-garde Luther Blisset phenomenon. Named after the first black Italian footballer, the Luther Blisset movement (if that’s what it was) ran from the mid-1990s until 1999, when its members around the world committed symbolic seppuku.

Although Wu Ming do frequent public appearances and have collaborated on films and with the Italian rock band Yo Yo Mundi on an album, they refuse to be photographed and consider the cult of the author to detract from the written word. “Once the writer becomes a face… it’s a cannibalistic jumble… A photo is witness to my absence…” they stated in a 2007 interview. “On the other hand my voice — with its grain, with its accents, with its imprecise diction, its tonalities, rhythms, pauses and vacillations — is witness to a presence even when I’m not there…”

The first novel of a trilogy that Wu Ming is calling the Atlantic Triptych, Manituana is virtually seamless and the translation is impeccable. It defines what the booksellers mean when they list something as literary fiction. It is a quality story that includes characters of depth, a good deal of action, a consistently thoughtful context and thought-provoking concepts — all presented in a fictional form.

Thus one sometimes hears that it is all about Arab/Palestinian ‘terrorism’ and suicide bombings and the ultimate goal of the terrorists-Palestinians is to ‘push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive” and that their motives are those of anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews. Those who hold this view see the conflict as one of the survival of the Jewish state amid a sea of irrational hatred.

That is the view of the Zionists, and the one they would like for the world to accept.

One also hears that the conflict is a religious one between Jews and Arabs and that it has been continuous for ‘thousands of years’.

Neither is correct.

The first Palestinian suicide bombing occurred in 1994, 40 days after the massacre by the Brooklyn native Baruch Goldstein of 29 praying Muslims at the Al Ibrahim Mosque in Hebron. The ’67 War and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip was 25 years old at that time. Thus an entire generation of Palestinians had grown to maturity knowing nothing but occupation before the first suicide bomber struck.

The phrase, ”push all the Jews into the sea, dead or alive”, can be traced to a 1961 speech to the Knesset delivered by Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. This apparently was the first use of this phrase by a significant political personality, and thus, for all intents and purposes, the phrase has a Jewish and not an Arab origin. The propagation of this emotional phrase throughout the Israeli-Palestinian debate has its source the Israeli Prime Minister himself. (See “Who is Pushing Whom into the Sea?“)

The view that the conflict is religious and that it has been ongoing for thousands of years is inaccurate. For approximately 2000 years Jews and Arabs enjoyed a harmonious relation, and for four hundred years up until World War I, as citizens of the Ottoman empire with equal rights. Indeed, Jews enjoyed high government position within the Ottoman Empire.

Change occurred in 1896 with the publication of Theodore Herzl’s book, The Jewish State, in which Herzl propounded the idea of inevitability, immutability, permanence, and omnipresence of anti-Semitism and argued that the only solution was a separate state for Jews.

Herzl’s understanding of the inevitability of anti-Semitism was possibly self fulfilling, for rather that opposing anti-Semitism in the first half of the 20th century, the Zionists found common cause with Hitler, Eichmann and the Nazis and used anti-Semitism and Nazism as a means of achieving their end which was the establishment of a Jewish state. The two reactionary movements shared the view that German Jews were living there as a ‘foreign race’ and that the racial divide was essential to maintain. (Historian Lenny Brenner has written three excellent books on the Zionists-Nazi collaboration.) The Zionist’s use of Nazism involved, among other things, the blocking of avenues of escape to other countries of Europe’s Jews and diverting them to Palestine, even as the death trains began to roll in Europe. The rise of Nazism and Hitler to power was never, or almost never, opposed by the Zionist prior to the establishment of Israel.

History might have been very different had the Zionists component of Jewry opposed Nazism and there might never have been a Holocaust. And there might never have been a state of Israel, as many of the Zionists well understood.

Lenni Brenner puts it:

… of all of the active Jewish opponents of the boycott idea [of Nazi Germany], the most important was the world Zionists Organization (WZO). It not only bought German wares; it sold them, and even sought out new customers for Hitler and his industrialist backers.

The WZO saw Hitler’s victory in much the same way as its German affiliate, the ZVfD [the German Zionist Organization]: not primarily as a defeat for all Jewry, but as positive proof of the bankruptcy of assimilation and liberalism. (Brenner, Zionism in the Age of Dictators)

Zionist collaboration with the Nazis, as well as with the Fascists and Mussolini is a deep and extensive topic and must be abandoned here.

Though a region of Argentina as well as Ethiopia were considered by Herzl, Palestine was the site for which there was the greatest consensus.

Of the indigenous Palestinians, of which there were about a million at the time living in Palestine, he said: “[We shall] spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

Thus the concept of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionism was introduced.

It is not rocket science. If you want to create a state exclusively of European Jews in the heart of the Middle East, you must first get rid of the Arabs.

Herzl went on the found the World Zionists Organization, whose intent was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine and to make itself into proto-government from which the actual state government would seamlessly emerge upon the establishment of the Jewish state.

Though the world seems not to understand the intent of the Zionist program, there was no misunderstanding among the Zionists themselves.

In his 1923 book, The Iron Wall, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder to the “Revisionists” wing of Zionism, wrote

There can be no discussion of voluntary reconciliation between the Arabs, not now and not in the foreseeable future. All well-meaning people, with the exception of those blind from birth, understood long ago the complete impossibility of arriving at a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine for the transformation of Palestine from an Arab country to a country with a Jewish majority.

Any native people view their country as their national home, of which they will be the complete masters. They will never voluntarily allow a new master. So it is for the Arabs. Compromisers among us try to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked with hidden formulations of our basic goals. I flatly refuse to accept this view of the Palestinian Arabs.

The Palestinians will struggle in this way until there is hardly a spark of hope.

It matters not what kind of words we use to explain our colonization. Colonization has its own integral and inescapable meaning understood by every Jew and every Arab. Colonization has only one goal. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible. It has been necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs and the same conditions exist now.

… a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. All colonization, even the most restricted, must continue in defiance of the will of the native population. Therefore, it can continue and develop only under the shield of force which comprises an Iron Wall which the local population can never break through. This is our Arab policy. To formulate it any other way would be hypocrisy.

Whether through the Balfour Declaration or the Mandate, external force is a necessity for the establishing in the country conditions of rule and defence through which the local population, regardless of what it wishes, will be deprived of the possibility of impeding our colonization, administratively or physically. Force must play its role – with strength and without indulgence. In this, there are no meaningful differences between our militarists and our vegetarians. One prefers an Iron Wall of Jewish bayonets; the other an Iron Wall of English bayonets.

If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison for that land,… . Or else? Or else, give up your colonization, for without an armed force which will render physically impossible any attempt to destroy or prevent this colonization, colonization is IMPOSSIBLE! Zionism is a colonization adventure and there fore it stands or it falls by the question of armed force. It is important to speak Hebrew but, unfortunately, it is even more important to be able to shoot – or else I am through with playing at colonization.

To the hackneyed reproach that this point is unethical, I answer – absolutely untrue. This is our ethic. There is no other ethic. As long as there is the faintest spark of hope for the Arabs to impede us, they will not sell these hopes – not for any sweet words not for any tasty morsel. Because this (the Palestinians) is not a rabble but a people, a living people. And no people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions, except when there is no hope left, until we have removed every opening visible in the Iron Wall.

The ‘Revisionists’ advocated the revision of the British Mandate for Palestine to include the east bank of the Jordan, now the state of Jordan, as well as the west bank, the Jordan River forming the eastern boundary of the mandate at that time. The ‘Revisionist’ transformed over time into the present day Lukud party, the right wing party of Menachem Begin, who regarded Zabotinsky as his model and philosophical father, of Yitzchak Shamir, who became the leader of the Revisionists at the time of Zabotinsky’s death, of Ariel Sharon, and of Benjamin Netanyahu.

Thus in 1937, Ben Gurion stated: “The compulsory transfer of Arabs from the valleys of the proposed Jewish state could give us something which we never had, even when we stood on our own feet during the days of the First and Second Temple.”

And in a letter to his son, also in 1937, he stated: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places then we have force at our disposal.”

And in early 1948 Ben Gurion wrote in his War Diary, “During the assault we must be ready to strike the decisive blow; that is, either to destroy the towns or expel its inhabitants so our people can replace them.”

And in February 1948, Ben Gurion told Yoseph Weitz, director of the settlement of the Jewish National Fund and head of the official Transfer Committee of 1948: “The war will give us land. The concept of ‘ours’ and ‘not ours’ are peace concepts, only, in war they lose their whole meaning.”

And in 1940, Joseph Weitz, who was head of land purchasing for the World Jewish Organization, and head of one of several ‘transfer committees’ (committees to study ways of transferring the Arabs from Palestine) wrote:

Between ourselves it must be clear that here is no room for both peoples together in this country. We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs are in this country. There is no other way than to transfer the Arabs from here to neighboring countries – all of them. Not one village, not one tribe, should be left.

And in 1983, Raphael Eytan, then chief of staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, said,

We declare openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter of Eretz Israel .… Force is all they do or ever will understand. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours…. When we have settled the land, all the Arab will be able to do will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.

Exactly why the indigenous people of Palestine do not have right to live on the land of their and their ancestors births, or why the colonial European Jews have this right, Mr Eytan is silent.

Between the time that Israel declared itself a state in May of 1948 and the summer of 2005, Israel killed 50,000 Palestinians, according to Israeli Historian Ilan Pappe. And since October of 2000, Israel has killed 6348 Palestinians, according to the web site, If American Knew. The latter figure averages to about 2 Palestinians killed per day by Israel (1.932, by my calculation.)

One thing is certain: Israel is not the victim, as it is constantly screaming, but the victimizer.

What then is the conflict all about? What is the theme that runs through the entire history of

Zionism?

It is about the ongoing program of Zionism to destroy the Palestinians as a people and to assume possession of their ancestral land.

There are Zionists who would settle for a two state solution and a withdrawal of the Israel presence to the 1967 borders allowing a mini-Palestinian state on the remaining 22% of Palestine. But the reality on the ground is that Israel has expanded beyond the point of retreat with 300,000 settlers in the West Bank, 183,000 in East Jerusalem, as of this writing, with 200 or more settlements in the West Bank some twice the size of Manhattan containing their own, schools, universities, shopping malls and the billions of dollars of invested infrastructure, both private and public, and a segregated, for-Jews-only, highway system, 300 miles long, cutting up the West Bank with Palestinians imprisoned between these disjoint concrete and asphalt barriers.

But whatever the views of these moderate Zionists, who call for contraction to the ’67 borders, the dynamics of Israel is and has always been expansion. The centrifugal forces pushing the expansion are multivaried and complicated. They are religious, they are military, they are for want of security, they are from want of power for its own sake, but they are persistent and they have an entire century of momentum and a century of Zionism on the move.

What the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is all about then is the destruction of the Palestinian people and their evacuation and the complete takeover of Palestine to the Jordan River by the Jewish state. And what hangs win the balance is whether or not the Palestinians will be destroyed and eliminated as a people with a distinct culture and history and with an attachment to the land of their birth and their parent’s and ancestor’s births.

The one-day stoppage is due to take place on October 1, a date heavy with symbolism because it marks the anniversary of another general strike, in 2000 at the start of the second intifada, when 13 Arab demonstrators were shot dead by Israeli police.

The Arab leadership said it was responding to a string of what it called “racist” government measures that cast the Arab minority, a fifth of the population, as enemies of the state.

“In recent months, there has been a parallel situation of racist policies in the parliament and greater condoning of violence towards Arab citizens by the police and courts,” said Jafar Farah, the head of Mossawa, an Arab advocacy group in Israel. “This attitude is feeding down to the streets.”

Confrontations between the country’s Arab minority and Mr Netanyahu’s coalition, formed in the spring, surfaced almost immediately over a set of controversial legal measures.

The proposed bills outlawed the commemoration of the “nakba”, or catastrophe, the word used by Palestinians for their dispossession in 1948; required citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a Zionist state; and banned political demands for ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. Following widespread outcries, the bills were either watered down or dropped.

But simmering tensions came to a boil again late last month when the education minister, Gideon Saar, presented educational reforms to mark the start of the new school year.

He confirmed plans to drop the word “nakba” from Arabic textbooks and announced his intention to launch classes on Jewish heritage and Zionism. He also said he would tie future budgets for schools to their success in persuading pupils to perform military or national service.

Arab citizens are generally exempted from military service, although officials have recently been trying to push civilian national service in its place.

Mohammed Barakeh, an Arab member of the parliament, denounced the linking of budgets to national service, saying that Mr Saar “must understand that he is the education minister, not the defence minister”.

The separate Arab education system is in need of thousands of more classrooms and is massively underfunded – up to nine times more is spent on a Jewish pupil than an Arab one, according to surveys. Research published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem last month showed that Jewish schools received five times more than Arab schools for special education classes.

Mr Netanyau, who accompanied Mr Saar on a tour of schools last week, appeared to give his approval to the proposed reforms: “We advocate education that stresses values, Zionism and a love of the land.”

Mr Barakeh also accused government ministers of competing to promote measures hostile to the Arab minority. “Anyone seeking fame finds it in racist whims against Arabs – the ministers of infrastructure, education, transportation, whoever.”

Mr Barakeh was referring to a raft of recent proposals.

Avigdor Lieberman, the foreign minister and leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, announced last month that training for the diplomatic service would be open only to candidates who had completed national service.

Of the foreign ministry’s 980 employees only 15 are Arab, a pattern reflected across the civil service sector according to Sikkuy, a rights and coexistence organisation.

The housing minister, Ariel Atias, has demanded communal segregation between Jewish and Arab citizens and instituted a drive to make the Galilee, where most Arab citizens live, “more Jewish”.

The interior minister, Eli Yishai, has approved a wave of house demolitions, most controversially in the Arab town of Umm al Fahm in Wadi Ara, where a commercial district has been twice bulldozed in recent weeks.

The transport minister, Israel Katz, has insisted that road signs include placenames only as they are spelt in Hebrew, thereby erasing the Arabic names of communities such as Jerusalem, Jaffa and Nazareth.

Arab legislators have come under repeated verbal attack from members of the government. Last month, the infrastructures minister, Uzi Landau, refused to meet Taleb al Sana, the head of the United Arab List party, on parliamentary business, justifying the decision on the grounds that Arab MPs were “working constantly here and abroad to delegitimise Israel as a Jewish state”.

Shortly afterwards, Mr al Sana and his colleague Ahmed Tibi, the deputy speaker of parliament, attended Fatah’s congress in Bethlehem, prompting Mr Lieberman to declare: “Our central problem is not the Palestinians, but Ahmed Tibi and his ilk – they are more dangerous than Hamas and [Islamic] Jihad combined.”

Mr Tibi responded: “When Lieberman, the foreign minister, says that, ordinary Israelis understand that he is calling for me to be killed as a terrorist. It is the most dangerous incitement.”

Israel’s annual Democracy Index poll, published last month, showed that 53 per cent of Israeli Jews supported moves to encourage Arab citizens to leave.

Mr Farah said the strike date had been selected to coincide with the anniversary of the deaths of 13 Arab citizens in October 2000 to highlight both the failure to prosecute any of the policemen involved and the continuing official condoning of violence against Arab citizens by police and Jewish citizens.

Some 27 Arab citizens have been killed by the police in unexplained circumstances since the October deaths, Mr Farah said, with only one conviction. Last week, Shahar Mizrahi, an undercover officer, was given a 15-month sentence for shooting Mahmoud Ghanaim in the head from point-blank range. The judge called Mizrahi’s actions “reckless”.

This week, in another controversial case, Shai Dromi, a Negev rancher, received six months community service after shooting dead a Bedouin intruder, Khaled al Atrash, as the latter fled.

Mr Farah said the regard in which Arab citizens were held by the government was illustrated by a comment from the public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, in June. During an inspection of police officers working undercover as drug addicts, the minister praised one for looking like a “real dirty Arab”.

The ultimate goal…is, in time, to take over the Land of Israel and to restore to the Jews the political independence they have been deprived of for these two thousand years…The Jews will yet arise and, arms in hand (if need be), declare that they are the masters of their ancient homeland.

— Vladimir Dubnow, 1882

Zionism is best described as an abnormal nationalism. This singular fact has engendered a history of deepening conflicts between Israel — leading an alliance of Western states — and the Islamicate more generally.

Jewish ‘nationalism’ was abnormal for two reasons. It was homeless: it did not possess a homeland. The Jews of Europe were not a majority in, or even exercised control over, any territory that could become the basis of a Jewish state. We do not know of another nationalist movement in recent memory that started with such a land deficit — that is, without a homeland.

Arguably, Jewish nationalism was without a nation too. The Jews were a religious aggregate, consisting of communities, scattered across many regions and countries, some only tenuously connected to others, but who shared the religious traditions derived from, or an identity connected to, Judaism. Over the centuries, Jews had been taught that a divinely appointed Messiah would restore them to Zion; but such a Messiah never appeared; or when he did, his failure to deliver ‘proved’ that he was false. Indeed, while the Jews prayed for the appearance of the Messiah, they had no notion about when this might happen. In addition, since the nineteenth century, Reform Jews have interpreted their chosenness metaphorically. Max Nordau complained bitterly that for the Reform Jew, “the word Zion had just as little meaning as the word dispersion…He denies that there is a Jewish people and that he is a member of it.”

Since Zionism was a nationalism without a homeland or a nation, its protagonists would have to create both. To compensate for the first deficit, the Zionists would have to acquire a homeland: they would have to expropriate territory that belonged to another people. In other words, a homeless nationalism, of necessity, is a charter for conquest and — if it is exclusionary — for ethnic cleansing. At the same time, the Zionists would have to start creating a Jewish nation out of the heterogeneous Jewish colons they would assemble in their newly minted homeland. At the least, they would have to create a nucleus of Jews who were willing to settle in Palestine and committed to creating the infrastructure of a Jewish society and state in Palestine. For many years, this nucleus would be small, since, Jews, overwhelmingly, preferred assimilation and revolution in Europe to colonizing Palestine.

A Jewish nation would begin to grow around this small nucleus only if the Zionists could demonstrate that their scheme was not a chimera. The passage of the Zionist plan — from chimera to reality — would be delivered by three events: imposition of tight immigration restrictions in most Western countries starting in the 1900s, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933. As a result, when European Jews began fleeing Nazi persecution, most of them had nowhere to go to but Palestine.

In their bid to create a Jewish state in Palestine, the Zionists could not stop at half-measures. They could not — and did not wish to — introduce Jews as only one element in the demography of the conquered territory. The Zionists sought to establish a Jewish state in Palestine; this had always been their goal. Officially, they never acknowledge that the creation of a Jewish state would have to be preceded, accompanied, or followed by ethnic cleansing. Nevertheless, it is clear from the record now available that Zionists wanted nothing less than to make Palestine “as Jewish as England is English.” If the Palestinians could not be bribed to leave, they would have to be forced out.

The Zionists were determined to reenact in the middle of the twentieth century the exclusive settler colonialism of an earlier epoch. They were determined to repeat the supremacist history of the white colons in the Americas and Oceania. By the measure of any historical epoch, much less that of an age of decolonization, the Zionist project was radical in the fate it had planned for the Palestinians: their complete or near-complete displacement from Palestine. A project so daring, so radical, so anachronistic could only emerge from unlimited hubris, deep racial contempt for the Palestinians, and a conviction that the ‘primitive’ Palestinians would prove to be utterly lacking in the capacity to resist their own dispossession.

The Zionists faced another challenge. They had to convince Jews that they are a nation, a Jewish nation, who deserved more than any nation in the world — because of the much greater antiquity of Jews — to have their own state, a Jewish state in Palestine. It was the duty of Jews, therefore, to work for the creation of this Jewish state by supporting the Zionists, and, most importantly, by emigrating to Palestine. Most Jews in the developed Western countries had little interest in becoming Jewish pioneers in Palestine; their lives had improved greatly in the previous two or three generations and they did not anticipate any serious threats from anti-Semitism. The Jews in Eastern Europe did face serious threats to their lives and property from anti-Semites, but they too greatly preferred moving to safer and more prosperous countries in Western Europe, the Americas, South Africa, and Australia. Persuading Jews to move to Palestine was proving to be a far more difficult task than opening up Palestine to unlimited Jewish colonization. Zionism needed a stronger boost from anti-Semites than they had provided until the early 1930s.

The Zionists always understood that their movement would have to be driven by Jewish fears of anti-Semitism. They were also quite sanguine that there would be no paucity of such assistance, especially from anti-Semites in Eastern Europe. Indeed, now that the Zionists had announced a political program to rid Europe of its Jews, would the anti-Semites retreat just when some Jews were implicitly asking for their assistance in their own evacuation from Europe? This was a match made in heaven for the anti-Semites. Once the Zionists had also brought the anti-Semites in messianic camouflage — the Christian Zionists — on board, this alliance became more broad-based and more enduring. Together, by creating and continuing to support Israel, these allies would lay the foundations of a deepening conflict against the Islamicate.

Zionism was a grave assault on the history of the global resistance to imperialism that unfolded even as Jewish colons in Palestine laid the foundations of their colonial settler state. The Zionists sought to abolish the ground realities in the Middle East established by Islam over the previous thirteen hundred years. They sought to overturn the demography of Palestine, to insert a European presence in the heart of the Islamicate, and to serve as the forward base for Western powers intent on dominating the Middle East. The Zionists could succeed only by combining the forces of the Christian and Jewish West in an assault that would almost certainly be seen as a new, latter-day Crusade to marginalize the Islamicate peoples in the Middle East.

It was delusional to assume that the Zionist challenge to the Islamicate would go unanswered. The Zionists had succeeded in imposing their Jewish state on the Islamicate because of the luck of timing — in addition to all the other factors that had favored them. The Islamicate was at its weakest in the decades following the destruction of the Ottoman Empire; even a greatly weakened Ottoman Empire had resisted for more than two decades Zionist pressures to grant them a charter to create a Jewish state in Palestine. The first wave of Arab resistance against Israel — led by secular nationalists from the nascent bourgeoisie classes — lacked the structures to wage a people’s war. Taking advantage of this Arab weakness, Israel quickly dismantled the Arab nationalist movement, whose ruling classes began making compromises with Israel and its Western allies. This setback to the resistance was temporary.

The Arab nationalist resistance would slowly be replaced by another that would draw upon Islamic roots; this return to indigenous ideas and structures would lay the foundations of a resistance that would be broader, deeper, many-layered, and more resilient than the one it would replace. The overarching ambitions of Israel — to establish its hegemony over the central lands of the Islamicate — would guarantee the emergence of this new response. The quick collapse of the Arab nationalist resistance in the face of Israeli victories ensured that the deeper Islamicate response would emerge sooner rather than later. As a result, Israel today confronts — now in alliance with Arab rulers — the entire Islamicate, a great mass of humanity, which is determined to overthrow this alliance. If one recalls that the Islamicate is now a global community, enjoying demographic dominance in a region that stretches from Mauritania to Mindanao — and now counts more than a billion and a half people, whose growth rate exceeds that of any other collectivity — one can easily begin to comprehend the eventual scale of this Islamicate resistance against the Zionist imposition.

In the era preceding the rise of the Nazis, the Zionist idea — even from a Jewish standpoint — was an affront to more than two millennia of their own history. Jews had started migrating to the farthest points in the Mediterranean long before the second destruction of the Temple, where they settled down and converted many local peoples to the Jewish faith. Over time, conversions to Judaism established Jewish communities farther afield — beyond the Mediterranean world. In the 1890s, however, a small but determined cabal of European Jews proposed a plan to abrogate the history of global Jewish communities extending over millennia. They were determined to accomplish what the worst anti-Semites had failed to do: to empty Europe and the Middle East of their Jewish population and transport them to Palestine, a land to which they had a spiritual connection — just as Muslims in Bangladesh, Bosnia, and Burkina Faso are connected to Mecca and Medina — but to which their racial or historical connections were nonexistent or tenuous at best. Was the persecution of Jews in Europe before the 1890s sufficient cause to justify such a radical reordering of the human geography of the world’s Jewish populations?

A more ominous implication flowed from another peculiarity of Zionism. Unlike other white settlers, the Jewish colons lacked a natural mother country, a Jewish state that could support their colonization of Palestine. In the face of this deficiency, the career of any settler colonialism would have ended prematurely. Instead, because of the manner in which this deficit was overcome, the Zionists acquired the financial, political, and military support of much of the Western world. This was not the result of a conspiracy, but flowed from the peculiar position that Jews — at the end of the nineteenth century — had come to occupy in the imagination, geography, economy, and the polities of the Western world.

The Zionists drew their primary support from the Western Jews, many of whom by the middle of the nineteenth century were members of the most influential segments of Western societies. Over time, as Western Jews gravitated to Zionism, their awesome financial and intellectual assets would become available to the Jewish colons in Palestine. The Jewish colons drew their leadership — in the areas of politics, the economy, industry, civilian and military technology, organization, propaganda, and science — from the pool of Europe’s best. It can scarcely be doubted that the Jewish colons brought overwhelming advantages to their contest against the Palestinians and the neighboring Arabs. No other colonists, contemporaneous with the Zionists or in the nineteenth century, brought the same advantages to their enterprise vis-à-vis the natives.

Pro-Zionist Western Jews would make a more critical contribution to the long-term success of Zionism. They would mobilize their resources — as well-placed members of the financial, intellectual, and cultural elites of Western societies — to make the case for Zionism, to silence criticism of Israel, and generate domestic political pressures to secure the support of Western powers for Israel. In other words, the Zionist ability to recruit Western allies depended critically upon the peculiar position that Jews held in the imagination, prejudices, history, geography, economy, and politics of Western societies.

The Jews have always had a ‘special’ relationship with the Christian West; they were special even as objects of Christian hatred. Judaism has always occupied the unenviable position of being a parent religion that was overtaken by a heresy. For many centuries, the Christians regarded the Jews, hitherto God’s ‘chosen people,’ with disdain for rejecting Jesus. Nevertheless, they incorporated the Jewish scriptures into their own religious canon. This tension lies at the heart of Western ambivalence toward Jews; it is also one of the chief sources of the enduring hatred that Christians have directed toward the Jews.

In addition, starting in the fifteenth century, the Protestants entered into a new relationship with Judaism and Jews. In many ways, the Protestants drew inspiration from the Hebrew bible, began to read its words literally, and paid greater attention to its prophesies about end times. The theology of the English Puritans, in particular, assigned a special role to the Jews in their eschatology. The Jews would have to gather in Jerusalem before the Second Coming of Jesus; later, this theology was taken up by the English Evangelicals who carried it to the United States. Over time, with the growing successes of (Jewish) Zionism, the Evangelicals slowly became its most ardent supporters in the United States. The obverse of the Evangelical’s Zionism is a virulent hatred of Islam and Muslims.

Most importantly, however, it was the entry of Jews into mainstream European society — mostly during the nineteenth century — that paved the way for Zionist influence over the politics of several key Western states. The Zionists very deftly used the Jewish presence in the ranks of European elites to set up a competition among the great Western powers — especially Britain, Germany, and France — to gain Jewish support in their wars with each other, and to undermine the radical movements in Europe that were also dominated by Jews. Starting with World War II, the pro-Zionist Jews would slowly build a network of organizations, develop their rhetoric, and take leadership positions in important sectors of American civil society until they had gained the ability to define the parameters within which the United States could operate in the Middle East.

Serendipitously, it appears, pro-Zionist Jews also found, ready at hand, a rich assortment of negative energies in the West that they could harness to their own project. The convergence of their interests with that of the anti-Semites was perhaps the most propitious. The anti-Semites wanted the Jews out of Europe, and so did the Zionists. Anti-Semitism would also become the chief facilitator of the Jewish nationalism that the Zionists sought to create. In addition, the Zionists could muster support for their project by appealing to Western religious bigotry against Muslims as well as their racist bias against the Arabs as ‘inferior’ non-whites.

The Zionists would also argue that their project was closely aligned with the strategic interests of Western powers in the Middle East. This claim had lost its validity by the end of the nineteenth century, when Britain was firmly established in Egypt and it was the dominant power in the Indian Ocean. Indeed, the insertion of an exclusionary Jewish colonial settler state into the Islamicate geographical matrix was certain to provoke waves of resistance from the Muslim peoples. Western interests in the Islamicate were not positively aligned with the Zionist project. Yet, once Israel had been created, it would provoke anti-Western feelings in the Middle East, which, conveniently, the Zionists would deepen and offer as the rationale for supporting and arming Israel to protect Western interests against Arab and, later, Islamicate threats.

Israel was the product of a partnership that seems unlikely at first blush, between Western Jews and the Christian West. It is the powerful alchemy of the Zionist idea that produced and sustained this partnership. The Zionist project to create a Jewish state in Palestine possessed the power to convert two historical antagonists, Jews and Gentiles, into allies united in a common imperialist enterprise against the Islamicate. At different times, the Zionists have harnessed all the negative energies of the West — its imperialism, anti-Semitism, Crusading zeal, anti-Islamic bigotry, and racism — and focused them on a new project, the creation of a surrogate Western state in the Islamicate heartland. At the same time, the West could derive considerable satisfaction from the success of the Zionist project. Western societies could take ownership of, and revel in, the triumphs of this colonial state as their own; they could congratulate themselves for helping ‘save’ the Jewish people; they could feel they had made adequate amends for their history of anti-Semitism; they could feel they had finally paid back the Arabs and Turks for their conquests of Christian lands. Israel possessed a marvelous capacity to feed several of the West’s egotistical needs.

As a vehicle for facilitating Jewish entry into the stage of world history, the Zionist project was a stroke of brilliance. Since the Jews were influential, but without a state of their own, the Zionists were going to leverage Western power in their cause. As the Zionist plan would unfold, inflicting pain on the Islamicate, evoking Islamicate anger against the West and Jews, the complementarities between the two ancient adversaries would deepen, and, over time, new commonalities would be discovered or created between these two antagonist strains of Western history. In the United States, the Zionist movement would encourage Evangelical Christians — who looked upon the birth of Israel as the fulfillment of end-time prophecies — to become fanatic partisans of Israel. The West had hitherto traced its central ideas and institutions to Rome and Athens; in the wake of Zionist successes, it would be repackaged as a Judeo-Christian civilization, drawing its core principles, its inspiration from the Old Testament. This reframing would not only underscore the Jewish roots of the Western world: it would also make a point of emphasizing that Islam is the outsider, the eternal adversary opposed to both.

Zionism owes its success solely to this unlikely partnership. The Zionists could not have created a Jewish state in Palestine by bribing the Ottomans into granting them a charter to colonize Palestine. Despite his offers of loans, investments, technology, and diplomatic expertise, Theodore Herzl was repeatedly rebuffed by the Ottoman Sultan. It is even less likely that the Zionists, at any time, could have mobilized a Jewish army to invade and occupy Palestine, against Ottoman and Arab opposition. The Zionist partnership with the West was indispensable for the creation of a Jewish state.

This partnership was also fateful. It produced a powerful new dialectic, which has encouraged Israel — as the political center of the Jewish diaspora and the chief outpost of the West in the heart of the Islamic world — to become ever more aggressive in its designs against the Islamicate. In turn, a fragmented, weak and humiliated Islamicate, more resentful and determined after every defeat at the hands of Israel, has been driven to embrace increasingly radical ideas and methods to recover its dignity, wholeness, and power, and to seek to attain this recovery on the strength of Islamic ideas. This destabilizing dialectic has now brought the West itself into a direct confrontation against the Islamicate. This is the tragedy of Israel. It is a tragedy whose ominous consequences, including those that have yet to unfold, were contained in the very idea of an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine.

The crowning moment for Dr Davis arrived last weekend when he became the first Israeli Jew to be elected to one of Fatah’s governing bodies, the Revolutionary Council.

It is a public relations breakthrough for Fatah – which held its sixth congress last week, this time under occupation in the West Bank city of Bethlehem – in which Dr Davis clearly takes some pride.

His presence on the 120-member council, sometimes referred to as the Palestinian parliament, is unlikely to make a significant difference to Fatah’s policies, which will continue to be largely dictated by Mahmoud Abbas, the president, and his inner circle. But it does have huge symbolic significance.

His polling in the 31st place for one of 80 seats contested by more than 600 Fatah members, he said in an interview, challenged Israel’s suggestion that the Palestinian people and its leaders regard the Jews as their enemies.

Or as one local Palestinian pundit noted of the vote’s message: “It is not Judaism that Palestinians are fighting, it is Zionism.”

It also finally puts Dr Davis in a position from which he hopes to shake up the complacency that has bedevilled the Fatah leadership and the PLO in their neglect of supporters outside the Palestinian fold.

“In my view [Fatah] is conducting a struggle with one hand tied behind its back,” he said, sipping Arabic coffee in the garden of St George’s cathedral in East Jerusalem.

“The PLO represents a democratic alternative for all, including the current coloniser people, the current perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” he said in reference to Israel and its Jewish population. “In the 25 years since my joining the Fatah and PLO, this message has been marginalised. The mainstream went another direction, the Oslo accords direction.”

He is loath to discuss the current tensions between Fatah and Hamas, claiming it is “not my area of competence”. However, he denounces Hamas for fanning the threat of civil war.

His chief task, he said, will be to push Fatah to become a broad-based resistance movement modelling itself on the African National Congress, which brought down apartheid in South Africa.

The reference to South Africa is not unexpected. Dr Davis started describing Israel as an apartheid state in the early 1980s, long before it had become fashionable even on the far left.

His most recent book is Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, published in 2003, in which he argues that discrimination against Palestinians is embedded in Israeli law and sets out what he regards as the four classes of citizenship established by Israel’s parliament.

The country’s six million Jews, he said, occupied the most privileged place in this hierarchy, followed by the country’s 1m-strong Palestinian minority with its second-class citizenship. Lagging behind both are a quarter of a million refugees living inside Israel, who are stripped of their right to inherit property, and in final place come a further 5m refugees who had their and their descendants’ citizenship nullified after the 1948 war.

Over the years, Dr Davis has experienced life in each of these categories.

He was raised an Ashkenazi Jew in Jerusalem and schooled in Kfar Shemaryahu, a wealthy suburb of Tel Aviv. He then spent a decade in exile from Israel starting in 1984, after his recruitment to Fatah by one of the founders of the PLO, Khalil al Wazir, known as Abu Jihad.

He ran the party’s London bureau until the mid-1990s, when he was allowed to return under the Oslo accords. He surprised friends by choosing to move to Sakhnin, a Palestinian community in northern Israel, from which he led a campaign against laws and practices that force Jewish and Palestinian citizens to live almost entirely apart.

He is more circumspect about discussing his current circumstances. His marriage to a Palestinian woman from Ramallah a year ago, his fourth, violated yet another Israeli taboo.

Before the ceremony he converted to Islam, though he continues to describe himself as a “Palestinian Hebrew of Jewish origin.”

While he admits to no longer living in Israel, he is wary of saying more, possibly for good reason: it is against Israeli law for an Israeli citizen to be living in an area under the Palestinian Authority control. Equally, his wife, Miyassar, has been denied a permit to live in Israel, as is the case for almost all Palestinians in the occupied territories. A perfect illustration of the apartheid nature of the Israeli state, he said.

The plight of the Palestinians under occupation has come into much sharper focus since his marriage.

Last month, he had to watch the indignities heaped on his wife after her brother, suffering from cancer, was transferred to a hospital in East Jerusalem, which is illegally annexed to Israel. She was denied a visitor’s permit and could only hear about her brother’s slow demise from Dr Davis and friends.

“This situation is not unique to my family, of course. It is part of the cruelty perpetrated by the occupation authorities against the mass of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Dr Davis has yet to find out how Israel will respond to his regular attendance at Revolutionary Council meetings in Ramallah.

He said his election had been greeted with an outpouring of support both internationally and from the broader Jewish community that has surprised him. The main hostility has come during interviews with the Israeli media, which have taken offence at “my language referring to Israel as an apartheid state, to Zionism as a settler colonial project, to the criminality of the Israeli leadership.”

His unpopularity among the majority of Israeli Jews is likely to grow as he uses his new platform at the Revolutionary Council to push for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

The ultimate goal, he said, was the enforcement of United Nations resolutions that would in practice bring about a one-state solution.

Dr Davis concluded the interview with a story about the defining moment in his disillusionment with Israel and Zionism. He was doing alternative civilian service in the early 1960s guarding the perimeter fence of a kibbutz, one of Israel’s collective agricultural communities, on the edge of Gaza. As a pacifist at that time, he refused to carry a gun.

After one of many shouting matches, an exasperated kibbutz member led him into a eucalyptus grove inside the fence and pointed to piles of stones. “Those aren’t stones, they’re the ruins of a village called Dimra. Our kibbutz is cultivating the lands of Dimra,” he told the teenage Davis. “The families are refugees on the other side of this fence [in Gaza]. Now do you understand why all the Arabs must hate Jews and want to throw us into the sea?”

Dr Davis says he understood better the look he was shot by the man when he replied that the kibbutz members should invite the refugees back to share the agricultural land.

That way, the young Davis suggested, the kibbutz could “turn an enemy into a friend.”

It is of course all but impossible for the average citizen to glean the real truth behind events such as these. We can only filter through the various snippets of information provided by the corporate press and try to work out what’s really happening by reading between the lines; and then hope against hope that what we come up with is a little closer to the truth than what’s being sold. The given reasons by the British government for their actions can obviously be dismissed out of hand, like the bit where Governor Wetherell says “it is not a British takeover” (In fact it’s a pretty good rule of thumb to usually believe the very opposite of what governments tell us). The good governor’s statement was full of the usual professional bureaucrat’s flannel: “We need to stabilise TCI’s finances and help rebuild a more diverse and vigorous economy.” (But according to the Independent, TCI’s economy grew under the leadership of Premier Misick from a GDP in 2003 – when he came to power – of $216m to $722m, and tourism grew from 175,000 visitors per annum to 264,000) And the bit I particularly liked: “We need to clean up public life and start to develop a fairer, more open society” – by sacking the elected administration and suspending trial by jury?

Other news reports suggest that Misick and his government were indeed living the high life – but that sort of thing never usually disturbs the slumbers of HMG; indeed, it’s more usually an essential qualification. So what might really be going on?

For me, one particular sentence stood out from a quite good report in the Independent way back in March (25th): “Sir Robin’s commission heard how Mr Misick and other ministers had grown rich by acquiring publicly-owned Crown land, selling it to developers and receiving commissions.” In the same article another interesting little gem claimed: “Canadian legislators have made regular overtures to unite with TCI. Nova Scotia voted in 2004 to invite the islands to join the province.”¹

Surely those dastardly islanders wouldn’t be presuming to decide for themselves what to do with their own land would they? Sorry, I meant to say HMG’s land?

The arrogance of the British government’s decision to scrap the islands’ democratically elected government is of course reason enough to arouse our suspicions – especially when none of the story has made it into Britain’s mainstream media (like the recent military coup in Honduras); but the real clincher is the fact that the government has also chosen to scrap trial by jury for the next two years. Something very dirty is happening in paradise.

1. This is a little misleading, as indicated in the following excerpt:

   In recent news, Nova Scotia’s parliament voted to offer a Caribbean nation, Turks and Caicos, to join their province if they were to pursue political and economical union between Canada. Although it’s official, no talks have commenced on the topic.

   Canada has had several talks with the Caribbean country, which is a British colony, all of which have led to absolutely nothing. The main factors on Canada’s part has been it’s unwillingness to be seen as a neocolonist. The Caribbean islands have been pursuing a union for almost 100 years, and it has popped up yet once again.

   See Christopher Walsh, “Turks and Caicos move to join Canada,” Canadian Content, 25 April 2004.

The cemetery, surrounded on all sides by Jewish homes and farms, is a small time capsule, transporting Mr Muhammad Ali — known to everyone as Abu Arab — back to the days when this place was known by an Arabic name, Saffuriya, rather than its current Hebrew name, Tzipori.

Unlike most of the Palestinian refugees forced outside Israel’s borders by the 1948 war that led to the creation of the Jewish state, Abu Arab and his family fled nearby, to a neighbourhood of Nazareth.

Refused the right to return to his childhood home, which was razed along with the rest of Saffuriya, he watched as the fields once owned by his parents were slowly taken over by Jewish immigrants, mostly from eastern Europe. Today only Saffuriya’s cemetery remains untouched.

Despite the loss of their village, the 4,500 refugees from Saffuriya and their descendants have clung to one hope: that the Jewish newcomers could not buy their land, only lease it temporarily from the state.

According to international law, Israel holds the property of more than four million Palestinian refugees in custodianship, until a final peace deal determines whether some or all of them will be allowed back to their 400-plus destroyed Palestinian villages or are compensated for their loss.

But last week, in a violation of international law and the refugees’ property rights that went unnoticed both inside Israel and abroad, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, forced through a revolutionary land reform.

The new law begins a process of creeping privatisation of much of Israel’s developed land, including refugee property, said Oren Yiftachel, a geographer at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva.

Mr Netanyahu and the bill’s supporters argue that the law will cut out a whole level of state bureaucracy, make land transactions simpler and more efficient, and cut house prices.

In practice, it will mean that the 200 Jewish families of Tzipori will be able to buy their homes, including a new cluster of bungalows that is being completed on land next to the cemetery that belonged to Abu Arab’s parents.

The privatisation of Tzipori’s refugee land will remove it from the control of an official known as the Custodian of Absentee Property, who is supposed to safeguard it for the refugees.

“Now the refugees will no longer have a single address — Israel — for our claims,” said Abu Arab. “We will have to make our case individually against many hundreds of thousands of private homeowners.”

He added: “Israel is like a thief who wants to hide his loot. Instead of putting the stolen goods in one box, he moves it to 700 different boxes so it cannot be found.”

Mr Netanyahu was given a rough ride by Israeli legislators over the reform, though concern about the refugees’ rights was not among the reasons for their protests.

Last month, he had to pull the bill at the last minute as its defeat threatened to bring down the government. He forced it through on a second attempt last week but only after he had warned his coalition partners that they would be dismissed if they voted against it.

A broad coalition of opposition had formed to what was seen as a reversal of a central tenet of Zionism: that the territory Israel acquired in 1948 exists for the benefit not of Israelis but of Jews around the world.

In that spirit, Israel’s founders nationalised not only the refugees’ property but also vast swathes of land they confiscated from the remaining Palestinian minority who gained citizenship and now comprise a fifth of the population. By the 1970s, 93 per cent of Israel’s territory was in the hands of the state.

The disquiet provoked by Mr Netanyahu’s privatisation came from a variety of sources: the religious right believes the law contravenes a Biblical injunction not to sell land promised by God; environmentalists are concerned that developers will tear apart the Israeli countryside; and Zionists publicly fear that oil-rich sheikhs from the Gulf will buy up the country.

Arguments from the Palestinian minority’s leaders against the reform, meanwhile, were ignored — until Hizbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, added his voice at the weekend. In a statement, he warned that the law “validates and perpetuates the crime of land and property theft from the Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Nakba”.

Suhad Bishara, a lawyer from the Adalah legal centre for Israel’s Palestinian minority, said the law had been carefully drafted to ensure that foreigners, including wealthy sheikhs, cannot buy land inside Israel.

“Only Israeli citizens and anyone who can come to Israel under the Law of Return — that is, any Jew — can buy the lands on offer, so no ‘foreigner’ will be eligible.”

Another provision in the law means that even internal refugees like Abu Arab, who has Israeli citizenship, will be prevented from buying back land that rightfully belongs to them, Ms Bishara said.

“As is the case now in terms of leasing land,” she explained, “admissibility to buy land in rural communities like Tzipori will be determined by a selection committee whose job it will be to frustrate applications from Arab citizens.”

Supporters of the law have still had to allay the Jewish opposition’s concerns. Mr Netanyahu has repeatedly claimed that only a tiny proportion of Israeli territory — about four per cent — is up for privatisation.

But, according to Mr Yiftachel, who lobbied against the reform, that means about half of Israel’s developed land will be available for purchase over the next few years. And he suspects privatisation will not stop there.

“Once this red line has been crossed, there is nothing to stop the government passing another law next year approving the privatisation of the rest of the developed areas,” he said.

Ms Bishara said among the first refugee properties that would be put on the market were those in Israel’s cities, such as Jaffa, Acre, Tiberias, Haifa and Lod, followed by homes in many of the destroyed villages like Saffuriya.

She said Adalah was already preparing an appeal to the Supreme Court on behalf of the refugees, and if unsuccessful would then take the matter to international courts.

Adalah has received inquiries from hundreds of Palestinian refugees from around the world asking what they can do to stop Israel selling their properties.

“Many of them expressed an interest in suing Israel,” she said.

What the plaque fails to mention is that the site where Cornwallis directed the colonists/settlers to erect Halifax was on the Mi’kmaq settlement of Jipugtug (anglicized to Chebucto).² The Mi’kmaq, considered themselves the sovereign power in Mi’kma’ki (the present day Maritimes),³ but Cornwallis did not recognize this sovereignty, and he did not consult the Mi’kmaq about his plans.

Halifax historians Judith Fingard, Janet Guildford, and David Sutherland wrote of Cornwallis’s attitude toward the Mi’kmaq: “That arrogance set in motion the train of events that led to tragic violence, the memories of which would long complicate race relations in colonial Nova Scotia.”⁴

What it did set in motion was the murder and dispossession of the Original Peoples of Mi’kma’ki, and one outcome was the eponymous honoring of the Cornwallis. Cornwallis has streets, schools, etc. named after him in the province.

Naming places and buildings after a person is common practice, but usually not when that person is an inciter of genocide. Principle 8 of Canadian Permanent Committee of Geographical Names states, “Personal names should not be used unless it is in the public interest to honor a person by applying such a name to the geographical feature. Names should be derived from persons who have significantly contributed to the features selected.”⁵

Author Daniel Paul wrote that Cornwallis and his council raised a “company of Volunteers” by offering a bounty on Mi’kmaq (women, children, infirm; it didn’t matter).⁶

The British had “unwavering resolve to dispossess the Mi’kmaq of everything and to subjugate them absolutely.”⁷ The Mi’kmaq were forced on to reserves too small to provide an adequate means of subsistence. This reduced the Mi’kmaq to a state of dependency, subordination, and internal colonization.⁸

Credentials of a Genocidaire

That Cornwallis is a genocidaire is apparent from the proclamation Cornwallis and his council issued on 1 October 1759. The proclamation set a bounty on the scalps of Mi’kmaq. One can read from the proclamation:

That, in order to secure the Province from further statements of the Indians, some effectual methods should be taken to pursue them to their haunts, and show them because of such actions, they shall not be secure within the Province…

That a reward of ten guineas be granted for every Micmac taken, or killed.⁹

In 1750, the bounty was raised from 10 to 50 guineas. Paul said this bounty is still in effect, having never been repealed by the federal government.

To reclaim this sordid history, the Rename Cornwallis Initiative is underway, drafted by school teacher Cheryl Leblanc-Weldon and Paul, to redesignate these landmarks named after a genocidaire. The petition reads, in part:

To: To the Governments of Canada, Great Britain, the province of Nova Scotia, and all its municipalities and school boards

… Professor Geoffrey Plank of the University of Cincinnati comments about their rational [sic] for approving such a barbarous course of action:

“If the Micmac chose to resist his expropriation of land, the governor intended to conduct a war unlike any that had been fought in Nova Scotia before. He outlined his thinking in an unambiguous letter to the Board of Trade. If there was to be a war, he did not want the war to end with a peace agreement. ‘It would be better to root the Micmac out of the peninsula decisively and forever.’ The war began soon after the governor made this statement.”

Therefore, we the undersigned, because we firmly believe that no person who attempted genocide should, under any circumstances, receive public honors, express support for changing the name of all public entities such as schools, streets, parks, etc. which currently honor the name of Edward Cornwallis, founder of the British colonial city of Halifax which is currently the capital city of the province of Nova Scotia, Canada.

We ask this be done as a move towards restoring justice to the Mi’kmaq First Nation People of Nova Scotia. Governor Cornwallis, as part of the machinery of colonization, attempting to destroy them completely, oversaw the infliction of terrible suffering and indignities on men, women and children of the Mi’kmaq Nation. Morally, no Nation that self-describes itself as civilized, can justify honoring such a man. His action demands that he be condemned by honorable caring citizens, not honored!

Opposition has arisen to the Rename Cornwallis Initiative. Joseph Bogle calls accusations of genocide against Cornwallis “a blatant lie.” He has started a counter petition to preserve the name of Cornwallis that has garnered 12 signatures (as of 12 August 2009).

LeBlanc-Weldon said, “I am pleased with the progress of our petition as it continues to grow on a daily basis. I think the fact that the counter petition only has 12 signatures pretty much shows that there is not a vocal opposition to our desire for change.”

Bogle’s accusation is counter to the colonial records.¹⁰

Governmental Inaction

The former Nova Scotia heritage minister Bill Dooks argued against the redesignation. Dooks said, “Changing a name does not change what happened. I cannot change the past.” No one asked Dooks to change past events. The designations are current, and that is the change being sought.

The new social democratic government in Nova Scotia also seems uninterested in the redesignation. David Denny, advisor to Heritage Minister Percy Paris, communicated in a statement: “This is not a matter under consideration or review by the new government at this time.”

Changing Names

Redesignation has been the historical practice in Canada; witness the renaming of Mt. Stalin in British Columbia to Mt. Peck and renaming the Ontario town of New Berlin to Kitchener (who is held by many to be a war criminal himself¹¹ ). Furthermore, many place names are reverting to their Indigenous names; for example, the Queen Charlotte Islands are now usually called Haida Gwaii, the Mackenzie River is Deh Cho, etc.

The renaming of landmarks, buildings, and institutions that honor the genocidaire Cornwallis should only be a beginning. The city of Amherst, “Nova Scotia” is named after British army officer Jeffery Amherst notorious for advocating biological warfare against Original Peoples.¹²

In front of the Halifax Public Library is a statue of the bulky mass of Winston Churchill — the man who advocated “spread[ing] a lively terror” with poison gas. His words reveal his racism: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas… I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… ”¹³

Racism, and indifference, by Nova Scotians also affect the Rename Cornwallis campaign. “In some cases it’s a racist thing. They say ‘[the Mi’kmaq] lost, too bad’… or ‘lots of people did things wrong, it was war, don’t judge it by today’s standards.’ Others say ‘it doesn’t affect my life,’ but when they find out about it they say ‘yeah, it should change,’” said Leblanc-Weldon.¹⁴

1. Jipugtug is the original designation by the indigenous Mi’kmaq people. Halifax is the colonial designation.
2. Judith Fingard, Janet Guildford, & David Sutherland, Halifax: The First 250 Years (Halifax: Formac Publishing, 1999): 8.
3. See map.
4. Fingard et al.: 13.
5. William B. Hamilton, The Macmillan Book of Canadian Place Names (Macmillan, 1978).
6. Daniel N. Paul, We Were Not the Savages: A Mi’kmaq Perspective on the Collision between European and Native American Civilizations (Black Point, Nova Scotia: Fernwood Press, 2000): 109-113.
7. Paul: 115.
8. Harald E.L. Prins, The Mi’kmaq: Resistance, Accommodation, and Cultural Survival (Harcourt Brace, 1996): 7.
9. ”A Monstrous crime, a day to remember in Canadian history,” Shunpiking: People of the Dawn (First Nations Supplement), 13 (49), Fall 2007: 14. See also Daniel N. Paul, “British Scalp Proclamations: 1749 and 1750,” www.danielnpaul.com.
10. “It is ironic Europeans who were responsible for diminishing Mi’kmaq life documented much of what they were destroying – in explorer’s logs, trade letters, missionary letters, colonial records, and so forth.” Prins: 4.
11. See “The crimes,” AngloBoer.com.
12. ”Jeffrey Amherst and Smallpox Blankets,” Native Web.
13. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (Noonday Press, 1992).
14. Ben Sichel, “Renaming Cornwallis,” The Dominion, 17 July 2009.

What most surprised me on this tour was how at home I felt – not in the West Bank, but in Israel. Except for signs in Hebrew, things often seemed so “American” that it was like we were in the 51st state. For example, even in the Arab quarters of Israeli cities, many non-Arab Israelis dress with an immodesty (pleasing to my male, westernized eye) that surely offends the indigenous Muslim people they live among.

But this at-home feeling went beyond appearances. It was in the attitudes. The non-activist Israelis I met reminded me of many folks back in the US. Here were nice, hospitable, English-speaking people who – just as in the US – live in what I call the “Bubble.” Colonizing and nationalizing our minds, the Bubble is spun by our governments and mainstream media. It narrows our horizons, drowns our dissent, stifles the voices of the voiceless. Distracting and trivializing, the Bubble shelters us from others’ pain.

The non-activist Jewish Israelis I met seemed oblivious to – or were quick to rationalize – how predatory their military and the Israeli settlers they protect were being in the Occupied Territories. They took for granted the great theft of indigenous Palestinian land supported with their taxes (and with $3 billion a year of our taxes). After centuries of inhabiting what has become Israel proper, in recent decades Palestinians have been either pushed into exile or relegated by force to the caged reservations and “Bantustans” of Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli scholar Ilan Pappé calls this historical process “ethnic cleansing.”

The fear that some Israelis feel regarding Palestinians mirrors the fear some US whites feel toward people of color. These Israelis also were quick to blame the victim and to shudder at the “other.”

My sense is that these good people had little idea how Israel was economically strangling Palestine. Or that the (much publicized) Palestinian terrorism perpetrated on Israelis was a fraction of the (inadequately publicized) episodic terrorism of the Israeli Air Force and the daily systemic violence that the Israeli Defense Force, the IDF, perpetrates on Palestinians. (One Jewish Israeli woman referred to the protracted aerial bombing of Gaza, killing 900 civilians, as an “incident.”)

Those Other Settler States

I was prepared for what I saw in Israel/Palestine thanks to my knowing what European settlers did to First Nations people in what became the United States. The five or six weeks I spent back in the early eighties in South Africa was also good prep. There too I was struck by how at home I felt. White South Africa was also a 51st state – one then backed by the US government.

In Johannesburg, the commercial and government center, many of the affluent white minority lived in gated communities while by law blacks lived in the grim sprawling Soweto ghetto – whose few roads in and out were controlled by the South African Defense Force.

The South Africa I experienced was legally and physically divided by ethnicity and skin color. “Divided,” though, doesn’t begin to acknowledge the stark disparity of wealth, power and opportunity.

In Israel – and in the US – there are similar disparities, the product of similar apartheids. (Another thing that surprised me, in both Israel and Palestine, were the legions of young male and female Israeli soldiers…many casually toting automatic weapons.)

The US, South Africa, Israel: all three are/were expansionist “settler states.” All three have been populated by land-hungry Judeo-Christian Europeans. These outlanders arrived with far more capital and political and military backing than the indigenous people whose land they coveted − and, by hook or by crook, eventually confiscated…or are now bent on confiscating.

Our delegation spent a week in the occupied West Bank. We passed through the Separation Wall, the Berlin-like barrier dividing Israel from its hapless – but stubborn and resisting – colony. The thing to note about the Wall, four times the height of a man, is that only 20% of it is built on the Green Line, the internationally recognized border between Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

The Israelis built most of the Wall well inside the West Bank on inhabited or cultivated Palestinian land – thereby seizing more Palestinian territory. That land grab is part of achieving “facts on the ground” ASAP before some “peace process” forces the Israelis to stop multiplying their (illegal) settlements throughout the West Bank.

The Last Surprise…Sort Of

In the West Bank I was also surprised – or rather would have been if I hadn’t already read Anna Baltzer’s Witness in Palestine – by all the military roadblocks. As privileged foreigners, the Israeli soldiers waved our vehicles on. But these same soldiers might hold up Palestinians for hours at a time, or delay market-bound Palestinian produce until it rots.

Like the Wall, most of the roadblocks aren’t at the Green Line, but are sprinkled all over the West Bank. They strangulate Palestinian movement, both personal and commercial, within their own territory. They fragment the West Bank, undermining its commerce, leashing its people, generating resentment.

The roadblocks seem intended to ratchet up daily misery. Maybe even more Palestinians will simply pack up and flee. The goal: to transform the West Bank (in the words of the old Zionist canard) into “a land without people for a people without land.”

One way I’ve come to visualize the Occupation is to imagine the indigenous Onondaga Nation here in Onondaga County (NY), a Nation that white settlers long ago reduced to a fraction of its former territory. But to make the situations more comparable, suppose a 25-foot wall separated the Onondagas from the surrounding white-controlled county. Imagine that the Onondagas risked being shot from sniper towers or detained for months without trial if they somehow passed thru the wall without a permit. Imagine further that within the Onondaga Nation there were numerous militarized roadblocks cutting Onondagas off from their neighbors or their crops. Such a bizarre scenario would be a microcosm of the occupied West Bank.