Israeli Conflict Quotes

People who call themselves supporters of Israel are actually supporters of its moral degeneration and ultimate destruction.

For if life had taught her anything, it was that healing and peace can begin only with acknowledgment of wrongs committed.

If every single Jew born anywhere in the world has the right to become an Israeli citizen, then all the Palestinians who were chucked out of Palestine by the Zionist Government should have the same right, very simple.

I am frequently asked if I have visited Israel, whereas yet, it is simply assumed that I have. Well, I don’t travel. I really don’t, and if I did, I probably wouldn’t visit Israel. I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right. I can’t help but feel that the Jews didn’t really have the right to appropriate a territory only because 2000 years ago, people they consider their ancestors, were living there. History moves on and you can’t really turn it back. (#92 ff.)

Israeli occupation exposes us very young to the extremes of our emotions, until we cannot feel except in the extreme.

The new crimes that the US and Israel were committing in Gaza as 2009 opened do not fit easily into any standard category—except for the category of familiarity.

Hamas is regularly described as 'Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.' One will be hard put to find something like 'democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus'—blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable.

Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?

Man, not the tank, shall prevail.

We were existing somewhere between life and death, with neither accepting us fully.

You can't have occupation and human rights.

Now for a good twelve-hour sleep, I told myself. Twelve solid hours. Let birds sing, let people go to work. Somewhere out there, a volcano might blow, Israeli commandos might decimate a Palestinian village. I couldn't stop it. I was going to sleep.

Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault.

They had bombed and burned,killed and maimed,plundered and looted.Now they had come to claim the land.

Toughness found fertile soil in the hearts of Palestinians, and the grains of resistance embedded themselves in their skin. Endurance evolved as a hallmark of refugee society. But the price they paid was the subduing of tender vulnerability. They learned to celebrate martyrdom. Only martyrdom offered freedom. Only in death were they at last invulnerable to Israel. Martyrdom became the ultimate defiance of Israeli occupation. "Never let them know they hurt you" was their creed

The recent renewal of hostilities in the Middle East and cross-border casualties and damage prove once again the fragility of unilateral decisions and quick fixes and their failure to ensure safety and STABILITY. Israelis and Palestinians need to move fast towards a permanent settlement to enjoy lasting peace and SECURITY.

I think it was smart that you’re wary of using the word “terrorism,” and if you talk about the cycle of violence, or “an eye for an eye,” you could be perpetuating the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a balanced conflict, instead of a largely unarmed people against the fourth most powerful military in the world.

So here we have found a means of a) alienating even the most flexible and patient Palestinians; while b) frustrating the efforts of the more principled and compromising Israelis; while c) empowering and financing some of the creepiest forces in American and Israeli society; and d) heaping ordure on our own secular founding documents. When will the Justice Department and the Congress and the Supreme Court become aware of this huge and rank offense, which is designed to bring us ever nearer to holy war?

I tell my story as well to let the Israeli people know that there is hope. If I, the son of a terrorist organization dedicated to the extinction of Israel, can reach a point where I not only learned to love the Jewish people but risked my life for them, there is a light of hope.

Israel's demonstration of its military prowess in 1967 confirmed its status as a 'strategic asset,' as did its moves to prevent Syrian intervention in Jordan in 1970 in support of the PLO. Under the Nixon doctrine, Israel and Iran were to be 'the guardians of the Gulf,' and after the fall of the Shah, Israel's perceived role was enhanced. Meanwhile, Israel has provided subsidiary services elsewhere, including Latin America, where direct US support for the most murderous regimes has been impeded by Congress. While there has been internal debate and some fluctuation in US policy, much exaggerated in discussion here, it has been generally true that US support for Israel's militarization and expansion reflected the estimate of its power in the region. The effect has been to turn Israel into a militarized state completely dependent on US aid, willing to undertake tasks that few can endure, such as participation in Guatemalan genocide. For Israel, this is a moral disaster and will eventually become a physical disaster as well. For the Palestinians and many others, it has been a catastrophe, as it may sooner or later be for the entire world, with the growing danger of superpower confrontation.

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders.

Let us change a letter from the word ‘EVIL’ Make it 'Ivil' as long as 'Israel' remains so… Let us protect the letter ‘P’ for Prayers.. for PALESTINE... for Peace..

If I were a Palestinian at the right age, I would have joined one of the terrorist organizations at a certain stage.

It is human nature to seek revenge in the face of relentless suffering. You can’t expect an unhealthy person to think logically.

If the Palestinian people really wish to decide that they will battle to the very end to prevent partition or annexation of even an inch of their ancestral soil, then I have to concede that that is their right. I even think that a sixty-year rather botched experiment in marginal quasi-statehood is something that the Jewish people could consider abandoning. It represents barely an instant in our drawn-out and arduous history, and it's already been agreed even by the heirs of Ze'ev Jabotinsky that the whole scheme is unrealizable in 'Judaea and Samaria,' let alone in Gaza or Sinai. But it's flat-out intolerable to be solicited to endorse a side-by-side Palestinian homeland and then to discover that there are sinuous two-faced apologists explaining away the suicide-murder of Jewish civilians in Tel Aviv, a city which would be part of a Jewish state or community under any conceivable 'solution.' There's that word again...

He looked me directly in the eye. 'So you live in America?' 'We do.' I smiled. He stopped, opened his backpack, pulled out an empty tear gas grenade and handed it to me. 'I believe it was a present from your country.' Majid smiled. 'Tell your friends thanks. We got their grenade.

Blood is everywhere.. Vultures take shelter beneath the tanks; for the fumed sky is unsafe for their avian flight to prey on the Palestinian flesh.

مِن كوّة زنزانتي الصُّغرى أبصرُ أشجاراً تَبسمُ لي وسطوحاً يملأها أهلي ونوافذَ تبكي وتصلي من أجلي من كُوّةِ زنزانتي الصغرى أبصرُ زنزانَتَكَ الكُبرى

Any attempt to solve a conflict has to touch upon its very core; the core, more often than not, lies in its history.

The fact is, few Westerners can come close to understanding the complexities of the Middle East and its people.

I regard anti-Semitism as ineradicable and as one element of the toxin with which religion has infected us. Perhaps partly for this reason, I have never been able to see Zionism as a cure for it. American and British and French Jews have told me with perfect sincerity that they are always prepared for the day when 'it happens again' and the Jew-baiters take over. (And I don't pretend not to know what they are talking about: I have actually seen the rabid phenomenon at work in modern and sunny Argentina and am unable to forget it.) So then, they seem to think, they will take refuge in the Law of Return, and in Haifa, or for all I know in Hebron. Never mind for now that if all of world Jewry did settle in Palestine, this would actually necessitate further Israeli expansion, expulsion, and colonization, and that their departure under these apocalyptic conditions would leave the new brownshirts and blackshirts in possession of the French and British and American nuclear arsenals. This is ghetto thinking, hardly even fractionally updated to take into account what has changed. The important but delayed realization will have to come: Israeli Jews are a part of the diaspora, not a group that has escaped from it. Why else does Israel daily beseech the often-flourishing Jews of other lands, urging them to help the most endangered Jews of all: the ones who rule Palestine by force of arms? Why else, having supposedly escaped from the need to rely on Gentile goodwill, has Israel come to depend more and more upon it? On this reckoning, Zionism must constitute one of the greatest potential non sequiturs in human history.

I always have believed that we should not call it an Arab-Israeli issue or a Palestinian-Arab dispute or a peace negotiation. I think we should call it what it is: an occupation of Palestine, full stop. This is not a popular position in mixed company.

المسألة بيننا وبين إسرائيل ليست مباراة رياضية، أو مجرد صراع عابر، إنها بالدرجة الأساسية،مسألة صراع وجود وإرادات، وعلى ذلك فإنه من الوهم تصور أن الزيادة السكانية العربية سوف تحل هذه المشكلة، أو أن العوامل الطبيعية هي التي ستقرر مصير هذا الصراع. ولذلك يجب أن نتأمل بعمق الظاهرة السكانية لدى طرفي الصراع، وأن يتعاون الداخل العربي مع المحيط كله من أجل قراءة هذه الظاهرة وماذا يمكن أن يترتب عليها من نتائج، لا أن نعيش على وهم أن الزمن والزمن وحده، يمكن أن يحل المشكلة.

Some say that this is the Israelis' original sin. With this I do not agree but I think we can call it Israel's immaculate misconception.

What's a house when you've lost a country?' she says with a sigh.

But in our camp, his story was everyone’s story, a single tale of dispossession, of being stripped to the bones of one’s humanity, of being dumped like rubbish into refugee camps unfit for rats. Of being left without rights, home, or nation while the world turned its back to watch or cheer the jubilation of the usurpers proclaiming a new state they called Israel.

Half the published articles on Gaza contain a standard reference to its resemblance to a vast open-air prison (and when I last saw it under Israeli occupation it certainly did deserve this metaphor). The problem is that, given its ideology and its allies, Hamas qualifies rather too well in the capacity of guard and warder.

it must be shown to American Jews that the choice between Israel’s survival and Palestinian rights is a false one; that it is in fact Israel’s denial of Palestinian rights and reflexive resort to criminal force that are pushing it toward destruction; that it is possible to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict so that everyone, Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab, can preserve their full human dignity; and that such a settlement has been within reach for decades, but that Israel—with critical U.S. backing, largely because of the Israel lobby—has blocked it.

It was not the creation of 760,000 Arab-Palestinian refugees that has created this hatred. It was this hatred that created the refugees. Had six Arab armies not attacked Israel to destroy it in 1948, there would not have been any refugees.

Gazelles like to die among their people. Falcons don't care where they die.

there really isn't that much to elaborate on...

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere. 2. Chile.... Kissinger had direct personal knowledge of the CIA’s plan to kidnap and murder General René Schneider, the head of the Chilean Armed Forces ... who refused to countenance military intervention in politics. In his hatred for the Allende Government, Kissinger even outdid Richard Helms ... who warned him that a coup in such a stable democracy would be hard to procure. The murder of Schneider nonetheless went ahead, at Kissinger’s urging and with American financing, just between Allende’s election and his confirmation.... This was one of the relatively few times that Mr Kissinger (his success in getting people to call him ‘Doctor’ is greater than that of most PhDs) involved himself in the assassination of a single named individual rather than the slaughter of anonymous thousands. His jocular remark on this occasion—‘I don’t see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible’—suggests he may have been having the best of times.... 3. Cyprus.... Kissinger approved of the preparations by Greek Cypriot fascists for the murder of President Makarios, and sanctioned the coup which tried to extend the rule of the Athens junta (a favoured client of his) to the island. When despite great waste of life this coup failed in its objective, which was also Kissinger’s, of enforced partition, Kissinger promiscuously switched sides to support an even bloodier intervention by Turkey. Thomas Boyatt ... went to Kissinger in advance of the anti-Makarios putsch and warned him that it could lead to a civil war. ‘Spare me the civics lecture,’ replied Kissinger, who as you can readily see had an aphorism for all occasions. 4. Kurdistan. Having endorsed the covert policy of supporting a Kurdish revolt in northern Iraq between 1974 and 1975, with ‘deniable’ assistance also provided by Israel and the Shah of Iran, Kissinger made it plain to his subordinates that the Kurds were not to be allowed to win, but were to be employed for their nuisance value alone. They were not to be told that this was the case, but soon found out when the Shah and Saddam Hussein composed their differences, and American aid to Kurdistan was cut off. Hardened CIA hands went to Kissinger ... for an aid programme for the many thousands of Kurdish refugees who were thus abruptly created.... The apercu of the day was: ‘foreign policy should not he confused with missionary work.’ Saddam Hussein heartily concurred. 5. East Timor. The day after Kissinger left Djakarta in 1975, the Armed Forces of Indonesia employed American weapons to invade and subjugate the independent former Portuguese colony of East Timor. Isaacson gives a figure of 100,000 deaths resulting from the occupation, or one-seventh of the population, and there are good judges who put this estimate on the low side. Kissinger was furious when news of his own collusion was leaked, because as well as breaking international law the Indonesians were also violating an agreement with the United States.... Monroe Leigh ... pointed out this awkward latter fact. Kissinger snapped: ‘The Israelis when they go into Lebanon—when was the last time we protested that?’ A good question, even if it did not and does not lie especially well in his mouth. It goes on and on and on until one cannot eat enough to vomit enough.

I summarize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as two peaceful peoples who form the majority, caught in the crossfire between extremists who are the minority—each dreaming of annihilating the other they call enemy and danger, and extending their control from the water to the water, fueled by hate, revenge and anger.

All questions of right to one side, I have never been able to banish the queasy inner suspicion that Israel just did not look, or feel, either permanent or sustainable. I felt this when sitting in the old Ottoman courtyards of Jerusalem, and I felt it even more when I saw the hideous 'Fort Condo' settlements that had been thrown up around the city in order to give the opposite impression. If the statelet was only based on a narrow strip of the Mediterranean littoral (god having apparently ordered Moses to lead the Jews to one of the very few parts of the region with absolutely no oil at all), that would be bad enough. But in addition, it involved roosting on top of an ever-growing population that did not welcome the newcomers.

It has never ceased to astonish me that the Arab states have been so eager to go to war against us. Almost from the very beginning of Zionist settlement until today, they have been consumed by hatred for us.

Rami often felt that there were nine or ten Israelis inside him, fighting. The conflicted one. The shamed one. The enamored one. The bereaved one. The one who marveled at the blimp’s invention. The one who knew the blimp was watching. The one watching back. The one who wanted to be watched. The anarchist. The protester. The one sick and tired of all the seeing.

In the conflict between Israelis and Arabs you have wounded civilizations — the Arabs have been wounded in their dealings with the West, and an insecure Jewish people have gone through terrible disasters and traumas. There is no end to the Jewish quest for security, and there is no end for the Arab quest for redress and dignity. It is very difficult to reconcile the two.

I went to interview some of these early Jewish colonial zealots—written off in those days as mere 'fringe' elements—and found that they called themselves Gush Emunim or—it sounded just as bad in English—'The Bloc of the Faithful.' Why not just say 'Party of God' and have done with it? At least they didn't have the nerve to say that they stole other people's land because their own home in Poland or Belarus had been taken from them. They said they took the land because god had given it to them from time immemorial. In the noisome town of Hebron, where all of life is focused on a supposedly sacred boneyard in a dank local cave, one of the world's less pretty sights is that of supposed yeshivah students toting submachine guns and humbling the Arab inhabitants. When I asked one of these charmers where he got his legal authority to be a squatter, he flung his hand, index finger outstretched, toward the sky.

This confirmation problem pervades our modern life, since most conflicts have at their root the following mental bias: when Arabs and Israelis watch news reports they see different stories in the same succession of events. Likewise, Democrats and Republicans look at different parts of the same data and never converge to the same opinions. Once your mind is inhabited with a certain view of the world, you will tend to only consider instances proving you to be right. Paradoxically, the more information you have, the more justified you will feel in your views.

Ben-Gurion articulated clearly the place of expulsion in the future of the Zionist project in Palestine when he wrote that same year, "With compulsory transfer we would have a vast area for settlement... I support compulsory transfer. I don't see anything immoral in it.

The conflict is not between the Palestinians and the Israelis. It’s between the Arab world and Israel.

Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.

When my father was growing up inside the Old City of Jerusalem, he and his friends liked to trade desserts after diner.

We have become Gabriel's nightmare and Satan's fantasy.

To call genocide as self-defense, may be textbook diplomacy. Killing innocents to keep control, is an act of terrorist hypocrisy.

In a speech at Bar Ilan university, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the first time endorses the establishment of a Palestinian state.

How can we speak to each other like equals when one of us is holding a gun?

فيما كانت تعمل إسرائيل طبقاً لقواعد الميدان .. كان الجانب العربي يعمل من هامش التاريخ

Occupation has no place in a civilized society. It is time Palestine redeemed freedom from Israeli occupation, Scotland from British occupation, and Jammu and Kashmir from Indian occupation.

Anyone who knows the basics of what is happening in Gaza knows that the more people you kill, the more you play into Hamas's hands. They flourish on this shit, after each war, they get more money & more recruits

For Jabotinsky, the confrontation between Jews and Arabs was rooted in the fact that both sides shared historical rights to the same land. This was not a struggle between right and wrong, but between right and right.

President Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of constructing a new Israel-Palestine peace plan. Kushner had no experience authoring international treaties of any kind, so the announcement was met with skepticism. When Kushner released his plan at the beginning of 2020, he proudly announced that he had “read twenty-five books” on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To date, Israel and Palestine have not achieved peace.

Disputes that were secular in origin, such as the Arab-Israeli conflict, have been allowed to fester and become “holy,” and once they have been sacralized, positions tend to harden and become resistant to pragmatic solutions.

The Palestinian refugee problem could have easily been solved in 1948, just as virtually every other refugee problem in the world has been; and just as the refugee problem of the 800,000 Jews who fled Arab countries during and after 1948 was solved. But, since 1948, Arab countries have deliberately mistreated the Palestinian refugees by refusing to integrate them into their countries and by keeping them in refugee camps—the only refugees in the world to be kept in camps for three generations. The Arab countries did this so as to keep the world’s attention focused on the plight of the Palestinian refugees and to use them as a way to defame and ultimately, they hope, delegitimize and de-Judaize Israel.

Bringing up wrongdoings of the Israeli government is therefore about as relevant to the Holocaust as mentioning the warmongering decisions of recent US administrations in relation to the slaughter of Native Americans when America was first colonized centuries ago. In other words, whatever your opinion of Israel’s handling of the Middle East conflict – and we ourselves have some misgivings on that matter – that is in no way shape or form related to the facts of the Holocaust.

There's a certain amount of ambiguity in my background, what with intermarriages and conversions, but under various readings of three codes which I don’t much respect (Mosaic Law, the Nuremberg Laws, and the Israeli Law of Return) I do qualify as a member of the tribe, and any denial of that in my family has ceased with me. But I would not remove myself to Israel if it meant the continuing expropriation of another people, and if anti-Jewish fascism comes again to the Christian world—or more probably comes at us via the Muslim world—I already consider it an obligation to resist it wherever I live. I would detest myself if I fled from it in any direction. Leo Strauss was right. The Jews will not be 'saved' or 'redeemed.' (Cheer up: neither will anyone else.) They/we will always be in exile whether they are in the greater Jerusalem area or not, and this in some ways is as it should be. They are, or we are, as a friend of Victor Klemperer's once put it to him in a very dark time, condemned and privileged to be 'a seismic people.' A critical register of the general health of civilization is the status of 'the Jewish question.' No insurance policy has ever been devised that can or will cover this risk.

I am not one of those who believes—as Obama is said to believe—that a solution to the Palestinian statehood question would bring an end to Muslim resentment against the United States. (Incidentally, if he really does believe this, his lethargy and impotence in the face of Netanyahu's consistent double-dealing is even more culpable.) The Islamist fanatics have their own agenda, and, as in the case of Hamas and its Iranian backers, they have already demonstrated that nothing but the destruction of Israel and the removal of American influence from the region will possibly satisfy them. No, it is more the case that justice—and a homeland for the Palestinians—is a good and necessary cause in its own right. It is also a special legal and moral responsibility of the United States, which has several times declared a dual-statehood outcome to be its objective.

He took in a premeditated breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled into the nye at his lips, playing a new tune. It was not the sad music of waiting. Nor was it a melody of his heritage. It was a call to the earth. To Allah. To the country within him.

Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn't seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life—the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier—would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic. Again, he could accede politely to my point but carry on somehow as if nothing had been conceded. I came slowly to realize that with Edward, too, I was keeping two sets of books. We agreed on things like the first Palestinian intifadah, another event that took the Western press completely off guard, and we collaborated on a book of essays that asserted and defended Palestinian rights. This was in the now hard-to-remember time when all official recognition was withheld from the PLO. Together we debated Professor Bernard Lewis and Leon Wieseltier at a once-celebrated conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Cambridge in 1986, tossing and goring them somewhat in a duel over academic 'objectivity' in the wider discipline. But even then I was indistinctly aware that Edward didn't feel himself quite at liberty to say certain things, while at the same time feeling rather too much obliged to say certain other things. A low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to Interview magazine in the late 1980s.

The civilized world has abandoned us to our fate. We would never have come back to this land if we weren’t pushed here by the hatred of Europe’s Christians, and now that we’re here, they won’t let us fight, lest we antagonize the Arabs in their midst.

Existence has taught me that a man can live on love and fresh water, on crumbs and promises, but he can never survive insults. And insults are all I've known since I came into the world. Every morning. Every evening. That's all I've seen for my whole life.

The British army’s occupation of Arab territories ended four centuries of Ottoman rule over them. An entirely new political map emerged as six new successor states from the former Ottoman Empire were created: Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan.

When Lebanese Muslims and Palestinians declared jihad on Christians in 1975, we didn’t even know what that word meant. We had taken the Palestinians in, giving them refuge in our country, allowing them to study side by side with us in our schools and universities. We gave them jobs and shared our way of life with them. What started as political war spiraled very fast into a religious war between Muslims and Christians, with Lebanese Muslims joining the PLO fighting the Christians. We didn’t realize the depth of their hatred and resentment toward us as infidels. The more that Christians refused to get involved in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and to allow the Palestinians to use Lebanon as a launching pad from which to attack Israel, the more the Palestinians looked at us as the enemy. Muslims started making statements such as “First comes Saturday, then comes Sunday,” meaning first we fight the Jews, then we come for the Christians. Christian presence, influence, and democracy became an obstacle in the Palestinians' fight against Israel. Koranic verses such as sura 5:51—"Believers, take not Jews and Christians for your friends. They are but friends and protectors to each other"—became the driving force in recruiting Muslim youth. Many Christians barely knew the Bible, let alone the Koran and what it taught about us, the infidels. We should have seen the long-simmering tension between Muslims and Christians beginning to erupt, but we refused to believe that such hatred and such animosity existed. America also failed to recognize this hatred throughout all the attacks launched against it, beginning with the marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983 all the way up to September 11, 2001. It was that horrible day that made Americans finally ask, What is jihad? And why do they hate us? I have a very simple answer for them: because you are “infidels.

Between the Mediterranean and the borders of Iraq, in what was once Palestine, there are now two countries, one Jewish and one Arab, and there is no room for a third. The Palestinians must find the solution to their problem together with that Arab country, Jordan, because a ‘Palestinian state’ between us and Jordan can only become a base from which it will be more convenient to attack and destroy Israel.

Dr. Shammaa’s story was a dreadful one and her voice broke as she told it. “I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames,” she said. “When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours.” Next morning, Amal Shammaa took the tiny corpses out of the mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into flames.

In the end both people realized something so utterly simple and yet horrifyingly distant- by removing the ‘otherness’ from their respective identification, they can embrace a land that animates their historical sense of purpose and direction. They can embrace fate by embracing each other as joint caretakers of a historical location that witnessed rivers of blood and the silent weeping of those who dream of a New Jerusalem.

The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a 'warrant for genocide' forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test.

Ahad Ha’am, for example, visited Palestine and observed that ‘it is difficult to find fields that are not sowed’. He warned prophetically: ‘If a time comes when our people in Palestine develop so that, in small or great measure, they push out the native inhabitants, these will not give up their place easily.

The scariest thing for non-Jewish Americans in talking about Palestinian self-determination is the fear of being or sounding anti-Semitic. The people of Israel are suffering, and Jewish people have a long history of oppression. We still have some responsibility for that, but I think it’s important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel, as a state, and Jewish people. That's kind of a no-brainer, but there is very strong pressure to conflate the two.

Sonnet of Palestine I don't want to wage a war, All I want is to raise a family. I don’t want your empty pity, All I seek is a little humanity. To call genocide as self-defense, May be textbook diplomacy. Killing innocents to keep control, Is an act of terrorist hypocrisy. Brokers may bring ceasefire, But they can never give us liberty. All they do is arrange assemblies, While we suffer through the century. So I say to you o people in luxury, Look at us and you'll know your fallacy.

But she was so happy in her gilded cage, wasn’t she? She ate well, slept well, enjoyed herself She lacked nothing. And then, look, a bunch of mental cases turn her away from her happiness and send her to -- how did you put it? -- to ‘blow herself away’?. The good doctor lives next door to a war but he doesn’t want to hear a word about it. And he thinks his wife shouldn’t worry about it, either. … We’re at war. Some people take up arms; others twiddle their thumbs. And still others make a killing in the name of the Cause. That’s life. … Your wife chose her side. The happiness you offered her smelled of decay. It repulsed her, you get it? She didn’t want your happiness. She couldn’t work on her suntan while her people were bent under the Zionist yoke. Do I have to draw you a picture to make you understand, or do you refuse to look reality in the face?

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (‘nobody’s land’), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. In the early twentieth century a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of ‘a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]’. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored. In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli Parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter ‘p’ does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, ‘f’ stands for ‘p’, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

The Plight of the Palestinians is a cause that should be advocated by every soul / person on Earth. Every human being deserves their human rights. Equally the Jewish people deserve their human rights. God has commanded us to provide justice to all even if its an atom. Advocacy and dialogue is key to the Palestinian and Israeli conflict. #advocate

Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.

Normal people apply butter on bread to feed their child, and most news anchor and reporter apply genocide victims' blood on bread to feed their children

By 1914, approximately 85,000 Jews resided in Palestine, of whom about 35,000 had arrived in recent decades.

every uncompromising ideology reduces faith to an idolatry,

While we enjoy sunrise and all touch of sunlight, the other side of the world suffers from dark times, fireballs, and mourning, like a sunset that ends the day.

Acts of terror committed by a government is still terrorism.

Just a little piece of peace can cultivate the land of Palestine, but inhuman human won't let it do that....

We state it with a pure heart and full confidence that no Jew has ever thought and is not thinking now in any way whatsoever of impinging on Muslim rights and their holy places.

So you have a maniac who says he's representing all of World Jewry, and people say "okay, if he represents all of World Jewry, then the Jews are a problem

The Middle East has been a region of conflict for centuries, and during most of that time, Israel and the Jews had nothing to do with it.

Only within a world shut off from the view of the other side can each side mourn its dead and celebrate its heroes.

In this world hypocrisy killing innocent people more than any disease pandemic and hunger combined.

Everything changed with the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war. By virtually all accounts, it was only after this conflict that The Holocaust became a fixture in American Jewish life.

I've forgotten how to breathe with my lungs I've forgotten speech I'm scared for my language Leave the rest and just bring back my language!

Why should they love us?Why do you think the Arabs are not entitled to resist strangers who come here suddenly as if from another planet, and take away their land and their soil, fields, villages and towns, the graves of their ancestors and their children’s inheritance? We tell ourselves that we only came to this land “to build and be rebuilt”, “to renew our days of old”, “to redeem our ancestors heritage”, etcetera, but you tell me if there is any other people in this world who would welcome with open arms an incursion of hundreds of thousands of strangers, and then millions of strangers, landing from far away with the weird claim that their holy scripture, which they brought with them also from far away, promise this whole land to them and them alone.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. Both Israelis and Palestinians are irresistible forces, and they’re both immovable objects.

Collective memory, the foundation of any culture's narrative, is a historical; mythology, laces with figments of truth, is essential to forming a country's founding identity and maintaining social cohesion.

Nothing could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it. And even then your experience is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells, and of course, the fact that I have the option to leave. I am allowed to see the ocean.

But Arafat's devotion was to the Palestinian cause and not to the Palestinian people. [...] As a result, Arafat delayed the conflict's solution, leaving a legacy of avoidable disaster and unnecessary suffering.

If you think I am wrong, I am wrong for all the right reasons. Dealing with death on a regular basis makes you shallow inside. Your soul sleeps inside your chest, pleading to be woken up. In those dark times in a battle, one bad moment, a step on a mine, a bullet on target, or a lethal explosion, and you are a dismembered lifeless memory. Your dead flesh lays on the hot sand which burns your bare skin if you are unlucky enough not to be numb.

The mindset and basic values of Israeli Jewish society and Palestinian Muslim society are so different and mutually exclusive as to render a vision of binational statehood tenable only in the most disconnected and unrealistic of minds.

Criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest.

I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.

On a collective level, the mind-set “We are right and they are wrong” is particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long-standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own “story,” that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks of the possibility of “accommodating a competing narrative,”3 but in many parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard themselves as victims and the “other” as evil, and because they have conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy, they can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children, without feeling their humanity and suffering.

Inevitably came the time when he angrily repudiated his former paladin Yasser Arafat. In fact, he described him to me as 'the Palestinian blend of Marshal Petaín and Papa Doc.' But the main problem, alas, remained the same. In Edward's moral universe, Arafat could at last be named as a thug and a practitioner of corruption and extortion. But he could only be identified as such to the extent that he was now and at last aligned with an American design. Thus the only truly unpardonable thing about 'The Chairman' was his readiness to appear on the White House lawn with Yitzhak Rabin and Bill Clinton in 1993. I have real knowledge and memory of this, because George Stephanopoulos—whose father's Orthodox church in Ohio and New York had kept him in touch with what was still a predominantly Christian Arab-American opinion—called me more than once from the White House to help beseech Edward to show up at the event. 'The feedback we get from Arab-American voters is this: If it's such a great idea, why isn't Said signing off on it?' When I called him, Edward was grudging and crabby. 'The old man [Arafat] has no right to sign away land.' Really? Then what had the Algiers deal been all about? How could two states come into being without mutual concessions on territory?

اسرائیل آینه‌ی تمام‌نمای جهان معاصر است. وقتی انقلاب فلسطین این موجود را پس می‌زند، بر خلاف دیگر انقلاب‌ها، در حال پس زدن دلایل و عوامل ایجاد اسرائیل است. این پس زدن به معنای پس زدن عقلانیت رایج در جهان است که مدیریت آن را نیز بر عهده دارد و همچنین پس زدن این منطق سیاسی سلطه‌جو و ابعاد تمدنی آن. پس این انقلاب، تولد تمدنی تازه و طلیعه‌های جهانی دیگر است که تعاملات آن هیچ‌گاه موجب تولد چنین رژیمی نخواهد بود. تمدن تازه‌ای که تمدن ارزش‌هاست و نه منافع شخصی؛ تمدن عدالت است نه غلبه و تمدن واقعیت است نه رسانه‌های فریب‌کار.

Sources of economic growth are all completely destroyed – the airport (runways demolished, totally closed); the border for trade with Egypt (now with a sniper tower in the middle of the crossing); access to the ocean (completely cut off in the last two years ).

Clearly, it is not simply exegesis that determines how we read the Bible; rather, it is our vested interests, our hopes, and our fears that largely determine our reading. And because the reach of the gracious God of the Bible is toward the other, we ought rightly to be skeptical and suspicious of any reading of the Bible that excludes the other, because it is likely to be informed by vested interest, fears, and hopes that serve self-protection and end in self-destruction. Palestinians’ and Israelis’ fear of the other, said to be grounded in the Bible, has been transposed into a military apparatus that is aimed at the elimination of the other. It is wholly illusionary to imagine that such an agenda is congruent with the God of the Bible who is commonly confessed by Jews and Christians.

The custom to put others in the line of fire is a recurring theme in Judaism. It boils down to the Levite Korahites’ willingness to sacrifice their ordinary Jewish subjects in order to ensure their own survival. This should be a historic warning to modern-day Israelites: their orthodox government would not hesitate to risk the lives of the many for the sake of the survival of the few in the orthodox elite. The citizens of Israel will have to think about how to remove the systemic threat that comes from within their own ranks.

One should never underestimate the power of institutions to try to preserve themselves. One explanation for the thirty-year impasse of the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process”—if at this point one can even call it that—is that on both sides, there are now powerful institutional structures which would lose their entire raison d’être if the conflict ended, but also, a vast “peace apparatus” of NGOs and UN bureaucrats whose careers have become entirely dependent on maintaining the fiction that a “peace process” is, in fact, going on.

There are twenty-two Arab countries, with land thousands of times larger than the entire tiny Jewish state; most of it empty and barren like Israel was before the Jews returned. The so-called Palestinians can settle there, live peacefully and prosper anywhere they choose.

I countered that Syria would have to first dismantle the headquarters of the myriad terrorist organizations housed in Damascus, just as the PLO would have to fight and jail Hamas terrorists, cancel its Covenant, which called for Israel’s destruction, and stop their terrible antisemitic indoctrination of Palestinian schoolchildren, who today are still being taught to seek our annihilation. This last point, which exposes a major reason the Palestinian-Israeli conflict lingers, is seldom covered by the media or discussed by Western elites. My

She helped Shamron into his jacket and kissed his cheek. There was simple ritual in this act. How many times had he separated from his wife after hearing that Jews had been killed by a bomb? He had lost count long ago. He had resigned himself, late in life, that it would never end.

The Zionists indeed learnt well from the Nazis. So well that it seems that their morally repugnant treatment of the Palestinians, and their attempts to destroy Palestinian society within Israel and the occupied territories, reveals them as basically Nazis with beards and black hats.

The plan (Dalet) included the following clear reference to the methods to be employed in the process of cleansing the (Palestinian) population: 'Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously... Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.

Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before. Yet this was an age in which men and women were being pushed toward ever-narrower definitions of themselves, encouraged to call themselves just one thing, Serb or Croat or Israeli or Palestinian or Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Baha'i or Jew, and the narrower their identities became, the greater was the likelihood of conflict between them. Literature's view of human nature encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identification with people not like oneself, but the world was pushing everyone in the opposite direction, toward narrowness, bigotry, tribalism, cultism and war. There were plenty of people who didn't want the universe opened, who would, in fact, prefer it to be shut down quite a bit, and so when artists went to the frontier and pushed they often found powerful forces pushing back. And yet they did what they had to do, even at the price of their own ease, and sometimes their lives.

The main Arab contention has nothing to do with land, one specific border or another, or even the ‘right’ of the conjured Palestinian people to establish an independent country --a twenty-third Arab state. It is the mere existence of Israel that has been and currently is being rejected by the world’s Arab leaders.

The truth was, each side understood they were in a war for communal survival. One side had knives and pistols; the other had secret agents and courts. While each constantly cried out to the world how evil the other was, when they looked one another in the eye . . . they said something different: I will do whatever I have to to survive.

I believe that it is impossible to understand the current situation in the Middle East if one thinks that there is a territorial Arab-Israeli conflict at hand, when in fact, it is clearly a war of religions that unfortunately has no end in sight. To think that this conflict is about land, occupation, racism, apartheid or any other nonsensical media-based and politically created jargon is to play into the hands of those who for so long have taken advantage of the prevalent ignorance of the majority of the world’s public. Make no mistake, this conflict is a religious one, and although Israel is a secular state, it is its ‘Jewish character’ that has the Muslim world up in arms.

I think Zionism - the idea of building a state of Jewish farmers on Arab land in the Middle East - is a stupid idea to begin with...I think it's a bad idea, I think it's a messianic idea, I think it's a superstitious idea... and it guaranteed a quarrel with the Arabs because it meant "we're going to take away from you what's most precious: your land".

Moreover, until the advent of anachronistic European political Zionism at the turn of the 20th century the people of Palestine (Arabic: sha’b Filastin) included Arab Muslims, Arab Christians and Arab Jews. Being a rendering of the Israeli Zionist/Palestinian conflict, historically speaking the binary of Arab versus Jew in Palestine is deeply misleading.

The explanation for this stark difference has to do with how the two cultures define respect. As we saw in chapter 8, many Asian people show esteem by minimizing conflict. But Israelis, say the researchers, “are not likely to view [disagreement] as a sign of disrespect, but as a signal that the opposing party is concerned and is passionately engaged in the task.

Meaning of the "White House" to the war victim children of Syria or Palestine is nothing but just a white-painted house. Perhaps, they imagine Casper lives there...or maybe some dead people. They really don't have time to think about it. Because they are busy discovering their own bloody limbs along with their parents' dead bodies from the ashes of their burnt homes.

Whose truth do you want to know, Dr. Amin Jaafari? The truth of a Bedouin who thinks he’s free and clear because he’s got an Israeli passport? The truth of a serviceable Arab per excellence who’s honored wherever he goes, who gets invited to fancy parties by people who want to show how tolerant and considerate they are? The truth of someone who thinks he can change sides like changing a shirt, with no trace left behind? Is that the truth you’re looking for, or is it the one you’re running away from? What planet do you live on, sir? … Our cities are being buried by machines on caterpillar tracks, our patron saints don’t know which way to turn, and you, simply because you’re nice and warm in your golden cage, refuse to see the inferno consuming us.

« les juifs d'Israël, descendants des victimes d'un apartheid nommé ghetto, ghettoïsent les Palestiniens. Les juifs qui furent humiliés, méprisés, persécutés, humilient, méprisent et persécutent les Palestiniens. Les juifs qui furent victimes d'un ordre impitoyable imposent leur ordre impitoyable aux Palestiniens. Les juifs victimes de l'inhumanité montrent une terrible inhumanité »

Mungu alilibariki taifa la Israeli katika misingi ya kidini na si katika misingi ya kisiasa au misingi ya kihistoria; na asili ya dini ya Kikristo ni kutoka katika taifa hilo ambalo Biblia imelitaja kama taifa teule la Mwenyezi Mungu. Mgogoro wa Israeli na Palestina ulianzishwa na Israeli mwenyewe. Yakobo alipokea baraka iliyokuwa si ya kwake kwa kutumia hila ya Rebeka. Baraka ya Yakobo ilikuwa ya Esau.

A jobboldal legerősebb érve mindig a félelem. Nem mondják ki fennhangon, mert szégyellik, de a leginkább meggyőző érvük az, hogy valójában félnek. És ez még csak nem is ostobaság. Én magam is félek az araboktól. Ha újrakezdhetném a béketárgyalásokat, szóvá tenném az araboktól való félelmünket. Őszinte párbeszédet kell folytatnunk arról, hogy a zsidók félnek az üldöztetéstől és a megsemmisüléstől." Ámosz Oz

A lot of Israelis have begun to talk of ‘two Jewish societies’ in Israel, some even talk about ‘two Jewish peoples’ within the Israeli Jewish nation. What holds them together? The conflict, of course. The occupation. The perpetual state of war … It is not that the Israeli–Arab conflict has been forced on Israel. Rather, it’s the other way around: Israel keeps up the conflict, because it needs the conflict for its very existence.

The fixation with Israel/Palestine does sometimes return, but the magnitude of what is going on elsewhere has finally enabled at least some observers to understand that the problems of the region are not down to the existence of Israel. That was a lie peddled by the Arab dictators as they sought to deflect attention from their own brutality, and it was bought by many people across the area and the dictators’ useful idiots in the West. Nevertheless the Israeli/Palestinian joint tragedy continues, and such is the obsession with this tiny piece of land that it may again come to be considered by some to be the most pressing conflict in the world. The Ottomans had regarded the area west of the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Coast as a part of the region of Syria. They called it Filistina. After the First World War, under the British Mandate this became Palestine.

There used to be a middle class here – recently. We also get reports that in the past, Gazan flower shipments to Europe were delayed for two weeks at the Erez crossing for security inspections. You can imagine the value of two-week-old cut flowers in the European market, so that market dried up. And then the bulldozers come and take out people’s vegetable farms and gardens. What is left for people? Tell me if you can think of anything. I can’t.

East Germany brought down their wall in 1989 as a sign of surrender. The Soviet experiment had failed, and the Eastern bloc realized they couldn't win the Cold War. The falling Berlin Wall was their white flag. The walls I'd visited, though, expressed the opposite. The rising of these walls was the surrender. The walls stood as evidence that their conflicts were unwinnable and permanent. When diplomacy and negotiation crumbles, when the motivation to find solutions wanes and dies, when governments resign themselves to failure, the walls go up. Instead of trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we build a wall. Instead of finding a way for Catholics and Protestants to live together in Belfast, we build a wall. Instead of addressing the despair that leads migrants across our borders, we build a wall. The walls admit our defeat. We throw up a wall right after we throw up our hands.

So it's 2019. I'm gonna say the right thing to do is for the US to declare bankruptcy (Trump can do it… done it before…), and dismantle the criminal state of Israel as it exists today. Unfortunately, politicians are so full of shit and AIPAC money, and the economy is so addicted to war, and the US population is so fucking stupid... that we’ll probably have to go and try to fuck up another two or three countries before moving on to a decent, honest life.

That an Israeli soldier could bulldoze 189 olive trees on the Land he claims is part of the "God-given Land" is something I will never comprehend. Did he not consider the possibility that God might get angry? Did he not realize that it was a tree he was running over? If a Palestinian bulldozer were ever invented (Haha, I know!) and I were given the chance to be in an orchard, in Haifa for instance, I would never uproot a tree an Israeli planted. No Palestinian would. To Palestinians, the tree is sacred, and so is the Land bearing it. And as I talk about Gaza, I remember that Gaza is but a little part of Pales tine. I remember that Palestine is bigger than Gaza. Palestine is the West Bank; Palestine is Ramallah; Palestine is Nablus; Palestine is Jenin; Palestine is Tulkarm; Palestine is Bethlehem; Palestine, most importantly, is Yafa and Haifa and Akka and all those cities that Israel wants us to forget about.

People of faith can read the Bible so that almost any perspective on a current issue will find some support in the Bible. That rich and multivoiced offering in the Bible is what makes appeals to it so tempting—and yet so tricky and hazardous, because much of our reading of the Bible turns out to be an echo of what we thought anyway. THE ISSUE OF LAND The dispute between Palestinians and Israelis is elementally about land and secondarily about security and human rights.

But what choice does it have? As long as Israel is perceived by its enemies to be vulnerable, many Arabs and radical Muslims will continue to make Israelis kill them... When Israeli soldiers kill Arabs by accident, they mourn—and it causes psychological damage to those soldiers, and to all of Israeli society. The wars the Arab states have instigated are bloody and cruel, and a heavy price is paid by Israel, even when it wins. And win it must, because one loss means the loss of Israel.

This basic asymmetry with respect to archives is a reflection of the asymmetry between the two sides. While one side, operating through a modern nation-state, has used its documentary and other resources to produce a version of its history that has subtly shaped the way the world sees the conflict, a version that is now ironically being undermined from within via use of these same resources, the production of a standard “official” Palestinian narrative was never really possible on the other side.

Israeli intelligence, on the other hand, relied mostly on human resources—had countless spies in mosques, Islamic organizations, and leadership roles; and had no problem recruiting even the most dangerous terrorists. They knew they had to have eyes and ears on the inside, along with minds that understood motives and emotions and could connect the dots. America understood neither Islamic culture nor its ideology. That, combined with open borders and lax security made it a much softer target than Israel.

adult men enjoy having sex with one another, and they don’t harm anyone while doing so, why should it be wrong, and why should we outlaw it? It is a private matter between these two men, and they are free to decide about it according to their own personal feelings. If in the Middle Ages two men confessed to a priest that they were in love with one another, and that they had never felt so happy, their good feelings would not have changed the priest’s damning judgement – indeed, their lack of guilt would only have worsened the situation. Today, in contrast, if two men are in love, they are told: ‘If it feels good – do it! Don’t let any priest mess with your mind. Just follow your heart. You know best what’s good for you.’ Interestingly enough, today even religious zealots adopt this humanistic discourse when they want to influence public opinion. For example, every year for the past decade the Israeli LGBT community has held a gay pride parade in the streets of Jerusalem. It’s a unique day of harmony in this conflict-riven city, because it is the one occasion when religious Jews, Muslims and Christians suddenly find a common cause – they all fume in accord against the gay parade. What’s really interesting, though, is the argument they use. They don’t say, ‘These sinners shouldn’t hold a gay parade because God forbids homosexuality.’ Rather, they explain to every available microphone and TV camera that ‘seeing a gay parade passing through the holy city of Jerusalem hurts our feelings. Just as gay people want us to respect their feelings, they should respect ours.’ On 7 January 2015 Muslim fanatics massacred several staff members of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, because the magazine published caricatures of the prophet Muhammad. In the following days, many Muslim organisations condemned the attack, yet some could not resist adding a ‘but’ clause. For example, the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate denounced the terrorists for their use of violence, but in the same breath denounced the magazine for ‘hurting the feelings of millions of Muslims across the world’.2 Note that the Syndicate did not blame the magazine for disobeying God’s will. That’s what we call progress.

Most observers and analysts deny the duality. The ones on the left address occupation and overlook intimidation, while the ones on the wight address intimidation and dismiss occupation. But the truth is that without incorporating both elements into one worldview, one cannot grasp Israel or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Any school of thought that does not relate to seriously to these two fundamental is bound to be flawed and futile. Only a third approach that internalizes both intimidation and occupation can be realistic and moral and get the Israel story right.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

Israel is 640 times smaller than the Arab world. The combined size of the 21 Arab states is 5.3 million square miles! That’s almost double the size of the United States! A large percentage of the Arab lands are uninhabited and their soil is as varied as it was Israel’s prior to Jewish immigration. The Arab-Israeli question is obviously not about the Arab need for more land -they have more than they could possibly ever need- rather it is a religious conflict rooted in Arab hatred, intolerance and contempt, turned into an apparent political struggle where the victimizer is portrayed as the victim.

The graphics of Israeli life, death, and detention are more vibrant; it conforms to the norm of human life already established, is then more of a life, is life, whereas Palestinian life is either no life, a shadow-life, or a threat to life as we know it. In this last form, it has undergone a full transformation into arsenal or spectral threat, figuring an infinite threat against which a limitless “defense” formulates itself. That defense without limit then embodies the principles of attack without limit (without shame, and without regard for established international protocols regarding war crimes).

We make ourselves out to be innocent victims of attack. It’s true that in August the attackers were Arabs. Since they have no army, they cannot observe the rules of the game. They availed themselves of all the barbaric means typical of an anticolonialist rebellion. But we need to look at the deepest sources of the uprising. We have spent twelve years in Palestine without having even once asked the Arabs’ consent, without conducting any sort of discussion with the people living in this land. We have trusted solely to British power. We have set ourselves goals that must inevitably lead to conflict. (Lavsky 1990, 204)

Many scholars believe the Arab-Israeli conflict did not start out as a war between religions, but as a territorial dispute between two competing groups—Jews and Arabs—with nationalist claims and aspirations, and that religion was one of the characteristics that identified the competing nationalist groups. I will agree that that is what it might look like on the surface. But for these two particular groups whose religion, at least for the Muslims, is a significant daily part of their lives, it is hard to believe that religious beliefs do not influence their thinking and aspirations. All you have to do is read a few scriptures from the Koran about the Jews and hear the holy book recited weekly in every mosque and you’ll begin to understand where this resentment is coming from, regardless of what country this hate verbiage is coming out of. The major difference between the religions is that Judaism does not aspire to convert the world as Islam does. Jews can live within the context of a different society without seeking converts. Jews do not go to temple every Friday and read that God’s will is victory over all Muslims. They do not read that all Muslims are apes and pigs because they are cursed by Allah, which is what Muslims teach about Jews in their mosques. Muslims are out to convert everyone. Once they have the upper hand, they want to run the whole show and subject everyone to their own rules.

Facilitated by British rule over Palestine during the interwar period, Zionist settlement patterns focused strategically on Palestine's agriculturally rich valleys and coastal plains, largely disregarding the centres of ancient Jewish civilization that were located in Palestine's central hilly regions. This geographical division between the plains and the hills led to a profound redefinition of the territorial location of the Jewish homeland in the first half of the 20th century. When the 1937 Peel partition plan and the 1947 UN partition plan proposed a Jewish state be established in Palestine, they mapped out the coastal and valley areas, where Zionist land purchases were highest relative to the landholdings of the indigenous Arab population.

TRUMP HAD MADE history. He was able to do so because of his inherent irreverence. He was bound by few conventions. This is why he could brush aside the traditional thinking of the foreign policy elite on such matters as the Iran nuclear deal and recognizing Jerusalem and the Golan. Yet, paradoxically, his initial fixation on that old axiomatic truth—that an Israeli-Palestinian peace would solve the problems of the Middle East and that the key to achieving that peace was overcoming Israeli intransigence—delayed the launch of the historic peace accords between Israel and Arab states to the end of his term rather than its beginning, as I had hoped. “By that time,” as Ron Dermer told Jared Kushner, we were “running out of runway to get more peace treaties,” which could have effectively ended the Israeli-Arab conflict.

American progressives cannot wave a magic wand and solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, but we can certainly take action. We can push Israel to allow the people of Gaza the freedom to rebuild their economy. We can put real pressure on Israel to stop expanding its settlements, and to allow Palestinian towns to grow, as well as allow the free movement of Palestinians in the West Bank. We can make it clear that our democratic values demand that we support Palestinians having the same right to a national existence as Israelis do, and the same right to live in peace and security. We can press Israel to stop blocking the rights that Palestinians are just as entitled to as anyone else. In short, we can act on our principles, which maintain that oppressive conditions diminish life for all but the very few who profit from them.

In the American context, as we have seen, settler colonialism functions as an all-purpose explanation for capitalism, sexism, and climate change. Adding the Israel-Palestinian conflict to the mix is powerfully energizing, giving a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract. The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler colonial model must be made to fit. This Procrustean process is never more conspicuous than when Western progresskves insist that the struggle for LGBTQ rights and the struggle to liberate Palestine are one and the same. ... .... To make Israel fit its ideologically allotted role, theorists of settler colonialism must similarly redefine two central concepts: indigeneity and genocide.

Peace cannot require Palestinians to acquiesce to the denial of what was done to them. Neither can it require Israeli Jews to view their own presence in Palestine as illegitimate or to change their belief in their right to live there because of ancient historical and spiritual ties. Peace, rather, must be based on how we act toward each other now. It is unacceptable for a Palestinian to draw on his history of oppression and suffering to justify harming innocent Israeli civilians. It is equally unacceptable for an Israeli to invoke his belief in an ancient covenant between God and Abraham to justify bulldozing the home and seizing the land of a Palestinian farmer. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which proposes a political framework for a resolution to the conflict in Ireland, and which was overwhelmingly endorsed in referendums, sets out two principles from which Palestinians and Israelis could learn. First “[i]t is recognized that victims have a right to remember as well as to contribute to a changed society.” Second, whatever political arrangements are freely and democratically chosen for the governance of Northern Ireland, the power of the government “shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions and shall be founded on the principles of full respect for, and equality of civil, political, social, and cultural rights, of freedom from discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and of just and equal treatment for the identity, ethos, and aspirations of both communities.” Northern Ireland is still a long way from achieving this ideal, but life has vastly improved since the worst days of “the Troubles” and it is a paradise on earth compared to Palestine/Israel.

I believe this quasi-religious attitude explains the repeated misunderstandings and deficiencies of revolutionary Marxism in the face of all the major events that have accompanied decolonization—such as the secessions of Katanga and Rhodesia, the Biafra war, and even the Algerian war and the Israeli-Arab conflict. Marxists seem to circle round and round these problems without knowing from which angle to tackle them. Innumerable ‘mini-theories’ are produced that contradict one another; words are refuted by other words; and no current doctrine of imperialism is accepted by more than a small group, even within the great ‘left-wing’ parties themselves on those occasions when reflection is encouraged, allowed or simply tolerated. This confusion becomes unbearable when the inadequacy of the old concepts is recognized and people try to save them with a multitude of deductive developments instead of firmly replacing them by new ones.

Looking at a situation like the Israel-Palestine conflict, Americans are likely to react with puzzlement when they see ever more violent and provocative acts that target innocent civilians. We are tempted to ask: do the terrorists not realize that they will enrage the Israelis, and drive them to new acts of repression? The answer of course is that they know this very well, and this is exactly what they want. From our normal point of view, this seems incomprehensible. If we are doing something wrong, we do not want to invite the police to come in and try and stop us, especially if repression will result in the deaths or imprisonment of many of our followers. In a terrorist war, however, repression is often valuable because it escalates the growing war, and forces people to choose between the government and the terrorists. The terror/repression cycle makes it virtually impossible for anyone to remain a moderate. By increasing polarization within a society, terrorism makes the continuation of the existing order impossible. Once again, let us take the suicide bombing example. After each new incident, Israeli authorities tightened restrictions on Palestinian communities, arrested new suspects, and undertook retaliatory strikes. As the crisis escalated, they occupied or reoccupied Palestinian cities, destroying Palestinian infrastructure. The result, naturally, was massive Palestinian hostility and anger, which made further attacks more likely in the future. The violence made it more difficult for moderate leaders on both sides to negotiate. In the long term, the continuing confrontation makes it more likely that ever more extreme leaders will be chosen on each side, pledged not to negotiate with the enemy. The process of polarization is all the more probably when terrorists deliberately choose targets that they know will cause outrage and revulsion, such as attacks on cherished national symbols, on civilians, and even children. We can also think of this in individual terms. Imagine an ordinary Palestinian Arab who has little interest in politics and who disapproves of terrorist violence. However, after a suicide bombing, he finds that he is subject to all kinds of official repression, as the police and army hold him for long periods at security checkpoints, search his home for weapons, and perhaps arrest or interrogate him as a possible suspect. That process has the effect of making him see himself in more nationalistic (or Islamic) terms, stirs his hostility to the Israeli regime, and gives him a new sympathy for the militant or terrorist cause. The Israeli response to terrorism is also valuable for the terrorists in global publicity terms, since the international media attack Israel for its repression of civilians. Hamas military commander Salah Sh’hadeh, quoted earlier, was killed in an Israeli raid on Gaza in 2002, an act which by any normal standards of warfare would represent a major Israeli victory. In this case though, the killing provoked ferocious criticism of Israel by the U.S. and western Europe, and made Israel’s diplomatic situation much more difficult. In short, a terrorist attack itself may or may not attract widespread publicity, but the official response to it very likely will. In saying this, I am not suggesting that governments should not respond to terrorism, or that retaliation is in any sense morally comparable to the original attacks. Many historical examples show that terrorism can be uprooted and defeated, and military action is often an essential part of the official response. But terrorism operates on a logic quite different from that of most conventional politics and law enforcement, and concepts like defeat and victory must be understood quite differently from in a regular war.

In reality, Jones often seemed ill-disposed toward Israel. Though he had trained with the IDF as a young Marine and, as Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, oversaw the U.S.-Israel military alliance, the State Department mission he headed to the West Bank in 2007 left him questioning Israel’s commitment to peace. He returned convinced that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would end all other Middle East disputes. “Of all the problems the administration faces globally,” he told the J Street conference, “I would recommend to the president…to solve this one. This is the epicenter.” The notion of “linkage”—all Middle Eastern disputes are tied to that between Israel and Palestinians—became doctrine in the Obama administration and Jones’s belief in it bordered on the religious. As he once confessed to an Israeli audience, “If God had appeared in front of the president and said he could do one thing on the planet it would be the two-state solution.

Israel has an extremely vibrant hi-tech sector, and a cutting-edge cyber-security industry. At the same time it is also locked into a deadly conflict with the Palestinians, and at least some of its leaders, generals and citizens might well be happy to create a total surveillance regime in the West Bank as soon as they have the necessary technology. Already today whenever Palestinians make a phone call, post something on Facebook or travel from one city to another they are likely to be monitored by Israeli microphones, cameras, drones or spy software. The gathered data is then analysed with the aid of Big Data algorithms. This helps the Israeli security forces to pinpoint and neutralise potential threats without having to place too many boots on the ground. The Palestinians may administer some towns and villages in the West Bank, but the Israelis control the sky, the airwaves and cyberspace. It therefore takes surprisingly few Israeli soldiers to effectively control about 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank.

FACING A TOUGH election, I also saw that the P5+1 and Iran were racing to a dangerous nuclear agreement that would pave Iran’s path to the bomb. Under the impending agreement, Iran would be able to freely enrich uranium within a few years. Becoming a threshold nuclear power with a nuclear arsenal, Iran would jeopardize the very existence of Israel. I had to fight this. But how could I possibly do it? The polls showed I could soon be out of office. On Friday, January 8, 2015, I received a fateful call from Ron Dermer from our embassy in Washington. He told me that Speaker of the House John Boehner had called him asking whether I would be willing to address a joint meeting of Congress on the dangers of the impending nuclear deal. It was a monumental decision. This would not just be another speech. I would be going into the lion’s den in Washington to challenge a sitting American president. Stirring up such a hornets’ nest on the eve of an Israeli election could have devastating political consequences. The nuclear deal was Obama’s top priority. Blocking it was my top priority. Placing this conflict on such a global stage would put me on a head-on collision course with the president of the United States. Yet I was given the opportunity to speak before Congress and the American people on a matter vital to Israel’s very survival. I felt the pull of history. Such an invitation could not be declined. “The answer is yes, in principle,” I said to Ron. That still left me time to think everything through. Dermer began working on the details with Boehner. We settled on March 3 as the date of the speech, to coincide with AIPAC’s annual conference. I would have six weeks to prepare the most important speech of my life. Word spread that I would be giving the speech just a few days after we picked the date, and a chorus of condemnation erupted like a volcano. Statements like “Netanyahu is destroying our alliance with the United States” and “an act of enormous irresponsibility” flooded the press, the media, and the Knesset. In the US, Dermer personally met with dozens of Democratic

THE EGO IS NOT PERSONAL On a collective level, the mind-set “We are right and they are wrong” is particularly deeply entrenched in those parts of the world where conflict between two nations, races, tribes, religions, or ideologies is long-standing, extreme, and endemic. Both sides of the conflict are equally identified with their own perspective, their own “story,” that is to say, identified with thought. Both are equally incapable of seeing that another perspective, another story, may exist and also be valid. Israeli writer Y. Halevi speaks of the possibility of “accommodating a competing narrative,”3 but in many parts of the world, people are not yet able or willing to do that. Both sides believe themselves to be in possession of the truth. Both regard themselves as victims and the “other” as evil, and because they have conceptualized and thereby dehumanized the other as the enemy, they can kill and inflict all kinds of violence on the other, even on children, without feeling their humanity and suffering. They become trapped in an insane spiral of perpetration and retribution, action and reaction.

the Iranian Revolution would take on the profound significance that it has, that its legacy would mark it as one of the most important political developments of the modern age. If at first glance this seems a tad hyperbolic, consider what that revolution has wrought. In the forty-six years since its success, the Western and Islamic worlds have engaged in what many on both sides regard as an existential confrontation, one marked by revanchist religious fundamentalism and state-sponsored terrorism on one side and by paranoia and ultranationalist bigotry on the other. It has colored almost every political and economic development in the Middle East during that time, a gamut that spans everything from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to international trade and energy policy. While the effects of the revolution have obviously been most profoundly felt within Iran itself, they have been only slightly less so in the United States. The collapse of the Iranian monarchy brought an abrupt end to one of the most important economic and military alliances the United States had established anywhere in the world. Its aftershocks led to the fall of an American president and the advent of a new administration intent on re-exerting American influence abroad through massive rearmament and the sponsorship of proxy wars. The radically altered Middle Eastern chessboard created by the revolution has led directly to some of America’s greatest missteps in the region over the past four decades—to name but two, the 1983 intervention in Beirut that left nearly three hundred American servicemen dead and the early embrace of Iraq’s despotic Saddam Hussein—and it has been a crucial contributing factor in most others: the disastrous 2003 American invasion of Iraq, its ham-fisted approach to the Syrian civil war and the rise of ISIS. Today, the specter of revolutionary Iran continues to drive American foreign policy in such disparate corners of the Middle East as Lebanon and Yemen and Israel; remains a point of division between Washington and its European allies in how best to deal with Iran’s ongoing and highly contentious nuclear energy program; and poses a chief complicating factor in Western efforts to aid Ukraine in its fight against Russian invaders.

He was walking down a narrow street in Beirut, Lebanon, the air thick with the smell of Arabic coffee and grilled chicken. It was midday, and he was sweating badly beneath his flannel shirt. The so-called South Lebanon conflict, the Israeli occupation, which had begun in 1982 and would last until 2000, was in its fifth year. The small white Fiat came screeching around the corner with four masked men inside. His cover was that of an aid worker from Chicago and he wasn’t strapped. But now he wished he had a weapon, if only to have the option of ending it before they took him. He knew what that would mean. The torture first, followed by the years of solitary. Then his corpse would be lifted from the trunk of a car and thrown into a drainage ditch. By the time it was found, the insects would’ve had a feast and his mother would have nightmares, because the authorities would not allow her to see his face when they flew his body home. He didn’t run, because the only place to run was back the way he’d come, and a second vehicle had already stopped halfway through a three-point turn, all but blocking off the street. They exited the Fiat fast. He was fit and trained, but he knew they’d only make it worse for him in the close confines of the car if he fought them. There was a time for that and a time for raising your hands, he’d learned. He took an instep hard in the groin, and a cosh over the back of his head as he doubled over. He blacked out then. The makeshift cell Hezbollah had kept him in in Lebanon was a bare concrete room, three metres square, without windows or artificial light. The door was wooden, reinforced with iron strips. When they first dragged him there, he lay in the filth that other men had made. They left him naked, his wrists and ankles chained. He was gagged with rag and tape. They had broken his nose and split his lips. Each day they fed him on half-rancid scraps like he’d seen people toss to skinny dogs. He drank only tepid water. Occasionally, he heard the muted sound of children laughing, and smelt a faint waft of jasmine. And then he could not say for certain how long he had been there; a month, maybe two. But his muscles had wasted and he ached in every joint. After they had said their morning prayers, they liked to hang him upside down and beat the soles of his feet with sand-filled lengths of rubber hose. His chest was burned with foul-smelling cigarettes. When he was stubborn, they lay him bound in a narrow structure shaped like a grow tunnel in a dusty courtyard. The fierce sun blazed upon the corrugated iron for hours, and he would pass out with the heat. When he woke up, he had blisters on his skin, and was riddled with sand fly and red ant bites. The duo were good at what they did. He guessed the one with the grey beard had honed his skills on Jewish conscripts over many years, the younger one on his own hapless people, perhaps. They looked to him like father and son. They took him to the edge of consciousness before easing off and bringing him back with buckets of fetid water. Then they rubbed jagged salt into the fresh wounds to make him moan with pain. They asked the same question over and over until it sounded like a perverse mantra. “Who is The Mandarin? His name? Who is The Mandarin?” He took to trying to remember what he looked like, the architecture of his own face beneath the scruffy beard that now covered it, and found himself flinching at the slightest sound. They had peeled back his defences with a shrewdness and deliberation that had both surprised and terrified him. By the time they freed him, he was a different man.  

After the Hebron Agreement there was the briefest of honeymoons with the Clinton administration. Clinton sent me a letter commending me for my “courage” for making a tough decision. He sent Arafat a similar letter. I thought that was peculiar since the only courage Arafat displayed was the courage to receive the Palestinian neighborhoods we had transferred to his control. But this was clearly as good as it was going to get. “Netanyahu and Arafat are both allies of the United States,” the White House briefed Israeli reporters.3 This was incredible. The democratically elected leader of the staunchest ally of the US and the leader of a terrorist organization that had murdered hundreds of Americans were put on equal footing. But such was the diplomatic mind-set of Washington in those days. The administration suffered from double-barreled myopia. First, it refused to see that the core of our conflict with the Palestinians was the persistent Palestinian refusal to recognize a Jewish state in any boundary. Second, it refused to really internalize that Israel’s government was dependent on a parliamentary system in which the prime minister could be toppled at any moment by the slimmest of majorities.

Not everybody can simply wake up one morning, brush his teeth, drink a cup of coffee and kill a god! To murder a deity you need to even stronger than the god as well as infinitely malicious and evil. Whoever murdered Jesus, a warm-hearted deity radiating love, he must have been stronger than he and also shrewd and abominable. Those accursed god-killers were only able to kill god on condition that they really possessed monstrous resources of strength and wickedness. And so that is indeed what the jews possess in the deepest recesses of the Jews-hater's imagination. We are all Judas. Even eighty generations later we are still Judas. But the truth, my young friend, the real truth, we can behold before our very eyes here in the land of Israel: the modern Jew who has sprung up here, just like his ancient predecessor, is neither strong nor malicious, but hedonistic, with an ostentatious of wisdom, boisterous, confused and consumed by suspicions and fear. Yes indeed. Chaim Weizmann once said, in a moment of despair, that there can never be such a thing as a Jewish state, because it contains an inbuilt contradiction: if it is a state it will not be Jewish, and if it is Jewish it will certainly not be a state.

What about Jerusalem? When discussing the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, pundits and politicians often tell us that Jerusalem is one of the holy cities of Islam—indeed, its third holiest city, right after Mecca and Medina. But in reality, the Islamic claim to Jerusalem is extremely tenuous, based only on a legendary journey of Muhammad—a journey that is at best a dream and at worst a fabrication. The Koran refers to this journey only obliquely and in just one place; Islamic tradition fills in the details and connects Jerusalem with the words of the Koran. But the Koran itself never mentions Jerusalem even once—an exceptionally inconvenient fact for Muslims who claim that the Palestinians must have a share of Jerusalem because the city is sacred to Islam. Muhammad’s famous Night Journey is the basis of the Islamic claim to Jerusalem. The Koran’s sole reference to this journey appears in the first verse of sura 17, which says that Allah took Muhammad from “the Sacred Mosque” in Mecca “to the farthest [al-aqsa] Mosque.” There was no mosque in Jerusalem at this time, so the “farthest” mosque probably wasn’t really the one that now bears that name in Jerusalem, the Al-Aqsa mosque located on the Temple Mount. Nevertheless, Islamic tradition is firm that this mosque was in Jerusalem.

Statement on Hamas (October 10th, 2023) When Israel strikes, it's "national security" - when Palestine strikes back, it's "terrorism". Just like over two hundred years ago when native americans resisted their homeland being stolen, it was called "Indian Attack". Or like over a hundred years ago when Indian soldiers in the British Army revolted against the empire, in defense of their homeland, it was called "Sepoy Mutiny". The narrative never changes - when the colonizer terrorizes the world, it's given glorious sounding names like "exploration" and "conquest", but if the oppressed so much as utters a word in resistance, it is branded as attack, mutiny and terrorism - so that, the real terrorists can keep on colonizing as the self-appointed ruler of land, life and morality, without ever being held accountable for violating the rights of what they deem second rate lifeforms, such as the arabs, indians, latinos and so on. After all this, some apes will still only be interested in one stupid question. Do I support Hamas? To which I say this. Until you've spent a lifetime under an oppressive regime, you are not qualified to ask that question. An ape can ask anything its puny brain fancies, but it's up to the human to decide whether the ape is worthy of a response. What do you think, by the way - colonizers can just keep coming as they please, to wipe their filthy feet on us like doormat, and we should do nothing - just stay quiet! For creatures who call themselves civilized, you guys have a weird sense of morality. Yet all these might not get through your thick binary skull, so let me put it to you bluntly. I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends. However, I do have one problem here. Why do civilians have to die, if that is indeed the case - which I have no way of confirming, because news reports are not like reputed scientific data, that a scientist can naively trust. During humankind's gravest conflicts news outlets have always peddled a narrative benefiting the occupier and demonizing the resistance, either consciously or subconsciously. So never go by news reports, particularly on exception circumstances like this. No matter the cause, no civilian must die, that is my one unimpeachable law. But the hard and horrific fact of the matter is, only the occupier can put an end to the death and destruction peacefully - the resistance does not have that luxury.

The US administration constantly sought to advance its misplaced messianic quest for a magical peace via “courageous” acts on the part of Israel’s leaders, even if these acts meant political suicide. Would American presidents consider taking “courageous actions,” such as, to use a historical example, far-reaching concessions to the Soviet Union if Congress could remove them from office the next day? Of course not. Yet this didn’t prevent American presidents and their envoys from attempting to tutor Israeli prime ministers, especially me, about the need for “courage” and “leadership.” I was being lectured about courage from people who had neither risked their own lives in war nor their political lives. When such “leadership” wasn’t forthcoming from me, this was proof of a clear failure of character by a politician guided solely by cynical and personal interests. The conflict between national necessity and political survival is as old as democracy itself, but it didn’t apply here. What stood in the way of the concessions I was pressed to make was simply my belief that they would greatly endanger Israel. So why make them? This too has eluded many American pundits. They might have noted that when I did believe certain measures were vital for Israel’s future, I didn’t hesitate to take them.

I left the White House knowing that I was dealing with a US administration totally in the grip of the Palestinian Centrality Theory. It held that Palestinian grievances were the heart of “the Middle East conflict,” ignoring the conflicts in the Middle East that had nothing to do with Israel. White House officials simply refused to believe that Palestinian violations of Oslo were rooted in a refusal to genuinely recognize Israel, arguing instead that Palestinian grievances were rooted in the expansion of Israeli settlements, just as they believed that Syrian antagonism to Israel was rooted in our presence on the Golan. The overriding axiom was that the Palestinians would not make peace unless we withdrew from Judea and Samaria and Gaza and that Syria would not make peace unless we withdrew from the Golan. The conclusion of this line of thinking was not complicated: get Israel to withdraw from all these territories and you’ll have peace. But all this flew in the face of the facts. Palestinian and Syrian grievances against Israel were not rooted in Israel’s holding on to this or that territory. That’s why they attacked us from the Golan, Judea and Samaria, and Gaza when those areas were in their hands. Their grievances were directed against Israel’s very existence, in any territory. The inability of America’s diplomats to see this simple truth remains astonishing. But to face it they would have to chuck the sacred “territory for peace” equation.

When Israel strikes, it's "national security" - when Palestine strikes back, it's "terrorism". Just like over two hundred years ago when native americans resisted their homeland being stolen, it was called "Indian Attack". Or like over a hundred years ago when Indian soldiers in the British Army revolted against the empire, in defense of their homeland, it was called "Sepoy Mutiny". The narrative never changes - when the colonizer terrorizes the world, it's given glorious sounding names like "exploration" and "conquest", but if the oppressed so much as utters a word in resistance, it is branded as attack, mutiny and terrorism - so that, the real terrorists can keep on colonizing as the self-appointed ruler of land, life and morality, without ever being held accountable for violating the rights of what they deem second rate lifeforms, such as the arabs, indians, latinos and so on. After all this, some apes will still only be interested in one stupid question. Do I support Hamas? To which I say this. Until you've spent a lifetime under an oppressive regime, you are not qualified to ask that question. An ape can ask anything its puny brain fancies, but it's up to the human to decide whether the ape is worthy of a response. What do you think, by the way - colonizers can just keep coming as they please, to wipe their filthy feet on us like doormat, and we should do nothing - just stay quiet! For creatures who call themselves civilized, you guys have a weird sense of morality. Yet all these might not get through your thick binary skull, so let me put it to you bluntly. I don't stand with Hamas, I am Hamas, just like, I don't stand with Ukraine, I am Ukraine. Russia stops fighting, war ends - Ukraine stops fighting, Ukraine ends. Israel ends invasion, war ends - Palestine ends resistance, Palestine ends.

Emerging from these predictable televised jousting matches, I thought I could do something different. I arranged an Israeli press conference for all the Arab journalists covering the conference. This was thoroughly unconventional at the time. Most of the journalists came, and I let them fire questions at me. One by one they leveled the usual vilifications, and one by one I rebuffed them with factual counterarguments. But I tried to do so in a noncombative way. Having met several Arab diplomats in the United Nations, I was shocked to discover a simple truth: They didn’t know even the most rudimentary facts about the history of our conflict or of our historic attachment to the contested land. For decades they had absorbed the lies of Arab propaganda and believed them to be true. The fact that this propaganda was taken for truth was typically explained away by American diplomats as deriving from different narratives, another piece of jargon used to denote that each side’s arguments are relative and beyond any objective examination of the facts. Competing “narratives” have been very much present in the Knesset, too. In a late-night debate in 2013, an Arab Knesset member was debating a Likud member about who preceded whom in what is now Israel. The historical facts are not that difficult to establish, since the Jews appeared in what became the Land of Israel roughly 3,500 years ago and the Arab conquest of this land occurred some two thousand years later, in the seventh century CE. The Arab member of the Knesset summed up his speech with a sharp, double-edged barb: “We were here before you, and we will be here after you.” At two in the morning I had had enough. I asked to use the prime minister’s prerogative to speak and gave my shortest speech in the Knesset: “To the Knesset member who just spoke, I say this: The first thing you said didn’t happen, and the second never will.” 13

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

My identity as Jewish cannot be reduced to a religious affiliation. Professor Said quoted Gramsci, an author that I’m familiar with, that, and I quote, ‘to know thyself is to understand that we are a product of the historical process to date which has deposited an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory’. Let’s apply this pithy observation to Jewish identity. While it is tempting to equate Judaism with Jewishness, I submit to you that my identity as someone who is Jewish is far more complex than my religious affiliation. The collective inventory of the Jewish people rests on my shoulders. This inventory shapes and defines my understanding of what it means to be Jewish. The narrative of my people is a story of extraordinary achievement as well as unimaginable horror. For millennia, the Jewish people have left their fate in the hands of others. Our history is filled with extraordinary achievements as well as unimaginable violence. Our centuries-long Diaspora defined our existential identity in ways that cannot be reduced to simple labels. It was the portability of our religion that bound us together as a people, but it was our struggle to fit in; to be accepted that identified us as unique. Despite the fact that we excelled academically, professionally, industrially, we were never looked upon as anything other than Jewish. Professor Said in his book, Orientalism, examined how Europe looked upon the Orient as a dehumanized sea of amorphous otherness. If we accept this point of view, then my question is: How do you explain Western attitudes towards the Jews? We have always been a convenient object of hatred and violent retribution whenever it became convenient. If Europe reduced the Orient to an essentialist other, to borrow Professor Said’s eloquent language, then how do we explain the dehumanizing treatment of Jews who lived in the heart of Europe? We did not live in a distant, exotic land where the West had discursive power over us. We thought of ourselves as assimilated. We studied Western philosophy, literature, music, and internalized the same culture as our dominant Christian brethren. Despite our contribution to every conceivable field of human endeavor, we were never fully accepted as equals. On the contrary, we were always the first to be blamed for the ills of Western Europe. Two hundred thousand Jews were forcibly removed from Spain in 1492 and thousands more were forcibly converted to Christianity in Portugal four years later. By the time we get to the Holocaust, our worst fears were realized. Jewish history and consciousness will be dominated by the traumatic memories of this unspeakable event. No people in history have undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality, a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall, a mystical belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these, together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews who have grown up under its shadow. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

Israelis, obviously, find the notion that the conflict may not be solvable distressing. They dream of a world in which their children, or their grandchildren, will not have to go to war, but at the same time, with any progress on a peace settlement increasingly distant, it is their sense of purpose that leads the vast majority to stay in Israel and to soldier on. Though peace is nowhere in sight, Israelis rank among the happiest populations on earth. Israel was rated the eleventh happiest country by the World Economic Forum in 2018, while the United States was eighteenth. Israelis are overwhelmingly comfortable with a Law of Return that guarantees Jews, but no one else, an automatic right to citizenship. Infused with a deep sense of purpose, Israeli Jews have more children than almost any other first-world country. And that is not only because of the ultra-Orthodox community. In fact, “since the beginning of the twenty-first century, fertility has actually declined by about 10 percent among Haredim, risen slightly (5 percent) among religiously observant women, and risen significantly, by 15–20 percent, among all other sectors of Israeli Jewish society.

People gather in giant rooms like this, deliver fancy speeches, but nothing ever changes. They still hate, they still fight. All we do, despite all our efforts, is put a pause to it, to bury all the dead. People are still the same, the rage inside them is still the same. What we do is not a cure, but mere bandages on the corpses, utterly useless.

The Intifada shattered the illusion that the occupation was external to Israel’s “social system” and “democratic” political regime. A number of Zionist Left intellectuals gradually came to recognize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as central to Israeli history and the formation of Israeli society. The

Many Israelis expressed reservations about the removal of the civilians from Lydda and Ramle. One party leader did not accept Allon’s position that strategic needs justified the removal of thousands of women, children, and old men from their homes. A hardened military leader of the operation recalled his conflicting emotions: “For years you’ve trained for this day,” he explained. “You’ve been told there is an inevitable war coming. You’ve been told that the Arabs will have to go. And yet you are in shock. In Lydda, the war is as cruel as it can be. The killing, the looting, the feelings of rage and revenge. Then the column marching. And although you are strong and well-trained and resilient, you experience some sort of mental collapse. You feel the humanist education you received collapsing.”21 Like Deir Yassin, Lydda remains one of the most controversial episodes in Israel’s history, causing much debate and internal anguish to this day, and continued condemnation from the Palestinians, more proof in their eyes of Zionist aggression.

All peace initiatives reject the notion of the unity of the Palestinian people and thus reduce the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to a territorial dispute with the residents of the 1967 occupied territories alone.

I could have been a hero and made my people proud of me. I knew what kind of hero they ere looking for: a fighter who dedicated his life and family to the cause of a nation. Even if I was killed, they would have told my story for generations to come and been proud of me forever, but in reality, I would not have been much of a hero.

I could have been a hero and made my people proud of me. I knew what kind of hero they were looking for: a fighter who dedicated his life and family to the cause of a nation. Even if I was killed, they would have told my story for generations to come and been proud of me forever, but in reality, I would not have been much of a hero.

I want to give you something that has helped me to survive so far: all the guilt and shame I have carried for all these years is a small price to pay if it saves even one innocent human life.

If one feels he is in possession of an absolute truth such as, “God gave this Land to us,” there is little that can be said, which is convincing and rational, that has the power to persuade someone that there is even the slightest bit of room for a different possibility or that they may be wrong. If the Israeli-Arab conflict is in fact a conflict between Judaism and Islam, then it cannot be resolved. But, it is not.

On November 21, 2017, the one-hundredth-year celebration of the Balfour Declaration, which promised the Jews a national home in their ancestral land, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke in front of the Israeli parliament and lamented, “Sadly I must say that I have yet to meet a Palestinian Sadat who will declare out of his own will the end of the conflict, acknowledge Israel’s border, and support our rights to live peacefully and safely.” No matter what you think of Bibi, even his critics would agree that he’s not wrong about that.

I continue to believe the roots of the conflict are in the desire and preparedness of both sides to fight, kill, and die so they can have a territorial expression of their identity.

for Palestinians, the principle of the right of return is a holy right and an individual right. It is not a collective right, and it is not a right that is negotiable. For Israel, the implementation of the right of return would be a death blow to the idea of a Jewish nation-state with a clear Jewish majority. Millions of Palestinian refugees returning to the State of Israel would render the State of Israel a binational state and eventually one with a Palestinian majority and a large Jewish minority. This is a nonstarter for Israel.

The continuation of this conflict in insane and totally futile, and there are ways to reach political agreements. Reconciliation and true peace will come later—the first step must be political agreements.

The biggest reason for innocent people's genocide is... The world is Hypocrite.. People are moral

the “right of return” is a demand for the return of a population more than six times larger than the one that fled, seventy years ago. It is a population that has been indoctrinated for three generations to blame Israel for their suffering, rather than the actual culprits. It is a population replete with individuals deeply hostile to Israel’s continued existence. That cannot end well.

Though demonized by his Jewish and British enemies, Hajj Amin al-Husayni in fact cooperated well enough with the mandate administration. Only gradually did he use his religious authority to achieve a position of significant political influence contrary to British interests. It was a potent mix. The key event in this transformation was the so-called ‘Western Wall riots’ in 1929. The Western Wall was the only revealed section of what remained from the massive retaining wall built by Herod. This wall allowed Herod to enlarge the platform on which the Second Temple stood before being destroyed in 70 CE. Given this association, the wall became Judaism’s most important place of pilgrimage and prayer. The wall also was part of a Muslim religious trust (waqf): Muslim attachment to the wall and to the al-Haram al-Sharif (or ‘Noble Sanctuary’, as the Temple Mount is known in Arabic) is due to their association with the story of Muhammad’s night journey to heaven. The wall is known to Muslims as al-Buraq, because Muhammad tethered his horse there, and the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa mosque, built in the 7th century, are two of Islam’s most revered buildings.

In 1928, attempts by some Jews to extend their access to the wall by bringing screens and benches were fiercely challenged by Hajj Amin, no doubt as part of a larger political campaign to enhance his national status. Claims and counterclaims became increasingly heated over the following year and, when a Revisionist Party youth movement organized a demonstration demanding Jewish control over the whole complex, tensions spiralled out of control. Rioting broke out in Jerusalem in August 1929, the British struggled to restore order, and the violence spread to Hebron, Jaffa, and Safad, cities with significant Jewish populations. The massacre of Jews in Hebron was especially horrifying, and those who survived fled Hebron in the wake of the riots. Overall, 133 Jews and 116 Arabs lost their lives. Palestinians worried that the Jews were violating the sanctity of Islam and dispossessing them of their patrimony. Jews compared Hebron to the pogroms of Eastern Europe.

The tensions over access to the Western Wall galvanized the communal hostilities generated during the first decade of the mandate. In effect, they ended any real chance of Arab–Jewish peace in Palestine. Britain struggled to deal with the fallout. The Shaw commission, sent out to report on the 1929 disturbances, criticized Hajj Amin al-Husayni’s lack of restraint but acquitted him of incitement. More significantly, the commission warned against continued Jewish immigration and land purchase, arguing that the further dispossession of Arab farmers could only lead to more disturbances. In October 1930 the British issued the Passfield White Paper, stressing the need to deal more forthrightly with Arab concerns. It called for restrictions on Jewish immigration and land purchase and drew attention to the conspicuous absence of a representative legislative council. Zionist leaders were furious. In London, they voiced strong criticism of the White Paper and succeeded the following year in persuading the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, to write a personal letter to Weizmann in which key elements of the 1930 White Paper were revoked.

This chapter examines the late 19th- and early 20th-century context in which two emerging national communities—Zionist and Palestinian—first collided over their mutually exclusive desire for the same piece of land, not much larger than Wales (approximately 16,000 square kms). Identifying 1897 as the beginning of the history of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict is significant. It underlines the fact that this hundred (or so) years’ conflict is neither rooted in ancient and religious animosities nor even are its origins so much Middle Eastern as European. Just as European Jews were responding to the nationalist spirit spawned by the conditions in 19th-century Europe, so too was the identity of the indigenous Arab population about to be reshaped by the sharpening of a specifically Palestinian consciousness that formed around the inhabitants’ resistance to the threat that Zionism posed to their own patrimony. It was in this context that Jewish immigrants from Europe struggled to find ways to successfully settle the land of Palestine, improvising and developing strategies that would have a huge impact on the future trajectory of the Zionist project.

Israeli human rights group Yesh Gvul accused Galant of committing war crimes during this round of conflict, Operation Cast Lead.

There are many generally accepted limitations on the weapons and tactics that may be used in wartime. Many of them are set out in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the two Additional Protocols of 1977 which deal respectively with international armed conflicts and with non-international (internal) armed conflicts. (A third protocol, adopted in 2005, adopted the ‘red crystal’ as an international symbol to indicate protected persons and objects, alongside the red cross and red crescent symbols.) The Geneva Conventions also prescribe rules on matters such as the treatment of prisoners of war, and on the rights and duties of States that are in occupation of foreign territory. The latter rules, along with rules from the 1907 Hague Convention on the Laws and Customs of War on Land, are applicable to the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory in the West Bank and Gaza, for example.

The United States is completely powerless to effect a change in the rejectionist position of Hamas and the Islamic Jihad and the Palestinian majority that supports them, and it is only marginally influential with regard to Israeli policies on the basic issues.

Without doubt, the Israeli settlements in the West Bank have increased Palestinian militancy and motivation to fight Zionism and add a further layer of obstruction to any possibility of partitioning the land into two viable states—though the example and precedent of Israel’s uprooting of all its settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005 indicates that the majority of West Bank settlements, too, could be removed should the Israeli government and public come to believe that such a course would assure Israel peace and future prosperity. But given Palestinian behavior and discourse—and this must include the observation that the Israeli pullout from the Gaza Strip did nothing to moderate Palestinian behavior and attitudes toward Israel; rather the opposite—there is little chance that Israelis will come to feel and believe this in the foreseeable future.

Israeli Jewish society is incapable, for moral and political reasons, of murdering millions or hundreds of thousands of Arabs. It is also inconceivable that Palestine’s Arab inhabitants would abandon the country of their own free will. But a campaign of expulsion, as required to rid the country of all or most of its Arab population, would doubtless take weeks if not months to implement and would be halted in its tracks by the international community and by much of Israel’s Jewish public. Similarly, the achievement of a Jew-less Land of Israel through murder or expulsion or a combination of the two by the Arabs would in all likelihood be stymied by the international community, or at least the United States, which might well intervene militarily.

No Arab party during the 1930s and 1940s sought coexistence; all sought to crush the Yishuv and rule all of Palestine themselves, though a minority may occasionally have temporized or sought tactical, short-term accommodations.

If Arab expressions in the early years of the twentieth century of fear of eventual displacement and expulsion by the Zionists were largely propagandistic, today—in view of what has happened—they are very real. And if Jewish fears in the 1930s of Arab intentions to push them “into the sea”—to destroy the Zionist enterprise and perhaps slaughter the Yishuv—were, if heartfelt, unrealistic (as it turned out), today they are very real, as are Jewish fears of a nuclear Holocaust at Islamic hands. These fears and hatreds make a shared binational state, in which each community inevitably would seek to dominate the other, if only to prevent the other’s domination of itself, inconceivable.

In the late 1980s and the 1990s, it appeared as if the PLO, under Yasser Arafat, might be abandoning the one-state goal and adopting a two-state paradigm, envisaging a Palestinian Arab state arising, on 22 percent of historic Mandate Palestine, alongside Israel, and coexisting with it in peace. Such a vision, at least from the Israeli side, underlay the Oslo peace process. But already at the time the sincerity of Arafat’s newfound commitment to a two-state settlement was doubtful in view of some of his public pronouncements, his incitement to hatred and terrorism vis-à-vis Israel, and his serial nonimplementation of various provisions, especially those related to curbing terrorism, of the interim agreements he signed during the 1990s.

Great Britain enabled the Zionists to create the springboard from which they were ultimately able to take over the entire country at the expense of its indigenous population. It thereby helped significantly to produce a conflict that only became more bitterly intractable as time went on.

In addition to wartime strategic interests, a complex combination of motives led to the final decision to issue the Balfour Declaration. Contemporary explanations tended to stress the Biblical romanticism of British officials’ interest in the restoration of the Jewish nation in Palestine and their sympathy for the plight of Jews in eastern Europe. The first scholarly accounts focused more on the political and diplomatic context in which British officials came to see Zionism as an ally. These early interpretations stressed the Balfour Declaration as a product of the activities of the Zionist Organization, or specifically of Dr Chaim Weizmann, the most prominent Zionist spokesman. Weizmann was engaged during the war in biochemical research for Britain’s Ministry of Munitions. His influential contacts and skilful persistence were credited with convincing British officials of the wartime propaganda value that a gesture of support for Zionism would carry in the United States and Russia, where Jews were believed to wield great power.

The first was in Jordan (1968–1970); the second, in Lebanon (1970–1982); the third, the Palestinian Authority in parts of the West Bank and Gaza (1994–present); and the fourth, the Hamas regime in Gaza (2007–present).