Israeli Officials Quotes

The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens--and honor its own previous commitments--by accepting its legal borders. All Arab neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace under these conditions. The United States is squandering international prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation and colonization of Palestinian territories.

We are in a strange world,' one senior Israeli official said to me, 'where the defense minister and to a lesser degree the prime minister are focused intently on the military option, and the intelligence services and the military, with some exceptions, are deeply doubtful.

Bombing operations in Gaza and raids into the West Bank are often referred to by Israeli officials as mowing the lawn.

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.

Israeli Defense Force Order 101, Regarding Prohibition of Incitement and Hostile Propaganda Actions, was put into effect in 1967. It forbade Palestinians to use the word Palestine in official documents, to depict or raise or fly their flag, or to make any sort of art that combined the colors of the traditional flag.

Working with present-day genocidal regimes doesn’t bother Israel but it has also refused to publicly acknowledge past genocides. The Armenian genocide, formally recognized by US President Joe Biden in 2021, occurred in 1915 and 1916. Due to relations with Turkey, Israel has refused to recognize the Armenian genocide, and declassified documents prove that Israeli officials worked for decades to pressure countries and individuals around the world who wanted to do so.

The head of the Israeli military intelligence, Shlomo Gazit (whom we met as the first coordinator of the military rule after 1967), explained that this destruction of the infrastructure was intentional. Israel wanted the Palestinians to ‘face unemployment and a shortage of land and water and thus we can create the necessary conditions for the departure of the Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza’.32 On top of all of these measures during the period when the official mentality in Israel was that the occupied people had to be punished, there was yet more licence for the settlers’ violence and intimidation. In periods like this, the courts were particularly lenient in their attitude to the killing of Palestinians by settlers. Of the forty-eight cases concerning the killing of Palestinians between 1988 and 1992 by settlers only one culprit was charged with murder.

You might look back at the Zionist movement—there were plenty of Jews killed by other Jews. They killed collaborators, traitors and people they thought were traitors. And they weren’t under anything like the harsh conditions of the Palestinian occupation. As plenty of Israelis have pointed out, the British weren’t nice, but they were gentlemen compared with us. The Labor-based defense force Haganah had torture chambers and assassins. I once looked up their first recorded assassination in the official Haganah history. It’s described there straight. It was in 1921. A Dutch Jew named Jacob de Haan had to be killed, because he was trying to approach local Palestinians to see if things could be worked out between them and the new Jewish settlers. His murderer was assumed to be the woman who later became the wife of the first president of Israel. They said that another reason for assassinating him was that he was a homosexual.

The CIA prepared a briefing paper on July 10 for senior Bush administration officials: “Based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.”24

On June 4, 2009 President Obama gave an hour long speech in Cairo, Egypt. The overseas trip was his second to the Middle East, and in neither visit did the President land in Israel, or meet with Israeli officials. In his speech the President referred to the “Holy Quran” and quoted from the Hadith, referring to the “story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.” It’s safe to say that these three persons have never joined in prayer, though the President gave his approval to the mythological Muslim story. He also said that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance”, not mentioning that there is not a single Christian church or Jewish synagogue in Saudi Arabia or in  most other Muslim nations. The Zionist Organization of America called the Presidents’ speech “strongly biased against Israel”. The organization’s President, Morton A. Klein, said Obama’s remarks “may well signal the beginning of a renunciation of America’s strategic alliance with 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.

In the Negev in Israel, Israeli authorities have refused to legally recognize 35 Palestinian Bedouin communities, making it impossible for their 90,000 or so residents to live lawfully in the communities they have lived in for decades. Instead, authorities have sought to concentrate Bedouin communities in larger recognized townships in order, as expressed in governmental plans and statements by officials, to maximize the land available for Jewish communities. Israeli law considers all buildings in these unrecognized villages to be illegal, and authorities have refused to connect most to the national electricity or water grids or to provide even basic infrastructure such as paved roads or sewage systems. The communities do not appear on official maps, most have no educational facilities, and residents live under constant threat of having their homes demolished. Israeli authorities demolished more than 10,000 Bedouin homes in the Negev between 2013 and 2019, according to government data. They razed one unrecognized village that challenged the expropriation of its lands, al-Araqib, 185 times.

We have a better understanding today of what triggered such a furious Israeli reaction. In their book Boomerang, two senior Israeli journalists, Ofer Shelah and Raviv Drucker, interviewed the General Chief of Staff and strategists in the Ministry of Defence and offered inside knowledge on the way these officials and generals were thinking about the issue.12 Their conclusion was that in the summer of 2000 the IDF was a frustrated outfit following its humiliating defeat by Hezbollah in Lebanon, who had forced the army to withdraw totally from Lebanon. There was a fear that this retreat made the army look weak. And so a show of strength was much needed. The reassertion of dominance within the occupied Palestinian territories was just the kind of display of sheer power the ‘invincible’ Israeli army needed

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.

The Iran/Contra cover-up The major elements of the Iran/Contra story were well known long before the 1986 exposures, apart from one fact: that the sale of arms to Iran via Israel and the illegal Contra war run out of Ollie North’s White House office were connected. The shipment of arms to Iran through Israel didn’t begin in 1985, when the congressional inquiry and the special prosecutor pick up the story. It began almost immediately after the fall of the Shah in 1979. By 1982, it was public knowledge that Israel was providing a large part of the arms for Iran—you could read it on the front page of the New York Times. In February 1982, the main Israeli figures whose names later appeared in the Iran/Contra hearings appeared on BBC television [the British Broadcasting Company, Britain’s national broadcasting service] and described how they had helped organize an arms flow to the Khomeini regime. In October 1982, the Israeli ambassador to the US stated publicly that Israel was sending arms to the Khomeini regime, “with the cooperation of the United States…at almost the highest level.” The high Israeli officials involved also gave the reasons: to establish links with elements of the military in Iran who might overthrow the regime, restoring the arrangements that prevailed under the Shah—standard operating procedure. As for the Contra war, the basic facts of the illegal North-CIA operations were known by 1985 (over a year before the story broke, when a US supply plane was shot down and a US agent, Eugene Hasenfus, was captured). The media simply chose to look the other way. So what finally generated the Iran/Contra scandal? A moment came when it was just impossible to suppress it any longer. When Hasenfus was shot down in Nicaragua while flying arms to the Contras for the CIA, and the Lebanese press reported that the US National Security Adviser was handing out Bibles and chocolate cakes in Teheran, the story just couldn’t be kept under wraps. After that, the connection between the two well-known stories emerged. We then move to the next phase: damage control. That’s what the follow-up was about. For more on all of this, see my Fateful Triangle (1983), Turning the Tide (1985), and Culture of Terrorism (1987).

be “a familiar judicial exercise.”46 My colleagues believed the courts should not avoid the question by invoking the “political question” doctrine.47 They consequently sent the case back to the lower court for a decision on the merits.48 Though alone, I saw the case differently. “In the Middle East,” I wrote, “administrative matters can have implications that extend far beyond the purely administrative.”49 The secretary of state had argued that requiring her to stamp the word Israel on a passport would represent an “official decision by the United States to begin to treat Jerusalem as a city” under Israeli sovereignty.50 She maintained that upholding the statute would have significant foreign policy implications (a conclusion that others denied). Because of our inability to know the answer to this kind of dispute, I concluded that the merits of the case raised a political question, which the other two branches should resolve between themselves.51 What matters for our purposes, however, is that the other members of the Court disagreed with me. They thought that, even there, the doctrine did not prevent the Court from reviewing the merits of this foreign policy-related question. The upshot is that neither the classical view of Cicero nor the “political question” doctrine prevents today’s Court from reaching, and deciding the merits of, many questions in which security and civil liberties collide. But there are other doctrines, embodied in other cases, that have had much the same effect.

The more the State of Israel relied on force to manage the occupation, the more compelled it was to deploy hasbara. And the more Western media consumers encountered hasbara, the more likely they became to measure Israel’s grandiose talking points against the routine and petty violence, shocking acts of humiliation, and repression that defined its relationship with the Palestinians. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a professional explainer who spent the early years of his political career as a frequent guest on prime time American news programs perfecting the slickness of the Beltway pundit class, the Israeli government invested unprecedented resources into hasbara. Once the sole responsibility of the Israeli foreign ministry, the task of disseminating hasbara fell to a special Ministry of Public Diplomacy led by Yuli Edelstein, a rightist settler and government minister who called Arabs a “despicable nation.” Edelstein’s ministry boasted an advanced “situation room,” a paid media team, and coordination of a volunteer force that claimed to include thousands of volunteer bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook commenters fed with talking points and who flood social media with hasbara in five languages. The exploits of the propaganda soldiers conscripted into Israel’s online army have helped give rise to the phenomenon of the “hasbara troll,” an often faceless, shrill and relentless nuisance deployed on Twitter and Facebook to harass public figures who expressed skepticism of official Israeli policy or sympathy for the Palestinians.

Jews, notably, were defined as a ‘people’, while others, not even identified, were referred to only as ‘communities’. It was an extraordinary phrase that echoes down the decades and explains why Balfour is remembered a century later by Arabs as the architect of perfidy and disaster.16 Zionists, for opposite reasons, revere his memory; Balfour Street in Jerusalem is still the site of the official residence of the Israeli prime minister. The reservation had been inserted in the text to meet the strong objections raised by Lord Curzon, the former British viceroy of India and, as lord president of the council, an influential member of the war cabinet. Curzon – reflecting contemporary perceptions about the map and identity of the region – had referred to the ‘Syrian Arabs’ who had ‘occupied [Palestine] for the best part of 1,500 years’, and asked what would become of them. ‘They will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigrants or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’, he predicted with the help of another then familiar biblical reference.17 The declaration’s second reservation – about the rights of Jews in other countries – was a response to the opposition of Edwin Montagu, the secretary of state for India, even though he was not in the war cabinet. Montagu was a Jewish grandee who feared that an official expression of sympathy for Zionism in fact masked anti-Semitic prejudice and would undermine the hard-won position of British Jews and their co-religionists elsewhere in the world. However, it did not weaken his vehement opposition, any more than the words about ‘non-Jewish communities’ assuaged Arab fears. Over time, Jewish attitudes to Zionism would change significantly; Arab attitudes, by and large, did not.

Then there were those who were thrilling to Senator Sanders, who believed that Bernie would be the one to give them free college, to solve climate change, and even to bring peace to the Middle East, though that was not an issue most people associated with him. On a trip to Michigan, I met with a group of young Muslims, most of them college students, for whom this was the first election in which they planned to participate. I was excited that they had come to hear more about HRC's campaign. One young woman, speaking for her peers, said she really wanted to be excited about the first woman president, but she had to support Bernie because she believed he would be more effective at finally brokering a peace treaty in the Middle East. Everyone around her nodded. I asked the group why they doubted Hillary Clinton's ability to do the same. "Well, she has done nothing to help the Palestinians." Taking a deep breath, I asked them if they knew that she was the first U.S. official to ever call the territories "Palestine" in the nineties, that she advocated for Palestinian sovereignty back when no other official would. They did not. I then asked them if they were aware that she brought together the last round of direct talks between the Israelis and Palestinians? That she personally negotiated a cease-fire to stop the latest war in Gaza when she was secretary of state? They shook their heads. Had they known that she announced $600 million in assistance to the Palestinian Authority and $300 million in humanitarian aid to Gaza in her first year at State? They began to steal glances at one another. Did they know that she pushed Israel to invest in the West Bank and announced an education program to make college more affordable for Palestinian students? More head shaking. They simply had no idea. "So," I continued, "respectfully, what is it about Senator Sander's twenty-seven-year record in Congress that suggests to you that the Middle East is a priority for him?" The young woman's response encapsulated some what we were up against. "I don't know," she replied. "I just feel it.

questioning the lawfulness of a long-standing State Department policy specifying that the birthplace of an American citizen born in Jerusalem be given as “Jerusalem” rather than “Israel or Jordan” in his passport.43 The courts were asked to review this policy in light of a congressional statute requiring the State Department to describe the birthplace as “Israel” if the citizen so wished. Did the statute unconstitutionally interfere with the President’s power to conduct foreign affairs?44 The lower courts had decided that the case presented an unreviewable political question.45 But the Supreme Court held to the contrary. All the justices but one (and I was the one) considered the matter of deciding what the statute meant and whether it was constitutional to be “a familiar judicial exercise.”46 My colleagues believed the courts should not avoid the question by invoking the “political question” doctrine.47 They consequently sent the case back to the lower court for a decision on the merits.48 Though alone, I saw the case differently. “In the Middle East,” I wrote, “administrative matters can have implications that extend far beyond the purely administrative.”49 The secretary of state had argued that requiring her to stamp the word Israel on a passport would represent an “official decision by the United States to begin to treat Jerusalem as a city” under Israeli sovereignty.50 She maintained that upholding the statute would have significant foreign policy implications (a conclusion that others denied). Because of our inability to know the answer to this kind of dispute, I concluded that the merits of the case raised a political question, which the other two branches should resolve between themselves.51 What matters for our purposes, however, is that the other members of the Court disagreed with me. They thought that, even there, the doctrine did not prevent the Court from reviewing the merits of this foreign policy-related question. The upshot is that neither the classical view of Cicero nor the “political question” doctrine prevents today’s Court from reaching, and deciding the merits of, many questions in which security and civil liberties collide. But there are other doctrines, embodied in other cases, that have had much the same effect.

Another obstacle was the stubbornness of the countries the pipeline had to cross, particularly Syria, all of which were demanding what seemed to be exorbitant transit fees. It was also the time when the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel were aggravating American relations with the Arab countries. But the emergence of a Jewish state, along with the American recognition that followed, threatened more than transit rights for the pipeline. Ibn Saud was as outspoken and adamant against Zionism and Israel as any Arab leader. He said that Jews had been the enemies of Arabs since the seventh century. American support of a Jewish state, he told Truman, would be a death blow to American interests in the Arab world, and should a Jewish state come into existence, the Arabs “will lay siege to it until it dies of famine.” When Ibn Saud paid a visit to Aramco’s Dhahran headquarters in 1947, he praised the oranges he was served but then pointedly asked if they were from Palestine—that is, from a Jewish kibbutz. He was reassured; the oranges were from California. In his opposition to a Jewish state, Ibn Saud held what a British official called a “trump card”: He could punish the United States by canceling the Aramco concession. That possibility greatly alarmed not only the interested companies, but also, of course, the U.S. State and Defense departments. Yet the creation of Israel had its own momentum. In 1947, the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine recommended the partition of Palestine, which was accepted by the General Assembly and by the Jewish Agency, but rejected by the Arabs. An Arab “Liberation Army” seized the Galilee and attacked the Jewish section of Jerusalem. Violence gripped Palestine. In 1948, Britain, at wit’s end, gave up its mandate and withdrew its Army and administration, plunging Palestine into anarchy. On May 14, 1948, the Jewish National Council proclaimed the state of Israel. It was recognized almost instantly by the Soviet Union, followed quickly by the United States. The Arab League launched a full-scale attack. The first Arab-Israeli war had begun. A few days after Israel’s proclamation of statehood, James Terry Duce of Aramco passed word to Secretary of State Marshall that Ibn Saud had indicated that “he may be compelled, in certain circumstances, to apply sanctions against the American oil concessions… not because of his desire to do so but because the pressure upon him of Arab public opinion was so great that he could no longer resist it.” A hurriedly done State Department study, however, found that, despite the large reserves, the Middle East, excluding Iran, provided only 6 percent of free world oil supplies and that such a cut in consumption of that oil “could be achieved without substantial hardship to any group of consumers.

The Israelis were flummoxed. Did the national security advisor really give precedence to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before ending the massacres in Sudan, relieving hunger, or curing AIDS? Did he truly hold that reconciling Jews and Arabs could cease the centuries-long strife between Shiites and Sunnis or even the more modern split between Islamists and secularizers? No less puzzling for many Israelis was the administration’s tendency to view settlements as the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Reminding White House officials that the removal of all twenty-one settlements in Gaza had brought not peace to Israel but thousands of Hamas rockets proved futile.

the United States no longer was a Constitutional Republic, but was now a totalitarian regime. Then news came up about Iran’s attempt to nuke Israel: “Israel has officially condemned the attempt by Iran to nuke Israeli cities, and has said its own response will be forthcoming soon. The United Nations, as always, has asked the two nations to let cooler heads prevail, and said that if Israel escalates the hostility, war could break out, quite possibly dragging the rest of the world into it. Meanwhile, Iraq has declared Mosul a radioactive wasteland, demanded the head of Supreme Ayatollah Karimi, and vowed to exact revenge for this insult to all Iraqis. Karimi has officially disavowed any knowledge of an Iranian nuclear missile destroying an Iraqi city, and claims that the Iraqis made it up so that they could drag their American masters into another conflict.

And still my research continued. Foreign diplomatic sources informed me that, in spite of his stated rejection of any containment of an Iranian bomb, Obama would settle for capping Iran’s ability to make a bomb within one year—the so-called threshold capacity. Other analysts claimed the president regarded Iran as an ascendant and logical power—unlike the feckless, disunited Arabs and those troublemaking Israelis—that could assist in resolving other regional conflicts. I first heard this theory at Georgetown back in 2008, in conversations with think tankers and former State Department officials. They also believed that Iran’s radical Islam was merely an expression of interests and fears that the United States could, with sufficient goodwill, meet and allay. Such ideas initially struck me as absurd. After all, even irrational regimes such as Nazi Germany could take rational steps to reach fanatical goals. But Obama, himself, now began describing Iran’s behavior as “strategic” and “not impulsive.” The ayatollahs, he told Jeffrey Goldberg, “have their worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits….[They] are not North Korea.” Suddenly, it seemed plausible that an America freed of its dependence on Middle Eastern oil and anxious to retreat from the region could view Iran as a dependable ally. The only hurdle remained that pesky nuclear program.

Would you buy a used car from your occupier? For the first six months of the intifada, Ehud Gol was the official Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. Every day he had to go before the world’s press and defend Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. But in the spring of 1988, Gol was made the Israeli Consul General in Rio de Janeiro and he had to sell his car before he left the country. Practically the first place he went was to a Palestinian car dealer in the West Bank town of Ramallah. “Intifada or no intifada, this was business,” Gol explained to me. “The car dealer even came down to the Foreign Ministry and we went over all the papers in my office. There I was, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, and this guy, whose son was probably out throwing stones, was ready to buy from me—and it was a used car!” A Palestinian teacher I knew was driving from Ramallah to Jerusalem one afternoon when he saw a colleague of his from Bir Zeit University and offered to give him a lift. “This fellow came from a small village near Ramallah,” said my teacher friend. “The whole way into Jersualem he was talking to me about the intifada and how it had changed his village, how everyone was involved, and how the local committees of the uprising were running the village and they were getting rid of all the collaborators. He was really enthusiastic, and I was really impressed. As we got close to Jerusalem, I asked him where he wanted to be dropped off and he said, ‘The Hebrew University.’ I was really surprised, so I said, ‘What are you going there for?’ and he said, ‘I teach an Arabic class there.’ It simply didn’t occur to him that there was any contradiction between enthusiasm for the intifada and where he was going.

The official position on the 1948 Nakba was that Palestinians willingly left the country following orders broadcast over the radio by Arab and Palestinian leaders, calling for people to move to safer places in anticipation of the triumphant Arab armies. Supposedly others fled due to their baseless fears of the Jewish army. The misleading official Israeli position led to the widely accepted conclusion that refugees should be settled in the Arab states, given that they (the Arabs) started the war and created the problem in the first place; thus, they should pay for the consequences. Since the late 1950s, the Israeli narrative has been refuted by historians like Walid Khalidi and Erskine Childers.18 These historians disproved the Israeli contention that official and unofficial bodies in the Arab world, including Palestinian groups, called upon Palestinians to stay in their homes, and even threatened to punish those who left.19

successive Israeli governments have built new settlements in the West Bank to provide homes for Israeli Jews. These settlements are illegal under international law and, while the United States has routinely tolerated their presence in practice, official U.S. policy prior to November 2019 was that they were “inconsistent” with international law and “an obstacle to peace.

After Netanyahu was defeated in the 1999 election, his more liberal successor, Ehud Barak, made efforts to establish a broader peace in the Middle East, including outlining a two-state solution that went further than any previous Israeli proposal. Arafat demanded more concessions, however, and talks collapsed in recrimination. Meanwhile, one day in September 2000, Likud party leader Ariel Sharon led a group of Israeli legislators on a deliberately provocative and highly publicized visit to one of Islam’s holiest sites, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. It was a stunt designed to assert Israel’s claim over the wider territory, one that challenged the leadership of Ehud Barak and enraged Arabs near and far. Four months later, Sharon became Israel’s next prime minister, governing throughout what became known as the Second Intifada: four years of violence between the two sides, marked by tear gas and rubber bullets directed at stone-throwing protesters; Palestinian suicide bombs detonated outside an Israeli nightclub and in buses carrying senior citizens and schoolchildren; deadly IDF retaliatory raids and the indiscriminate arrest of thousands of Palestinians; and Hamas rockets launched from Gaza into Israeli border towns, answered by U.S.-supplied Israeli Apache helicopters leveling entire neighborhoods. Approximately a thousand Israelis and three thousand Palestinians died during this period—including scores of children—and by the time the violence subsided, in 2005, the prospects for resolving the underlying conflict had fundamentally changed. The Bush administration’s focus on Iraq, Afghanistan, and the War on Terror left it little bandwidth to worry about Middle East peace, and while Bush remained officially supportive of a two-state solution, he was reluctant to press Sharon on the issue. Publicly, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states continued to offer support to the Palestinian cause, but they were increasingly more concerned with limiting Iranian influence and rooting out extremist threats to their own regimes.

Israeli journalist Ronen Bergman, who watched a live television broadcast of an official ceremony in Egypt, saw President Hosni Mubarak warmly shaking the hand of Marwan, who accompanied him in laying a wreath on Nasser’s tomb. After

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.

But rather than deal with labels, I want to deal with substance. There are two prerequisites for peace. First, the Palestinians must recognize the Jewish state. They have to stop calling and educating their people for Israel’s destruction. Second, in any peace agreement Israel must retain the overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River. If we don’t we’ll get another radical Islamic terrorist state in the Palestinian areas which will explode the peace and explode the Middle East. Unfortunately, the Palestinians vehemently reject both prerequisites for peace. They even deny, Mr. President, our historical connection to our homeland. Why are Jews called Jews? The Chinese are called Chinese because they come from China. The Japanese are called Japanese because they come from Japan. Well, Jews are called Jews because they come from Judea. This is our ancestral homeland. Jews are not foreign colonialists in Judea. LEAVING WASHINGTON, I realized I had a problem. The president of the United States opposed the Iran nuclear deal, as I did, but he had also become convinced that I was the obstacle to a Palestinian-Israeli peace that Mahmoud Abbas was ready for. I had to hand it to the Palestinians. They outflanked me by embracing a friend from whom I had grown apart, promising him that he would be the great peacemaker. Trump had known this person for many years and considered him a reliable source on the Middle East. How could I not see that coming? Admittedly, I wasn’t so much worried that Trump would cozy up to the Palestinians with the same vindictive zeal as Obama. Most of the senior officials in his administration did not buy the Palestinian line. Besides, I knew that Trump would come to appreciate the great support Israel and I had in the evangelical community, the most important element of his political base.

My father’s hopes were high for his return to Jaffa when the Swedish nobleman Count Folke Bernadotte was appointed on May 20, 1948 as the UN mediator in Palestine, the first official mediation in the UN’s history. He seemed the best choice for the mission. During the Second World War Bernadotte had helped save many Jews from the Nazis and was committed to bringing justice to the Palestinians. His first proposal of June 28 was unsuccessful, but on September 16 he submitted his second proposal. This included the right of Palestinians to return home and compensation for those who chose not to do so. Any hope was short-lived. Just one day after his submission he was assassinated by the Israeli Stern Gang. Bernadotte’s death was a terrible blow to my father and other Palestinians, who had placed their hopes in the success of his mission. Three months later, on December 11, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 194, which states that: refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.

Bernadotte succeeded in focusing international pressure of some kind on Israel, or he had at least produced the potential for such pressure. In order to counteract this, the Israeli architects of the ethnic cleansing programme realised they would need to involve the state’s diplomats and the Foreign Ministry more directly. By July the political apparatus, the diplomatic corps and the military organisations within the new State of Israel were already working harmoniously together. Prior to July, it is not clear how much of the ethnic cleansing plan had been shared with Israeli diplomats and senior officials. However, when the results gradually became visible the government needed a public relations campaign to stymie adverse international responses, and began to involve and inform those officials responsible for producing the right image abroad – that of a liberal democracy in the making. Officials in the Foreign Ministry worked closely with the country’s intelligence officers, who would warn them in advance of the next stages in the cleansing operation, so as to ensure they would be kept hidden from the public eye.

And as we followed the news, we learned that the Israeli government was debating the controversial and racist “Basic” or Nation-State Law, which it ended up passing in July 2018. The law declares that “the right to exercise national self-determination” in Israel is “unique to the Jewish people.” It establishes Hebrew as the official language of the country, with Arabic downgraded to “special status.” Finally, the law mandates that the state regard “Jewish settlement as a national value” and to “act to encourage and promote its establishment and consolidation.” Israeli apartheid was now more official than ever.

Unlike me and my mother—unlike all other Palestinians, for that matter—Yifat did not have to spend the months before her trial or the time during her trial in prison. She got out on bail. By hitting a military official, Yifat had proven her point: Even when their crimes are nearly identical to those of Israelis, Palestinians are not punished the same, tried the same, or given the same rights and protections as Israelis. In May 2020, Yifat was sentenced in a civilian court to eight months in prison and ordered to pay a fine of roughly nine hundred dollars.

Corresponding through letters isn’t an option, either. Regular mail delivery is one of many luxuries Palestinians don’t have under occupation. Most of our houses and buildings aren’t numbered, which means incoming mail is usually sent to post offices. But that mail first must be processed, and likely inspected, by Israel, and there’s no guarantee if or when it will arrive to its intended recipient. There was no official way that prisoners like me could send letters out. Only the girls from Jerusalem or who lived within Israel had that option. But even then, the letters they’d try to send out or receive from their families would be stuck for months with Israeli intelligence officials, who probably read everything and would sometimes sit on mail for weeks.

Yehoshua Verbin, commander of the military government that ruled over Arab citizens between 1948 and 1966, admitted that ethnic cleansing occurred in 1948. “We expelled around half a million Arabs, we burnt homes, we looted their land—from their point of view—we didn’t give it back, we took land …” he said. The “solution” offered, then and now, was eerily similar to Kimmerling’s thesis; either make the Arabs disappear, and if that was not possible render them unequal in the hope that they might emigrate by choice for a better life elsewhere. Kimmerling could have added that politicide became a marketable tool around the world for nations and officials that wanted to emulate Israeli “success.

The Israeli social media strategy aimed to involve both domestic and global supporters of its military missions. By doing so, and asking backers to post their own supporting tweets, Face-book posts, or Instagram images, the IDF created a collective mission that other nations could easily mimic by stirring up nationalist fervor online. During Operation Pillar of Defense, the IDF encouraged supporters of Israel to both proudly share when “terrorists” were killed while at the same time reminding a global audience that the Jewish state was a victim. It was a form of mass conscription to the cause through the weaponization of social media.12 This was war as spectacle, and the IDF was spending big to make it happen. The IDF media budget allowed at least 70 officers and 2,000 soldiers to design, process, and disseminate official Israeli propaganda, and almost every social media platform was flooded with IDF content. Today, the IDF Instagram page regularly features pro-gay and pro-feminist messaging alongside its hard-line militaristic iconography.13 On October 1, 2021, the IDF posted across its social media platforms a photo of its headquarters swathed in pink light with this message: “For those who are fighting, for those who have passed, and for those who have survived, the IDF HQ is lit up pink this #BreastCancerAwarenessMonth.” Palestinian American activist Yousef Munayyer responded on Twitter: “An untold number of women in Gaza suffer from breast cancer and are routinely denied adequate treatment and timely lifesaving care because this military operates a brutal siege against over 2 million souls.” On Instagram, however, most of the comments below the post praised the IDF.

Two years before his brutal murder, Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, ending hostilities between the two countries. The historic treaty had enormous ramifications in the Middle East. Under Sadat’s leadership, Egypt became the first Arab state to officially recognize Israel. Now, it looked like all the hard work that had been done to restore peace between the two countries was going to be reversed.

The United States could afford to leave Afghanistan, albeit with tragic consequences for the Afghan people, who would again be subjugated by the Taliban, because that country was thousands of miles away from America. But an Israeli withdrawal from large areas in Judea and Samaria would place the Islamists a few thousand meters from all of our major cities. We would hand the hills around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv to Hamas. A terrorist organization supported by Iran and committed to our destruction would take over the heart of our homeland and threaten our survival. US officials repeatedly underestimated the power of the Islamists and overestimated the power of their non-Islamist allies. Unless you have forces with an equal commitment to fight and die to defend their country, the Islamists eventually win. As long as Israeli forces held on to territories adjoining Israel, the Islamists would be kept at bay. The minute we vacated those territories, the Islamists would take over, as did Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

When a hugely popular chat app, ToTok, was launched in the United Arab Emirates in 2019, it attracted millions of downloads. But it was in fact a spying tool, just the latest entry from a long list of repressive states in the Gulf that have used private American and Israeli companies to design surveillance systems to monitor their own citizens. The firm DarkMatter was behind it, an Emirati corporation that has attracted former Israeli intelligence officials and National Security Agency staff.93

For Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel controls the population registry, leaving them at the mercy of Israeli occupation whims. Israel has controlled this registry since 1967 with absolute power over granting Palestinian passports and ID cards and impacting whether they’re allowed to enter or exit the territory.32 Because Israel no longer processes Palestinian family reunification requests, thousands of Palestinians live as noncitizens and can’t access jobs, healthcare, proper education, or the legal system. Indian officials fear a Palestinian-style insurgency against its rule in Kashmir, or at least claim that they do to justify harsh countermeasures. During the conflict between Israel and Hamas in May 2021, a mural in Srinagar with the words “We are Palestine” appeared and the local graffiti artist Mudasir Gul was forced to deface his own work before being arrested. Twenty Kashmiris were arrested for demonstrating in support of Palestine.

But if Chinese technology and its ideology is a threat the world, why is Israel not viewed in the same way? It is inarguable that Israel, a nation with a tiny population compared to China, has sold more of this equipment and impacted more people, and yet the outrage around Israeli actions is muted. It is clear that this is because Israel is an ally of the West and therefore not an official “enemy,” while Beijing is now designated as a national security threat and therefore must be targeted in a multitude of ways. It shows both a lack of care for populations suffering under Israeli-designed surveillance and selective outrage about high-tech monitoring. Both nations are behaving despicably toward their unwanted populations, but only one is sanctioned and demonized.

The exact extent of collaboration between Israel and Iran’s feared secret police, the Savak, is unclear. What the documents show are senior Iranian officials requesting that the Israeli Defense Forces [IDF] train bodyguards for their use. The Shah wanted to purchase Israeli planes and tanks and the Israelis were amenable to his request. From the late 1960s there is communication between Iranian and Israelis officials that outlines the negotiations. Between 1968 and 1972, Iran had purchased Israeli mortars, radio equipment, and other defense equipment. Israel trained Iranian police officers on its own territory. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir met the Shah in 1972 and said that the co-operation “between countries that stand against communism should be strengthened: Persia, Israel, Turkey and Ethiopia.

The original documents contained racist and derogatory language by Israeli officials toward Haitians, mocking their poverty and skin color, and so Judge Brenner claimed that this was a reason not to allow them into the public realm. Files, she wrote, which “include the use of insulting terminology that was accepted about fifty years ago and which today is perceived in a particularly negative light may damage the country’s image and foreign relations.” Brenner also worried that allowing the documents to be made public might assist the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

In 2008 an official website commemorating Sharon’s life and achievements was established, in which, rather than hiding his role in Gaza in those days, it proudly lauded it: Sharon participates in these searches himself. He orders the soldiers to perform a full body search on all males and sometimes imposes curfews on refugee camps in order to conduct a search. The clear goal of the mission is finding terrorists and killing them. The soldiers have orders not to try and capture the terrorists alive. Sharon instructs them to be rough with the local population, to perform searches in the streets and even to strip suspects naked if necessary; to shoot to kill any Arab who holds a gun; to shoot to kill any Arab who does not obey a Stop! call; and to diminish the risk to their lives by employing a big volume of fire, by uprooting trees from orchards which makes it difficult to capture terrorists, by demolishing houses and driving out their owners to other houses in order to pave secure roads. Haider Abd al-Shafi, Senior Palestinian leader, says: ‘Sharon took a decision to open roads in Al Shateya camp and in Rafah for security. That led to removing houses, the houses of refugees, which is an action not to be taken lightly, but there was no objection neither from Dayan nor from the Israeli government. They let Sharon realize his aim and he really destroyed a lot of refugees’ houses.’ Eli Landau, political ally and a friend of Ariel Sharon, says: ‘He was a very senior officer going with the troops from house to house, from bunker to bunker, from orange grove to orange grove, to explain what he meant. Three months later, Gaza was quiet. The terror was crushed with an iron fist, with a vicious hand. He cast fear in Gaza, he was feared.’9 The manner and detail of the retaliation were based on British military counter-insurgency methods employed against the Palestinians during the Arab revolt in the 1930s; it seems that the new rulers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip were highly impressed by this ruthless methodology. In the case of the British this pattern of inhumanity was in place for three years; in the case of the Palestinians it has lasted for more than fifty years.

Today, ReWalk has been approved for sale in Europe and in the United States. There are roughly four hundred users around the globe, including a number of US military veterans and law enforcement officials. The company is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, which has provided Goffer with millions of dollars for research and investment.37 Over the next few years, the Israeli inventor hopes more people like Lomas will be able to use the device. The market’s

The United Arab Emirates reportedly had its contract with NSO cancelled in 2021 when it became clear that Dubai’s ruler had used it to hack his ex-wife’s phone and those of her associates. The New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard, Beirut chief for the paper, had his phone compromised while reporting on Saudi Arabia and its leader Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a man who has invested huge amounts of money in commercial spyware.45 Palestinian human rights activists and diplomats in Palestine have also been targeted by Pegasus, including officials who were preparing complaints against Israel to the International Criminal Court. NSO technology was used by the Israeli police to covertly gather information from Israelis’ smartphones. Pegasus had become a key asset for Israel’s domestic and international activities.46 Saudi Arabia is perhaps the crown jewel of NSO’s exploits, one of the Arab world’s most powerful nations and a close ally of the US with no formal relations with the Jewish state. It is a repressive, Sunni Muslim ethnostate that imprisons and tortures dissidents and actively discriminates against its Shia minority.47 Unlike previous generations of Saudi leaders, bin Salman thought that the Israel/Palestine conflict was “an annoying irritant—a problem to be overcome rather than a conflict to be fairly resolved,” according to Rob Malley, a senior White House official in the Obama and Biden administrations.48

In 1943, when evidence of the scale of Nazi atrocities in Europe was already familiar, Simon lectured a group of Jewish eighteen-year-olds: ‘We are entering a country populated by another people and are not showing that people any consideration,’ he warned. ‘The Arabs are afraid we may force them out of here.’ The youngsters’ response was hostile, truculent and highly revealing: ‘Which is more ethical?’ one of them asked. ‘To leave Jews to be annihilated in the diaspora or to bring them in the face of opposition to Palestine and to carry out a transfer, even by force, of Arabs to Arab countries?’ It was an attitude that was increasingly prevalent among the so-called ‘Sabra’ generation of Jews who were born or raised in Palestine (named after the cactus-like plant that was prickly on the outside but soft inside), and who were to fight and rise to public prominence in the years to come. ‘Reference to the aspiration for peace and the desire for Arab–Jewish friendship became a kind of ritualised convention, repeated without any deep conviction’,19 in the words of one mainstream Israeli historian. Ihud leaders held discussions with Arab leaders in Palestine and the neighbouring countries. But these efforts were ‘unavailing as long as the official leadership on both sides looked on them with disdain’.

The state leadership and the Jewish Agency feared for Israel’s character as a European pioneering society if Oriental immigration was to continue unchecked. The expected demographic change that would result from mass immigration from Oriental countries was at the heart of this fear. Such preoccupations were enhanced by the fact that, following the destruction of most of European Jewry, North Africa had become the main reservoir for new immigrants.107 As Yaron Tsur argues, this fear was partially material for the political decision makers. The Labor establishment was afraid that the new immigrants would strengthen the ranks of the Revisionist opposition.108 Yet fear of Levantinization was not simply a matter of quantitative aspects of Mizrachi immigration; it was also associated with qualitative aspects of what Ashkenazi officials imagined to be a “Levantine” way of life. In closed forums, they quite openly discussed the anticipated negative consequences for Israeli state building. During the discussions regarding selection guidelines for 1953, Giora Josephthal, the head of the Klitah (Absorption) Department of the Jewish Agency, stated, for instance: “I say that this land is in danger, its ethical and social existence are in danger because of this Aliyah [from Oriental countries]. . . . They say that life in Israel will obtain a Levantine character, I am convinced that some of us are already afraid of the immigrants.

By the end of the year 2000, Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza numbered 225,000. The best offer to the Palestinians—by Clinton, not Barak—had been to withdraw 20 percent of the settlers, leaving more than 180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 10 percent of the occupied land, including land to be “leased” and portions of the Jordan River valley and East Jerusalem. The percentage figure is misleading, since it usually includes only the actual footprints of the settlements. There is a zone with a radius of about four hundred meters around each settlement within which Palestinians cannot enter. In addition, there are other large areas that would have been taken or earmarked to be used exclusively by Israel, roadways that connect the settlements to one another and to Jerusalem, and “life arteries” that provide the settlers with water, sewage, electricity, and communications. These range in width from five hundred to four thousand meters, and Palestinians cannot use or cross many of these connecting links. This honeycomb of settlements and their interconnecting conduits effectively divide the West Bank into at least two noncontiguous areas and multiple fragments, often uninhabitable or even unreachable, and control of the Jordan River valley denies Palestinians any direct access eastward into Jordan. About one hundred military checkpoints completely surround Palestine and block routes going into or between Palestinian communities, combined with an uncountable number of other roads that are permanently closed with large concrete cubes or mounds of earth and rocks. There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. Violence in the Holy Land continued.

I saw Clinton again during the signing of the peace treaty with Jordan in Israel’s Arava Valley in 1995. That year, I also sent him my third book on terrorism, Fighting Terrorism, and he sent me back a cordial letter. Notwithstanding his civility, I knew his administration would do anything to defeat me. In fact they did. Totally committed to the idea of a fully independent Palestine, they were not aware that Rabin himself had been opposed to such a state. Clinton sent his number one campaign strategist, James Carville, his pollster Stan Greenberg and his top team of experts to Israel to help tip the scales in Peres’s favor. Special envoy Dennis Ross would later say, “We did everything we could to help Peres,” and Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, would also later admit, “If there was ever a time that we tried to influence an Israeli election, it was Peres vs. Netanyahu.”23 Normally such an outrageous and systemic interference in another democracy’s elections would elicit outcries of protest from the press in America and Israel alike. No such protests were heard. Totally supportive of Peres, the press in both Israel and the United States was silent. Though the odds were stacked against us, we weren’t fazed. “About Carville,” Arthur said, “we can beat him.” Clinton and Peres organized an international peace conference in Sharm el-Sheikh a few weeks before the elections. Peres, Clinton, President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Hussein of Jordan, and Arafat all showed up and danced the dance. Yet a few months earlier, soon after Peres was installed without an election as replacement prime minister following Rabin’s assassination, King Hussein had sent me a message through his brother Crown Prince Hassan, asking: Would I meet Hassan secretly in London? In a London flat the crown prince and I hit it off immediately. I liked Hassan. Straightforward, with a humorous streak, he didn’t even attempt to hide his concern about a Peres victory. Though they wouldn’t admit it publicly, he and many Jordanian officials I met over the years were concerned that an armed Palestinian state could destroy the Hashemite regime and take over Jordan.

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.

Last week, however, Erdogan publicly shook the hand of an Israeli official, the first time in six years he had done so.

the Yishuv, even if willing, was powerless-and transfer was never adopted as official Zionist policy. Yet through the late 193os and early and mid-194os Zionist leaders continued in private to espouse the idea. For example, Weizmann

the very same day that the American embassy in Jerusalem officially opened), some sixty Palestinians were killed trying to approach the fence. It was a grim day for Israelis, who were saddened by the loss of life. Nonetheless, even among Israel’s left, there were no mass demonstrations, no widespread calls for investigations of the army’s policy or its execution, and no calls for a change in government as a result of what had happened. Israel’s left understood what was at stake. When Hamas’s leader, Ismail Haniyeh, had said in March, a few months prior, that the protests along the Gaza border were the beginning of the Palestinian return to “all of Palestine,” Israeli leftists believed him. They similarly understood that if Haniyeh was cynically going to send dozens of young Palestinians to trample a border that Israel has always defended with lethal force (while he sat comfortably many kilometers away), he was knowingly sending his own citizens directly into harm’s way. The Israeli left remained saddened and frustrated but, for the most part, quiet.

Sharon’s push to Judaize the Negev, as well as the Galilee, developed against the backdrop of the government’s decision to withdraw Jewish settlers from Gaza. After ending Jewish settlement there, Israel began to treat Gaza effectively as a territorial jurisdiction whose population it could consider as outside the demographic calculus of Jews and Palestinians who live in Israel and in the vast majority of the OPT—the West Bank including East Jerusalem—that Israel intends to retain. Israeli officials at the time acknowledged the demographic objectives behind the move. Amid the push to withdraw settlers from Gaza, Sharon said in an August 2005 address to Israelis, “Gaza cannot be held onto forever. Over one million Palestinians live there and they double their numbers with every generation.” Peres said the same month, “We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography.

States should impose individual sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against officials and individuals responsible for the continued commission of these serious crimes and condition arms sales and military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

Meanwhile, Facebook censors Palestinian groups so often that they have created their own hashtag, #FBCensorsPalestine. That the groups have become prominent matters little: in 2016, Facebook blocked accounts belonging to editors at the Quds News Network and Shehab News Agency in the West Bank; it later apologized and restored the accounts.30 The following year, it did the same to the official account of Fatah, the ruling party in the West Bank.31 A year after Facebook’s relationship with the Israelis was formalized, the Guardian released a set of leaked documents exposing the ways the company’s moderation policy discriminates against Palestinians and other groups. Published in a series called “The Facebook Files,” the documents contained slides from manuals used to train content moderators. On the whole, the leaks paint a picture of a disjointed and disorganized company where the community standards are expanded piecemeal, and little attention is given to their consequences. Anna, the former Facebook operations specialist I spoke with, agrees: “There’s no ownership of processes from beginning to end.” One set of documents demonstrate with precision the imbalance on the platform between Palestinians and Israelis (and the supporters of both). In a slide deck entitled “Credible Violence: Abuse Standards,” one slide lists global and local “vulnerable” groups; alongside “foreigners” and “homeless people” is “Zionists.”32 Interestingly, while Zionists are protected as a special category, “migrants,” as ProPublica has reported, are only “quasi-protected” and “Black children” aren’t protected at all.33 In trying to understand how such a decision came about, I reached out to numerous contacts, but only one spoke about it on the record. Maria, who worked in community operations until 2017, told me that she spoke up against the categorization when it was proposed. “We’d say, ‘Being a Zionist isn’t like being a Hindu or Muslim or white or Black—it’s like being a revolutionary socialist, it’s an ideology,’” she told me. “And now, almost everything related to Palestine is getting deleted.

Throughout history there have been populations that have lived in desperation, and none of them have resorted to the intentional targeting and murder of children as an officially practiced and widely praised mode of achieving political ends. When extremist elements of otherwise legitimate liberation movements such as the Republican Sinn Fein have committed such atrocities, their actions have been unconditionally condemned by the civilized world, and their political objectives have been discredited by their vile crimes. This is not so with the Palestinians. Once upon a time there was a special place in the lowest depths of hell for anyone who would intentionally murder a child. Now that place is in the pantheon of Palestinian heroes. Now that behavior is legitimized as ‘armed struggle’ against Israeli ‘occupation’ by, among others, the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Human Rights Commission, and the European Union. Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the rise of Hamas in 1987, the campaign to destroy Israel has taken on an ugly, fanatic religious tone. Holy obligation reinforces (and is replacing) Palestinian nationalism as the motivation for committing terrorist murder. As we have seen the secular, ‘moderate’ factions of the Palestinian nationalist movement (such as Abbas’s Fatah Party) will shrink into insignificance, and is replaced by terrorist Islamic factions such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Hamas receives financial and material support from the same sources as al Qaeda, and from al Qaeda directly. Islamic Jihad receives financial and material support from Iran, directly and through Hezbollah. These are the same international criminal entities that wage religion-based terror war against the United States. They do it for the same reason and by the same means: to make Islam supreme in the world, by the sword or the suicide bomb.

The boycott in the academic world today against Israelis has its roots, in some measure, in the 2001 United Nations–sponsored Durban World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance. There were actually two gatherings in Durban—the official United Nations conference and one sponsored by a group of about three thousand nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The discussion about Israel at both meetings was vituperative and overshadowed all other issues on the meetings’ agendas. The final declaration adopted by the NGO forum laid the groundwork for the BDS movement by equating Zionism with racism and calling for a boycott of Israel.

This had been made clear months before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, when the US had rejected Iraq’s offer of negotiations over weapons of mass destruction. In the offer, Iraq proposed to destroy all such chemical and biological weapons, if other countries in the region also destroyed their weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein was then Bush’s friend and ally, so he received a response, which was instructive. Washington said it welcomed Iraq’s proposal to destroy its own weapons, but didn’t want this linked to “other issues or weapons systems.” There was no mention of the “other weapons systems,” and there’s a reason for that. Israel not only may have chemical and biological weapons—it’s also the only country in the Mideast with nuclear weapons (probably about 200 of them). But “Israeli nuclear weapons” is a phrase that can’t be written or uttered by any official US government source. That phrase would raise the question of why all aid to Israel is not illegal, since foreign aid legislation from 1977 bars funds to any country that secretly develops nuclear weapons.

Stuxnet managed to slip through and infect them anyway, with devastating results. Officially, no country ever took responsibility for the cyberattack. Speculation was rife in the media, but the West maintained plausible deniability. However, Kendra knew better. It was Echelon programmers who had coded the malware, while Israeli agents inside Iran had delivered the actual payload. It was all done in an attempt to prevent Iran from

On the most basic question of all, “who is a Jew?” Elisabeth could find no solid answers. Many of her interviewees simply shrugged: “Ask three Jews, get five opinions.” In a later Christianity Today article, Elisabeth summarized her search for answers. “It is not, Israel officially proclaims, a racial question. There are Jews in every anthropologically-defined “race”—from the black Ethiopian to the Chinese orthodox Jew. “It is not a religious question. Probably fewer than ten percent of Israelis are orthodox Jews, and many are not only not religious, but are militantly anti-God. “To be Jewish is not a linguistic question. Over seventy languages are spoken in Israel, even though Hebrew is the official language and strong efforts are made to encourage everybody to learn it. “It is not a cultural question. Some Jews, desperately casting about for a definition that would satisfy me, said that Jewishness is a “cultural consciousness.” But what culture? Elisabeth had seen keening eastern Jewish women in Arab dress, Jews from New York’s East Side, Russian Jews, and Israeli natives born on kibbitzes. There were clearly no common denominators in terms of rituals, speech, dress, or outlook. “Is Jewishness then a political category?” Elisabeth continued. “Israel is a political state, but there are millions of Jews who are not Israelis. There are thousands of “Israelis” who are not Jews—every Arab now “assimilated” into the nation of Israel by conquest is officially an Israeli . . .” At the time the Israeli government defined Jews genetically, which to Elisabeth seemed a strange contradiction when they so vehemently deny that Jewishness has anything to do with race. But the determining question is, “‘Who is your mother?’ Anyone born of a Jewish mother is Jewish. The question as to what makes her Jewish has no answer. If your father is Jewish, if he is even a rabbi, it will not help you at all.”⁠3 “I have come to the conclusion that it remains for Israel; alone to execute justice for those who are its responsibility. If its highways must cut through the Arabs’ desert, if it claims ‘eminent domain,’ it must justly compensate those who have been displaced, those whose empty houses and lands Israel is now determined to fill with its own immigrants.

In parallel, he devised a system of underpasses and circuitous routes for Palestinian villagers who were barred from accessing the settler highways cutting through their lands. These were given the benevolent-sounding name of "fabric of life" roads. In private, Israeli officials called the something more honest. Speaking to the US ambassador in Tel Aviv, who summarised the conversation in a diplomatic cable, Israel's deputy defense minister referred to them as "apartheid roads.