AL-AWDA:PALESTINE 60 YRS OF FORCED EXILE : Cleveland IMC (((i)))

Al-Awda: Palestine: 60 Years of Forced Exile - Time for Return! Sixth Annual International Convention May 16-18 2008
[Please Forward Widely!]
DON'T DELAY! REGISTER TODAY!

Sixth Annual International AL-AWDA CONVENTION
on the

60th YEAR OF THE NAKBA AND STRUGGLE FOR RETURN

Embassy Suites Hotel Anaheim South, 11767 Harbor Boulevard
Garden Grove, California, 92840
May 16-18, 2008

Palestine: 60 Years of Forced Exile - Time for Return!

** world-renowned speakers ** discussions ** workshops ** exhibits ** book signings ** film-showings ** ** presentations ** lunch and dinner ** music ** mass rally and march **

Register now to be part of a historic and unique event. The Sixth Annual International Al-Awda Convention will aim to recapitulate Palestinian history with the help of those who have lived it. Together, we will strengthen our ability to educate the US public about the importance and justness of implementing the unconditional right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and lands. The focus of the convention will be on education that leads to strategies and mechanisms for expanding the effectiveness of our advocacy for the return.

*This year's 6th Annual International Al-Awda Convention is our most important one to date!*

Confirmed speakers include Bishop Atallah Hanna (Palestine), Supreme Justice Dr. Sheikh Taiseer Al Tamimi (Palestine), Dr. Adel Samara (Palestine, economist, author, founder of Al-Mashriq Al-A’amal Center for Cultural and Development Studies), Dr. Salman Abu Sitta (writer/researcher, founder of Palestine Land Society), Dr. Ghada Karmi (London, academic, researcher/writer), Dr. As'ad Abu Khalil (professor, Politics and Public Administration, CSU Stanislaus), Dr. Saree Makdisi (professor, English and Comparative Literature, UCLA), Ramzy Baroud (Seattle, journalist, former Al-Jazeera producer and editor of PalestineChronicle.com), and Dr. Ilan Pappe (History Professor at Exeter University, England). Palestinian Legislative Council member Khalida Jarrar, Dr. Isam Nassar (Assistant Professor of History at Illinois State University), Haneen Zoabi (member of the political bureau of Balad), and others have also been invited.

Special book signing with Dr. Ghada Karmi (author of "Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine" and "In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story"), Dr. Saree Makdisee (author of the upcoming book "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation"), Ramzy Baroud (author of "The Second Intifada"), Dr. Salman Abu Sitta (author of "The Return Journey"), Dr. Ilan Pappe (author of the "Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine") and we hope Dr. Issam Nassar (author of "Different Snapshots: The History of Early Local Photography in Palestine, 1850-1948")

In addition to the general meetings and lectures, we will be hosting an exhibit organized by Dr. Fayeq Oweis about The Return and Palestinians in Lebanon. We will also have a series of film showings including the soon to be announced winner of this year's Al-Awda Alternate Focus worldwide film contest. We have also scheduled several specialty meetings and workshops to include for example discussions of the following projects: Media, The Palestine Library, and Refugee Support; as well as Funding and Institutionalizing Al-Awda's Work for the Return. The convention will culminate in a mass protest and march.

Host Organizations of this year's convention include Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, Palestinian American Women Association, Free Palestine Alliance, National Council of Arab-Americans, Middle East Cultural and Information Center - San Diego, The Arab Community Center of the Inland Empire, Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid - Southern California, Palestine Aid Society, Palestinian American Congress, Bethlehem Association, Al-Mubadara - Southern California, Union of Palestinian American Women, Birzeit Society, El-Bireh Society, Arab American Friends of Nazareth, Ramallah Club, A.N.S.W.E.R. Coalition, International Action Center, Students for Justice in Palestine at CSUSB, UCLA and UCR, Students for International Knowledge at CSUSB, Muslim Students Association at Palomar College, UCSD, and Mira Costa, and The Arab American Council.

INVITATION

We invite all members and supporters of the implementation of the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes of origin and to reclaim their lands to join us in this landmark Al-Awda Convention on the 60th year of al-Nakba.

MASS RALLY FOR THE RETURN TO PALESTINE

The convention will culminate in a major mass rally and march to mark 60 years of Nakba and to call for The RETURN TO PALESTINE. The demonstration will be held in solidarity and coordination with our sisters and brothers who continue the struggle in our beloved homeland.

JOIN US for the largest annual gathering of Palestinians and their supporters on this most important occasion of the 60th year of the Nakba.

DON'T DELAY! REGISTER TODAY!

Registration
Sponsorship
Advertising
Exhibitors
Commemorative Shirts
Accommodation
Directions
Media
Host Organizations
Points of Unity

For more information, please go to http://al-awda.org/convention6 and keep revisiting that page as it is being updated regularly.

Al-Awda 6th International Convention Shirts Now Available!
http://www.al-awda.org/alert-conv6_shirt.html

Until Return,

Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition
PO Box 131352
Carlsbad, CA 92013, USA
Tel: 760-685-3243
Fax: 360-933-3568
E-mail: info@al-awda.org
WWW: http://al-awda.org

Al-Awda, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition (PRRC) is the largest network of grassroots activists and students dedicated to Palestinian human rights. We are a not for profit tax-exempt educational and charitable 501(c)(3) organization as defined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of the United States of America. Under IRS guidelines, your donations to PRRC are tax-deductible.

Order copies of "In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story" for signing from Al-Awda's

The Palestine Book Center

Special book signing with Dr. Ghada Karmi (author of "Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine" and "In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story")

1948, Israel, and the Palestinians - The True Story
By Efraim KARSH
Commentary Magazine
May 2008

http://tinyurl. com/4apu47 <http://tinyurl. com/4apu47>

or
http://www.commenta rymagazine. com/viewarticle. cfm/1948- -israel-- a
nd-the-palestinians -br--the- true-story- 11355
<http://www.commenta rymagazine. com/viewarticle. cfm/1948- -israel--
and-the-palestinian s-br--the- true-story- 11355>

Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally
recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the
only state in the world that is subjected to a constant
outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and
blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively
condemned by the international community; and whose right to
exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its
Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the
West.

During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the
Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of
these
educated Westerners. The "one-state solution," as
it is
called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement
of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of
historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the
status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can
expiate the "original sin" of Israel´s
founding, an act
built (in the words of one critic) "on the ruins of Arab
Palestine" and achieved through the deliberate and
aggressive dispossession of its native population.

This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent
creation of the longstanding Palestinian "refugee
problem"
forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars
pressed by Israel´s alleged victims and their Western
supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed.
As early as the mid-1950´s, the eminent American historian
J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his
findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of
scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most
influential of Israel´s revisionist "new
historians," and
one who went out of his way to establish the case for
Israel´s "original sin," grudgingly
stipulated that there
was no "design" to displace the Palestinian Arabs.

The recent declassification of millions of documents from
the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel´s
early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of
writers and ignored or distorted by the "new
historians,"
paint a much more definitive picture of the historical
record. They reveal that the claim of dispossession is not
only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What
follows is based on fresh research into these documents,
which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.

Far from being the hapless objects of a predatory Zionist
assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early
1920´s onward, and very much against the wishes of their
own
constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate
the Jewish national revival. This campaign culminated in the
violent attempt to abort the UN resolution of November 29,
1947, which called for the establishment of two states in
Palestine. Had these leaders, and their counterparts in the
neighboring Arab states, accepted the UN resolution, there
would have been no war and no dislocation in the first
place.

The simple fact is that the Zionist movement had always been
amenable to the existence in the future Jewish state of a
substantial Arab minority that would participate on an equal
footing "throughout all sectors of the country´s
public
life." The words are those of Ze´ev Jabotinsky, the
founding
father of the branch of Zionism that was the forebear of
today´s Likud party. In a famous 1923 article, Jabotinsky
voiced his readiness "to take an oath binding ourselves
and
our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to
the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try
to eject anyone."

Eleven years later, Jabotinsky presided over the drafting of
a constitution for Jewish Palestine. According to its
provisions, Arabs and Jews were to share both the
prerogatives and the duties of statehood, including most
notably military and civil service. Hebrew and Arabic were
to enjoy the same legal standing, and "in every cabinet
where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership
shall be offered to an Arab and vice-versa."

If this was the position of the more "militant"
faction of
the Jewish national movement, mainstream Zionism not only
took for granted the full equality of the Arab minority in
the future Jewish state but went out of its way to foster
Arab-Jewish coexistence. In January 1919, Chaim Weizmann,
then the upcoming leader of the Zionist movement, reached a
peace-and-cooperati on agreement with the Hashemite emir
Faisal ibn Hussein, the effective leader of the nascent
pan-Arab movement. From then until the proclamation of the
state of Israel on May 14, 1948, Zionist spokesmen held
hundreds of meetings with Arab leaders at all levels. These
included Abdullah ibn Hussein, Faisal´s elder brother and
founder of the emirate of Transjordan (later the kingdom of
Jordan), incumbent and former prime ministers in Syria,
Lebanon, Egypt, and Iraq, senior advisers of King Abdul Aziz
ibn Saud (founder of Saudi Arabia), and Palestinian Arab
elites of all hues.

As late as September 15, 1947, two months before the passing
of the UN partition resolution, two senior Zionist envoys
were still seeking to convince Abdel Rahman Azzam, the Arab
League´s secretary-general, that the Palestine conflict
"was
uselessly absorbing the best energies of the Arab League,"
and that both Arabs and Jews would greatly benefit "from
active policies of cooperation and development." Behind
this
proposition lay an age-old Zionist hope: that the material
progress resulting from Jewish settlement of Palestine would
ease the path for the local Arab populace to become
permanently reconciled, if not positively well disposed, to
the project of Jewish national self-determination. As David
Ben-Gurion, soon to become Israel´s first prime minister,
argued in December 1947:
If the Arab citizen will feel at home in our state, ...
if the state will help him in a truthful and dedicated way
to reach the economic, social, and cultural level of the
Jewish community, then Arab distrust will accordingly
subside and a bridge will be built to a Semitic, Jewish-Arab
alliance.

On the face of it, Ben-Gurion´s hope rested on reasonable
grounds. An inflow of Jewish immigrants and capital after
World War I had revived Palestine´s hitherto static
condition and raised the standard of living of its Arab
inhabitants well above that in the neighboring Arab states.
The expansion of Arab industry and agriculture, especially
in the field of citrus growing, was largely financed by the
capital thus obtained, and Jewish know-how did much to
improve Arab cultivation. In the two decades between the
world wars, Arab-owned citrus plantations grew sixfold, as
did vegetable-growing lands, while the number of olive
groves quadrupled.

No less remarkable were the advances in social welfare.
Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the Muslim
population dropped sharply and life expectancy rose from
37.5 years in 1926-27 to 50 in 1942-44 (compared with 33 in
Egypt). The rate of natural increase leapt upward by a
third.

That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the
neighboring British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention
India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish
contribution to Mandate Palestine´s socioeconomic
well-being. The British authorities acknowledged as much in
a 1937 report by a commission of inquiry headed by Lord
Peel:
The general beneficent effect of Jewish immigration on
Arab welfare is illustrated by the fact that the increase in
the Arab population is most marked in urban areas affected
by Jewish development. A comparison of the census returns in
1922 and 1931 shows that, six years ago, the increase
percent in Haifa was 86, in Jaffa 62, in Jerusalem 37, while
in purely Arab towns such as Nablus and Hebron it was only
7, and at Gaza there was a decrease of 2 percent.

Had the vast majority of Palestinian Arabs been left to
their own devices, they would most probably have been
content to take advantage of the opportunities afforded
them. This is evidenced by the fact that, throughout the
Mandate era, periods of peaceful coexistence far exceeded
those of violent eruptions, and the latter were the work of
only a small fraction of Palestinian Arabs. Unfortunately
for both Arabs and Jews, however, the hopes and wishes of
ordinary people were not taken into account, as they rarely
are in authoritarian communities hostile to the notions of
civil society or liberal democracy. In the modern world,
moreover, it has not been the poor and the oppressed who
have led the great revolutions or carried out the worst
deeds of violence, but rather militant vanguards from among
the better educated and more moneyed classes of society.

So it was with the Palestinians. In the words of the Peel
report:
We have found that, though the Arabs have benefited by
the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration,
this has had no conciliatory effect. On the contrary . . .
with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the
economic situation in Palestine [has] meant the
deterioration of the political situation.

In Palestine, ordinary Arabs were persecuted and murdered by
their alleged betters for the crime of "selling
Palestine"
to the Jews. Meanwhile, these same betters were enriching
themselves with impunity. The staunch pan-Arabist Awni Abdel
Hadi, who vowed to fight "until Palestine is either placed
under a free Arab government or becomes a graveyard for all
the Jews in the country," facilitated the transfer of
7,500
acres to the Zionist movement, and some of his relatives,
all respected political and religious figures, went a step
further by selling actual plots of land. So did numerous
members of the Husseini family, the foremost Palestinian
Arab clan during the Mandate period, including Muhammad
Tahir, father of Hajj Amin Husseini, the notorious mufti of
Jerusalem.

It was the mufti´s concern with solidifying his political
position that largely underlay the 1929 carnage in which 133
Jews were massacred and hundreds more were wounded-just as
it was the struggle for political preeminence that triggered
the most protracted outbreak of Palestinian Arab violence in
1936-39. This was widely portrayed as a nationalist revolt
against both the ruling British and the Jewish refugees then
streaming into Palestine to escape Nazi persecution. In
fact, it was a massive exercise in violence that saw far
more Arabs than Jews or Englishmen murdered by Arab gangs,
that repressed and abused the general Arab population, and
that impelled thousands of Arabs to flee the country in a
foretaste of the 1947-48 exodus.

Some Palestinian Arabs, in fact, preferred to fight back
against their inciters, often in collaboration with the
British authorities and the Hagana, the largest Jewish
underground defense organization. Still others sought
shelter in Jewish neighborhoods. For despite the paralytic
atmosphere of terror and a ruthlessly enforced economic
boycott, Arab-Jewish coexistence continued on many practical
levels even during such periods of turmoil, and was largely
restored after their subsidence.

Against this backdrop, it is hardly to be wondered at that
most Palestinians wanted nothing to do with the violent
attempt ten years later by the mufti-led Arab Higher
Committee (AHC), the effective "government" of the
Palestinian Arabs, to subvert the 1947 UN partition
resolution. With the memories of 1936-39 still fresh in
their minds, many opted to stay out of the fight. In no
time, numerous Arab villages (and some urban areas) were
negotiating peace agreements with their Jewish neighbors;
other localities throughout the country acted similarly
without the benefit of a formal agreement.

Nor did ordinary Palestinians shrink from quietly defying
their supreme leadership. In his numerous tours around the
region, Abdel Qader Husseini, district commander of
Jerusalem and the mufti´s close relative, found the
populace
indifferent, if not hostile, to his repeated call to arms.
In Hebron, he failed to recruit a single volunteer for the
salaried force he sought to form in that city; his efforts
in the cities of Nablus, Tulkarm, and Qalqiliya were hardly
more successful. Arab villagers, for their part, proved even
less receptive to his demands. In one locale, Beit Safafa,
Abdel Qader suffered the ultimate indignity, being driven
out by angry residents protesting their village´s
transformation into a hub of anti-Jewish attacks. Even the
few who answered his call did so, by and large, in order to
obtain free weapons for their personal protection and then
return home.

There was an economic aspect to this peaceableness. The
outbreak of hostilities orchestrated by the AHC led to a
sharp drop in trade and an accompanying spike in the cost of
basic commodities. Many villages, dependent for their
livelihood on the Jewish or mixed-population cities, saw no
point in supporting the AHC´s explicit goal of starving
the
Jews into submission. Such was the general lack of appetite
for war that in early February 1948, more than two months
after the AHC initiated its campaign of violence, Ben-Gurion
maintained that "the villages, in most part, have remained
on the sidelines."

Ben-Gurion´s analysis was echoed by the Iraqi general
Ismail
Safwat, commander-in- chief of the Arab Liberation Army
(ALA), the volunteer Arab force that did much of the
fighting in Palestine in the months preceding Israel´s
proclamation of independence. Safwat lamented that only 800
of the 5,000 volunteers trained by the ALA had come from
Palestine itself, and that most of these had deserted either
before completing their training or immediately afterward.
Fawzi Qawuqji, the local commander of ALA forces, was no
less scathing, having found the Palestinians "unreliable,
excitable, and difficult to control, and in organized
warfare virtually unemployable."

This view summed up most contemporary perceptions during the
fateful six months of fighting after the passing of the
partition resolution. Even as these months saw the all but
complete disintegration of Palestinian Arab society, nowhere
was this described as a systematic dispossession of Arabs by
Jews. To the contrary: with the partition resolution widely
viewed by Arab leaders as "Zionist in inspiration, Zionist
in principle, Zionist in substance, and Zionist in most
details" (in the words of the Palestinian academic Walid
Khalidi), and with those leaders being brutally candid about
their determination to subvert it by force of arms, there
was no doubt whatsoever as to which side had instigated the
bloodletting.

Nor did the Arabs attempt to hide their culpability. As the
Jews set out to lay the groundwork for their nascent state
while simultaneously striving to convince their Arab
compatriots that they would be (as Ben-Gurion put it)
"equal
citizens, equal in everything without any exception,"
Palestinian Arab leaders pledged that "should partition be
implemented, it will be achieved only over the bodies of the
Arabs of Palestine, their sons, and their women." Qawuqji
vowed "to drive all Jews into the sea." Abdel Qader
Husseini
stated that "the Palestine problem will only be solved by
the sword; all Jews must leave Palestine."

They and their fellow Arab abetters did their utmost to make
these threats come true, with every means at their disposal.
In addition to regular forces like the ALA, guerrilla and
terror groups wreaked havoc, as much among noncombatants as
among Jewish fighting units. Shooting, sniping, ambushes,
bombings, which in today´s world would be condemned as war
crimes, were daily events in the lives of civilians.
"[I]nnocent and harmless people, going about their daily
business," wrote the U.S. consul-general in Jerusalem,
Robert Macatee, in December 1947,

are picked off while riding in buses, walking along the
streets, and stray shots even find them while asleep in
their beds. A Jewish woman, mother of five children, was
shot in Jerusalem while hanging out clothes on the roof. The
ambulance rushing her to the hospital was machine-gunned,
and finally the mourners following her to the funeral were
attacked and one of them stabbed to death.
As the fighting escalated, Arab civilians suffered as well,
and the occasional atrocity sparked cycles of large-scale
violence. Thus, the December 1947 murder of six Arab workers
near the Haifa oil refinery by the small Jewish underground
group IZL was followed by the immediate slaughter of 39 Jews
by their Arab co-workers, just as the killing of some 100
Arabs during the battle for the village of Deir Yasin in
April 1948 was "avenged" within days by the killing
of 77
Jewish nurses and doctors en route to the Hadassah hospital
on Mount Scopus.

Yet while the Jewish leadership and media described these
gruesome events for what they were, at times withholding
details so as to avoid panic and keep the door open for
Arab-Jewish reconciliation, their Arab counterparts not only
inflated the toll to gigantic proportions but invented
numerous nonexistent atrocities. The fall of Haifa (April
21-22), for example, gave rise to totally false claims of a
large-scale slaughter, which circulated throughout the
Middle East and reached Western capitals. Similarly false
rumors were spread after the fall of Tiberias (April 18),
during the battle for Safed (in early May), and in Jaffa,
where in late April the mayor fabricated a massacre of
"hundreds of Arab men and women." Accounts of Deir
Yasin in
the Arab media were especially lurid, featuring supposed
hammer-and-sickle tattoos on the arms of IZL fighters and
accusations of havoc and rape.

This scare-mongering was undoubtedly aimed at garnering the
widest possible sympathy for the Palestinian plight and
casting the Jews as brutal predators. But it backfired
disastrously by spreading panic within the disoriented
Palestinian society. That, in turn, helps explain why, by
April 1948, after four months of seeming progress, this
phase of the Arab war effort collapsed. (Still in the offing
was the second, wider, and more prolonged phase involving
the forces of the five Arab nations that invaded Palestine
in mid-May.) For not only had most Palestinians declined to
join the active hostilities, but vast numbers had taken to
the road, leaving their homes either for places elsewhere in
the country or fleeing to neighboring Arab lands.

Indeed, many had vacated even before the outbreak of
hostilities, and still larger numbers decamped before the
war reached their own doorstep. "Arabs are leaving the
country with their families in considerable numbers, and
there is an exodus from the mixed towns to the rural Arab
centers," reported Alan Cunningham, the British high
commissioner, in December 1947, adding a month later that
the "panic of [the] middle class persists and there is a
steady exodus of those who can afford to leave the
country."

Echoing these reports, Hagana intelligence sources recounted
in mid-December an "evacuation frenzy that has taken hold
of
entire Arab villages." Before the month was over, many
Palestinian Arab cities were bemoaning the severe problems
created by the huge influx of villagers and pleading with
the AHC to help find a solution to the predicament. Even the
Syrian and Lebanese governments were alarmed by this early
exodus, demanding that the AHC encourage Palestinian Arabs
to stay put and fight.

But no such encouragement was forthcoming, either from the
AHC or from anywhere else. In fact, there was a total lack
of national cohesion, let alone any sense of shared destiny.
Cities and towns acted as if they were self-contained units,
attending to their own needs and eschewing the smallest
sacrifice on behalf of other localities. Many "national
committees" (i.e., local leaderships) forbade the export
of
food and drink from well-stocked cities to needy outlying
towns and villages. Haifa´s Arab merchants refused to
alleviate a severe shortage of flour in Jenin, while Gaza
refused to export eggs and poultry to Jerusalem; in Hebron,
armed guards checked all departing cars. At the same time
there was extensive smuggling, especially in the
mixed-population cities, with Arab foodstuffs going to
Jewish neighborhoods and vice-versa.

The lack of communal solidarity was similarly evidenced by
the abysmal treatment meted out to the hundreds of thousands
of refugees scattered throughout the country. Not only was
there no collective effort to relieve their plight, or even
a wider empathy beyond one´s immediate neighborhood, but
many refugees were ill-treated by their temporary hosts and
subjected to ridicule and abuse for their supposed
cowardice. In the words of one Jewish intelligence report:
"The refugees are hated wherever they have
arrived."

Even the ultimate war victims-the survivors of Deir
Yasin-did not escape their share of indignities. Finding
refuge in the neighboring village of Silwan, many were soon
at loggerheads with the locals, to the point where on April
14, a mere five days after the tragedy, a Silwan delegation
approached the AHC´s Jerusalem office demanding that the
survivors be transferred elsewhere. No help for their
relocation was forthcoming.

Some localities flatly refused to accept refugees at all,
for fear of overstraining existing resources. In Acre
(Akko), the authorities prevented Arabs fleeing Haifa from
disembarking; in Ramallah, the predominantly Christian
population organized its own militia-not so much to fight
the Jews as to fend off the new Muslim arrivals. Many
exploited the plight of the refugees unabashedly, especially
by fleecing them for such basic necessities as
transportation and accommodation.

Yet still the Palestinians fled their homes, and at an ever
growing pace. By early April some 100,000 had gone, though
the Jews were still on the defensive and in no position to
evict them. (On March 23, fully four months after the
outbreak of hostilities, ALA commander-in- chief Safwat noted
with some astonishment that the Jews "have so far not
attacked a single Arab village unless provoked by it.") By
the time of Israel´s declaration of independence on May
14,
the numbers of Arab refugees had more than trebled. Even
then, none of the 170,000-180, 000 Arabs fleeing urban
centers, and only a handful of the 130,000-160, 000 villagers
who left their homes, had been forced out by the Jews.

The exceptions occurred in the heat of battle and were
uniformly dictated by ad-hoc military
considerations- reducing civilian casualties, denying
sites
to Arab fighters when there were no available Jewish forces
to repel them-rather than political design. They were,
moreover, matched by efforts to prevent flight and/or to
encourage the return of those who fled. To cite only one
example, in early April a Jewish delegation comprising top
Arab-affairs advisers, local notables, and municipal heads
with close contacts with neighboring Arab localities
traversed Arab villages in the coastal plain, then emptying
at a staggering pace, in an attempt to convince their
inhabitants to stay put.

What makes these Jewish efforts all the more impressive is
that they took place at a time when huge numbers of
Palestinian Arabs were being actively driven from their
homes by their own leaders and/or by Arab military forces,
whether out of military considerations or in order to
prevent them from becoming citizens of the prospective
Jewish state. In the largest and best-known example, tens of
thousands of Arabs were ordered or bullied into leaving the
city of Haifa on the AHC´s instructions, despite
strenuous
Jewish efforts to persuade them to stay. Only days earlier,
Tiberias´ 6,000-strong Arab community had been similarly
forced out by its own leaders, against local Jewish wishes.
In Jaffa, Palestine´s largest Arab city, the municipality
organized the transfer of thousands of residents by land and
sea; in Jerusalem, the AHC ordered the transfer of women and
children, and local gang leaders pushed out residents of
several neighborhoods.

Tens of thousands of rural villagers were likewise forced
out by order of the AHC, local Arab militias, or the ALA.
Within weeks of the latter´s arrival in Palestine in
January
1948, rumors were circulating of secret instructions to
Arabs in predominantly Jewish areas to vacate their villages
so as to allow their use for military purposes and to reduce
the risk of becoming hostage to the Jews.

By February, this phenomenon had expanded to most parts of
the country. It gained considerable momentum in April and
May as ALA and AHC forces throughout Palestine were being
comprehensively routed. On April 18, the Hagana´s
intelligence branch in Jerusalem reported a fresh general
order to remove the women and children from all villages
bordering Jewish localities. Twelve days later, its Haifa
counterpart reported an ALA command to evacuate all Arab
villages between Tel Aviv and Haifa in anticipation of a new
general offensive. In early May, as fighting intensified in
the eastern Galilee, local Arabs were ordered to transfer
all women and children from the Rosh Pina area, while in the
Jerusalem sub-district, Transjordan´s Arab Legion likewise
ordered the emptying of scores of villages.

As for the Palestinian Arab leaders themselves, who had
placed their reluctant constituents on a collision course
with Zionism in the 1920´s and 1930´s and had now
dragged
them helpless into a mortal conflict, they hastened to get
themselves out of Palestine and to stay out at the most
critical moment. Taking a cue from these higher-ups, local
leaders similarly rushed en masse through the door. High
Commissioner Cunningham summarized what was happening with
quintessential British understatement:

You should know that the collapsing Arab morale in Palestine
is in some measure due to the increasing tendency of those
who should be leading them to leave the country. . . . For
instance, in Jaffa the mayor went on four-day leave 12 days
ago and has not returned, and half the national committee
has left. In Haifa the Arab members of the municipality left
some time ago; the two leaders of the Arab Liberation Army
left actually during the recent battle. Now the chief Arab
magistrate has left. In all parts of the country the effendi
class has been evacuating in large numbers over a
considerable period and the tempo is increasing.
Arif al-Arif, a prominent Arab politician during the Mandate
era and the doyen of Palestinian historians, described the
prevailing atmosphere at the time: "Wherever one went
throughout the country one heard the same refrain: `Where
are the leaders who should show us the way? Where is the
AHC? Why are its members in Egypt at a time when Palestine,
their own country, needs them?´"

Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib, a Palestinian Arab leader during
the 1948 war, would sum up the situation in these words:
"The Palestinians had neighboring Arab states which opened
their borders and doors to the refugees, while the Jews had
no alternative but to triumph or to die."

This is true enough of the Jews, but it elides the reason
for the refugees´ flight and radically distorts the
quality
of their reception elsewhere. If they met with no sympathy
from their brethren at home, the reaction throughout the
Arab world was, if anything, harsher still. There were
repeated calls for the forcible return of the refugees, or
at the very least of young men of military age, many of whom
had arrived under the (false) pretense of volunteering for
the ALA. As the end of the Mandate loomed nearer, the
Lebanese government refused entry visas to Palestinian males
between eighteen and fifty and ordered all "healthy and
fit
men" who had already entered the country to register
officially or be considered illegal aliens and face the full
weight of the law.

The Syrian government took an even more stringent approach,
banning from its territory all Palestinian males between
sixteen and fifty. In Egypt, a large number of demonstrators
marched to the Arab League´s Cairo headquarters and lodged
a
petition demanding that "every able-bodied Palestinian
capable of carrying arms should be forbidden to stay
abroad." Such was the extent of Arab resentment toward the
Palestinian refugees that the rector of Cairo´s al-Azhar
institution of religious learning, probably the foremost
Islamic authority, felt obliged to issue a ruling that made
the sheltering of Palestinian Arab refugees a religious
duty.

Contempt for the Palestinians only intensified with time.
"Fright has struck the Palestinian Arabs and they fled
their
country," commented Radio Baghdad on the eve of the
pan-Arab
invasion of the new-born state of Israel in mid-May.
"These
are hard words indeed, yet they are true."
Lebanon´s
minister of the interior (and future president) Camille
Chamoun was more delicate, intoning that "The people of
Palestine, in their previous resistance to imperialists and
Zionists, proved they were worthy of independence," but
"at
this decisive stage of the fighting they have not remained
so dignified."

No wonder, then, that so few among the Palestinian refugees
themselves blamed their collapse and dispersal on the Jews.
During a fact-finding mission to Gaza in June 1949, Sir John
Troutbeck, head of the British Middle East office in Cairo
and no friend to Israel or the Jews, was surprised to
discover that while the refugees
express no bitterness against the Jews (or for that
matter against the Americans or ourselves) they speak with
the utmost bitterness of the Egyptians and other Arab
states. "We know who our enemies are," they will
say, and
they are referring to their Arab brothers who, they declare,
persuaded them unnecessarily to leave their homes. . . . I
even heard it said that many of the refugees would give a
welcome to the Israelis if they were to come in and take the
district over.

Sixty years after their dispersion, the refugees of 1948 and
their descendants remain in the squalid camps where they
have been kept by their fellow Arabs for decades, nourished
on hate and false hope. Meanwhile, their erstwhile leaders
have squandered successive opportunities for statehood.

It is indeed the tragedy of the Palestinians that the two
leaders who determined their national development during the
20th century-Hajj Amin Husseini and Yasir Arafat, the
latter
of whom dominated Palestinian politics since the
mid-1960´s
to his death in November 2004-were megalomaniacal
extremists
blinded by anti-Jewish hatred and profoundly obsessed with
violence. Had the mufti chosen to lead his people to peace
and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, as he had
promised the British officials who appointed him to his high
rank in the early 1920´s, the Palestinians would have had
their independent state over a substantial part of Mandate
Palestine by 1948, and would have been spared the traumatic
experience of dispersion and exile. Had Arafat set the PLO
from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation,
instead of turning it into one of the most murderous
terrorist organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state
could have been established in the late 1960´s or the
early
1970´s; in 1979 as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli
peace
treaty; by May 1999 as part of the Oslo process; or at the
very latest with the Camp David summit of July 2000.

Instead, Arafat transformed the territories placed under his
control in the 1990´s into an effective terror state from
where he launched an all-out war (the "al-Aqsa
intifada")
shortly after being offered an independent Palestinian state
in the Gaza Strip and 92 percent of the West Bank, with East
Jerusalem as its capital. In the process, he subjected the
Palestinian population in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip
to a repressive and corrupt regime in the worst tradition of
Arab dictatorships and plunged their standard of living to
unprecedented depths.

What makes this state of affairs all the more galling is
that, far from being unfortunate aberrations, Hajj Amin and
Arafat were quintessential representatives of the cynical
and self-seeking leaders produced by the Arab political
system. Just as the Palestinian leadership during the
Mandate had no qualms about inciting its constituents
against Zionism and the Jews, while lining its own pockets
from the fruits of Jewish entrepreneurship, so PLO officials
used the billions of dollars donated by the Arab oil states
and, during the Oslo era, by the international community to
finance their luxurious style of life while ordinary
Palestinians scrambled for a livelihood.

And so it goes. Six decades after the mufti and his henchmen
condemned their people to statelessness by rejecting the UN
partition resolution, their reckless decisions are being
reenacted by the latest generation of Palestinian leaders.
This applies not only to Hamas, which in January 2006
replaced the PLO at the helm of the Palestinian Authority
(PA), but also to the supposedly moderate Palestinian
leadership-from President Mahmoud Abbas to Ahmad Qureia
(negotiator of the 1993 Oslo Accords) to Saeb Erekat to
prime minister Salam Fayad-which refuses to recognize
Israel´s very existence as a Jewish state and insists on
the
full implementation of the "right of return."

And so it goes as well with Western anti-Zionists who in the
name of justice (no less) call today not for a new and
fundamentally different Arab leadership but for the
dismantlement of the Jewish state. Only when these
dispositions change can Palestinian Arabs realistically look
forward to putting their self-inflicted
"catastrophe" behind
them.
_________

How Anti-Zionism lays the basis for open antisemitism

Something new and sinister is beginning to emerge out of the left anti-Zionist movement. Left anti-Zionists like Sue Blackwell and Tony Greenstein are alarmed that there is an openly antisemitic current forming within their movment, represented by people like Gilad Atzmon, Paul Eisen and Israel Shamir. While these left anti-Zionists are quite right to fight against this openly antisemitic current, they also have to accept some political responsibility for its emergence. Left anti-Zionism is an institutionally antisemitic movement; right now this movement is giving birth to open antisemites. The British Socialist Workers Party has taken a step towards embracing the new current.

Anti-Zionists like Sue Blackwell and Tony Greenstein think of themselves as being on the left. They say that they are genuinely disgusted by antisemitism and that they feel no hatred towards Jews. This piece is not a personal attack on them; it is rather a political critique and an urgent warning that there is a new danger emerging.

I can understand why left anti-Zionists are angry with people like Engage, who accuse them of institutional antisemitism, even though they feel that they loathe antisemitism.

They are also angry because there is a huge campaign of organised violence and humiliation being perpetrated by Israel against Palestinians and they are campaigning against this. People like Engage seem to do everything they can to undermine their campaign against Israeli injustice. Instead of joining the campaign, we seem to close our ears to the real injustice and we seem to be obsessed, in a paranoid way, with antisemitism – which, in comparison to the occupation and to global Islamophobia, seems to cause insignificant harm right now. Engage appears to repeat the lies of Sharon and Sharansky: we seem to raise the spectre of antisemitism for the purpose of disabling the Palestine Solidarity movement. We remind the left anti-Zionists of those right wing Israelis who have debased the very concept of antisemitism by cynically using it as a shield to deflect legitimate criticism.

But we have been measured and precise in our criticisms of the left anti-Zionists. We have said that they are fighting for a politics and for a world-view that is effectively antisemitic; we have said that they are building a movement that is objectively antisemitic; we have not said that they are antisemites; we have not said that they feel a racist hatred of Jews; we have not said that they are motivated by antisemitism.

About Sue Blackwell, for example, we have said the following: the way that she singles out Israel as being the only ‘illegitimate’ state constitutes demonization rather than criticism. She does not criticise Israel’s bad policies but instead she understands its bad policies to be an inevitable manifestation of its bad (racist) essence. She wanted AUT to have policy of holding Israeli academics to a much higher standard of behaviour than any other academics. She was not, we said, careful to avoid using antisemitic imagery and narratives in her opposition to Israeli policy.

About Tony Greenstein we have said that his claim that Zionism is a form of Nazism is effectively antisemitic. He claims that Zionism is like Nazism, that Zionists helped the Nazis to carry out the Holocaust and that the reason they did this was because Nazism and Zionism shares a basic axiom: that Jews and non-Jews cannot and should not live together in Europe. This identification of Nazism with Zionism, we have said, licenses people to relate to Jews who do not identify themselves as anti-Zionists, as though they were Nazis. We have said that the left anti-Zionist story of how Israel was founded and why Israel is uniquely racist is based on a one-sided reading of history. We have criticised the way that this story puts Zionism at the centre of the world; it mirrors the way that open antisemites have put ‘the Jewish problem’ at the centre of world history.

We have used the analogy of institutional racism. The police force in London has a problem with institutional racism – it functions in an effectively racist way – but this claim does not rely on proving that individual police officers hate black people.

Similarly, we have said that left anti-Zionist politics has the effect of treating Jews and Israel as being essentially and unchangeably worse than other people and other states. The anti-Zionists don’t argue for this world-view because they feel a hatred towards Jews. It is not hatred that leads to an antisemitic politics, it is the antisemitic politics itself that is the problem.

We think that this effectively antisemitic world-view is dangerous.

1 It disables genuine criticism of Israel. Israel does not have to take antisemitic demonization seriously in a way that it would have to take opposition to its bad actions seriously.

2 It plays into the hands of people like Sharon, who mis-use the charge of antisemitism as a shield to deflect justified criticism.

3 The Palestine Solidarity movement has failed to build mass support for a just peace because it smells of antisemitism – and most people do not want to be associated with it.

4 It licenses people to relate to Jews and Israelis in our labour movement and in our universities in a racist way.
5 It functions as a programme for war against Israel rather than a programme for peace in the Middle East.

The clearest danger is that a movement that is based upon an objectively antisemitic politics is a breeding ground for antisemitism. It is inevitable that a movement based on antisemitic politics will create actual antisemites.

The left anti-Zionists have to take responsibility for the consequences of their politics and the consequences of the movement that they have played a part in building.

And now Sue Blackwell, Tony Greenstein and others have recognised that something new and alarming is happening and they have reacted with some clarity and with some courage. Gilad Atzmon is a saxophonist and an anti-Zionist. He has been politically formed in the anti-Zionist movement and he repeats most of its standard rhetoric.

But he goes further. Atzmon has begun openly, consciously and wilfully to argue for an antisemitic world-view. Anti-Zionists like Mark Elf, Roland Rance and Stephen Marks have rightly crticised Atzmon’s antisemitism – see this piece on Harry’s Place for the case against Atzmon, and follow the trail of links for the full story about Atzmon’s use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and his claim that any Jew who does not denounce their Jewish identity is objectively a Zionist agent. Sue Blackwell has removed the link from her site to Atzmon’s consciously antisemitic site. Tony Greenstein wrote a piece entitled ‘Why Palestine Solidarity activists must reject antisemitism’.

The British Socialist Workers Party has invited Atzmon to their showpiece Marxism 2005 event and they gave him a platform to speak at their bookshop. Those anti-Zionists who have recognised Atzmon’s antisemitism are campaigning against the SWP’s support for Atzmon. They picketed his talk at the SWP bookshop and they are collecting names for a petition.

The SWP have defended Atzmon, pretending that he is not an antisemite or a Holocaust denier. The SWP have for some time occupied the anti-Zionist territory that Engage has described as politically or institutionally antisemitic. By embracing Atzmon, they have taken a tentative step into a new territory; they are dipping their toe in the water of open and conscious antisemitism. There is still time for the SWP to step backwards; perhaps there will be a member’s revolt against this new development, but at this moment, they have made a definite move over this line.

Tony Greenstein, Sue Blackwell and many other anti-Zionists agree, I think, that the SWP have taken this step into the realm of openly antisemitic politcs.

Gilad Atzmon is influenced by Israel Shamir and he links to Shamir’s website from his own site. Shamir wrote the following about the anti-Zionists' campaign against Atzmon’s antisemitism and the SWP support for him:

This is a talk he gave in Bookmarks, London’s Marxist bookshop; while outside, a group of Jews picketed and demanded to shut him up. … As Gilad was speaking in a Marxist bookshop, they [the Jews] sent antizionist Jews. Thus these protesters revealed their most important inner quality - they felt they weren't antizionists of Jewish origin, but representatives of Jewry within the antizionist Left…. It is hardly a question of religion as these picketers are irreligious. Indeed, it is a question of spirit, the Judaic spirit we find at the basis of Zionism.

Paul Eisen is another anti-Zionist who has now positioned himself in the territory of open antisemitism and again, left anti-Zionists have criticised him for his claim that there is a Jewish essence by which the existence of Israel as a racist state can be explained; he is also criticised for his claims about global Jewish power and conspiracy . Eisen has been active in the British anti-Zionist movement, building an apparently respectable anti-Zionist campaign called ‘Deir Yassin Remembered’ that aimed to commemorate the massacre that was carried out by Israeli extremists in 1948.

Engage has said to the anti-Zionists that they are institutionally antisemitic; that when they say ‘Zionist’ often this functions as code for ‘Jew’. Left anti-Zionists have always angrily rejected this charge, saying that they are only hostile to Zionist Jews and not at all hostile to Jews in general. This new current of anti-Zionist antisemites answer us: “Yes. We mean Jew. We are antisemites. So What?”

There is another story this week that demonstrates the tentative development of open antisemitism out of the anti-Zionist movement and the complex connections between this new phenomenon back to the old politics.

Gush Shalomhttp://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en , the Israeli Peace Bloc, has never been ant-Zionist in the sense that Sue Blackwell, Tony Greenstein and the SWP are. Gush Shalom has always been a living demonstration of the difference between genuine, intelligent yet militant criticism of Israeli policy - and politically antisemitic demonization of Israel’s existence – in which it has never indulged.

The symbol of Gush Shalom is an Israeli flag and a Palestinian flag side by side. Gush Shalom has fought clearly and politically against the utopianism and political demonization of Israel that is associated with the ‘democratic secular state’ slogan. It has never argued for war against Israel, but rather, has argued for a just peace between Israel and Palestine on the basis of the pre-1967 borders. It has supported Palestinians in their struggle against the occupation, and more recently against the wall that is being built across their territory; it has made heroic efforts to build a movement in Israel for a just peace. Gush Shalom also has a record of campaigning for the shaky formal equality that is afforded to Arabs who live in Israel to be made real. Gush Shalom has not fought for the destruction of Israel but for an end to the occupation; they have never demonised Israel as a uniquely racist state but have campaigned against Israeli racism.

Adam Keller I have had a detailed debate over Engage’s claim that the anti-Zionist movement is institutionally antisemitic – see this , this, this and this.

Adam argued that Sue Blackwell and the anti-Zionist left is not motivated by antisemitism; I accepted that, but argued that their politics was, in itself antisemitic, irrespective of their psychological state.

Adam argued that we should understand if Palestinians who are at the sharp end of Israeli violence develop a hostility to Jews; I argued that politically we should fight against antisemitism in Palestine and that left anti-Zionists outside Israel who are not victims of Israeli violence have a duty to craft a politically clear response.

Adam argued that Israeli Jews are not currently victims of antisemitism; I argued that there are people in my union and in our universities who have an effectively antisemitic relationship to Jews and Jewish Israelis. I also argued that there are many people in the world who would like to see Jews driven out of Israel, or at least politically subjugated in a greater Palestine.

Adam argued that Jews are understood by the Israeli government, and by the Palestine Solidarity movement to function as extensions of the state of Israel – his point seems, here, to be that it is not entirely irrational, then, if some people take out their anger with Israel, on Jews.

We argued that AUT had an institutionally antisemitic policy when it singled out Israel and Israeli academics for standards and treatment that it did not apply anywhere else in the world; Adam found nothing objectionable in this singling out of Israel for criticism.

Adam argued that Israel has cried wolf so many times about antisemitism that no claim of antisemitism can be taken seriously any longer.

Adam argued that Israel should be understood as a settler colonial state in the same family as USA, Canada & Australia; we argued that this story of the foundation of Israel misses out the actual material circumstance that led to its foundation, which was the genocide of the Jews of Europe.

Adam’s central criticisms seems to be that we should fight against the occupation, which is causing huge and current human suffering and we should worry about antisemitism later; probably antisemitism will be much diminished if Israeli violence ends. So the key to ending antisemitism is ending Israeli violence.

This week in the Gush Shalom mailing, there is a link to an article in Counterpunch , which is written by Michael Neumann, a philosophy professor at Trent University in Canada. Gush Shalom add the words ‘full text of biting analysis’ next to the link to indicate what they think of this article.

Alexandra Simonon has already posted a critique of this article on Engage, so I don’t need to demonstrate its worthlessness here – or its absolute lack of depth or critical thought, or its factual errors and misrepresentations. But the interesting thing about this piece is its supercilious and light-hearted tone. I think that its tone demonstrates that this is another left anti-Zionist who has decided to take the step across the line from the institutionally antisemitic left anti-Zionist movement into the new territory of the openly antisemitic anti-Zionism of Atzmon, Eisen and Shamir.

Here are some quotes from Neumann’s piece. It is a hybrid piece. Its politics come out of the left anti-Zionist movement; its tone shows that it is moving towards the new territory of openly antisemitic anti-Zionism.

Undoubtedly there is genuine antisemitism in the Arab world: the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the myths about stealing the blood of gentile babies. This is utterly inexcusable. So was your failure to answer Aunt Bee's last letter.

The progress of Arab antisemitism fits nicely with the progress of Jewish encroachment and Jewish atrocities. This is not to excuse genuine antisemitism; it is to trivialize it.

If Arab anti-semitism persists after a peace agreement, we can all get together and cluck about it. But it still won't do Jews much actual harm.

Israel has committed war crimes. It has implicated Jews generally in these crimes, and Jews generally have hastened to implicate themselves. This has provoked hatred against Jews. Why not? Some of this hatred is racist, some isn't, but who cares? Why should we pay any attention to this issue at all?

There is an explicitly antisemitic site called Jewish Tribal Review, which describes itself as a “compilation of links to online articles largely from mainstream media sources about Jewish and Zionist influence in popular culture, Jewish ethnocentrism, Jewish power, Jewish wealth, American judeocentrism and Jewish political lobbying.”

Jewish Tribal Review reproduce an email exchange between themselves and Michael Neumann. It is an extremely illuminating exchange.

JTR ask Neumann whether he thinks that their website is antisemitic. He replies:

"Um, yes, I do, but I don't get bent out of shape about it. I know you're site and it's brilliantly done. Maybe I should say that I'm not quite sure whether you guys are antisemtic in the 'bad' sense or not… in this world, your material, and to a lesser extent mine, is a gift to neo-Nazis and racists of all sorts. Unlike most people in my political niche, this doesn't alarm me: there are far more serious problems to worry about.”

Later in the exchange, Neumann comments

“Please do not circulate this. I'll add that I have my own strategy regarding how to influence public opinion on Palestine. Some of it I keep to myself.”

JTR answers,

“Well, as I say, it seems that you are an honorable man. I think the reluctance to name the problem (the JEWISH propaganda apparatus) guarantees Palestinian defeat.”

This is what Neumann has to say on the notion of political responsibility to JTR:
“of course you are not the least bit responsible for how others use your site.”

Neuman goes on:

“My sole concern is indeed to help the Palestinians… I am not interested in truth, or justice, or understanding, or anything else, except so far as it serves that purpose. This means, among other things, that if talking about Jewish power doesn't fit my strategy, I won't talk about it. And, implausible as it may sound to you, I believe I can do *much* more damage by staying entirely away from such issues. Finally, I have always considered politics a crude, simple business in which there is little place for theory. It is very valuable to know the history behind the conflict, even far behind it, but it is not always politically effective to discuss it, not least because there are always contentious points and side-issues…. Whatever you may think of the strategy, you can see that it would pull me in a direction far different from your own. This is not to say that the questions in which you are interested may not become very relevant once public opinion is softened up for them.”

JTR comments later on,

“I am inclined, despite your request otherwise, to post them at our web site.”

Neuman now begins to panic:

“I do object to posting the exchange, very much so. My messages were not thought out with the deliberation I would take in making public pronouncements, and there is absolutely no question but that Zionists could twist them and misuse them.

As the antisemites twist the knife in the side of the unfortunate Professor Neumann, he says:

“When I said that I would do anything, including lie and obfuscate, to help the Palestinians, I meant the same sort of thing that someone would mean who said he would do anything, including lie and obfuscate, to save the lives of his parents. … In fact I do not lie or obfuscate in anything I write, because that would hurt the Palestinians.”

OK, Gush Shalom have made a mistake. They accidentally peddled the nonsense of an antisemite when they ought to have known better. Sue Blackwell suffered a similar accident with Gilad Atzmon and she then removed the link to his website and made some moves to campaign against his antisemitic politics.

But my point is this: there is an antisemitic continuum that is clearly visible in the anti-Zionist movement.

It begins with a people like Robert Fisk in the Independent and the other liberal anti-Zionists in public life. The next level is the organised anti-Zionist left, people who were responsible for the academic boycott campaign, people like Sue Blackwell and Tony Greenstein. They are not antisemites but they are building a movement on the basis of an institutionally antisemitic politics. We then have the SWP, who link this left anti-Zionist milieu to the new current of open antisemites: Atzmon, Eisen, and then Israel Shamir. Michael Neumann is clearly in this group. And Neumann is happy to discuss with his openly antisemitic friends (who choose to humiliate him in public for his efforts) at the Jewish Tribal Review website. At the next stage along the continuum are neo-Nazis like David Irving and Ernst Zundel. Irving’s website regularly links to stories from the anti-Zionist continuum.

It is becoming clear how the antisemitic culture that has been built and defended by left anti-Zionists like Sue Blackwell and Tony Greenstein produces open antisemites and will produce an openly antisemitic movement.

The left anti-Zionists have to think about what political responsibility they are prepared to accept for these developments.

Adam Keller and Gush Shalom have simply made a mistake here, but they will perhaps want to re-assess their glib dismissal of the existence and significance of antisemitic politics in the Palestine Solidarity movement.

The Socialist Workers Party has made a clear decision to step over the line by supporting Atzmon. There is time to step back. Perhaps its members can force it to step back?

David Hirsh
Lecturer in Sociology
Goldsmiths College, University of London
http://www.engageonline.org.uk/archives/index.php?id=7

The only difference between a Zionist and a Nazi is the name of their favorite ethnic group. A racist is a racist is a racist. Down with them all.

No Nessie, thats wrong, made especially clear on a day when hamas promises to cleanse the entire Holy Land of Jews and make it a country for Moslems only.

By the way, Nessie, some of the Russian boys were asking whether thats you protesting With the Women in Black in front of the Grand Lake Theater. They want to come and visit you.

No, Hamas and many other Palestinians want to drive the Zionist crusaders out of Palestinian lands. If there is some way to liberate Palestinian lands without driving the Zionists out, then lets hear it.

Zionists and their enablers keep pushing the idea that Palestinians liberating Palestinian lands from Zionist crusaders is an offense against Jews. No, liberation of Palestine would be a defensive action. It isn't like it is the Palestinian's fault that the murderous thieves occupying Palestinian lands call themselves Jews.

The ethnic cleansing promised by the "Palestinians" and the neighboring Arab states has been consistant since they promised "a slaugter like none seen since the time of the Mongols. The surviving Jews, if any, will be put on boats and sent back to Europe."

When the Arab forces were unsuccssful in their efforts to commit yet another genocide against the Jews in 1948, the Arab peasants feared that what they had promised to do to the Jews would be done t them. Whe their leaders told them to clear the battlefields and then when they returned with the victorious Arab armies, they could share in the looting of the Jews' properties.

The current status of the "Palestinians" is a direct consequence of their choices and actions.

Palestinians driving Zionist crusaders out of Palestine is about as much of an ethnic cleansing as driving the NAZI invadors out of Belgium or Poland would be. It isn't like it is the Palestinians fault that the MURDEROUS THIEVES occupying Palestinian lands call themselves jews. The locals didn't much like the murderous thieving allegedly Christian crusaders war of conquest either.

'Dead Gazan' alive and kicking

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3542849,00.html

Rights group got it wrong: Gaza cancer patient who 'died while waiting for permit' still alive

Stayin' alive: Muhammad al-Harrani, a father of six from Gaza diagnosed with cancer who reportedly died while waiting for a permit to enter Israel, miraculously "came back to life." This was not the result of a miracle, but rather, just part of the tactics used by al-Harrani's family in a bid to secure a permit for him.

Al-Harrani is currently awaiting an entry permit into Israel, so that he can undergo head surgery at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and receive radiation and chemotherapy treatment. At the end of April he was summoned to a questioning session at the Erez Crossing as part of the permit process, but the session was postponed by a week.

On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day, al-Harrani’s story was published. His family reported to the “Physicians for Human Rights” organization that he died. “The sick man could not withstand the wait for the permit,” claimed Ran Yaron, Director of the Occupied Territories Department who blamed the Shin Bet for adopting cruel policies against cancer patients.

However, the next day, the organization discovered that al-Harrani was still alive. Members of group estimated that his brother, who reported the death, “killed” him so he does not report to the questioning session.

“This is a rare case where a family member knowingly provided false information to the organization,” Physicians for Human Rights said. “Usually, the organization receives information from the families and from the hospitals, but in this case the information was received from the family and was not confirmed by the hospital."

Meanwhile, the Shin Bet sent the organization an angry response: “We view these harsh accusations on your part with great severity; not even a minimal inquiry into the facts was conducted.” The Shin Bet noted that due to the suspicion of his involvement in terror activities, al-Harrani was indeed called in for a security check, and it was indeed postponed by a week.

Since al-Harrani did not arrive at the questioning session, “he will have to bear the consequences or future damage that may be caused to him, in line with his refusal to cooperate in the procedure,” the Shin Bet said.

Wouldn't the correct answer be that the "Palestinians" should be treated in exactly the same way that they were preparing to treat others?

If not ,why not?

Cleveland Indy Media Center