Court applies Law of Return to Messianic Jews because of fathers

Court applies Law of Return to Messianic Jews because of fathers

Apr 22, 2008

By DAN IZENBERG

Messianic Jews are entitled to Israeli citizenship according to the Law of Return if their father is Jewish, according to a precedent-setting ruling handed down last week by the High Court of Justice.

Fifteen years ago, the court rejected a petition by Messianic Jews who demanded to be recognized as Jews so as to automatically receive Israeli citizenship according to the Law of Return. In that landmark case, the court ruled that Messianic Jews had converted, and therefore were no longer Jewish.

Since then, the state has refused to grant all requests for citizenship according to the Law of Return by Messianic Jews.

Two years ago, however, a number of new immigrants to Israel belonging to the Messianic Jewish community petitioned the High Court after the Interior Ministry refused to grant them new immigrant status and citizenship according to the Law of Return.

These petitioners, represented by attorneys Yehuda Raveh and Calev Myers, argued that they were eligible for new immigrant status and citizenship because they were the offsprings of fathers who were Jewish, not because they themselves were Jewish according to the definition of "Who is a Jew" in the Law of Return.

According to Amendment 4A (a) to the Law of Return, passed in 1970,

"The rights of a Jew under this law... are also vested in a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion."

The law defines a Jew as "a person who was born of a Jewish mother or has become converted to Judaism and who is not a member of another religion."

According to Myers, 12 Messianic Jews petitioned the High Court after the Interior Ministry refused to register them as new immigrants in accordance with the Law of Return. Myers said they had received letters stating that they would not receive citizenship because they allegedly engaged in missionary activity.

An article published in the Baptist Press after the High Court ruling was handed down maintained that the court had ruled that

"the Messianics should receive equal treatment under the Israeli Law of Return, which says that anyone who is born Jewish can immigrate from anywhere in the world to Israel and be granted citizenship automatically."

But, as was explained to The Jerusalem Post by a legal assistant to Myers, this is apparently a misunderstanding of the ruling, which determined that the petitioners were entitled to automatic new immigrant status and citizenship precisely because they were not Jews as defined by the Law of Return, but rather because they were the offspring of Jewish fathers.

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THE PROBLEM OF JEWISH SELF-DEFENSE

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Historical and Investigative Research

17 Jan 2006

by Francisco Gil-White
http://www.hirhome.com/israel/leaders1.htm

1		How the mainstream Jewish
		leadership failed the Jewish
		people in World War II

"I would rather have my fellow Jews die in Germany…”[1]

Said on the eve of the Nazi genocide by “Reform Rabbi Stephen Wise, the undisputed leader of organized American Jewry”[19], and “probably the most influential and well-respected American Jew of his generation”[24a], in reply to British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s suggestion that Jewish refugees from Hitler might settle in Tanganyika.

Stephen Wise got his wish.

< Introduction

< A few words about anti-Semitism

< Did mainstream American Jewish leaders help defend the Jews from genocide in World War II?

< Why Peter Bergson was obviously right and the “mainstream American Jewish leaders” who opposed him, obviously wrong

< How passionate were “mainstream American Jewish leaders” in their opposition to Peter Bergson?

< Why did the “mainstream American Jewish leaders” oppose themselves to Peter Bergson and to other rescue efforts on behalf of the European Jews?

< How similar to “mainstream American Jewish leaders” were mainstream Jewish leaders elsewhere?

As George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” For the Jewish people, this means repeating Catastrophe. Therefore, if you are a member of the Jewish community, which has been subjected to genocidal attacks for over 2000 years, the rational thing is to expect another such attack and prepare for it, the better to mount an effective self-defense and, ideally, to prevent the next mass killing altogether. You should study the past and remember it, so that you can recognize the signs that herald a new genocide and identify them when they recur. Unfortunately, however, the Jews are ill-equipped and ill-disposed to do this: they find it difficult to think rationally about their self defence. Jewish author Kenneth Levin has recently made the latest addition to a large literature that tries to understand this general problem.[1a]

An example of what I mean is that most Jews are unable to recognize the signs indicating that their own mainstream leaders are taking them down the path to destruction, just as mainstream Jewish leaders did the same prior to and during World War2. Don't misunderstand me: it was the German Nazis who were killing the Jews, and this was obviously not the fault of the Jewish people or of its leaders. But equally obviously, the Jewish leadership prior to and during World War2 had an obligation to defend the Jewish people, and it must be held accountable for how it reacted before the threat of Jewish extinction.

But Jewish leaders have not been held accountable. Stephen Wise, quoted above, is - absurdly - considered a hero by modern Jews, and “in the Jewish world, schools and museums and streets are named after Wise.”[1b] And yet Wise's role, as I will document below, was to use his position of supreme authority in the American Jewish community to sabotage the most successful effort to rescue the desperate European Jews, making it easier for the German Nazis to murder in cold blood between 5 and 6 million innocent people, destroying a beautiful, irreplaceable culture.

So why the Jewish celebration of Stephen Wise?

One main reason is that most ordinary Jews are unaware of what Wise and Co. did prior to and during WW2 to sabotage the defence of the Jewish people. It is irrational that Jews should not know this history well, but it is true that some special institutional difficulties exist: the same mainstream leaders who betrayed the Jewish people in WW2 created the mainstream Jewish organizations that hold sway over the Jewish people today. Stephen Wise himself was

"president of both the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress [which organizations he created], and a key figure, often chief officer, of perhaps a dozen other organizations and institutes."[1c]

In consequence, the people running these dominant organizations today have been careful not to expose the performance of their predecessors, in whose steps they are eagerly following, once again endangering the Jewish people in circumstances very similar to those that announced the German Nazi Final Solution. The connections between the past and current leadership are clear.

The present article is concerned with what happened in WW2. Its prequel,

• Part 0, covers the 1933 crisis, when Jewish leaders -- including Stephen Wise -- saved Hitler from a boycott that ordinary Jews around the world were organizing, and it explains the historical reasons for this behaviour. Its sequel,
• Part 2, will examine how today's mainstream Jewish leaders in the Diaspora are condemning the Jews to repeat a horrific history.
  
• Part 3 will do the same for today's Israeli leaders.
• Part 4 will examine how Israeli leaders reacted to the Holocaust. In
• Part 5 I begin to explore why it is so difficult for ordinary Jews to take their self-defence into their own hands. Beyond this, I will address the behaviour of religious Jewish leaders in Israel.

The point of this exercise is to prevent another Catastrophe, for the Jewish people is once again in mortal danger.
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A few words about anti-Semitism

Did mainstream American Jewish leaders help defend the Jews from genocide in World War II?

Long before October 1943 everybody knew that the Jewish people was being exterminated in Nazi-occupied Europe.

“From the summer of 1941, reports were reaching the West regularly, through diplomatic and other channels, of large-scale massacres of Jews in areas of eastern Europe under Nazi control. In May, 1942, a message transmitted to the West through the Polish Government-in-Exile in London contained a compilation, by the Jewish Bund in Poland, of confirmed massacres. The Bund estimated that 700,000 Jews had already been killed and surmised that the Nazis had embarked on a campaign to annihilate all the Jews of Europe.”[3a]

A January 1943 headline in the New York Times announced, “Liquidation Day Set For France’s Jews,”[4] and another in February blared “Total Nazi Executions Are Put at 3,400,000; Poland With 2,500,000 Victims, Tops List,” followed by the explanation, in the body of the article, that in Poland “1,000,000 Jews were said to have been killed or permitted to die in concentration camps.”[5] This was, of course, precisely what Adolf Hitler had promised he would do in Mein Kampf and in his speeches: annihilate the European Jewish population. And yet, the Allies were doing worse than nothing to help stop the genocide.[6]

--------------

Hillel Kook (alias Peter Bergson)

“a kind of prince... a ladies man, a bon vivant... very bright and ambitious, with British manners and a great name -- Kook ”

Eliahu Amikam, quoted in Rapoport (1999:22)

--------------

In October of 1943, as related in an article published by the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, there was an effort in the United States to change that.

“The date was October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur, and more than four hundred rabbis had come to plead for US government action to save Jews from Hitler.

The march was the brainchild of 33-year-old Hillel Kook of Jerusalem, nephew of Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine. Kook, who used the pseudonym Peter Bergson, travelled to the United States in 1940 to lobby for US support for Jewish immigration to Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state. After news of the Nazi genocide reached the United States in late 1942 and early 1943, Bergson established the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, a political action committee that sought US action to rescue Jewish refugees.

Bergson understood the need for dramatic tactics to publicize his cause. To alert the American public about the Nazi massacres, the Bergson group sponsored a theatrical pageant called ‘We Will Never Die,’ authored by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ben Hecht, which was viewed by more than 40,000 people at Madison Square Garden and then in other cities around the country. The Bergson activists also sponsored more than two hundred newspaper advertisements urging the United States government to rescue the refugees.”[7]

The identification of an absurdity is something that should make any rational person stop, for it is evidence that something important remains to be properly understood. But I have not shown you one yet -- so far this all makes sense. If the European Jews were being exterminated, it was perfectly natural for Jews who were in safety to try to do something about it. Jewish unity was equally to be expected, and in fact the Bergson effort brought together “an interesting array of hasidic rabbis side by side with rabbis known as mitnagdim, the traditional theological critics of Hasidism.” In other words, important differences were set aside in the Bergson effort because the Jewish people was being exterminated in Europe and unity was more important. The above does not contain absurdities: the Bergson effort made perfect sense.

No, the absurdity is here, in the article’s next sentence:

“Bergson’s hard-hitting approach rattled some mainstream American Jewish leaders, who feared that loud protests might provoke anti-Semitism.”

Ponder that. What could be the most extreme consequence of anti-Semitism? Why, an anti-Jewish genocide. So what could “some mainstream American Jewish leaders” fear might happen? The Jewish people was already being exterminated.

There is a joke told of two Jews, right before they are killed:

“Sam and Irving are facing the firing squad. The executioner comes forward to place the blindfold on them. Sam disdainfully and proudly refuses, tearing the thing from his face. Irving turns to him and pleads: ‘Please Sam, don’t make trouble!’”

The structure of this joke is identical to what happened when Peter Bergson tried to pressure the US government to save Jewish lives in Europe, causing “some mainstream American Jewish leaders” to say to his protesting rabbis: “Please, don’t make trouble.” The joke makes fun of a pathology of reasoning but the extermination of the Jewish people is not funny; if we do not want more exterminations of the Jewish people, we must understand this pathology of reasoning.

There is a promise in the above joke, and in that promise is locked a hope of mine. The joke is Jewish not only because it depicts Jews but because it is told by Jews (it is quite famous, and I heard it first from a Jewish friend). This is important, because by telling this joke Jews demonstrate that they are - at some level - aware that a certain pathology of reasoning makes their self-defence difficult.[7a] I have reason to hope, therefore, that a more careful reflection may be possible for the Jewish people before it is too late again. But we must move to a level of analysis considerably more sophisticated than the passing joke. And then there must be action.

Let us now return to the Wyman Institute piece and look the full absurdity in the face:

“Bergson’s hard-hitting approach rattled some mainstream American Jewish leaders, who feared that loud protests might provoke anti-Semitism. …Yet there were also pockets of sympathy for the Bergson group within the Jewish leadership.”

Given that the death factories from Auschwitz to Jasenovac were at that very minute busy murdering millions of innocent Jews, and billowing with smoke, where would you expect to find mere “pockets of sympathy” for those protesting this outrage? In a mostly antisemitic population. But the population in question here is “the Jewish leadership.”

“[the Bergson march] was to be the only rally in Washington on the rescue issue during the entire period of the Holocaust [but t]he idea of Jews marching through streets of the nation’s capital, promoting specifically Jewish requests such as rescue, especially during wartime, was anathema to mainstream Jewish leaders.”

The above does not make one little bit of sense. Why is the idea of rescue odious “especially during wartime”? Are people supposed to be rescued in peacetime? And why is “the only rally [!] in Washington on the rescue issue during the entire period of the Holocaust” a “specifically Jewish request”? It isn’t. This was a crime against humanity.

You see, the problem is not merely that the reaction of the Jewish leadership was absurd, but that the author chronicling this reaction writes absurdly. After all, given that the Jewish people was already being exterminated, the right thing to do here was obvious. So how could the request for rescue be “anathema” to mainstream Jewish leaders? What in the world were they for, as Jewish leaders, if they could not find it in themselves to oppose an anti-Jewish genocide?

It is significant that the author, Rafael Medoff, directs the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and also that he is one of the few people to do significant research on the Bergson effort. If he finds it difficult to write in a sensible manner, then it is unlikely that the majority of the Jewish people can learn from their own history. An institute of Holocaust studies should straightforwardly refute the arguments that supported the reasoning of Bergson's opponents, and which contributed to the deaths of millions. This is what I am doing here. My task is not difficult, because the issue is very clear, and the facts speak very loudly.

_____________________

Why Peter Bergson was obviously right and the “mainstream American Jewish leaders” who opposed him, obviously wrong.

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The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics: Johann Hari

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The loathsome smearing of Israel's critics: Johann Hari

Thursday, 8 May 2008

Commentator: Johann Hari

In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence – and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn't especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me "a Jew-lover", "a Zionist-homo pig" and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week,

• I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn't controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response?

• There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered.
  
• Instead, some of the most high profile "pro-Israel" writers and media monitoring groups – including Honest Reporting and Camera – said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh,
  
• while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine.
• Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this.

• If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, "Honest Reporting" claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews "poisoning the wells."
  
• If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained – in labour – by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, "Honest Reporting" will say you didn't explain "the real cause": the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel's leading newspaper, Ha'aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups "nascent McCarthyism". Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing:

"Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary ... It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal."

If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: "Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security." Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them "Jews For Genocide", and said they "encourage" the "killers" of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an "artificial" people who can be collectively punished because they are "a terrorist population". She believes that while

"individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project".

Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter's decision to speak to the elected Hamas government "border[ed] on anti-Semitism." A Ha'aretz poll last month found that 64% of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it – so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can't read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter's comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B'tselem says this "bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime". Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called "a racist". Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.

These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters' hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein's mother – who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps – had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews – the majority – are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all.

• It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight.
  
• It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And
  
• it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself:

"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

j.hari@independent.co.uk






1. Israel is suppressing a secret it must face

It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing

"a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions".

2. "It is the smell of shit. Raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements"

The local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..."

3. Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) is an international network of environmental organizations in 70 countries. In contrast to many other NGOs operating internationally, it is structured from the bottom up as a as a confederation of groups. Each country has its own separate different organization, which in many cases existed and campaigned in its own right before choosing to affiliate to the global network. The groups conduct their own campaigns and coordinate their activities through the umbrella body Friends of the Earth International. The national groups are often composed of grassroots local groups working in their own areas.

4. CAMERA The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) is a Boston-based, non-profit, pro-Israel media watch organization which was founded in 1982. CAMERA has been noted for its pro-Israel media monitoring and advocacy. CAMERA states it releases reports to stop what it sees as "frequently inaccurate and skewed characterizations of Israel and of events in the Middle East" that it believes may fuel anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice.

5. Honest Reporting is a watchdog organisation that monitors the media for what it deems to be media bias against Israel. It's members contact news agencies to request changes when they identify sources that they consider to be deliberately biased against Israel.



6. Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He was one of German dictator Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers. Goebbels was known for his zealous, energetic oratory and virulent anti-Semitism. After the Nazis gained power in 1933, he was appointed propaganda minister.

7. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the sixth and current President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He became president on August 6, 2005 after winning the 2005 presidential election by popular vote. Before becoming president, he was the mayor of Tehran. He is the highest directly elected official in the country; however, according to Article 113 of Constitution of Iran, he has less total power than the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of Iran and has the final word in all aspects of foreign and domestic policies.

8. Melanie Phillips is a British columnist and author. Her articles appear mainly in the Daily Mail newspaper and focus on political and social issues. She has previously written for The Guardian and other publications.

9. Well-poisoning is the act of malicious manipulation of potable water resources in order to cause illness or death, or to deny an opponent access to fresh water resources. Historically it was one of the gravest of three accusations brought against Jewish people as a whole (the other two being host desecration and blood libel), for example in Europe following the Black Death (1348-1350).

10. Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) is an organization launched on February 5, 2007 by 150 prominent British Jews such as Nobel laureate Harold Pinter, historian Eric Hobsbawm, lawyer Sir Geoffrey Bindman, film director Mike Leigh, and actors Stephen Fry and Zoë Wanamaker. The organization is reportedly

"born out of a frustration with the widespread misconception that the Jews of this country speak with one voice –– and that this voice supports the Israeli government's policies."

11. James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. was the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981 and a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. In foreign affairs, Carter pursued the Camp David Accords, the Panama Canal Treaties and the second round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT). Carter sought to put a stronger emphasis on human rights; he negotiated a peace between Israel and Egypt in 1979. His return of the Panama Canal Zone to Panama was a major reversal of U.S. claims of influence over parts of Latin America dating to the Monroe doctrine, and Carter came under heavy criticism for it.

After leaving office, Carter founded an institute to promote global health, democracy and human rights. He has travelled extensively to conduct peace negotiations and establish relief efforts; he is also a key figure in the Habitat for Humanity project. As of 2008, he is the earliest-serving living president and the second-oldest. Carter remains a relevant national figure today, and has been especially vocal on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

12. Haaretz founded in 1918, is Israel's oldest daily newspaper. It is published in Hebrew in Berliner format. Haaretz English Edition is the translated English edition of the paper. In Israel, it is published and sold together with the International Herald Tribune.

13. Alan Morton "Dersh" Dershowitz is an American lawyer, jurist, and political commentator. He is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and is known for his extensive published works, career as an attorney in several high-profile law cases, and commentary on the Arab-Israeli conflict.


14. Ethnic cleansing refers to various military policies or military practices aimed at achieving security during war through displacement of an ethnic group from a particular territory.

15. Hamas "Islamic Resistance Movement" is a Palestinian Sunni Islamist militant organization and political party. In January 2006, Hamas won a surprise victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, taking 76 of the 132 seats in the chamber, while the ruling Fatah party took 43.

16. Talk to Hamas, Israelis tell government as attacks continue

Feb 28 2008

Israel is under growing pressure to talk to the Islamist Palestinian group Hamas, which fired a barrage of rockets from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel yesterday, killing a student.

The strike followed the publication of a poll showing 64% of Israelis want their government to negotiate with Hamas to broker a ceasefire and secure the release of a soldier, Gilad Shalit, who was captured in 2006.

17. B'Tselem is an Israeli non-governmental organization (NGO) that describes itself as "The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories". It was founded by a group of Israeli public figures, including lawyers, academics, journalists, and members of the Knesset. B'Tselem's stated goals are "to document and educate the Israeli public and policymakers about human rights violations in the Occupied Territories, combat the phenomenon of denial prevalent among the Israeli public, and help create a human rights culture in Israel".


18. Norman Gary Finkelstein is an American political scientist and author, specialising in Jewish-related issues, especially the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His writings, noted for their support of the Palestinian cause have dealt with politically-charged topics such as Zionism, the demographic history of Palestine and his allegations of the existence of a "Holocaust Industry" that exploits the memory of the Holocaust to further Israeli and financial interests. Citing linguist and political activis Noam Chomsky as an example, Finkelstein notes that it is "possible to unite exacting scholarly rigor with scathing moral outrage," and supporters and detractors alike have remarked on the polemical style of Finkelstein's work. However, its content has been praised by eminent historians such as Raul Hilberg and Avi Shlaim, as well as Chomsky.

19. From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine is a 1984 book by Joan Peters about the constant presence of Jews in Palestine (Eretz Yisrael). The famous controversial issue in the book is the amount of modern Arab immigration in comparison to parallel Jewish immigration. Responses to the book have been deeply divided and it continues to receive both positive responses as well as harsh criticism.

However, reviewing the book for the January 16, 1986 issue of The New York Review of Books, Yehoshua Porath wrote that Peters made 'highly tendentious use — or neglect — of the available source material'. But more crucially, he wrote, 'is her misunderstanding of basic historical processes and her failure to appreciate the central importance of natural population increase as compared to migratory movements.' Porath concluded:

'Readers of her book should be warned not to accept its factual claims without checking their sources. Judging by the interest that the book aroused and the prestige of some who have endorsed it, I thought it would present some new interpretation of the historical facts. I found none. Everyone familiar with the writing of the extreme nationalists of Zeev Jabotinsky's Revisionist party (the forerunner of the Herut party) would immediately recognize the tired and discredited arguments in Mrs. Peters's book. I had mistakenly thought them long forgotten. It is a pity that they have been given new life.'

20a. The Case for Israel is a New York Times bestseller by Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard University. The book responds to common criticisms of Israel.

Norman Finkelstein claims the book is a hoax and that some of its citations are plagiarized from From Time Immemorial, another book Finkelstein extensively criticized. These heated claims have led to what has become known to some as the Dershowitz-Finkelstein affair. Former Harvard president Derek Bok exonerated Dershowitz of the plagiarism charges. Finkelstein devotes much of his book Beyond Chutzpah to responding to Dershowitz's arguments.

Michael Neumann, a professor of philosophy at Trent University, wrote a book entitled The Case Against Israel published by CounterPunch in response to The Case for Israel.

20b. "The Case Against Israel" argues that Zionism was responsible for the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and that Israel is responsible for its perpetuation. The argument rests on widely accepted factual claims and impeccable sources. It avoids rhetoric and gratuitous moralizing. There is no attempt to blacken Israel through association with colonialism, imperialism, or racism. Instead, Neumann's argument emphasizes the fateful Zionist quest for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. This quest - not the massacres or plans for transfer or other blots on Zionist history - made violence inevitable and compromise impossible. The prospect of Zionists gaining the power of life and death over all inhabitants of Palestine "had" to be seen by the Palestinians as a mortal threat. They responded accordingly.

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Memories of a promised land

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Memories of a promised land

Sixty years since its foundation Mike Marqusee and Eliane Glaser explore the state of Israel

May/June 2008

Mike Marqusee

Perhaps more than any country, Israel provokes strong feelings and violent arguments. Everyone, excluding the most fanatical Zionist or the Iranian President, seems to have complex, mixed feelings about it. Even the terms we use are booby-trapped. Does merely using the name Israel imply support of illegal occupation? If you call the region Palestine do you give succour to the suicide bombers? It is tempting to steer clear of the subject completely. Yet the fact of Israel’s existence and the arguments around it encapsulate so much that defines the present moment. As the frontier where memories of Nazism meet Islamic terrorism, as the continual reminder of the West’s hypocritical attitude to international law and as a profound contemporary case-study of the noxious influence of religion on politics, Israel has huge symbolic as well as strategic importance for all of us. To mark the 60th anniversary of its creation we asked two Jewish writers to reflect on what Israel means for them.

Mike Marqusee “The secular founders would be shocked to see the power obscurantist religious sects wield.”

Israel’s 60th birthday is being celebrated lavishly in Britain. The programme includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades in London and Manchester.

Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, without the benefit of state support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they are seeking to remind the world of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.

• In 1947 there were 1,293,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32% of the population, the UN partition plan (agreed in November 1947) assigned them 55% of the country, including the economically developed citrus-growing plains.
  
• Israel’s Declaration of Independence on 15 May 1948 was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new state and its Arab neighbours.

• In April and May, before the expiry of the British mandate, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa fell to Jewish forces, and more than 100,000 Palestinians fled. To the north, in Galilee, the Haganah – the mainstream Zionist defence force – systematically conquered clusters of villages, emptying them of inhabitants and often levelling them.
  
• In June, the Israelis advanced further into territory designated for the Arab state, capturing the towns of Lydda and Ramle where they killed 250 Palestinians and expelled almost all the rest – 40,000 – at gunpoint.

• In the course of 1948, 531 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed.
  
• In the Jaffa area, 96% of the villages were totally erased.
  
• As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the UN-allotted borders of the Jewish state, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population.

• When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish state had acquired 78% of Palestine.
  
• 180,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish state.
  
• 750,000 had been made refugees.

• The homes and lands they left behind were quickly occupied by Jewish settlers and the new Israeli parliament passed laws confiscating their property.
  
• Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property.
  
• In 1954 more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property.
  
• Conquest and expulsion provided the material base for the building of the Jewish state.

• For many years Zionists claimed that the Palestinians had left voluntarily, at the behest of Arab leaders.
  
• That myth has been repeatedly disproved: there’s no evidence of so much as a single broadcast or leaflet telling people to abandon their homes.
  
• There is, on the other hand, a great deal of evidence that the Zionists used the war to alter the demographic facts on the ground.
  
• On April 6, for example, David Ben-Gurion told a Zionist meeting:

  “We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area, even if only in an artificial way, in a military way … I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population.”

The facts of the Nakba are now well documented and beyond serious dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and shamefully acceptable in polite circles. That is partly because its victims have been so demonised and dehumanised. Acknowledgement of the Nakba is also resisted because it undermines Israeli and Jewish self-definitions; for many, it is a truth that simply cannot be assimilated.

The Nakba is far more than a historical controversy. It’s an unresolved and pressing global issue. The Palestinian refugee population – descendants of those driven out in 1948 – now numbers more than five million, one half of whom live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. One million remain stateless, with no form of identification other than a card issued by UNWRA, the United Nations refugee agency. This is the world’s largest and oldest continuing refugee crisis. Each year since December 1948, the UN General Assembly has reconfirmed Resolution 194, which enshrines the refugees’ right to return and compensation. The right of refugees to return to their homes is a necessary protection for all civilian populations in times of war. Without it, ethnic cleansing would be encouraged. Yet those who press for the implementation of that right are denounced as extremists who refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

There is today a huge Jewish population in Palestine whose rights as human beings must be recognised, but why should anyone anywhere be compelled to recognise the “right to exist” of a particular state formation? What’s being demanded here is ideological conformity: support for the right of the Jewish state to exist, in perpetuity, in Palestine, regardless of what that fact entails for others (or indeed for the welfare of Jews). For Palestinians, recognising Israel’s right to exist – as opposed to the fact of its existence – is tantamount to an historical seal of approval on the Nakba. Those who refuse to certify as legitimate a national project built on dispossession and ethnic supremacy are condemned as “anti-Semites” or, if they are Jews, as “self-haters”. The allegations rest on a false conflation of Israel and “the Jews”, one propagated by Zionists, who use it to exempt the Jewish state from the requirements of international standards of human decency.

• Israel is “Jewish” in a sense that no existing state is Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist.
• Though these religions are privileged in various states, none of those states claims to be the sole global representative of the faith; none grants citizenship to people solely because of their religion (without regard to place of birth or residence).
  
• Maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine means maintaining a sizeable Jewish majority population which enjoys privileged access to land, work and civic rights.

The founders of Israel were secularists; they saw Jewishness as a national rather than religious identity. Many were atheists and contemptuous of rabbinical culture. Like MA Jinnah, the secular Muslim founder of Pakistan, they would be shocked and dismayed if they could see the influence obscurantist religious sects now wield in the polities they established.

From the beginning, the notion that the State of Israel could be both “Jewish” and “democratic” was unsustainable, and was seen as such by significant numbers of diaspora Jews. Indeed, it’s important to remember that anti-Zionism was a Jewish ideology long before it was anything else. But in the wake of the Holocaust, and with the evolution of big power politics in the Middle East, Zionism came to dominate the diaspora. And the truth of the Nakba was shrouded beneath the myth of Israel’s “David versus Goliath” struggle for survival against irrationally hostile Arabs.

But what of the plight of the Jewish refugees in postwar Europe? Without Israel, what would have become of them? The answer is that they would have shared the same variety of fates as the general refugee population of Europe, of which they were part. The roots of that crisis lay in the refusal of the US, Britain and other countries to admit large numbers of displaced persons. It could not be resolved by allocating each group a “state of their own”, inevitably at the expense of another people. The right of refuge is a universal right (and need) but instead of shouldering that collective responsibility, the Western powers, with the support of the Soviet Union, dumped it on Palestine, demanding that a people who bore no responsibility for the Holocaust make way for its victims.

Many Zionists who do acknowledge the Nakba characterise it as tragic but “irreversible”. The Nakba was not, however, an isolated episode; it was a paroxysm in a process that continues to this day. The Jewish state remains incompatible with Palestinian rights and increasingly the very existence of Palestinians, as illustrated by the current siege of Gaza and the continuing assault on Palestinian society on the West Bank through the construction of the apartheid wall and the extension of Jewish settlements.

• It has become ever more apparent that Zionism will not tolerate any meaningful form of Palestinian independence.
  
• The exigencies of maintaining a Jewish state will not allow it.
  
• Within Israel, expansionist claims – in which the Jews are declared the rightful owners of the whole of the West Bank and even beyond – are commonplace, as are calls for the permanent transfer of the remaining Palestinian population.
  
• Some respectable voices speak openly of the need to finish the work left undone in 1948 – in order to ensure the survival of “the Jewish state”.

As ever, much of this is cloaked in Biblical sources.

• The paradox of Zionism was always that it was a secular ideology whose foundation lay in a religious discourse.
  
• At its heart is an obscurantist claim to historic territory.
  
• There is indeed much in the Hebrew Bible that gives succour to the wilder Zionist ambitions. But there is also another strand, one that warns against the menace of marrying religion to the state.
  
• In particular the Prophet Amos, a champion of the universality of ethical standards, explicitly denies the exclusivism of the Zionist claim to Palestine:

To Me, O Israelites, you are
Just like the Ethiopians – declares the Lord.
True I brought Israel up
From the land of Egypt,
But also the Philistines from Caphtor
And the Arameans from Kir.

Mike Marqusee (born 1953) is an American-born writer, journalist and political activist in London. His partner is the barrister Liz Davies.

Marqusee, who describes himself as a "deracinated New York Marxist Jew" has lived in Britain since 1971. He writes mainly about politics, popular culture, the Indian sub-continent and cricket, and is a regular correspondent for, among others, The Guardian, Red Pepper and The Hindu. Marqusee has been the editor of Labour Left Briefing, and an executive member of the Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Alliance . He is a leading figure in Iraq Occupation Focus.

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