From Occupied Palestine

The Holocaust as political asset
AMIRA HASS
Ha'aretz, 18 April 2007

Israel's right to be racist
JOSEPH MASSAD
Al Ahram Weekly, 15 - 21 March 2007

To Israel with hate

God's chosen people
JOSTEIN GAARDER
Aftenposten, 5 August 2006

[Translated from Norwegian by Sirocco]

There is no turning back. It is time to learn a new lesson: We do no longer recognize the state of Israel. We could not recognize the South African apartheid regime, nor did we recognize the Afghan Taliban regime. Then there were many who did not recognize Saddam Hussein's Iraq or the Serbs' ethnic cleansing. We must now get used to the idea: The state of Israel in its current form is history.

The Israel Lobby
JOHN MEARSHEIMER and STEPHEN WALT
London Review of Books: vol 28 no 6, 23 March 2006

[academic paper, footnoted: Harvard School of Government RWP06-011]

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread 'democracy' throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

The Israel Lobby, part II
JOHN MEARSHEIMER and STEPHEN WALT
London Review of Books: Vol. 28 No. 6, 23 March 2006

[Read entire article]

continued from part I ...

By the mid-1990s there was considerable dissatisfaction with dual containment, because it made the United States the mortal enemy of two countries that hated each other, and forced Washington to bear the burden of containing both. But it was a strategy the Lobby favoured and worked actively in Congress to preserve. Pressed by AIPAC and other pro-Israel forces, Clinton toughened up the policy in the spring of 1995 by imposing an economic embargo on Iran. But AIPAC and the others wanted more. The result was the 1996 Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on any foreign companies investing more than $40 million to develop petroleum resources in Iran or Libya. As Ze'ev Schiff, the military correspondent of Ha'aretz, noted at the time, 'Israel is but a tiny element in the big scheme, but one should not conclude that it cannot influence those within the Beltway.'

Worlds apart
CHRIS McGREAL
Guardian , 6 February 2006

Israelis have always been horrified at the idea of parallels between their country, a democracy risen from the ashes of genocide, and the racist system that ruled the old South Africa. Yet even within Israel itself, accusations persist that the web of controls affecting every aspect of Palestinian life bears a disturbing resemblance to apartheid. After four years reporting from Jerusalem and more than a decade from Johannesburg before that, the Guardian's award-winning Middle East correspondent CHRIS McGREAL is exceptionally well placed to assess this explosive comparison. Here we publish the first part of his two-day special report

Verging on Holocaust denial
HANNA YABLONKA
Ha'aretz, 23 July 2005

The Jewish settlers in the territories who wrote their identity numbers on their arms, and the reasons they gave for doing this, testify to the necessity for the public to deal anew with the phenomenon of everyday use of the Holocaust.

The new McCarthyism
JUAN COLE
Salon, 22 April 2005

A witch hunt against a Columbia professor, and the New York Times' disgraceful support for it, represent the gravest threat to academic freedom in decades.

A member of the U.S. Congress calls for an assistant professor at a major university to be summarily fired. The right-wing tabloid press runs a series of vicious attacks on him, often misquoting him and perpetuating previous misquotes. Opinion pieces attacking "tenured radicals" and questioning professors' patriotism use him as their centerpiece. All of these attacks are spurred by a propaganda film made by an advocacy group, in which anonymous accusations are made and the professor is not given an opportunity to respond to the allegations.

Is Zionism today the real enemy of the Jews? Yes.
AVI SHLAIM
International Herald Tribune, 4 February 2005

Oxford -- Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and the state of Israel is its political expression. Israel used to be a symbol of freedom and a source of pride for the Jews of the Diaspora. Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians, however, has turned it into a liability and a moral burden for the liberal segment of the Jewish community. Some Jews, especially on the left, would go even further by linking Israel's behavior to the upsurge of the new anti-Semitism throughout the world.