Voice of the
'Wrecking Ball': Interview with Israeli Historian Avi Shlaim
By Don
Atapattu
Thursday, May 13 2004
Palestine Chronicle Weekly Journal
"It came
as a great shock to hear Benny Morris blithely condemn the victims for their
own misfortunes and exonerate Israel of any responsibility for the war
crimes its forces committed in 1948..."
Avi Shlaim’s
perspectives on the ongoing crisis in the Middle East are possibly more salient than most
being both Jewish and an Israeli, but whose family origins are ethnically
Iraqi. Indeed, the whole history of his whole life has been inextricably linked
with the Arab-Israeli conflict; and has witnessed dramatic changes in fortune
in direct relation to events in the Middle East as a whole.
Uprooted from
their affluent upper-class lifestyle in Baghdad, Shlaim and his family were obliged to
start their lives from scratch in 1950’s Israel, where he still has relatives today.
In 1966 Shlaim again relocated, this time to England to study International Relations at Cambridge University, and today he holds the most
prestigious academic post available in Britain – a Professor’s Chair at Oxford University.
The author of
numerous articles, he is a an occasional contributor to the leading liberal
British broadsheet ‘The Guardian’; but he is probably best known as the writer
of several books on the history of Zionism and the Middle East; the most well
known being the exhaustively researched ‘The Iron Wall’.
Although
denounced by the hard-line Israeli daily The Jerusalem Post as ‘non history’
and a ‘Wrecker's ball aimed at the 'Zionist narrative'; ‘The Iron Wall’ was
widely acclaimed as a strikingly fair minded, and even those who disagree with
Shlaim’s liberal pro Israel, anti occupation politics have found it a
convincing revisionist account of the last half century of conflict.
Friendly and
always courteous (he declines to even respond to an attack on him by a certain
Right-wing Jewish writer), he speaks lucidly and at length on any topic you can
mention on the Middle
East and the
scholarship available on it.
This interview
was conducted at his Oxford home.
You were born
in Baghdad. Do you have any memories of living in
Iraq?
I was born in
1945, and my family left Iraq in 1950. I was 5 years old, and hadn’t
started going to school so I never learned to read and write Arabic. I have
only disjointed memories of life in Iraq. My father was a very wealthy merchant
… we lived in a spacious house, and had a very leisurely and pleasant
lifestyle. My parents always referred to Iraq as ‘God’s Paradise’, and there was no history of
anti-Semitism in Iraq, only isolated incidents. The Jews
were generally well integrated and happy.
But after Iraq’s participation in the 1948 war, there
was a backlash against the Jews. Life became uncomfortable and in 1950 there
was a mass exodus to Israel of about 100,000 of the 130,000 Iraqi
Jews. The Iraqi government did not want the Jews to leave as they were a pillar
of the Iraqi economy. The Israeli government, desperately short of manpower,
pressed for the Jews to come out, even if this meant they had to leave
everything behind.
My family and
I were part of that exodus to Israel. We were not refugees in the strict sense
of the word because we weren’t persecuted or expelled; we made our own decision
to leave. So are situation is not comparable to that of the Palestinian
refugees, who were displaced by Israel in 1948. But in a real sense to us, we
were victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Iraqi born
Israeli Rabbi David Rabeeya refers to himself as an Arab-Jew, which is not an
expression that the Israeli government recognises. Is this a term with which
you would describe yourself?
No, I would
not. I would describe myself as an Israeli because I grew up in Israel, served in the Israeli army, and I was
even a patriotic Israeli in my youth. It never occurred to me to describe
myself as an Arab-Jew. Neither part of this description would fit my identity
today. I don’t see myself as an Arab, and although I happen to be a Jew, it is
not a major part of my identity because I am an atheist.
I have often
thought that if the people of the Middle East were more aware of their common background as Semites,
this might go some way to blurring the battle-lines in the Middle East.
I agree with
that. Unfortunately the Israeli establishment has never used Jews from the Arab
countries as a bridge. The official ideology in the 1950s (during the time of
mass immigration to Israel) was that everything Arab was inferior
and primitive. The task was to erase the Arab identity, culture, language,
habits and folklore of the new immigrants, and give them a new Ashkenazi
identity.
There was an
element of racism, or at least arrogance on the part of the Ashkenazi elite, in
wanting to ‘raise’ the Oriental Jews to their level of civilisation. This
prevalent attitude meant that Jews from Arab countries did not dwell on their
Arab heritage, but strove to integrate themselves into their new society.
They also
internalised the ethos of Israel as a new state that surrounded by
implacable enemies with no option but to stand up and fight. This is the reason
that many Oriental Jews vote for Right-wing parties that are nationalistic and
xenophobic such as Herut and later Likud. Incidentally, it is also true that Israel has never used its Arab population as
a bridge to the neighbouring countries.
While the
Israeli Arabs accepted the legitimacy of the new state, the Israeli
establishment persisted in regarding them with suspicion as a potential Fifth
Column. Although the Israeli Arabs wanted to integrate, Israel saw them as a problem rather than an
asset and was unwilling or unable to treat them as equal citizens. David Ben
Gurion set the tone by projecting Israel as a European country in culture and
values which only ‘by accident’ is located in the Middle East.
Do you think
that Israeli democracy can be reconciled with Israeli ethnocracy?
Formally Israel is a democracy but in practice not all
of its inhabitants enjoy equal rights.
One problem is
that Israeli Arabs are treated as second-class citizens. Another problem arises
in the Occupied Territories. The occupation calls Israeli
democracy into question as it involves imposing coercive rule over another 3.5
million Arabs. Some sociologists refer to Israel as a ‘master-race democracy’, where
democracy is for the Jews only as the master-race. This strikes me as too
extreme and emotive a term. I would prefer to describe Israel as a flawed democracy and one which is
increasingly going the route of South African with its apartheid practices.
If you look at
Israel’s specific policies on the West Bank - the illegal Jewish settlements,
the brutal military repression of the Arabs, the abuses of human rights, the
habitual disregard for international law, the building of the so-called
‘security barrier’, the roads for the exclusive use of Jewish settlers – all
make up a pretty ugly picture. If that is not apartheid, I don’t know what is.
Even putting
aside the issue of the Palestinians, the numbers of competing sub cultures
within Israel (Ashkenazi, Sephardim, orthodox,
secular, Russian, Arab etc.) do not make for a cohesive state. How will such a
divided population, stand as a nation in the future?
Before 1967
Israeli was an embattled nation with a common enemy, a clear direction, and a
strong sense of purpose. In the last 20 years this national identity has been
eroded and Israel has collapsed into a series of very
distinct sub cultures with little in common.
The
orthodox-secular divide has become much more acute than in the past, with the
orthodox having little contact with everyone else. The alienation of Israel’s Arabs from the state is increasing
all the time. The gap between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews is still there. The
million or so Russian Jews have their own institutions and their own political
parties. To cap it all, the politicians of the right exploit these divisions to
their own advantage instead of trying to unite the country.
So Israel today is a highly divided society.
Dr David
Rabeeya suggests that the Israeli state deliberately fosters enmity between
Palestinians and Arab-Jews to prevent a threat to the Ashkenazi elite’s
supremacy. Would you agree with that assessment?
Yes I would.
The Ashkenazi elite has from the beginning wanted to maintain its hegemony
within Israeli society – political as well as cultural. They did this by
co-opting the Sephardic Jews into their own parties. The Labor Party promoted a
number of Iraqi Jews to ministerial posts, thereby depriving the Oriental
masses of alternative leadership.
Likud’s
leadership too has been predominantly Ashkenazi, with a few token Orientals.
Likud enjoys substantial grass-root Oriental support even though it adheres to
a social and political ideology that offers them next to nothing. It attracts
the Oriental masses by raising the nationalist banner, rather than that of
social reform or economic equality. Oriental Jews rally behind that banner as
it gives them the opportunity to place themselves above the Israeli Arabs in
the pecking order.
Many upwardly
mobile Orientals fear that if the occupation ended, they will have to go back
to doing the menial tasks that Arabs now do.
There was an
article in The Economist about Israel’s ‘Rainbow Coalition’ of liberal
Sephardic Jews. Its leader spoke of how he was taught to demonise Arabs at
school, and consequently forbade his own grandmother to be seen with him
publicly as she looked like a Palestinian. Do you think that much of the problem
with the Israeli side is the limited information and understanding of the
nature of the conflict, much of it stemming from school time indoctrination?
That was an
interesting example of socially-induced shame.
I had a
similar experience as a young boy. I felt that everything Arab was inferior and
primitive, and would be acutely embarrassed if my parents spoke to me in Arabic
in front of my friends. I never experienced direct discrimination as an
Oriental Jew, but subjectively I felt all the time that I was inferior because
I came from Iraq.
The dominant
culture was Ashkenazi, and this was the ideal to aspire to. The Israeli
education system does not provide much knowledge of the Arab world or its
history. The emphasis is on Jewish history from Biblical times to the present,
as well as some European history. There is a very high level of ignorance on
the part of Israeli school leavers about their neighbours, and in this context
prejudices are bound to grow, and racist stereotypes take hold to demonise Arabs
as the enemy.
The New
History had a limited influence on the teaching of history in Israeli schools
during the time of Oslo, particularly Benny Morris’s findings
on the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem. The traditional Zionist
version of the conflict was not discarded, but Israeli school kids were invited
to think about how they would have felt if they had been Arabs in 1948.
This approach
created a space for discussion and debate, and generated some empathy for ‘the
other’. But after the Likud returned to power in 2001, the Minister of
Education ordered the liberal history textbooks to be discarded and replaced
with books which conveyed only Jewish and Zionist values. Thus, during the last
three years, there has been a regression in the quality of secondary school
education about the Arabs.
The
governments of Netanyahu and Sharon were both notable in that they were
criticised by high level military and intelligence figures for not wanting to
make peace now when Israel has the region’s military balance
massively in its favour. Do you think the hope for a peace could lie with
pragmatic conservatives, now that the Israeli liberal peace camp is so marginal
and weak?
No. I am
deeply pessimistic about the future precisely because there is no hope either
from the Left or from the pragmatic Right. The Labor Party is in complete
disarray and does not offer a coherent alternative to the policies of the Likud
government. The greatest mistake that Shimon Peres made was to take the Labor
Party into the coalition government headed by Ariel Sharon.
This
compromised the Labor Party, and made it impossible to disassociate itself from
the hard-line policies of the government and the repression of the
Palestinians. Labor Party voters are not born, they only die. The young do not
vote for Labor, and so the party does not represent the wave of the future.
The pragmatic
Right is problematic as it only looks at Israel’s interests, without paying any
attention to the interests of the Palestinians, and consequently it offers no
hope of reconciliation and peace. One example is the wall being built on the West Bank. Building the wall signifies that the
Right has partially given up the dream of Greater Israel, having come to the
conclusion that it cannot rule the whole of the West Bank. It wants to cut its
losses in Gaza and annex about half of the West Bank to the state of Israel. But the wall offers no hope of
resolving the conflict with the Palestinians. What it amounts to is a
unilateral attempt by Ariel Sharon to repartition Palestine and re-draw the borders. As this will
not be acceptable to the Palestinians, the violence and the bloodshed will
continue.
Right-wing
Zionists such as Daniel Pipes are dismissive of the notion of a Palestinian
nationhood. In your opinion, is there a Palestinian ‘nation’ as opposed to the
Arabs of Palestine?
There
definitely is a Palestinian nation. It emerged in the aftermath of the First
World War and it was forged in the crucible of the conflict with the Zionists.
The Zionist movement in Palestine posed a challenge and led to the
emergence of the Palestinian sense of nationhood.
The
Palestinians are clearly a nation because that is how they define themselves.
They had a land called Palestine, and they were displaced from it. The
end result is that the Palestinians have never exercised sovereignty over the
land in which they lived: first they were under the Ottoman Empire; then they were under the British
mandate. The Israelis use this fact against them. They say: ‘you never had
sovereignty over this land, and therefore you have no rights.’ But during the
struggle for Palestine, the Palestinians had a strong
national movement under the leadership of the Grand Mufti, Hajj Amin
al-Husseini. In 1948 they felt they had at least as much of a right to
independence as the Iraqis or the Syrians, or the Lebanese. The fact that some
Israelis, like Golda Meir, deny the existence of a Palestinian nation is
neither here nor there.
You mention
the Mufti of Jerusalem. He is often used by Israel’s defenders to taint the Palestinians
as a whole with Nazism. Can you expand on what his role was in the pre 1948
period?
The Mufti was
the leader of the Palestinian national movement but he was an out-and- out
rejectionist and in this he did not serve his people well. He rejected a long
series of compromise proposals put forward by the British. He embarked upon a
very risky strategy of all-or-nothing 3and he ended up with nothing.
Whichever way
you look at the Palestinian struggle for independence under the British
mandate, it is the story of how Mufti muffed it! Yasser Arafat is not a great
statesman either. The Palestinians have been most unfortunate in having a good
cause, but incompetent leaders.
As for the
Mufti and Nazism, it is simply not true that he participated in the Nazi
holocaust. He fell out with Britain, he went over to Germany, and he met with Hitler. Zionist
writers, with the exception of Zvi Elpeleg, have been very harsh on the Mufti.
But they have produced no hard evidence to prove that he participated actively
in the Nazi destruction of European Jewry.
You wrote in
‘The Iron Wall’ that David Ben-Gurion snubbed Arab attempts at negotiation on
the grounds that time was on Israel’s side. Surely he was right. In 1949
the Arabs nations wanted land corridors through Israel and the return of refugees as the
price of peace, but in 2004 this has been lowered to withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. Perhaps in 2020, they will accept
whatever peace Israel dictates.
I think Ben
Gurion made a mistake after the end of the 1948 war. The Arab masses were
virulently anti-Zionist, but the rulers of Syria, Egypt, and Transjordan were all very pragmatic. They all
wanted two things: territory and the return of the refugees. But Ben Gurion was
not prepared to make any concession on either issue. He was only prepared to
make peace on the basis of the status quo – Israel keeps everything and does not allow
the refugees to return.
I don’t
believe that Ben Gurion was vindicated by subsequent history. He thought that
time was on Israel’s side and that the Arabs would lower
there expectations. What he did not realise was that just as there can be a
momentum towards peace, so there can also be a momentum towards escalation and
war. There can be no political vacuum or standstill for very long.
In the absence
of active diplomacy, the war clouds begin to gather above the region. Sooner or
later another war breaks out. Zionist propaganda has always claimed that Israel sought peace indefatigably and that there
was no one to talk to. My work and that of the other New Historians show that
there were many opportunities to negotiate with the Arabs after 1948 and that
Israeli intransigence played a major part in frustrating the quest for a
settlement.
Samuel Huntingdon’s
thesis on the ‘clash of civilisations’ has enjoyed a resurrection since September
11 2001,
despite being scorned by many when it first emerged. How useful is it as a
framework with which to explain the current situation in the Middle East?
Samuel
Huntingdon’s thesis is simplistic and superficial. When it was first put
forward it was roundly attacked by most experts on the Middle East and the Islamic world. The thesis is
not grounded in history. However, it has the merit of simplicity, hence its
appeal to Americans who know little about the outside world.
To the
uninformed, the theory seems to explain everything and 9-11 gave it a great
boost. But the theory makes the mistake of treating the Islamic world as a
monolithic entity, when it isn’t. There is much variety and pluralism in the
Islamic world. International politics today is not comparable to the Cold War,
when there was bi polarity and an identifiable enemy in the shape of the Soviet Union. Islamic fundamentalism is not an
enemy. It does not have an army or a state, so we need a much more
sophisticated approach to understanding terrorism and its roots than this
simple theory conveys.
Many of your
critics (and some of your supporters) describe you as anti-Zionist, but reading
your work this is clearly not the case. How would you describe your position?
I have never
been anti-Zionist, and I have never questioned the legitimacy of the Zionist
movement or the state of Israel. Zionism is the national liberation
movement of the Jews and the Jews are entitled, like any other nation, to
independence and statehood.
Where I differ
from the great majority of Israelis is that I openly acknowledge that Israel’s creation caused a monumental
injustice to the Palestinians. It is important for Palestinians to have
Israelis acknowledge at least a share of the moral responsibility for the
Nakba, for the catastrophe of 1948 and, more specifically, for creating the
refugee problem. But I don’t go on from there to say that Israel should be dismantled in order to
redress this injustice.
Israel is a fact, and you do not redress one
wrong by committing another wrong. The only realistic solution is not absolute
justice, but relative justice and that means the partition of Palestine. After 1967 there was a real
opportunity for the partition of Palestine and Israel rejected in favour of creeping
annexation.
I therefore
make a clear distinction between Israel in the pre- 1967 borders – which is
entirely legitimate in my eyes – and the Zionist colonial project across the
Green Line which is entirely illegal and illegitimate.
In a word, I
would describe myself as a Post-Zionist: Zionism had achieved its basic
objective by 1967 and now the occupation should be ended so both Israelis and
Palestinians can get on with their lives.
What would be
a fair settlement in your eyes?
The only fair
settlement is a negotiated settlement leading to an independent Palestinian
state on the West
Bank and Gaza with minor territorial adjustments. In
other words, it would have to be a two-state solution, with a Palestinian state
alongside Israel.
The contours
of such a settlement are clear. They were outlined in the Beilin-Abu Mazen plan
of 1995. We also have the Clinton parameters of December 2000 for an
independent Palestinian state in all of Gaza and 94% - 96% of the West Bank, with a capital in East Jerusalem. The Clinton parameters were the basis for the
negotiations held in Taba in January 2001. At Taba the Israeli and Palestinian
negotiators came closer to agreement on a final settlement than at any point
before or since. So a fair settlement would have to build on the understandings
reached at Taba.
You have
written that before you started researching Israeli history you had no reason
to doubt the orthodox ‘heroic’ version that you were taught. Were you
disappointed by your own findings?
I was sad to
discover that Israel’s conduct in 1948 was not as
unblemished and noble as my teachers had taught me at school. In particular, it
came as a surprise to learn that the IDF did not always live up to high moral
standards or to its own mantra about ‘the purity of arms’.
There were
countless cases of mistreatment of Palestinian civilians; there were forcible
expulsions; there were massacres; and there were even some cases of gang rape.
All this is deeply disturbing and upsetting. The evidence that Benny Morris and
others have produced shows quite conclusively that in 1948 Israel practiced what today we would call
‘ethnic cleansing’.
My reaction to
these findings is one of deep sorrow and sympathy for the victims. It therefore
came as a great shock to hear Benny Morris, in a recent interview in Ha’aretz,
blithely condemn the victims for their own misfortunes and exonerate Israel of any responsibility for the war
crimes its forces committed in 1948. I still respect Benny Morris’s scholarship
on the 1948 war but I find his current position on the creation of the
Palestinian refugee problem morally repugnant. To my mind war crimes can never
be condoned or justified whatever the circumstances.
What do you
think of the scholarship of the pro- Zionist, Right-wing critics of your work?
Most of the
criticism of my work, and that of the other New Historians, has come not from
the Right but from the Left and from supporters of the Labor Party in
particular. Professor Anita Shapira, one of my most vocal critics, is a Labor
party person - ‘the Princess of Zionist history’. In her sanctimonious
self-righteousness she is typical of the intellectual Labor mainstream in Israel.
They have a problem
because of the gap between the noble Zionist ideal and the reality on the
ground in the treatment of Palestinians; and they fill this gap with humbug and
hypocrisy. Professor Shapira is a good example of this humbug. Her book in
Hebrew is called the ‘The Sword of the Dove’, implying that Zionism was an
innocent white dove that was forced to carry a sword by the brutal and
fanatical Arab predators in the neighbourhood. That is a one-sided view of the
causes of the conflict which portrays the Arabs as the aggressors and the Jews
as the innocent victims.
But the
Zionist movement involved aggression against the local Arabs from the start. It
had to use force by definition as the Arabs were not just going to willingly
make way for the Zionists. A better title for her book would be ‘Anita in
Wonderland’! The Right, on the other hand, have much less difficulty in
accepting the findings of the New History. They admit that Israel expelled Palestinians in 1948 and
regret that it did not expel more because they started the war. At least they
are prepared to call a spade a spade.
I wonder if
you have been somewhat generous in your appraisal for the Oslo leaders of Arafat and Rabin. As you
have said yourself, Arafat’s leadership has been disastrous for the Palestinians.
Itzhak Rabin, on the other hand, built far more settlements than Netanyahu and
had a human rights record almost as atrocious as Sharon’s.
I would not
defend Rabin’s record. He was a very hard-line and brutal defence minister
under Itzhak Shamir during the first Intifada. But he eventually saw the light;
he understood that there is no military solution to this conflict. He realized
that a political solution had to be found and he accordingly embarked on the
road to Oslo. Rabin was not too troubled by the
prospect of a Palestinian state; what mattered to him was Israel’s security.
He and Arafat
cooperated closely and successfully in the security field and they made
progress in the political field with Oslo II. I believe that had Rabin stayed
in power, the course of history would have been different. Oslo was not doomed to failure from the
start. It failed because Israel, under the leadership of Binyamin
Netanyahu, reneged on its side of the deal
The
settlements are a cancer and have poisoned Israeli-Palestinian relations. They
also expose the colonial nature of the Zionist movement. You build settlements
when you don’t have a state in order to create a territorial base. When you do
have a state with internationally recognised borders, international law does
not allow you to build settlements on someone else’s land. Labor was much more
guilty than the Likud in this respect in the decade after Oslo. The greatest increase in settlement
activity occurred under Ehud Barak. Now the chickens have come home to roost as
Israel is so entrenched with settlements on
the West Bank, it is very difficult to roll back the
occupation. The settlements were a tragic mistake.
You view Sharon as a failure. However, that would seem
dependent on the criteria you are using. Some Left-wing critics allege that Sharon has been manifestly successful in
promoting his agenda of destroying the ‘peace process’ and keeping up the level
of violence. Norman Finkelstein¹ has written that Hamas was on the verge of
accepting a ceasefire in July 2002, when Sharon deliberately ordered dropping of a one
ton bomb that killed a Hamas leader and 16 others (including 11 children);
which saw the violence massively escalate.
Sharon’s policy is to avoid negotiation or
compromise with the Palestinians. He has been in power for three years and he
has not resumed final status talks with them. Sharon has been the unilateralist par
excellence throughout his long and chequered career, and that is what he is
now. He has his own agenda for Greater Israel and he is trying to impose it by
force on the Palestinians.
As you note, Sharon does not want a ceasefire with Hamas.
Every time he assassinates a Hamas leader, he knowingly provokes retaliation
which invariably takes the form of another suicide bombing. A continual low
level of violence keeps Sharon in power. As the leading Israeli
sociologist Baruch Kimmerling explains in his book Politicide, Sharon’s basic aim is to deny the
Palestinians an independent political existence in Palestine. His vision is to annex de facto half
the West Bank, to redraw unilaterally the borders of
Israel, and to leave a few isolated enclaves
for Palestinian rule. That would certainly not be a viable Palestinian state.
You can call this a success.
But in the
long term, Sharon’s project is doomed to failure because
the Palestinians will continue their struggle, and the economic, political, and
psychological price will become unsustainable for the Israeli public. In the
meantime Sharon is destroying both societies. This is
not my idea of a successful policy.
Can you
recommend some books for our interested readers who want an overview of the Middle East conflict?
There are two
good pro-Palestinian overviews: Charles D Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and the
new edition of David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch. From the New History
I would recommend the books by Simha Flapan, Ilan Pappe, and Benny Morris. I
would not recommend my own book but simply note that The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World covers the first 50
years of this conflict. There are also several critical sociologists who write
about the conflict, notably Baruch Kimmerling.
Finally, would
you like to comment on the so called ‘New Anti-Semtism’?
That is a very
important issue as in recent years there has been an upsurge of anti-semtism in
Europe. That is undeniable. The debate is
about its causes.
One view is
that the new anti-semitism is essentially a revival of old anti-semitism, of
deeply-rooted hostility and hatred towards the Jews. The other view emphasises
the contemporary sources of the new anti-semitism.
Without
denying for a moment that there is plenty of old anti-semitism about, it seems
to me that among the most important contributory causes of the new
anti-Semitism are the policies of the Sharon government. It is necessary to
distinguish between anti-Semitism and opposition to Sharon’s particular brand of Zionism, which
has nothing to do with traditional Jewish values of truth, justice, and
morality. Sharon is the enactment of the most
exclusive, aggressive, and xenophobic aspects of Zionist ideology. There is
growing hostility towards Israel, and by extension towards Jews
everywhere as a direct result of the relentless war he is waging against the
Palestinian people.
Israelis have
always tried to silence criticism by claiming that the motives behind it are
anti-semitism. But in most cases it is fair- minded people who see the
suffering of the Palestinians, and their sympathy is naturally on their side as
the underdog. Sympathy for the Palestinians is not evidence of anti-semitism.
I, for example, feel doubly guilty towards the Palestinians.
I feel guilty
as an Israeli for all the suffering Israel has inflicted upon them; and I feel
guilty as an Englishman because of Britain’s long record of betrayal going all
the way back to the Balfour Declaration. The Palestinians are the real victims
of this conflict, and they deserve all the international sympathy and support
that they can get. In short, it is essential today, more than ever, to make a
clear distinction between anti-semitism and anti-Zionism.
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