Part 1 of Ha'aretz article: Sharansky tours America

A Special Place in Hell

by Bradley Burston (Ha’aretz Blog)

Published 13:35 08.11.10

Bibi, Tom Friedman, and U.S. Jews divesting from Israel

Many people who support Israel but oppose its policies feel slammed by the 'It's All Good! [and Palestinians Are All Bad] Faction' if they criticize Israel, even when it's warranted.

By Bradley Burston

[First in a series. In part, a journal of a speaking tour hosted by J Street on the West Coast, and in part, reasons why I threw out my prepared remarks before I even got there.]

Ahead of a New Orleans address to the General Assembly [GA] of the Jewish Federations of North America, sources quoted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as having said that there is fundamental support for Israel within the United States.

"We may have lost Thomas Friedman, but I don't think we lost America," Netanyahu was quoted as saying.

I was getting ready to leave for the airport, when my wife caught me unawares. This was the first inkling I would have of something I was to learn again and again:

Where it comes to any issue of the Mideast conflict, and where it comes to questions relating to the complex relations between the U.S. Jewish community and Israel, you can either answer in three hours, or in one sentence. This was hers: "You know what it is - American Jews are divesting from Israel."

This is what I was to see in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Marin County, Portland and Seattle. It's not that they're getting involved in significant numbers in the divestment movement. It's that American Jews are divesting emotionally. They are quietly – but in terms of impact, dramatically – withdrawing altogether. Not just Jews. Americans. And the younger they are, that is, the more crucial they are to Israel's future, the more likely they are to divest.

That evening before I left, we had just watched the Israeli version of Meet the Press, very often a dreary affair, soporific domestic politics, the perfect sound track for a late Saturday snooze. But this one was different. This time the guest was The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. And not the coolly analytical pundit you're used to. This time he was talking directly to Israelis, and directly to their prime minister. There was an urgency and a passion in his voice, in his gestures, his eyes, that suggested why this was different. This time it was personal.

"You are losing the American people," Friedman warned. "Not to dislike, not to opposition - they are fed up, fed up with the Palestinians, believe me, fed up with the Mideast in general.

"But they're also fed up with Israel. When they see their president working hard to try to tee up an opportunity. All we're asking is just test - go all the way to test whether you have a real partner. "And you say 'No, first pay me - let Pollard out of jail, have Abu Mazen sing Hatikva in perfect Yiddish, and then we'll think about testing.' It rubs a lot of people the wrong way."

Given a consensus among Israeli analysts, rightly or wrongly, that the man they called the world's most important commentator was speaking not only for himself but directly for Barack Obama as well, you can bet that Benjamin Netanyahu was listening.

It says everything about the Netanyahu government's attitude toward America, however, that what the prime minister heard was the polar opposite of what Thomas Friedman said.

"Israel doesn't have to worry about me," Friedman had stressed early in the interview. "At the end of the day, Israel will have my support - it had me at hello."

But many Americans, Friedman continued "just are fed up with this conflict, and over time, that will become a national security problem for Israel, given the fact that the United States is your only friend."

Long term, American emotional divestment, Jewish and non, may well prove more of a threat to Israel's future than Ahmedinejad and his bomb factories, or Nasrallah and Mashaal and their rockets.

Netanyahu's sanguine All Clear on grass-roots American support for Israel dovetails beautifully with pre-GA statements by Jewish Agency Chair Natan Sharansky.

"Of course there are arguments about whether this policy or that policy is more productive," Sharansky said in the course of a West Coast swing of his own, dismissing the earthquake engendered by Peter Beinart's "Failure of the American Jewish Establishment."

"But basically there is no question that Israel is playing more and more a central role in the identity of American Jewry, and that American Jewry needs Israel as the best tool to guarantee its own survival as a Jewish [community]."

Sharansky's proof?

"I just spent two days in San Francisco and spoke to the leaders of the [Jewish] Federation there. The main task they face now is figuring out how to send all those who want to go to Israel on short trips and long trips."

Sharansky is a brilliant man, a genius at chess and at foiling Soviet human rights policy and Israeli peace overtures. He knows and has taken advantage, as only an immigrant can, of every weakness of the Israeli personality. How ironic, then, that he should fall victim to one of the worst of them: Ahbal Syndrome.

As the continued political survival of Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak demonstrates, Israelis have a fatal weakness for the magnificent Ahbal, the omniscient blockhead, the ostentatiously intelligent person who knows everything except the one thing he really needs to know: Everything that he doesn't. What's fatal about it? What makes Ahbal Syndrome, until recently Israel's most closely guarded secret, the silent killer? The one sentence answer: The Palestinians have figured it out, and American Jews are now catching on.

Question: What do the Palestinians know about Ahbal Syndrome that Netanyahu, Sharansky and Barak do not?

Answer: The Palestinians know what they have to do to eliminate Israel as a Jewish state.

Question: What's that?

Answer: Nothing.

Question: You want to explain that?

Answer: The Palestinians know, and American Jews are catching on, that no matter how many non-Jews Lieberman forces to pledge allegiance to a Jewish and democratic Israel, no matter how many ways Netanyahu can require the Palestinians to recognize a Jewish state which neither Egypt [peace treaty since 1979] or Jordan [since 1994] were asked to recognize – on that very day, 15 or 20 years from now, on which there are more Palestinians than Jews in Israel and the settlement-riddled West Bank – on that very day, Israel ceases to be, not only a democracy of any kind, but it ceases to be a Jewish state.

Question: You really think North American Jews care about that?

Answer: That's what they're telling me.

Question: What else are they telling you?

Answer: Many of those who support Israel but who oppose many of its policies feel caught in a bind, slammed by the Israel - It's All Good! [and Palestinians Are All Bad] Faction if they criticize Israel when it's warranted, and by the Zionists Never Deserved a State for Their Crimes Against the Palestinians Faction, when they dare declare support and, yes, love.

 Question: What are you telling them?

Answer: Read Part Two, to be posted within a week.

Happy Thanksgiving to my friends: A tasty article from Israel

Ha’aretz Daily Newspaper

Thanksgiving, Tikkun Olam, and U.S. Jews breaking the Israel barrier

It's in the direct interest of pro-settlement forces in the U.S. Jewish community to have an Israeli government which alienates as many young, energetic, moderate U.S. Jews as possible.

By Bradley Burston

Published 14:53 22.11.10

  

[Part 2 of a series on U.S. Jews emotionally divesting from Israel. In part, a journal of a recent West Coast speaking tour hosted by J Street]

 Norah: It reminds me of this part of Judaism that I really like. It's called Tikkun Olam. It says that the world is broken into pieces, and that it's everybody's job to find them and put them back together again.

 Nick: Well, maybe we're the pieces. And maybe we're not supposed to find the pieces. Maybe we are the pieces.

 "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist" (Columbia Pictures, 2008)

On this, the eve of Thanksgiving, I find myself thinking a great deal about Tikkun Olam, human acts which repair the world, words and deeds and decisions which mend and put together what has gone broken, twisted, missing.

At root, Thanksgiving is itself an act of Tikkun Olam. It celebrates the bridging of fierce differences, the coming together of seeming opposites, the idea that helping people in dire need takes precedence over barriers of creed and color.

Thanksgiving can also make it all too clear how broken the world has become. A few weeks ago, I went to America in search of the fault lines of the Jews. As different as American Jews are from Israelis, and the differences are in many ways core-deep, the fault lines are strikingly similar.

Here as there, the cracks which keep the Jewish people broken, keep us in pieces, extend to radically differing concepts of the forms Tikkun Olam should take, and radically differing reasons for giving thanks.

This is because the fault lines dividing Jew from Jew extend directly from the Green Line, the pre-1967 war border that divided Israel from the West Bank and East Jerusalem. For the purpose of this discussion, let's give these pieces a name. On one side are the Jews of the Wall. On the other, the Jews of the Gate.

The Jews of the Wall are that minority of Israeli and American Jews who sincerely and unshakably believe in permanent settlement in all of the West Bank. Over time, they have become the vanguard both of Orthodox Judaism and the secular neo-conservative Jewish right, whose power and influence, much of it monetary, has American Jewish institutions terrified of their own shadows.

 The Jews of the Gate, meanwhile, comprise the majority of Jews in both America and Israel. They want to see a future partition of the Holy Land into two independent states, a democratic and internationally recognized state of Israel next to a sovereign and independent state of Palestine.

 Before coming to America recently, I'd heard warnings from friends in the U.S. Jewish community that the very mention of J Street would spark nasty arguments, attempts to silence dissenting opinions regarding Israeli policies, behind-the-scenes sabotage by powerful pro-settlement donors and organizational professionals, perhaps cancellations of events.

 I had been warned, as well, that it was already too late. That young Jews of the Gate, liberal in outlook, open in faith, passionate about Israel but conflicted over its policies and disaffected by its explanations, had simply given up and gone, essentially leaving the field to the outnumbered but dogged Jews of the Wall.

In fact, when you consider it, it's in the direct interest of pro-settlement and right-leaning forces in the U.S. Jewish community to have an Israeli government, which alienates and repels as many young, energetic, moderate American Jews as possible. It's in the direct interest of the powerful minority of pro-occupation, pro-settlement (let's call them POPS) activists and communal officials, along with a Sharansky-driven Jewish Agency and a Lieberman-driven Foreign Ministry, to have these voices of conscience out of the way. For the pro-occupation, pro-settlement American Jewish right, it's not a problem that most Jews find the settlement enterprise repellent - it's a godsend.

 Following this visit, however, I find myself with renewed reason to be hopeful. More, this Thanksgiving season, to be thankful for. Because the voices of young American Jews of the Gate have never been stronger.

This month, when Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Jewish Federations of North America in what amounts to its annual State of the Jewish Community speech, a group of young Jews issued a remarkable, stunningly poetic counter-declaration to the general message of Everyone But Israel's At Fault.

While Netanyahu, the conference organizers and many of its speakers focused ire on foreign critics of Israel and – in an especially unfortunate McCarthyite phrase, "fellow travelers," apparently a reference to Jews who question Israeli policy - for de-legitimizing the Jewish state, the message of the counter-declaration was that Israel's Jewish critics see themselves and should be seen as part and parcel of the Jewish community.

Concurrently, Emily Schaeffer, a Boston-born American-Israeli human rights lawyer and activist, published an essay which clearly signaled to the wider Jewish community that the Boycott, Sanctions, Divestment movement – singled out by a senior Federation official as an existential danger to Israel – had a much more nuanced and complex side than the cartoon villains portrayed by invited experts to the New Orleans gathering.

As the Federation's General Assembly heard plans for a new multi-million dollar Israel Action Network the Tel Aviv-based Schaeffer wrote than "just because a person supports BDS and aspires for major change in Israel does not mean that said person cannot love a million and a half aspects about the life, culture, landscape and even politics of Israel today and historically. Nor does it mean that Israelis need to boycott themselves (something that is neither possible nor part of the Palestinian call). The only thing that is black and white in the BDS movement is that the call will remain in effect until Israel — with a lot of help from its friends — ceases to violate international humanitarian and human rights law."

Last week, after the Boston Globe reported that a Newton, Massachusetts synagogue had abruptly canceled an appearance by J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami, "because of vociferous objections from some members of the congregation about J Street’s politics," the event attracted national attention, and an overflow crowd to the nearby elementary school to which the evening was hastily relocated.

“I deeply regret the inconvenience to J Street, and the difficulty that created for them," said Rabbi Keith Stern, the congregation's spiritual leader, who said a “small, influential group’’ within the congregation had strongly opposed holding the event. Stern, who attended the school appearance, said “I feel badly that people got so exercised here, through a gesture I really believed was about bringing an opportunity to the congregation.’’

These voices, and many others, have broken the Israel Barrier, the unspoken compact that states that acquiescence to occupation and settlements – without, G-d forbid, using the O word, or the S designation – is the U.S. Jewish community's definition of apolitical, its gold standard for unity.

What I've seen in the past few weeks are unprecedented clashes between the two groups, a new desperation on the part of activists and string-pullers of the Jews of the Wall, and the nascent strength of the Jews of the Gate.

In New Orleans, when members of the Young Leadership Institute of Jewish Voice for Peace heckled Netanyahu and held up signs reading that occupation, loyalty oaths and settlements were delegitimizing Israel, they were manhandled, placed in headlocks, and their signs literally chewed to pieces.

 A few days later in the Bay Area, an Israeli flag-draped member of a rightist advocacy group, San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs, disrupting a Jewish Voice of Peace meeting, pepper-sprayed two JVP members in the face and eyes.

The attack followed the May vandalism of the Berkeley home of Rabbi Michael Lerner, whose Tikkun Magazine had awarded its annual human rights prize to Judge Richard Goldstone. Among the vandals' messages was one reading "Leftists and Islamofascists are Terrorists."

It makes perfect sense. Just when the Jews of the Gate are engaging the wider Jewish community in fresh ways, the Jews of the Wall are ratcheting up their attacks on them. They thought they had them where they wanted them. Because they want them gone.

The Jews of the Gate drive them bats. Because the Jews of the Gate face the world. The Jews of the Gate face one another. The Jews of the Gate believe in the possibility of a future. They have broken the Israel Barrier. They are being true to what they believe. They are being true to their Judaism and their love of Israel. They are using the tools God gave human beings to repair the world. Their voices and their hands.

The Jews of the Wall, in their drive for uniformity, rabbinical authority, spiritual and genetic cohesion, stand for exclusion. They face the Wall. They live the past. They translate compromise as surrender. They believe that God's Arabic vocabulary consists of the word No. They will tell you that they believe in negotiations, but ceding any of the homeland would rend Israeli society to the point of the destruction of the Jewish state. They will tell you that the Arabs hate us, Iranians, the Turks, Barack Obama, that they will always hate us. Therefore we cannot withdraw. If God Himself tells us to, we cannot withdraw.

The Jews of the Wall believe that the entire outside world is hostile to them. The truth, one suspects, is the exact opposite. They can't bring themselves to say what they really mean: The Occupation must persist in order that the settlements grow, and the settlements must grow in order that the Occupation become permanent.

They cannot accept that the Jews of the Gate care about Israel no less than they. And that Israel belongs to the Jews of the Gate every bit as much as it belongs to them. The Jews of the Gate want to see a different Israel, a better Israel. There are many more of them than there are of the Jews of the Wall. And their answers to Israel's problems, to the cliff up ahead are a great deal more reasonable and a great deal more realistic than Shut Up and Gun It.

It's time for the Federations to come clean - they are, to a great degree, Jews of the Gate as well. Next year, at the GA, it will be time to invite anti-occupation people into the tent. Until now, they've never been able to bring themselves to say the word. They can't bring themselves to name the disease. But BDS is a symptom. Flotillas are a symptom. Emotional divestment from Israel is a symptom.

Occupation is the disease.

Bullying comes of age

Bullying comes of age

By

Karen Nakamura

About 692 words

November 14, 2010 the quiet of the Sunday evening in Berkeley, California was shattered when Alexei Folger and Glen Hauer, members of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) were pepper-sprayed by Robin Dubner of San Francisco Voice for Israel/StandWithUs (SFVI/SWU).

This frightening incident was only one in a series of increasingly violent bullying tactics SFVI/SWU and other nationalistic pro-Israel groups are using against their political opposition in Israel, the United States and increasingly South America.

In the Bay Area, JVP offices were painted with offensive graffiti. The editor of Tikkun Magazine, Rabbi Michael Lerner had his home covered with threatening posters. SFVI/SWU and its sister organization, Facts & Logic About the Middle West or FLAME, are generally thought to have been behind intimidating advertisers of the Berkeley Daily Planet and the Coastal Post newspapers.

Internationally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insulted Vice-President Joseph Biden and the U.S. repeatedly over resumption of settlement building. President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel was harrassed in Israel during his son’s Bar Mitzvah for daring to approve of a two-state solution. There are plenty of other incidents such as trying to disrupt Pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Union Square in San Francisco.

The November 14 pepper spraying took placed in a Senior Center at a private meeting held of the increasingly powerful San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Voice for Peace group. The branch is both the founding and largest JVP branch. The mission of JVP is dedicated to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on democracy and full equality. Approximately 50 people were in attendance.

Speakers at the meeting included five young JVP members who had disrupted a New Orleans speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a week earlier. As the meeting proceeded, up to a dozen members of SFVI/SWU entered, espousing their political position while shoving cameras in attendees’ faces. FLAME member Dan Spitzer lambasted the speakers while defending Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Whistles were blown when the young speakers tried to begin again.

This frightened JVP members because in June, Women in Black members were filmed and harassed by the same group to the point JVP filed charges with the police. In this incident things were going far beyond the New Orleans encounter. One SFVI/SWU supporter shouted to JVP members:

“You’re all being identified, every last one of you… we will find out where you live. We’re going to make your lives difficult. We will disrupt your families…”

Two JVP members moved to protect attendees from being videotaped by non-violently trying to block Robin Dubner from taping attendees against their will. Wrapped in an Israeli flag, Dubner, an Oakland attorney, pepper-sprayed the two JVP members in the eyes and face.

One of them, Alexei Folger said: “I did not see it coming and all of the sudden there was gooey stuff all over my head and hand… my whole head felt like it was on fire.”

The second victim, Glen Hauer, a retired attorney and member of Congregation Sha’har Zahav in San Francisco, leads groups on healing from WWII and the Holocaust and regularly speaks to churches about anti-Semitism. He stated:

“When [Dubner] continued …filming people despite the facilitator and facility manager repeatedly telling her that she could not, I first asked her politely to please put away the video camera, then several times told her to put away the camera, and then tried nonviolently to stay in front of the camera with my body, even when she shoved me. I could have taken the camera but decided instead to talk to the woman and try to be the only person she photographed.”

Hauer continued: “In my mind was the history of targeting of Jewish peace activists by the right wing of the Jewish community, the posting of our photos on internet hate sites …followed by acts of vandalism at our homes and places of work. There were many in the room for whom I care deeply. I could also see that many at the meeting were new… and I did not want them to be scared away.”

Police ended up dispatching 6 squad cars and a fire-truck to quell the ruckus.

Film of the attack and full story are posted on the JVP website (jewishvoiceforpeace.org). Information was also gleaned from The Berkeley Daily Planet web site (berkeleydailyplanet.com).

Karen Nakamura wrote scathing diatribes on the Israel/Palestine conflict for 18 years until pro-Israeli advocates brought down her newspaper the Coastal Post May 31, the day of the attack on the Free Gaza Flotilla.

The Next Flotilla leaves Sept. 18

Karen Nakamura

A second “Viva Palestina” Flotilla is scheduled to set forth for Gaza on September 18.

Pro-Palestinian activist and former British MP George Galloway announced August 13 in the English “Morning Star” newspaper that at least 3 ships are planning Gaza Flotilla 2.

The convoy of ships are said to be leaving from such ports as London, Casablanca and Doha in Qatar. Other reports include Turkey, whose relationship with Israel has been tense since Israel killed a number of Turkish citizens in the last Flotilla of May 31.

The Flotilla will include supplies of medical instruments and other humanitarian supplies and will attempt to break Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Members of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition include IHH, which together with the Free Gaza movement led the first flotilla. The Swedish Ship to Gaza, European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza, International Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza and the Greek Ship to Gaza are also included. Other than George Galloway, coalition members include the highly respected Huwaida Arraaf and Greta Berlin.

The Turkish aid group, the Humanitarian Relief Foundation or IHH has been outlawed by Israel and accused of having ties to Hamas. This group sponsored the lead boat, the Mavi Marmara, in the Free Gaza Flotilla in May. Nine members of the coalition were killed. Aboard the various ships were 718 people aboard the various ships from 37 nations.

Another flotilla, the Saint Mariam (Virgin Mary) from Lebanon and a multi-faith, international, all-women group was prepared to leave Tripoli the 8th of August but refrained after Israeli diplomatic pressure on Lebanon stopped the departure. This flotilla had a group of nuns from the US and included Lebanese singer May Hariri. They were composed of nuns, doctors, lawyers, journalists, Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Whether the Saint Mariam and its sister ship, Naji Alali, will join the September sailing remains to be seen. But international interest and activity is growing. There are rumors that activists from a number of countries may join. Saudi Arabian and United Arab Emirates activists have been rumored to want to send ships. Canadians have sent feelers. Scandinavian countries have sponsored Gaza aide projects and conferences.

To gauge the interest, when the Saint Mariam and Naji Alali crew announced their plans they were inundated with requests to join. There were 400 from the US alone.

THE PRECONDITION TO NO PRECONDITIONS

Karen Nakamura

  

If it weren’t so deadly serious, you’d have to laugh at the sheer chutzpa.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a clever man. For decades he and his political soul mate Ariel Sharon have deflected all attempts to withdraw from Palestine. Israel’s refusal to end its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is the main bone of contention in the Middle East conflict.

This cleverness has never been clearer than a Netanyahu declaration released to the media August 24: “Israel does not place any preconditions to starting the direct talks” with Palestine.

Referring to the Washington talks scheduled for September, Netanyahu stressed “the importance of security arrangements and disarmament as part of a future agreement, to prevent terrorism and the firing of rockets from territories in Palestinian hands.”

That sounds so reasonable, so comforting. But an exploration of other statements from the Prime Minister shows the terrible truth behind the comforting illusion.

For Netanyahu, withdrawing from what he calls Judah and Samaria is a violation of his and his party’s core beliefs. While he blows smoke screens and sweet-talks the United States, his Likud dominated government has no intention of withdrawing from the West Bank. Highlighting this belief is an excerpt from the Likud party platform of which PM Netanyahu is the head. Under a subsection titled Settlements it states:

“The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria [the West Bank] and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting.”

Some will point to its withdrawal from Gaza as a demonstration of Israel’s determination to find an equitable solution. However, one needs to remember a few facts. The first is the 25-foot wall the Israelis built around Gaza. It effectively locks Gazans into what is referred to as “the world’s largest open air prison.” The second is the horrific pounding Israel inflicted on Gaza when it tried to break Israeli’s stranglehold.

The third is rarely acknowledged. Just before Israel pulled out, international pressure was building to get Israel to ease up in Gaza. One tactic was to cite Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states:

“To the fullest extent of the means available to it, the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate…”

If that was applied to Gaza and the West Bank, the occupation could be very expensive for Israel. This is especially true in Gaza where even before Israel’s 2008-09 invasion childhood hunger was deeply entrenched. On August 6, 2002, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) reported 30% of Gaza’s children were suffering from chronic malnutrition.

Some observers feel this pressure was a turning point. Sharon wasn’t necessarily being a humanitarian by pulling out. It made more sense to build a 25-foot wall around the territories and control traffic going in and out. The Siege of Gaza has been in effect since July 2007 when Israel closed the few opened gates after Hamas’ election. That policy continues to this day despite some easing following the Free Gaza Flotilla.

Which takes us back to Netanyahu’s statement he has no pre-conditions for the upcoming talks in Washington.

On July 2, 2009, The Israel Project released a script of a press conference with Mark Regev, Netanyahu’s media advisor. Here he answers a question from the BBC, which asked:

“Most of the world is wondering when Israel will recognize the State of Palestine and abide by its UN designated borders?”

Regev’s answer concluded: “…The second issue is security and here we've got to be clear. The Palestinian state …will be demilitarized.” Regev rationalized this by stating: “[Netanyahu] …doesn't see how demilitarization in any way negatively impacts upon Palestinian national self-determination. …And we're sure …there is international support for this demand…”

Palestinian demilitarization means one thing and one thing only. Israel is the proven aggressor and refuses to lay down its arsenal in kind. What little defense Palestine does have will be taken away giving Israel full rein to cleanse “The Land of Israel” of all Arabs, its treasured goal. Needless to say this will be brought about by the forcible removal and genocide of the Palestinians.