Israel-Palestine
Bankruptcy of the two-state solution
Substance of a talk given to the Brecon Political and Theological Discussion Group on 4th April, 2006
The prospects for the Palestinian people living in the area under Israeli control appear ever more hopeless day by day. The process by which they are being driven into isolated impoverished territories wholly dependent on their Israeli overlords seems to be inevitable. Humiliations follow one after the other and, though there is probably more sympathy for them throughout the world than there has ever been, it seems entirely powerless. Only the United States counts as a world power and both wings of its political life are unhesitating in their support for Israel. In these circumstances it may well seem presumptuous to argue that the whole basis of Palestinian politics is mistaken and needs to be changed from top to bottom. Yet a radical change of some sort has to occur if the Palestinians are to escape a logic that is fast heading toward a definitive state of hopeless poverty or ethnic cleansing.
The present Palestinian policy is directed towards establishing an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza strip on the basis of the boundaries that existed prior to the 1967 'Six Day War'. There is a difference as to whether this should be accepted as a permanent solution or whether it should be accepted temporarily pending a more permanent solution at some time in the future. My argument is that this ambition, whether in its 'extreme' or 'moderate' form, is hopeless and only serves the interests of the Israeli power which aims to separate itself from the Palestinians as much as possible with a view to preserving the Jewish character of the state. The Palestinian struggle for national rights - for a distinct Palestinian state - should, I will argue, be turned into a struggle for full civil rights within the polity created by the Israelis.
Such an initiative would be a difficult pill to swallow. In particular, it would involve renouncing a series of apparent victories, notably:
1. the resolutions passed in the UN Security Council (notably resolutions 252, 267, 271, 446, 452, 465, 471, 592, 605, 607, 608, 636, 641, 672, 673, 681, 904, 1322) which have recognised Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as an occupation, calling on Israel to observe the legal obligations of an occupying power and therefore, among much else, to dismantle all the settlements they have established 'illegally' in that area.
2. international recognition of the Palestinian right to a separate state (the 'road map'; the 'two state solution')
3. the moves the Israelis have already made or propose to make towards withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and from the West Bank.
All these, however, have proved to be Pyrrhic victories. They have done nothing to improve the lives of Palestinians. Quite the opposite. The promise of separate statehood has only led to a process of ghetto-isation. The supposed sovereignty of the Palestinian Authority merely saves the Israeli power the expense of providing for the people living in the ghettos. But Israel still retains full power over their lives, intervening at will, often very brutally. If Palestinians rejoiced to see the back of Israeli settlers in Gaza they should remember that to create the Warsaw ghetto, the Nazis first had to remove large numbers of Polish residents from the area. The Nazi policy was to concentrate the Jews in exclusively Jewish areas with a view to controlling them and eventually rounding them up for the camps. The Israeli policy with regard to the Palestinians seems to be something along similar lines.
WHY ISRAEL CAN'T BE SERIOUS ABOUT THE TWO STATE SOLUTION
In fact I would argue that Israel could never allow the emergence of a genuinely sovereign Palestinian state and would question if even at the height of the Oslo process they ever seriously considered it.
My thinking has been influenced by an article I read some years ago, written by an Israeli West Bank settler in an internal West Bank journal. I am summarising it from memory and do not have a reference for it.
He was arguing against any concessions being made to the Palestinians and in particular against renouncing any part of the West Bank. His reason was that the wrong done to the Palestinians was so great that it could never be forgiven. He was not referring to the wrong done in 1967 when Israel seized the so-called 'occupied territories', the West Bank and Gaza Strip. He was referring to the formation of the Israeli state in 1947/8, which Palestinians call the 'nakba', the catastrophe. He defends the existence of Israel on the grounds that after what had been done to them in Europe the Jews absolutely had to have a state of their own in which they could defend themselves. When a people have found themselves faced with imminent extermination then all normal considerations of morality go out the window.
But of course, he goes on, the same can be said of the Palestinians. They are a spirited people. They can never accept the destruction of their ancient way of life, the theft of their property, the expulsion from their land, which is what 'recognition of the state of Israel' amounts to. In a state of weakness leaders might sign all sorts of agreements but the people as a whole could not feel bound by them. Other political forces, other generations, would repudiate them. As an organised social force, therefore, the Palestinians would always pose a threat to Israel and could not be allowed to establish an independent state, especially not in a piece of territory in the very heart of Israel, as the West Bank is.
What I liked about this article is that it did not present the usual moralistic discourse about the evils of 'terrorism'. It did not present Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular as somehow inherently opposed to 'freedom', 'democracy' or as irrationally anti-Jewish. It recognises that they had the best possible reasons for hating Israeli Jews and, so his argument went, there was nothing the Jews could do about it. No concession could possibly satisfy the genuine, deeply felt and entirely understandable Palestinian sense of grievance which logically could only be satisfied by the dismantling of the state of Israel, reducing Jews to a state of vulnerability similar to that they had been trying to escape in Europe and Russia.
The argument follows the similar line advanced in 1923 by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of 'revisionist' Zionism, in his highly influential article The Iron Wall, arguing that there was no point in trying to seek prior agreement from the Arabs to facilitate a Jewish presence in their midst:
'As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.' (1)
and with some oft-quoted remarks of Jabotinsky's great rival, the 'Left Wing' Zionist, David Ben-Gurion, who was one of the architects of the policy of expelling Arabs from the territory to be turned into a Jewish state:
'I don't understand your optimism. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it's simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out... I'll be seventy years old soon... if you asked me whether I shall die and be buried in a Jewish State I would tell you Yes; in ten years, fifteen years, I believe there will still be a Jewish State. But ask me whether my son Amos, who will be fifty at the end of this year, has a chance of dying and being buried in a Jewish State, and I would answer: fifty-fifty'. (2)
It may seem paradoxical that it is the recognition of the wrong that provides the strongest argument for perpetuating it and consolidating it.
BENNY MORRIS AND ETHNIC CLEANSING
We can see much the same argument being used by the historian Benny Morris who had become something of a hero among opponents of Israeli policy because of his frank admission, in his book, Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, that Israel had been founded on a policy of ethnic cleansing and his detailing of war crimes which had been carefully concealed in official accounts of the origins of the state. In an interview given in January 2004, Morris surprised his supporters by revealing that he actually supported the process of ethnic cleansing he had described, he recognised it as the necessary condition for the existence of the state:
'That was the situation. That is what Zionism faced. A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians. Therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads. It was necessary to cleanse the villages from which our convoys and our settlements were fired on.' (3)
The two state solution is based on the contention that the existence of a Jewish state in the area is 'legitimate'. The Palestinian militant Islamist movement, Hamas, is under great international pressure to follow the Palestinian Liberation Organisation in recognising 'the right of Israel to exist'. But if we accept Morris' argument then the expulsion of at least 700,000 Palestinians was a necessary condition for the emergence of that legitimate state. At the very least it might be conceded that recognising this legitimacy poses problems.
With regard to political theory I am myself a disciple of Thomas Hobbes not of John Locke. I recognise that states are normally founded in conditions of war, conquest, tyranny, not in a 'social contract' between freely consenting individuals. The state may hopefully evolve into something else but it is founded in violence. I recognise too that the cruelty of the Israelis is not exceptional and that it is even a small scale affair compared to for example the British destruction of German cities during the war, or the French massacres just after the war in Madagascar and Algeria; or, more recently, the policy of imposing sanctions on Iraq and the subsequent destruction of the Iraqi state and reduction of the whole society to a state of elemental chaos. Examples could be multiplied endlessly. Although this talk was given in April it is being typed in July 2006 in the context of the Israeli assault on the Lebanon and it has been interesting to note that some Israeli spokesmen have been justifying the policy of destroying the civilian infrastructure by appealing to the NATO policy of destroying civilian infrastructure in the war against Yugoslavia in 1999. We are not at all talking about a cruelty that is peculiar to the Jews.
THE PEEL COMMISSION AND ETHNIC CLEANSING
In fact, the policy of forcible transfer of the population of the area was originally suggested by the British, in the report of the Peel Commission, published in 1937 as a reaction against the Arab revolt in 1936, itself largely inspired by the arrival of large numbers of Jewish immigrants in the area. The Peel Commission proposed a two state solution which would have offered the Jews a territory much smaller than the one offered them in the UN resolution of 1947, but the Arab population in that area would be removed, so far as possible voluntarily, with compensation, but eventually, if they refused, by force. The Zionist writer Tom Segev in his book, One Palestine Complete, comments on how this proposal was received by Ben Gurion:
'When, on his second reading, he grasped the implications, he could barely contain his enthusiasm. "This will be something we never had, even when we were under our own authority, neither in the period of the First Temple nor in the period of the Second Temple," he wrote in his diary, underlining the two decisive words "forced transfer". The proposal was of "huge consequence" ... For the first time a "really Jewish" state was on the verge of becoming a reality. He underlined the words "really Jewish" as well. The Jews would have an "undreamed of possibility, one which he could not dare to imagine in our boldest fantasies". He described the Commission's report as "our declaration of independence" and prophesied that the Balfour Declaration would dim by comparison.' (4)
Israeli accounts of the events of 1947-8 argue that the expulsion of the Arab population was necessary because the Arabs refused to accept the UN resolution establishing the Jewish state and organised militarily to oppose it. We may argue about who was attacking and who was defending in the period but that does not affect the main point I want to make here, which is that Benny Morris is right to see the ethnic cleansing of the Arab population as the necessary condition for the establishment of the Jewish state. To recognise the legitimacy of the Jewish state is to legitimise the ethnic cleansing which was its necessary precondition. We can understand why the Jews might believe that it was 'worth it' (to coin a phrase) but we can also easily understand why it is impossible for the Palestinians to accept it.
Which is why so long as the Palestinians have a possibility of organising in opposition to the existence of that state, they can be expected to do so. Which is why Israel cannot permit the emergence of a genuinely independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza, and indeed why the existence of any strong, independent Arab or Muslim polity in the area is a danger to Israel.
THE BIBLICAL HEARTLAND
There is another reason why Israel cannot renounce control over the West Bank.
People who engage in war or in any great project that requires a degree of brutality have to believe in their own rightness. The Jewish right to hold the land is not obvious according to the principles that have been developed in modern secular law.
It has essentially two sources
1. The impossibility of continuing to live in Europe, not just because of the Holocaust but also because of the pogroms in Poland and the Ukraine.
2. The Bible.
This second point may not appeal to those who are in one way or another in reaction against the Bible or who interpret it differently but the fact that a book that has seized the imagination of maybe half the world's population asserts an unbreakable connection between Jews and the land of Israel is a fact of enormous importance. To put it at its simplest the existence of a Jewish state in Israel seems more natural to most of us than the existence of a Jewish state in Cornwall, say, or, to evoke an idea that once flitted through the mind of Adolf Hitler, in Madagascar.
But the core of the historical Jewish presence in the area lies in the West Bank, which includes Hebron, Nablus (the biblical Shechem), Jerusalem, Bethlehem. If we argue that it is psychologically impossible for Palestinians to accept the theft of their land it is equally psychologically impossible or at least very difficult for Jews, once having gained these territories, to then renounce them again. Which helps to explain why, even when the Oslo process appeared to be going well, the Labour Government which had in principle agreed to renounce the West Bank continued to develop settlements there, to create 'facts on the ground'; and it helps to explain why Shimon Peres, supposedly one of the chief architects of Oslo, should be able to work together with Ariel Sharon, its chief opponent, together founding the new political movement, Kadima.
KADIMA AND THE PROBLEM OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC BALANCE
Kadima is a party based on two logics that appear to contradict each other:
1. the need to control the whole area from the Jordan river to the sea.
2. the need to keep Palestinians out of the polity. To allow Palestinians into the polity would be to alter the demographic balance, diluting the Jewish character of the state. Figures published by the Palestinian authority and widely accepted give 4.6 million Palestinians in the area as against 5.1 million Jews. They project that by the year 2020 there would be 8.2 million Palestinians as opposed to 6.4 million Jews. (5) These figures may be very unreliable but the fact that they even appear credible indicates the fragility of the Israeli position. It suggests the need for a further bout of ethnic cleansing, a further reduction in the number of Palestinians, if the Jewish state is to survive.
There are two ways in which this could be achieved
1. through a policy of making life in the Palestinian areas so intolerable that people would feel they had to emigrate. This corresponds very closely to the policy that is being followed by the Israeli government at the present time.
2. it could be done in hot blood in conditions of outright warfare as it was in 1948. This second option is envisaged as a possibility by Benny Morris:
'If you are asking me whether I support the transfer and expulsion of the Arabs from the West Bank, Gaza and perhaps even from Galilee and the Triangle, I say not at this moment. I am not willing to be a partner to that act. In the present circumstances it is neither moral nor realistic. The world would not allow it, the Arab world would not allow it, it would destroy the Jewish society from within. But I am ready to tell you that in other circumstances, apocalyptic ones, which are liable to be realized in five or ten years, I can see expulsions. If we find ourselves with atomic weapons around us, or if there is a general Arab attack on us and a situation of warfare on the front with Arabs in the rear shooting at convoys on their way to the front, acts of expulsion will be entirely reasonable. They may even be essential.' (6)
THE PALESTINIAN RESPONSE
I am now going to criticise the Palestinian response to all this but first it must be stressed that the situation in which they found themselves was immensely difficult and any policy, including the one I am advocating, was fraught with danger. They probably succeeded in the main thing they had to do which was simply to keep resistance alive though it might be said that the Israelis never even offered them a viable policy of surrender and acquiescence (substantial compensation to enable them to build their lives elsewhere for example).
There are two aspects of Palestinian policy that I would like to criticise:
1. By collaborating with the Oslo agreement they contributed to their own ghetto-isation and isolation from the overall Israeli polity. By recognising Israel, as they did in 1988 and then more formally in 1993, they renounced their moral right to live and thrive in all parts of the territory under dispute. These concessions were made by the PLO after they had been expelled from Beirut in 1982 and reduced to a state of utter powerlessness in Tunisia. They allowed the PLO to return to active politics but, though we can understand their desperation to leave Tunisia, we may question if this did much good for the Palestinians living in Israel/Palestine.
The PLO arrived as essentially a foreign importation and constituted itself as a ruling caste largely under the patronage of the Israeli enemy. They gained control over local patronage, which became an incentive for collaboration with the Israelis, and they were assigned the task of policing the area in the interests of Israeli security. This was all a recipe for corruption, intercommunal tension and the triumph of Hamas as the legitimate representative of the local Palestinian interest.
2 Recourse to a particular style of war - the suicide bomb especially when it is directed against civilian targets. I say 'war' rather than 'terrorism' because I regard 'war' and 'terrorism' as synonyms. Anyone engaged in war is engaged in terrorism. Whether or not we approve or disapprove of their cause or of the particular methods of terror they employ is another question. 'Terrorism' could be defined as war of which for one reason or another (possibly because it is directed against ourselves) we disapprove.
The war conducted by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al Aqsa Brigades has contributed as much as or possibly more than the policy of collaboration to the process of ghetto-isation. Most people reading this pamphlet will probably disapprove of the Israeli policy of closing the West Bank Palestinians up behind a separation wall, but one of the deeply depressing aspects of this is that it has received almost universal support among the Israeli population. None of the major parties in the recent election opposed it. Why? Not because it has reduced the territory available to form a Palestinian state but because it has 'worked'. It has improved the security situation within Israel.
At one stage suicide bombing looked like a tactic that could not be defeated. There was some Palestinian satisfaction even among 'moderates' that the death ratio between Palestinians and Israelis had gone from 10:1 to something like 3:1. The effect on the Israeli economy, especially the tourist trade, was devastating. But the wall has defeated it. After the assassination of Sheikh Yassin Hamas threatened a very bloody revenge. Instead they declared a unilateral truce and turned their attention to politics. Israeli mothers no longer have to worry so much every time their children want to go to the local Starbucks and they're very grateful. Certainly the suffering the wall inflicts on the Palestinian population is out of all proportion to the suffering Hamas inflicted on the Jewish population but this is perceived in Israel not as a question of justice but of simple self defence.
In 1984 400,000 Israelis protested against the massacres in the camps of Sabra and Chatila. Now Israeli opinion is united in support of the wall. That is a major consequence of the policy of the suicide bomb.
TOWARDS A CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Palestinians were never so strong as they were during the period of the first intifada when the perceived weapon was teenagers throwing stones. The sympathy for the Palestinian cause, both internationally and even in Israel itself, was unprecedented. But the demands raised by the intifada were unclear. It looked like a civil rights movement but since they weren't, as a matter of principle, demanding rights as citizens within the Israeli polity, it was difficult to know what concessions could be made to them. The chief demand was in fact that Israel negotiate with the PLO which Israel eventually did with, I have argued, disastrous results. It was this that led to the Oslo Agreement. But though I have argued that Oslo worked in the Israeli interest, the return of the PLO was still a very radical and high-risk strategy. It indicates how badly shaken the Israeli establishment was.
The first intifada was a missed opportunity. Its great strength was that it looked like a civil rights movement. What I am advocating is the launch of a real civil rights movement.
Instead of demanding Israeli withdrawal and separation such a movement could accept the fact of Israeli sovereignty over the whole territory from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean. It would recognise that the Israeli government is the only possible effective government in the region and demand that that government take responsibility for the wellbeing of all the people living in the area it controls. Such a stance would not involve a formal recognition of the state of Israel - such a recognition could be made conditional on the implementation of full civil and democratic rights. It would not even necessarily involve renunciation of the option of a separate Palestinian state. The argument would be that so long as the Israelis refuse to allow the functioning of an effective democratic Palestinian government, they must take on the responsibilities of government themselves. The movement making this demand would have to renounce violence but it would not at all be obliged to take on the responsibility of policing the area in opposition to those who would continue with the war. Its relations to the militant groups would resemble the relation of the Northern Irish Civil Rights movement or the SDLP to the IRA. The Irish Civil Rights movement included many nationalists opposed in principle to the existence of the Northern Ireland state. They were perfectly able to make demands of that state without recognising its legitimacy.
ANNEXATION NOW!
I would myself go so far as to argue that the actual annexation of the whole territory would be in the Palestinian interest, provided of course that it was not accompanied by ethnic cleansing. The Zionists themselves are very much aware of the dangers. Their traditional position has been to want to enlarge the territory under their control to the greatest possible extent, taking in not just the West Bank and Gaza but also crossing the Jordan or taking back Sinai. The major development in Zionist politics over the past five years has been Sharon's recognition that this would hugely increase the demographic strength of the non-Jewish population in the 'Jewish state'. It is hard to imagine that this had ever escaped his notice and one can only assume that he originally envisaged some form of ethnic cleansing; and it is hard to resist the thought that the present policy of locking the Palestinian population up in a gaggle of separated bantustans is designed as a form of ethnic cleansing by other means.
That is what the 'two state solution' amounts to. The one state slogan would be: one democratic state from the river to the sea with equal rights for all its citizens. As the New York Times commentator, Thomas Friedman put it: 'Well, what happens when there is no solution is that by default Israel remains in control of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. And by the year 2010, there are going to be more Arabs living in those areas than Palestinians [SIC - PB. It should presumably read more Palestinians than Jews]. And when that happens, the Palestinians are no longer going to call for two states; they're going to call for one man, one vote. And if you think it's hard for Israelis, or American Jews to defend Israel on college campuses today, wait till they have to argue against one man, one vote.' (7)
A WORD FROM EDWARD SAID
I would like to finish with some remarks from the late Edward Said, well known as a literary historian, author of the influential and controversial study, Orientalism. Said had been an independent member of the Palestinian National Council, the 'parliament' of the Palestinian people, established in 1964. Throughout his life he was a fierce critic of mainstream Palestinian policies and especially of the leadership of Yasser Arafat. Until the 1990s he accused his own side of paying too little attention to the massive reality of the Israeli population, of wanting to wish them out of existence. At that time he advocated a two state solution and in particular recognition of Israel. He looked like what the 'international community' might call a 'moderate'. But in the 1990s he opposed the Oslo agreement, arguing that it had sold the Palestinian refugees short and failed to address the problems of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, therefore failing to establish the necessary conditions for a genuinely independent Palestinian state. He turned to advocating a One State solution such as I am arguing here. He began to look like an 'extremist'.
This is from an article written in 2001 after a visit to South Africa (8). He is reflecting on why the Palestinian struggle had not 'captured the world's imagination' in the way the African National Congress had done, and he is also thinking about a phrase that had struck him in a speech by Nelson Mandela who said the anti-apartheid movement had been a means 'for all of us to assert our common humanity.'
'All of us', he reflects, including the pro-apartheid whites.
I quote:
'After the reemergence of a genuine Palestinian liberation movement in the late '60s, the formerly colonized people of Asia, Africa and Latin America adopted the Palestinian struggle, but in the main, the strategic balance was vastly in Israel's favour; it has been backed unconditionally by the US ($5 billion in annual aid), and in the West, the media, the liberal intelligentsia, and most governments have been on Israel's side. For reasons too well known to go into here, the official Arab environment was either overtly hostile or lukewarm in its mostly verbal and financial support.
'Because, however, the shifting strategic goals of the PLO were always clouded by useless terrorist actions, were never addressed or articulated eloquently, and because the preponderance of cultural discourse in the West was either unknown to or misunderstood by Palestinian policy makers and intellectuals, we have never been able to claim the moral high ground effectively. Israeli information could always both appeal to (and exploit) the Holocaust as well as the unstudied and politically untimely acts of Palestinian terror, thereby neutralizing or obscuring our message, such as it was. We never concentrated as a people on cultural struggle in the West (which the ANC early on had realized was the key to undermining Apartheid) and we simply did not highlight in a humane, consistent way the immense depredations and discriminations directed at us by Israel. Most television viewers today have no idea about Israel's racist land policies, or its spoliations, tortures, systematic deprivation of the Palestinians just because they are not Jews. As a black South African reporter wrote in one of the local newspapers here while on a visit to Gaza, Apartheid was never as vicious and as inhumane as Zionism: ethnic cleansing, daily humiliations, collective punishment on a vast scale, land appropriation, etc., etc.
'But, even these facts, were they known better as a weapon in the battle over values between Zionism and the Palestinians, would not have been enough. What we never concentrated on enough was the fact that to counteract Zionist exclusivism, we would have to provide a solution to the conflict that, in Mandela's second phrase, would assert our common humanity as Jews and Arabs. Most of us still cannot accept the idea that Israeli Jews are here to stay, that they will not go away, any more than Palestinians will go away. This is understandably very hard for Palestinians to accept, since they are still in the process of losing their land and being persecuted on a daily basis. But, with our irresponsible and unreflective suggestion in what we have said that they will be forced to leave (like the Crusades), we did not focus enough on ending the military occupation as a moral imperative or on providing a form for their security and self-determinism that did not abrogate ours. This, and not the preposterous hope that a volatile American president would give us a state, ought to have been the basis of a mass campaign everywhere. Two people in one land. Or, equality for all. Or, one person one vote. Or, a common humanity asserted in a binational state.'
I have not given full urls for items 'obtained off the internet' since, assuming they have survived on the internet, they can be found more easily by typing a phrase out of the quotation and searching for it on Google.
(1) Obtained off the internet at www.marxists.de, where an interesting account of 'revisionist' Zionism from Jabotinsky to Yitzhak Shamir by Lenni Brenner can also be found. Back
(2) In conversation with Nahum Goldmann, in 1956; as quoted in The Jewish Paradox: A personal memoir (1978) by Nahum Goldmann. Goldmann, founder of the Conference of Jewish Organisations, was a lifelong Zionist though he was critical of Israel's failure to accommodate its non-Jewish population. Back
(3) Ari Shavit: Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris, Counterpunch, January 16, 2004. Obtained off the internet. Back
(4) Segev, pp. 403-4, quoted in Angela Clifford (ed): Serfdom or Ethnic Cleansing? Churchill's evidence to the Peel Commission (1937), p. 13. Back
(5) According to a population census published in January 2004 by the Central Statistical Bureau of the Palestinian Authority. Back
(6) Shavit: Survival of the Fittest Back
(7) Interview with Margaret Warner, 16th January, 1916 on Newshour with Jim Lehrer, 16th January, 2003. Obtained off the internet. Back
(8) Edward Said: The Only Alternative, Al-Ahram Weekly, No 523, 1 - 7 March 2001. Obtained off the internet. Back
BOOKS
Angela Clifford (ed): Serfdom or Ethnic Cleansing? Churchill's evidence to the Peel Commission (1937), Belfast, Athol Books, 2003
Nahum Goldmann: The Jewish paradox, translated from the French by Steve Cox, London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978.
Benny Morris: The birth of the Palestinian refugee problem, 1947-1949, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Tom Segev: One Palestine, complete : Jews and Arabs under the British mandate, translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman, London : Little, Brown, 2000.