Palestine: It's All Over
Population Transfers, Land Theft and Bankrupt Ghettos

Back then you had to dig a little harder to excavate what Jewish Israelis were actually doing to Palestinians. Lay out the facts about institutionalized racism, land confiscations, torture and a hail of abuse would pour through the mailbox, as when I published a long interview in the Voice in 1980 with the late Israel Shahak, the intrepid professor from Hebrew University. It's slightly eerie now to look at what Shahak was saying back then and at the accuracy of his analysis and predictions: "The basic trends were established in '74 and '75, including settler organizations, mystical ideology, and the great financial support of the United States to Israel. Between summer '74 and summer '75 the key decisions were taken, and from that time it's a straight line." Among these decisions, said Shahak, was "to keep the occupied territories of Palestine," a detailed development of much older designs consummated in 1967.

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Jewish Opposition to Zionism
Review: A Threat from Within

None of this will be found in Rabkin's work, yet his title is appropriate. Rabkin brings us into the world of the anti-Zionist orthodox, for whom Zionism is the antithesis of Judaism and the destroyer of everything properly speaking Jewish. This may seem like an irrelevance today, or at least as a topic of very limited interest. By Rabkin's own account, the numbers of these orthodox anti-Zionists are small, and their influence has declined steadily over the last century. To many they are a lunatic fringe; to most they are a force with little political future. But Rabkin teaches us about realities we could never understand without his help. He deepens--that's utterly accurate here--our understanding of Zionism and Judaism; he reveals what the former has done to the latter; and in the end his message could not be more contemporary or more relevant to the present conflicts in the Middle East.

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Death on the beach: seven Palestinians killed as Israeli shells hit family picnic

A barrage of Israeli artillery shells rained down on a busy Gaza beach yesterday, killing seven Palestinians, three of them children. The attack put further strain on the 16-month truce between Israel and the governing Hamas movement.

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The war on children
The most vulnerable people in Gaza are suffering the worst acute mental and physical trauma as a result of Israel's actions: almost half the population is under 15.

Arthur Miller wrote, "Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has to be internally denied." Miller's truth was a glimpsed reality on television on 9 June when Israeli warships fired on families picnicking on a Gaza beach, killing seven people, including three children and three generations. What that represents is a final solution, agreed by the United States and Israel, to the problem of the Palestinians. While the Israelis fire missiles at Palestinian picnickers and homes in Gaza and the West Bank, the two governments are to starve them. The victims will be mostly children. This was approved on 23 May by the US House of Representatives, which voted 361-37 to cut off aid to non-government organisations that run a lifeline to occupied Palestine. Israel is withholding Palestinian revenues and tax receipts amounting to $60m a month. Such collective punishment, identified as a crime against humanity in the Geneva Conventions, evokes the Nazis' strangulation of the Warsaw ghetto and the American economic siege of Iraq in the 1990s. If the perpetrators have lost their minds, as Miller suggested, they appear to understand their barbarism and display their cynicism. "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet," joked Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert. This is the price Palestinians must pay for their democratic elections in January. The majority voted for the "wrong" party, Hamas, which the US and Israel, with their inimitable penchant for pot-calling-the-kettle-black, describe as terrorist. However, terrorism is not the reason for starving the Palestinians, whose prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, had reaffirmed Hamas's commitment to recognise the Jewish state, proposing only that Israel obey international law and respect the borders of 1967. Israel has refused because, with its apartheid wall under construction, its intention is clear: to take over more and more of Palestine, encircling whole villages and eventually Jerusalem.

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Begging for a Response
Israel's Air Strikes on Gaza are Politically Motivated

The Israelis are a stiff necked people. They refuse to accept anything less than full acquiescence by anyone involved in their plans, no matter the cost -- human, political, financial, or otherwise. Israel's non-stop aggression against Palestinians averaging two Palestinian deaths a day for several years now is much more than what is popularly being coined in Israel and abroad as low-intensity warfare. If international and humanitarian laws are to be used as a measure, the ongoing Israeli killing spree is taking on the shape of a sustained campaign of war crimes aimed to remove the Palestinians from Israel's way.

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Palestine on the Brink
Time is Running Out

The political and ideological division separating Palestinian society in the Occupied Territories has metamorphosed into a formidable chasm, despite the urgent need to consolidate Palestinian national unity in this current crisis. And a time of crisis it is. Never since the concoction of the Israeli state and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of nearly one million Palestinians in 1947-48, has an Israeli government been as determined as that of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to settle its account with the Palestinians, in so vile and careless a way. There is a growing realization among Israeli politicians that mirrors a sense of fear and anxiety from a possible relegation of the political hegemony and import of the United States. The US has served--and paradoxically inconsistently with its own interests--the role of the protector and provider, leaving Israel emancipated of any regional and international accountability, free to pursue its own agenda--imperialistic and violently racist, as it were--at the expense of the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors. The Israeli heyday may be over soon, due to growing predictions that the American project--for various reasons, notwithstanding the disaster-prone Iraq war is likely to diminish in coming years. And without US patronage, Israel is much less capable of serving as the region's bully.

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