The Question of Palestine

Preface to the 1992 Edition

This book was written in 1977–78 and published in 1979. An enormous amount has ensued since then, including the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the onset of the continuing intifada in December 1987, the Gulf crisis and war of 1990 and 1991, and the convening of a Middle East peace conference in late October and early November 1991. With the addition to this extraordinary mix of events of such things as the massive changes in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the freeing of Nelson Mandela, independence for Namibia, the end of the Afghanistan war, and regionally, of course, the Iranian revolution and its aftermath, we are in a new, but no less perilous and complex, world. And yet, strangely and unhappily, the question of Palestine remains—unresolved, seemingly intractable, undomesticated.

Two decades after Black September (1970), the main aspects of Palestinian life remain dispossession, exile, dispersion, disenfranchisement (under Israeli military occupation), and, by no means least, an extraordinarily widespread and stubborn resistance to these travails. Thousands of lives lost and many more irreparably damaged seem not to have diminished the spirit of resilience characterizing a national movement that, despite its many gains in achieving legitimacy, visibility, and enormous sustenance for its people against staggering odds, has not discovered a method for stopping or containing the relentless Israeli attempt to take over more and more Palestinian (as well as other Arab) territory. But the discrepancy between important political, moral, and cultural gains on the one hand, and, on the other, a droning ground bass of land alienation, is at the heart of the Palestinian dilemma today. To speak of this discrepancy, in aesthetic terms, as an ironic one is by no means to reduce or trivialize its force. On the contrary: what to many Palestinians is either an incomprehensible cruelty of fate or a measure of how appalling are the prospects for settling their claims can be clarified by seeing irony as a constitutive factor in their lives.

Paradox and Irony: The PLO and Its Environment

In the aftermath of the Gulf War, United States Secretary of State James Baker completed a series of eight trips to the region and successfully set out the main lines of a peace conference, its aim the settling of the Arab-Israeli conflict in general and that conflict’s Palestinian-Israeli component in particular. In the Arab states he visited, he was reportedly told by every senior official with whom he spoke that no improvement in the Arab states’ essentially nonexistent relationships with Israel could be expected until the question of Palestine was seriously addressed. Yet, at the same time, the PLO was snubbed throughout the Arab states of the coalition, Palestinians in the Occupied Territories continued to experience even greater hardship because of the disruption of funds from the Gulf, and the situation of Palestinians resident in the Gulf states was precarious. Most dramatically, the entire Palestinian community in Kuwait underwent severe tribulations, with torture, deportation, arbitrary arrests, and summary killings the order of the day. Leaving aside the immeasurable material losses to this community and its dependents in the Occupied Territories, there is the additional fact that the restored Kuwaiti authorities announced that those Palestinian residents who left Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation would not be allowed back, leaving hundreds of thousands of refugees in a Jordan already severely overburdened. Those who remained face astringent measures—among them further deportation and imprisonment—against them.

Thus the averred moral and political centrality of the Palestinian issue to official Arab discourse is scandalized by the actual relationship between the Palestinians as a real people, political community, and nation on the one hand, and the Arab states on the other. This particular contradiction takes us back to 1967, for the emergence of the Palestinian movement after the June War was fueled by a wish to compensate for the appalling performance of the Arab armies against Israel. In an important sense, then, the critical, almost abrasive relationship between Palestinian activity and the Arab state system is structural, not incidental. With the rise of the PLO in the late sixties came such things as a daring frankness, an unusual new cosmopolitanism in which figures such as Fanon, Mao, and Guevara entered the Arab political idiom, and the audacity (perhaps even brashness) attendant upon a political movement proposing itself as capable of doing better than many of its benefactors and patrons.

Yet we should not mistake this structurally critical relationship and speak about it only as an antithetical one. True, when we think of the conflict between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian guerrilla groups in 1970–71, or the various duels between the PLO and the Lebanese army in the early seventies, or the dreadful Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982, or the current antagonism between the PLO, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and, of course, Syria, the implicit tensions do seem to have taken dramatically unpleasant forms. But there is a whole other dimension that needs to be recalled as well. All Palestinians know that their principal constituency is Arab and that their struggle exists in an overwhelmingly Arab and Islamic environment. No less important in this critical relationship, therefore, is the symbiosis and sympathy between Arab and Palestinian causes, the way in which, for example, Palestine has come to symbolize what is best and most vital in the pan-Arab tradition of cooperation, dramatic energy, and spirit.

But here, too, paradox and irony are evident. Doubtless the post-Shukairy PLO that has come to be dominated for two decades by Yasir Arafat initially saw itself as Arabist in the Nasserist sense. But, early on, the organization involved itself in at least three, and perhaps even four or five, other circles of influence, or realms, regionally and internationally, not all of them congruent with one another, not all of them basically similar. First was the Persian Gulf, which since 1948 has been central to the economics and demographics of the Palestinian march forward. This brought not only the largely conservative political outlook of many of the rulers of the Gulf countries into a rapprochement with the PLO that lasted for years, but two other factors, each of which imparted an ideological inflection of significant note: money and Sunni Islam. Second was the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the immediate bond struck between the Khomeini regime and the PLO. This brought in important state support for Palestine from a non-Arab branch of Shia Islam associated with an extremely volatile quasi-millenarianism that would be startlingly reflected in sections of the PLO membership. And if the Iranian convergence was not enough, there remained a third element, the organic link between the Palestinian struggle and most of the progressive, oppositional movements within the Arab world, from Egyptian Marxists, Nasserists, and Muslim groups to a whole variety of large as well as small parties, personalities, and currents in the Gulf region, the Fertile Crescent, and North Africa.

Fourth, and particularly striking, is the world of independence and liberation movements. Some day the history of exchange and support between the PLO and such groups as the African National Congress (ANC), the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), the Sandinistas, as well as the anti-Shah revolutionary Iranian groups will describe an extraordinary chapter in the twentieth-century struggle against various forms of tyranny and injustice. No wonder that Nelson Mandela, for example, averred publicly that opposition to apartheid and adherence to the Palestinian cause were essentially a common effort, and no wonder that by the end of the seventies there was not a progressive political cause that did not identify with the Palestinian movement. Moreover, by the time of the Lebanese invasion and the intifada, Israel had lost virtually all the political high ground it had once occupied; now it was Palestine and its people that had gained the moral upper hand.

The point about all these often bewildering confluences is not that they worked badly or well, but that they worked at all, given the tremendous number of extremely unsettling forces latent in the relationships between the Palestinians and a number of Arab states. Still, as I argue in this book, large patches of history since 1970 can be interpreted as deriving from conjunctures that are held to, then put aside with animosity and recrimination, then sometimes resumed. The Palestinian-Jordanian relationship in the early seventies was deeply antagonistic, with great loss of life and property; a decade or so later it had become, while admittedly guarded, cordial, with a Jordanian-Palestinian entente sufficiently mutual to permit an Amman meeting in 1984 of the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the idea of a joint Palestinian-Jordanian UN delegation, and even confederation and a joint delegation to the peace talks of 1991–92. Syria’s presence in the movement has been equally oscillatory, if not always as forgiving—several PNC meetings were held in Damascus, and in the early days of the Lebanese Civil War there was a military alliance, but since things went sour in the early 1980s it has not been restored. With Egypt and Iraq there was never armed conflict, but there have been severe ups and downs, the most recent of which has put the PLO and Cairo at odds, partly over the PLO’s alliance with Iraq, which began well before August 2, 1991, and was occasioned by the drift away from support for Palestine in the major Arab states during the mid-eighties. As for Lebanon, there the story is a truly tangled one in which surrogates of the Arab states, Iran, or Israel, in addition to local militias and parties, waltzed with or actively fought the Palestinians, who were formally driven out in 1982 and (as I write) are now back, albeit adjusting uneasily to a post-Taif Lebanon effectively administered by the Syrian army.

Two themes emerge from this shifting story of an extremely uncertain, but inevitably involving, environment. First is the absence of a strategic ally of Palestinian nationalism. The second is a sort of obverse to the first, namely, the undoubted presence over the decades of a relatively independent Palestinian political will. And, indeed, the immensely convoluted road travelled by the Palestinian national movement suggests that this will was wrested from the environment. Thus, at the 1974 Rabat Summit just after the October War, the PLO was named the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. At the 1984 PNC meeting held in Jordan, the idea being celebrated was that, after the ghastly Palestinian engagement with the Syrian army in North Lebanon, Palestinians could hold a National Council meeting despite Syria’s proximity and its leader’s claims to hegemony over regional strategy. But the most striking example of the Palestinian exercise of independence was the 1988 PNC meeting in Algiers, during which a historical compromise was enacted by Palestinians, who now saw their fight for self-determination located in a partitioned Palestine; at the same time, a Palestinian state guided by a set of enlightened constitutional and wholly secular principles was also declared in Algiers.

Changes and Transformations

We should not, I think, scant the impressive generosity of vision, the audacity of leaps, the daring of certain formulations that stand out as the Palestinian will has been slowly forged. In other words, it has not just been a matter of Palestinian accommodations to reality, but often a matter of either actually anticipating or transforming that reality. By the same token, it would be wrong to deny the schooling effects of the international environment on the character of Palestinian politics.

The most noticeable result of these international effects was, of course, the transformation of a liberation movement into a national independence movement, already implicit in the 1974 PNC notion of a state and national authority. But there were other important changes, such as acceptance of United Nations Resolutions 242 and 338 (unnecessarily stigmatized as evil incarnate by Palestinian orators for almost a generation), a period of realignment with Egypt after Camp David, and the acceptance of the Baker Plan in 1989–90. When these accommodations are contrasted with the history of stubborn refusals that preceded them, one is surprised at how, given the intensely-lived background of Palestinian loss and suffering, these Palestinian declarations and leniencies stand out for their qualitative distinction and the genuine hope they carry for reconciliation with the Jewish state. They contain a longstanding project for political, rather than military, settlement with a difficult enemy, given the realization made along the way that neither Israelis nor Palestinians really have a military option against the other. But what also stands out is the implacability of the Israeli refusal to acknowledge, deal with, or come to any sort of understanding with Palestinian nationalism.

This point needs emphasis. Even though one would have wished that Palestinian acceptance of Resolution 242 might have taken place a decade earlier, at the time this book was first published in 1979–80, or that there had been a less strident tone to Palestinian rhetoric about armed struggle during the seventies and eighties, or that Palestinians would have seen their role as in fact bringing the Arab world together rather than driving it further apart (especially during the Gulf crisis), there is no question that the overall thrust of Palestinian policy has been moderating, rather than escalating, in its demands and dreams. The fact is that, under Arafat, Palestinian politics have worked their way in from the peripheries to the center of an international consensus on coexistence with Israel, as well as on statehood and self-determination; at the same time, the Israeli position has gone in the opposite direction, moving from the crafty apparent moderation of Labor governments to the hardening maximalist extremism of successive Likud-dominated governments after 1977. Today, for example, far-right Greater Israel zealots and ideologists like Shamir, Sharon, and Arens appear to be almost centrists in a cabinet that includes Yuval Neeman and a representative of the Moledet Party, which openly subscribes to the mass transfer of Palestinians out of Palestinian territory. Thus the presence of Arafat has steadied the course of Palestinian politics, domesticated it, some would say, whereas exactly the reverse has occurred inside Israel since Menachem Begin’s government took power in 1977. And one should not fail to note that when we speak here of Palestinian politics under Arafat we are referring to not just a handful of peace activists or oppositional sports, but to the Palestinian mainstream, formalized and coalesced in the declarations of the PNC, which represents the Palestinian nation at its highest legislative and political level.

Along with this change there has also been a reversal of roles on the discursive and symbolic level, about which I shall have more to say presently. Ever since its founding in 1948, Israel has enjoyed an astonishing dominance in matters of scholarship, political discourse, international presence, and valorization. Israel was taken to represent the best in the Western and Biblical traditions. Its citizens were soldiers, yes, but also farmers, scientists, and artists; its miraculous transformation of an arid and empty land gained universal admiration, and so on and on. In all this, Palestinians were either Arabs, or anonymous creatures of the sort that could only disrupt and disfigure a wonderfully idyllic narrative. Still more important, Israel represented (if it did not always play the role of) a nation in search of peace, while the Arabs were warlike, bloodthirsty, bent on extermination, and prey to irrational violence, more or less forever. By the end of the eighties, the images were brought into closer correspondence with reality through a combination of aggressive counteractivity, excellent scholarship and research, political resistance of the kind that the intifada raised to a very high level, and, of course, the increased brutality and political vacancy and negativism offered by official Israel. Although most of this was due to Palestinian activity, it is of great importance here to note the signal contribution of many Jewish, and even Zionist, groups and individuals, inside as well as outside of Israel, who, through revisionist scholarship, courageous speaking out for human rights, and active campaigning against Israeli militarism, helped to make the change possible.

Another factor must be added to this survey of change: the extraordinary paramountcy achieved by the United States of America. One way of looking at how the selective presence of the U.S. role in the early seventies was metamorphosed into what is without doubt the most massive institutional presence of any outside power in modern Middle East history is to compare Henry Kissinger’s role in the Nixon era, on the one hand, with the cementing of a strategic alliance between Israel and the U.S. during the Reagan years, on the other. Kissinger conducted shuttle diplomacy and statesmanship with noisy fanfare. He did help to negotiate the end of the 1973 war, and he did bring about Sinai II, as it was called in 1975, and he did lay the groundwork for the Camp David accords. Yet, even though the U.S. offered Israel a massive battlefield resupply in 1973, and even though there were associations and all sorts of joint efforts between the two countries, the presence of the Soviet Union, as well as U.S. interests actively pursued in some of the Arab states, prevented anything like an institutional connection between the two countries. So, while Richard Nixon was embroiled with Watergate and Kissinger’s self-promotions and peregrinations were tireless, Israel was not the principal focus of U.S. attention during the seventies; levels of aid were high but not yet astronomical; the competition between Egypt and Israel was still absorbing; the Cold War, Latin America, and Vietnam were still high priorities.

By the end of the period that had brought Ronald Reagan to office in 1980, things were very different. Egypt and Israel were bracketed together so far as foreign aid legislation and, to some extent, public perception were concerned. Alexander Haig had given Israel a green light in Lebanon (contrast this with Jimmy Carter’s stern admonishment to the Begin government during its 1978 Lebanese incursion that the Israeli army had to quit, which it immediately did). By the time George Shultz took office as Secretary of State in the summer of 1982, the groundwork had been laid for the largest single foreign aid, military assistance, and almost unconditional political support deal to be struck between the United States and any foreign government. And this while Israel’s expropriation of Palestinian land continued apace, while thousands of Palestinians lost their lives to Israeli violence, and while Israel’s lawless disregard of UN resolutions, the Geneva and Hague conventions, and international human rights norms continued undeterred. Although the practice had begun when Daniel Moynihan was America’s UN ambassador, the United States now stood alone with Israel in this world organization, often defying common sense and humanity with outrageous positions. During the summer of 1982, with the Israeli siege of Beirut continuing, with literally hundreds of air sorties flown unchecked and the city cut off from electrical, water, food, and medical supplies, a UN Security Council resolution calling on Israel to let pass humanitarian supplies was vetoed by the U.S. on the grounds that it was unbalanced.

The best American indices of how close the two countries had become were, first, the proclamation by the head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) that during the Reagan period the U.S. Congress had become the most pro-Israel in history (and the one in which members were most subject to sanction if they did not comply with the prevailing attitude, as was the case with Representative Paul Findley and Senator Charles Percy, both of Illinois) and, second, that U.S. aid had risen geometrically from $70 million per year in the late sixties to over $5.1 billion per year fifteen years later. The estimated total for aid given to Israel between 1967 and 1991 is a staggering $77 billion. These figures say nothing about such matters as intelligence sharing (which Jonathan Pollard’s arrest in 1986 seems to have done very little to limit or subject to further control), military strategic planning, and all sorts of joint activities with the less savory regimes of the Third World (as documented by researchers Jane Hunter and Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi).

The extraordinary interventionary powers of the U.S. in the Middle East had even more dramatic, more highlighted visibility in such episodes as, for instance, President Carter’s successful negotiation of the Camp David Accords, with the subsequent return of Sinai to Egypt and a treaty of quasi-normality between Israel and Egypt, and, of course, U.S. armed military intervention in the Gulf region in August 1991, following Iraq’s invasion and illegal annexation of Kuwait. Never before had so many U.S. troops been brought to the area (the 1958 and 1982–83 Lebanon incursions pale in comparison), and never since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century had such devastation been wrought upon a sovereign Arab state by an outside power. Thus, for better or for worse, and like a fact of nature, the United States stands unopposed by any significant state power in the Middle East. Its enormous interest in Gulf oil, the political (and mostly frozen) status of the area, and its favorable geo-strategic leverage over any and all—none of these are now seriously in jeopardy. Only the seething discontent of various disadvantaged or alienated groups—most prominently, of course, the Islamic associations—still has the potential of nudging things somewhat and, less likely, of overturning them completely, as in Algeria and Sudan. Only in its scandalous complicity with Israel, in violation of UN resolutions, does the U.S.’s juggling of double standards keep it (before even its staunchest allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt) embarrassed and perpetually disaffected.

The Palestinians and Western Discourse

As far as Western awareness of Palestinian rights is concerned, it is noticeable that things began to change for the better from the moment the PLO emerged as the authentic leadership of the Palestinian people. Expert commentators, such as Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times, have argued that the Palestinians owe their new relative prominence in Western consciousness to the fact that their opponents were Israeli Jews, but the fact is that the shift came about because of what Palestinians did constructively to change their status, and because of what was done in reaction by Israeli Jews. For the first time, Palestinians were treated by the media as independent from the collective Arabs; this was one of the first results of the 1968–70 period, when Amman was at the center of the storm. Thereafter, it was Beirut that attracted attention to the Palestinians. The climax of this period was the Israeli siege of Beirut, lasting from June until September 1982, with its grisly outcome: the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres of mid-September, just after the main body of PLO combatants had been forced to leave the country. But it was not only that Palestinians fought back, which they did, it was also that they projected a vision, if not always a clear program, and in their own lives embodied a nation in exile rather than a loose collection of individuals and small-scale groups living here and there.

There is also the considerable importance of the Palestinians’ extraordinary success in having their cause adopted by others, intelligently exploiting the multiple levels of significance affiliated with Palestine, no ordinary geographical spot. Here it is expedient simply to list the places, both cultural and political, upon which Palestine was projected by the mobilized and coordinated work of Palestinians and the PLO. By the early seventies, Palestine and the PLO were central to the Arab League and, of course, to the UN. By 1980, the European Economic Community (EEC) had declared Palestinian self-determination to be one of the main planks of its Middle East policy, though there did remain differences between countries like France, the Scandinavian states, Spain, Italy, Greece, Ireland, and Austria on the one hand, and Germany, Holland, and, above all, the Reagan-dominated United Kingdom on the other. Meanwhile, transnational organizations like the Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Islamic Conference, the Socialist International, and UNESCO, as well as the Vatican, various international church organizations, and an innumerable host of nongovernmental organizations all registered the cause of Palestinian self-determination with noticeable emphasis, many for the first time. Whereas some of these groups were able to extend their support into counterpart or branch American groups, there was always, in my view, a serious lag between what happened outside the U.S. and what occurred in it, between the frank support for Palestinian self-determination that occurred in Europe and the gingerly acceptance of Palestinian rights in the counterpart American position, which was reformulated so jesuitically as to elude the censorious thought police of the Israeli lobby.

Thus it is still the case in the United States that certain television producers consult with the Israeli consul on possible pro-Palestinian participants for their programs; note, however, that it is a relatively new thing to have Palestinians at all. It is still the case that pro-Israeli lobbyists organize protests when Palestinians speak, have published enemies lists, and have tried to prevent the broadcast of television programs. It is also the case that, under pressure, prominent artists like Vanessa Redgrave are punished for their positions, and that a whole slew of publications refuse to publish anything even mildly critical of Israel, or any Arab or Muslim voice that has not openly identified itself as anti-Arab and anti-Muslim. What I am trying to suggest, therefore, is the still-depressed nature of public discourse in the U.S., which lags dramatically behind its counterparts in most of Western Europe and, of course, in the Third World. The symbolism of Palestine is still so potent as to enlist amongst its enemies total denial and occlusion, as when theater performances are canceled because they either show Palestinians sympathetically or portray Zionism critically (Hakawati, by New York’s Public Theater, or Jim Allen’s play Perdition at London’s Royal Court Theatre), when books are published arguing that the Palestinians do not really exist (Joan Peters’s From Time Immemorial, with its mangled quotations and dubious statistics), or when crude attacks are mounted to portray Palestinians as the inheritors of Nazi anti-Semitism.

As part of the campaign against Palestinians there has been a vicious semiotic warfare conducted against the PLO as representative of the Palestinians. Suffice it to say that the Israeli position, too often echoed by the U.S., is that the PLO is not a fit interlocutor because it is only a terror organization. In fact, Israel will not negotiate with nor recognize the PLO precisely because it does represent the Palestinians. Thus (as even Abba Eban has acknowledged) for the first time in the history of conflict, one party to the conflict arrogates to itself the right to choose both negotiating teams. That such arrant nonsense has been tolerated by Israel’s friends is incredible. It has had the unilateral effect of allowing Israel to hold up negotiations for years, and has also allowed some governments (some of them Arab!) to play the international shellgame of looking for suitable, or alternative, or acceptable, or moderate, or proper Palestinian representatives.

The intricacies of what is or is not tolerable in representations of the Palestinians in American and European civil society need not detain us further. The main point is that, because the Palestinian struggle for self-determination became so noticeable and was conducted on so unmistakably national a scale, it entered U.S. discourse, from which it had been absent for a long time.

One other major point has to be elucidated. Terrorism has been the watchword here, that invidious association between individual and organized actions of Palestinian political terror and the whole of the Palestinian national movement. I would put it this way. To date, the principal and quite justified Palestinian fear is of the negation that can quite easily become our fate. Certainly, the destruction of Palestine in 1948, the years of subsequent anonymity, the painful reconstruction of an exiled Palestinian identity, the efforts of many Palestinian political workers, fighters, poets, artists, and historians to sustain Palestinian identity—all of these have teetered alongside the confounding fear of disappearance, given the grim determination of official Israel to hasten the process to reduce, minimize, and ensure the absence of Palestinians as a political and human presence in the Middle Eastern equation. To this, the Palestinian responses that began in the late sixties and early seventies have included airplane hijackings, assassinations (as at the Munich Olympics, Maalot, and, later, the Rome and Vienna airport massacres by the renegade and anti-PLO Abu Nidal group in 1985), and other such misadventures, of which two of the most stupid were the Abul Abbas 1985 Achille Lauro killing of Leon Klinghoffer and the 1990 Tel Aviv beach assault. That these can openly be condemned by Arabs and Palestinians today is an indication of how far beyond them a justifiably anxious community has travelled in political maturity and morality. Yet, that they occurred at all is not surprising; they are written, so to speak, into the scripts of every national movement (especially the Zionist one) trying to galvanize its people, attract attention, and impress itself on an inured world consciousness.

However much one laments and even wishes somehow to atone for the loss of life and suffering visited upon innocents because of Palestinian violence, there is still the need, I think, also to say that no national movement has been so unfairly penalized, defamed, and subjected to disproportionate retaliation for its sins as has the Palestinian. The Israeli policy of punitive counterattacks (or state terrorism) seems to be to try to kill anywhere from 50 to 100 Arabs for every Jewish fatality. The devastation of Lebanese refugee camps, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, and orphanages; the summary arrests, deportations, house destructions, maimings, and torture of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza; the use of poisonous, dehumanizing rhetoric by senior Israeli politicians, soldiers, diplomats, and intellectuals to characterize all Palestinian acts of resistance as terrorist and Palestinians as nonhuman (cockroaches, grasshoppers, two-legged vermin, etc.); these, and the number of Palestinian fatalities, the scale of material loss, the physical, political, and psychological deprivations, have tremendously exceeded the damage done by Palestinians to Israelis. And, I must add, the remarkable disparity, or asymmetry, between, on the one hand, the position of the Palestinians as an aggrieved, dispossessed, and sinned-against people and, on the other, Israel as the state of the Jewish people and the direct instrument of Palestinian suffering, is both great and greatly unadmitted.

Here, then, is another complex irony: how the classic victims of years of anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust have in their new nation become the victimizers of another people, who have become, therefore, the victims of the victims. That so many Israeli and Western intellectuals, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, have not faced this dilemma courageously and directly is, I believe, a trahison des clercs of massive proportions, especially in that their silence, indifference, or pleas of ignorance and non-involvement perpetuate the sufferings of a people who have not deserved such a long agony. Surely, if no one can come forth and say, frankly, Yes, the Palestinians actually do deserve to expiate for the historical crimes committed against the Jews in Europe, it must also be true that not to say, No, the Palestinians must not be allowed to go through these ordeals any longer, is an act of complicity and moral cowardice of singular dimension.

But that is the reality. How many ex-politicians or actively engaged intellectuals still say privately that they are horrified by Israeli military policy and political arrogance, or