The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Understanding the Israeli Project

Let’s spell this out in the simplest terms possible.

Israelis came to a land with its own native population. They wanted to live in the land and the land was not very large. (Israel is a small country.)

That required that the people who were already there be removed.

This was done in stages. Some of the early parts were done by buying the land, generally from landlords who didn’t live in Palestine, then evicting the natives. Most of it was done with violence, starting with the Nakba.

The project of Israel is to create a Jewish religious-ethnic state where there hasn’t been one in nearly two thousand years.

The locals people also breed faster than Israelis.

This means they must, again, be removed. There are two ways to do this. You can get them to move away from the land you want, which is known as ethnic cleansing, or you can kill them, which if done in large enough numbers against a specific group is known as genocide.

Israel’s project is intrinsically one of ethnic cleansing, with the possibility of genocide.

That’s how it was designed.

This is why I support a one state solution, in which Israel becomes a secular state with everyone having citizenship. As long as it is a “Jewish” state, ethnic cleansing will always be the goal, at least until it is completed.

Israel cannot be redeemed until the basis for its existence is changed.

This doesn’t make Israel unique, many if not most states were settler states at some point, with more or less ethnic cleansing (sometimes they just made the conquered people the lower castes, as with Normans in England or Aryans in India).

We now believe that ethnic cleansing and genocide is bad and that it shouldn’t be done any more. (Or we say we believe that.)

When Israelis say “you oppose what you yourself did” they aren’t wrong. But that’s like saying “well, you murdered a bunch of people in the past, why can’t I murder people now?”

At the end of the day, however, this will be determined not by what is moral, but by balance of force. For a long time the Israelis had the most force, the question is if they still do.

If they do (with America and Europe’s help) then they will keep moving towards their project.

If they don’t, then the best they can hope for is a single state solution. All other end states for them are worse.


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37 Comments

  1. Gaianne

    Beautifully straightforward description!

    –Gaianne

  2. StewartM

    I concur with Gaianne, an excellent summary of the problem.

    I too think one secular state solution is the only one that would work. But how to get there? The Israelis don’t want to give back the property they stole, and the Palestinians are so (understandably) enraged and motivated for revenge for their mistreatment it’s hard to imagine a ‘good solution’. Moreover, in the ‘conquest and De-Zionization’ scenario you described in your previous post, unlike WWII, the players aren’t democracies and it’s unlikely a secular government would be the result. (Not to deny that Israel too is going the way of Trump and Orban and that Bibi wants an Israeli ‘democracy’ where Likud can never lose).

    I fear that like climate change, there’s little chance of any ‘good’ solution at this point, and either Israel will succeed with its ethnic cleansing/genocide campaign or that the Palestinians will succeed at last and there’ll be mass killings of Israel Jews. When Likud got power (aided by the mass immigration of Eastern European , Russian, and Middle Eastern Jewish expats, with revanchist leanings) the die for this may have been cast.

    https://theconversation.com/why-do-israels-poorest-immigrants-vote-for-the-right-and-far-right-124233

  3. Carborundum

    The problem with the single state solution is that it is trivially easy to stall rights-based secularism while constantly turning the screws to provoke attacks from the Palestinians and justify the notion that it is impossible to achieve a modus vivendi (we’ve seen this play out daily for about 20 years now). Given the fragmentation of the Israeli body politic (and consistently poor Palestinian strategy), in only takes a small political minority to keep this going.

    From where I am sitting the single state solution (in my experience most commonly advocated by those not living in the region) is really just a means of obfuscating the dominant Israeli-desired outcome of “no state, ever” for the Palestinians. Had they threaded the needle successfully 30 years ago and achieved meaningful, publicly legitimated state level organization, that trajectory might have been arrested but I don’t see much hope of any other outcome.

  4. Purple Library Guy

    @Carborundum I used to support the two-state solution. But to an ever greater degree, that seems to have become exactly what you were describing the one-state solution as. Israel has steadily made it more and more difficult with its ever-more-mingled settlements, among other tactics.

    As to Palestinian strategy, there haven’t really been any good ones available. It’s just really hard to win when you have a pair of jacks, and your opponent has a full house and can see your hand. Palestinian leadership has also been consistently assassinated or jailed, which makes things hard.

  5. StewartM

    @Carborundum

    How do you have a two-state ‘solution’ where the richer Israeli state doesn’t essentially control/browbeat/intimidate the weaker Palestinian state. At best, Palestinians get the Afrikaner “homelands” (i.e., dirt poor pieces of real estate no one wants); at worst, their subject to the same military incursions of today.

    The only way I see to avoid this outcome is the one-state solution. The Israelis don’t want that as it truly would mean some form of retribution payments to the Palestinians for what they stole, and moreover the Jewish population would be the minority in such a country. I agree it’s harder to pull off, but it’s the only solution that offers a chance for a stable end game.

  6. mago

    Interesting how much errant comment one can read on an informed and relatively obscure website.
    But damn, there it is.
    Bake a potato, butter it and share with friends, thus nourishing self and others.
    I’m laughing. . .

  7. Eric Anderson

    I support the secular solution. When governance and religion climb in bed together, their offspring is always hatred of “others.” Religion, like its close cousin war, is a racket.

    “God” is a bloodthirsty murderer.

  8. Eric Anderson

    StewartM —

    There can’t be a “secular” state without indelible lines drawn between governance and religion. I see no lines on either side.

  9. Richard Holsworth

    Violence pre-Nakba

    The Arab Revolt
    In 1937, the Twentieth Zionist Congress rejected the proposed boundaries but agreed in principle to partition. Palestinian Arab nationalists rejected any kind of partition. The British government approved the idea of partition and sent a technical team to make a detailed plan. This group, the Woodhead Commission, reversed the Peel Commission’s findings and reported in November 1937 that partition was impracticable; this view in its turn was accepted. The Palestinian revolt resumed in the autumn of 1937. The British put down the revolt using harsh measures, shutting down the AHC and deporting many Palestinian Arab leaders.
    https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-1936-arab-riots

    ”British socialists who did support the Palestinians in the 1930s were condemned as antisemites. British troops backed Zionist settlers in repressing the 1936 Palestinian revolt. Some Labour MPs wanted them to destroy even more of the city.”

    https://socialistworker.co.uk/news/labour-has-backed-zionist-terror-for-100-years/

  10. Soredemos

    In a just world it would indeed be a single state: a state for Palestinians, with the Israelis all fucking off back to Europe and America (I’d say the middle eastern Jews could go back to their original countries, but they’ve long ago burned away any possible tolerance or good will. So they can fuck off to another continent as well). The Zionists would have to come crawling home, grow up, and learn to live as normal citizens and one ethnic group among many in a composite society.

  11. Z

    Masks off.

    Likud Party Leader threatens Russia: RUSSIA WILL PAY FOR SUPPORTING OUR ENEMIES. WE WILL MAKE SURE UKRAINE WINS.

    https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1714935996473557262

    Z

  12. Jan Wiklund

    Accorind to Kimmerling & Migdal: Palestinians, the Israeli project was feasible because the Osman state started to register land for taxing it. That resulted in literate people registering themselves as owners to be able to let the peasants pay rent. It may be that some of these didn’t live in the country but most did. It was for that reason the Palestinian national movement could be so radical in the 30s – the upper class Palestinians had already betrayed them, selling land to the immigrants who evicted the peasants.

  13. Z

    Israel fears China more than any other country because they haven’t infiltrated China’s political system and government and China won’t bow to pressure from Israel’s rabid attack Rottweiler, the U.S., either.

    Z

  14. Daniel Lynch

    Ian said “Israelis came to a land with its own native population.”

    Well, some came, but some were already there. What changed, in my mind, is the Zionist movement that advocated for segregation and state endorsement of their religion.

    As someone who grew up in the deep South during Jim Crow, I oppose segregation with every bone in my body. Integration and equality for all should be the goal.

    Does Israel have a right to exist? No segregated regime has a right to exist.
    Does Israal have a right to defend itself? No one should defend segregation.

  15. JEREMY

    Look on the bright side, Ian.

    Bibi sold out his entire population to Pfizer and implemented one of the most draconian death-vaxx mandates in the world.

    The unfolding death-vaxx holocaust in Israel will dwarf any previous misfortune visited on those people.

    I have family living in Israel and, from what I’m hearing from them, the slow kill from the death-vaxx began a while back and is relentless and unending.

  16. Chuck Mire

    “ This doesn’t make Israel unique, many if not most states were settler states at some point, with more or less ethnic cleansing (sometimes they just made the conquered people the lower castes, as with Normans in England or Aryans in India)”

    https://theconversation.com/gangsters-are-the-villains-in-killers-of-the-flower-moon-but-the-biggest-thief-of-native-american-wealth-was-the-us-government-207700

  17. KT Chong

    The World Uyghur Congress has issued statements to condemn Hamas and been tweeting strongly in support of Israel.

    Yep, the WUC that has been making up all the genocide accusations against China; they have come out in supports of the Zionists who had turned Gaza into a huge concentration camp and practiced ethnic cleansing and possibly genocide… against their fellow Muslim Palestinians that supposedly suffered the same fate as Uyghur in Xinjiang.

    That tells you who really is funding the WUC.

  18. Willy

    I never once sweated the loss of my ancestral family land taken by the Soviets during WW2. Probably because I was born in America. I had hope for my own “American Dream” and was never part of an Estonian retribution culture. So my youthful angst energies were spent anticipating stuff, like the new Star Wars movie. Even my mother considered that property long gone and had moved on to making the most of their new home.

    I had my first taste of retribution culture on an oceanside camping trip. To get to the state park trailhead many parked down a long secluded road which was inside an indian reservation. We saw a few smashed windows and asked the friendly native who’d approached us what this meant. He said those drivers hadn’t paid the parking fee, ten bucks. After a brief discussion about how we too, would be miffed if outsider-colonizers kept parking down our road, we respectfully paid. Plus threw in a little bottle of peppermint schnapps for good measure. After a few days our car was undamaged.

    Moving up a big notch in the world of the dispossessed, I can only imagine what Kurds, Turkish Christians and Dalits have to go through. It’s not good to be the opposite of the king.

    At the end of the scale we’ve got being stuck inside a giant cage where nobody outside wants you, where everything inside is dominated by overlords living retribution culture 24/7, between major demolition-sized bombardments every couple years. Personally, I’d think that I grew up under those conditions, then I’d seen the Tatooine stormtrooper scenes for the first time, it would’ve made me wanna kick in a moviehouse popcorn machine window.

    South Africa seems a single state success. The only South Africans I knew were an educated Pakistani married to a Dutch who’d moved to the states to be closer to their expat kids. They weren’t the best source for inside info. So I go to Wikipedia. They tell me their unemployment rate is 40% while 60% live under the poverty line. I bet most aren’t Afrikaners. Not good for a nation being “the most industrialized and technologically advanced in Africa”. Wikipedia also says that place is the “most protest-rich country in the world”. That’s a lotta angst. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.

    I’d segue to the conquest of Ukraine, but the Kraken Lady plea deal seems more interesting. I mean amusing.

  19. StewartM

    Eric Anderson

    There can’t be a “secular” state without indelible lines drawn between governance and religion. I see no lines on either side.

    I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Eric, but if you mean that neither side wants a secular state, or any interventionists (Hezbollah, Iran, etc) wants a secular state, that was in my initial comment to Ian on the ‘de-Zionization’ project. Unlike Germany and Japan after WWII, none of the occupiers/players would be secular democracies.

    I”m for a secular state for general principle as it’s the only solution shown to allow for coexistence between faiths. If it’s adopted in any post-Israel religious state, it would likely be the as the ‘alternative solution’ that neither side would really favor and would only grudgingly (and maybe only temporarily) accept . That’s a facet inherent in Abrahamic religions with their absolutist jealous God.

    (Why can’t everyone be like East Asians, where there’s no contradiction for someone being a Buddhist, Taoist, Confucianist, and follower of the folk religions simultaneously?)

  20. Tallifer

    “Israelis came to a land with its own native population.”

    Alternatively, the Jews came from Palestine. Then they were finally allowed to return. And according to Paul, they will ultimately accept Jesus as their Messiah.

    When two such world views clash, what hope is there for accommodation?

  21. Mark Level

    There are a lot of unanswered questions currently, the biggest is if the other Arab nations nearby are stepping away from Western (EUFUKUS as someone kindly anagrammed it) ownership now that the U$A has been shown in Eastern Europe to be a moribund colonial war sponsor after the spectacular failures in Ukraine. It seems that possibly even the Saudis & Jordan & Egypt, perhaps even bought-off Qatar are not doing Uncle Shmuel’s bidding as lap-dogs any more. Biden was supposed to have his “big summit” recently with the PA puppet Morsi, al-Sisi, the Jordanian King, etc. (the bought off pawns) but Israel’s decision to viciously bomb a Gaza hospital a 2nd time was too much for even those bought-off clowns, who refused to meet with him, lest their own populations revolt.

    I guess shamblin’ Great Grandpa Joe didn’t do himself a lot of favors with his senile babbling about “I saw pictures of 40 beheaded babies” & “Islamic Jihad bombed their own hospital” (Bibi told him & is notoriously truthful). Anyway, I had to drive a bit on errands just now, Bidet will be giving a big national speech at 7 pm Central . . . won’t watch it, we all know what to expect, he’ll cluelessly simper on about how noble & great the Israelis are, those people they’re slaughtering asked for it, etc.

    Having taught history (at the High School level) for 3 decades, I’m aware of how rigid, decaying empires walked themselves into World Wars I & II, it does seem that we’re sleepwalking in to iteration III right now . . . As Alexander Mercouris (among others) has noted, the NeoCons have no decelerate or stop option, they only understand hitting the gas pedal harder & doubling down. Perhaps the “civilization” Con ends soon, perhaps not as TS Elliot predicted in a whimper, but in a big bang. The fact that none of us ordinary people can stop the psychopaths who we’ve allowed into power creates in me feelings of depression, dread & malaise. “No one” is at the controls, or those that are simply operate out of Simian rage and can’t be stopped or controlled. Oh, well, whatever species succeeds Homo Sapiens (not very sapient) will have to do better, & the Anthropocene era will have lasted even more briefly than Fukuyama’s “End of History”, so I guess that provides some consolation to the rest of the sentient creatures we share the earth with.

  22. DMC

    The “ones that were already there” are collectively known as the haredi or haredrim. They are very distinctive in that they do not recognize the Zionist state, do not serve in the army, refuse to speak secular Hebrew(preferring Yiddish) and generally support the Palestinian cause. They have nothing to fear from One state solution, where there is anything other than an exclusively Zionist conclusion.

  23. Eric Anderson

    StewartM:

    Missed that comment. We’re on the same page. It was the “one” secular state part that grabbed me. “As if” two cultures beginning from a foundation of religious bigotry could ever exist cheek to jowl.

    Zionism was doomed from the beginning because it was imposed by secular nations who understood tolerance of difference to some degree. But hey, let’s just plop down a culture that begins from a place of religious insularity, right in the middle of another culture that begins from a place of religious insularity and completely ignore the fact that those cultures are nothing like the cultures doing the plopping. Don’t even consider it is not in either of these cultures genetic make-up to tolerate difference — because they are fundamentally “religious” cultures.

    Religion only exists by othering. Religious leaders only gain power and money by teaching their followers to other.

    I’m shocked. Shocked to find religious bloodshed is happening here.

    Free me equanimity.

  24. VietnamVet

    The USA is no longer a secular state. The House Speaker selection is dragging on because it is a fight between Republican factions who are imposing their version of Christianity on others and those who aren’t, for example, Corporatists. Company big money rules but there are divisions because to get votes Republicans need to pretend to be populists not war mongering profiteers that they and most Democrats actually are.

    In the Western Empire, nations are no longer sovereign but are subservient to trade institutions like the EU and NAFTA and are partners with global corporate monopolies (e.g. Lexus toll lane) and pharmaceutical moguls (Spikevax).

    The USA and Israel face the same quandary. Either there is actual legal equality and good government, run by and for the people, or the nations will splinter apart into ethnic ghettos that do not have the manpower (militias and armament) to defend their borders against the Others or to provide a safe healthy homeland. Christian Armenia, for example, is becoming smaller and smaller. The devolving nations have not won a war in a while (The 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the USA invasion of Panama).

    The final question becomes who gains control of the each nation’s nuclear weapons and will they use them.

  25. Z

    Exclusive: ‘Mutiny Brewing’ Inside State Department Over Israel-Palestine Policy

    That anxiety has often affected policymaking, according to Sarah Harrison, a former Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security official now at the nonprofit Crisis Group.

    “This is an environment that has been cultivated by Democratic and Republican administrations alike,” Harrison recently wrote on X. “If you work in the federal government and question anything Israel does you are sidelined and silenced.”

    https://www.huffpost.com/entry/state-department-gaza_n_6531a23ae4b0da897ab75ce4?b7p

    Z

  26. Mark Level

    Oops! I meant PA president Abbas, not Morsi. (The interim Muslim brotherhood Egyptian president between Mubarak’s ouster & the military coup that installed al-Sisi), had recently read a longish article about this, so either my brain or fingers botched Mohammed for Mahmoud (Abbas), correction here– The rest stands, & Alexander Mercouris is making the exact point as I type this. ‘Murican officials have NO credibility with any of the Arab regional leadership now, see Biden & Blinken etc. being shunned & ignored during the recent “trip”– Since U$A Dem party speaks only to & for the Israelis & ignores the RoW (rest of world) the Arab part of the world is completely rejecting future alliance with the US. Great job, shamblin’ Joe, no less than we would expect from you & your flunkies!

  27. Soredemos

    @Eric Anderson

    This bothsides-ism is an act in obfuscation. It’s fundamentally a colonial struggle. Jews, Muslims, and Christians have lived together in the Levant for millenia. It’s not that there’s never been friction, but it’s been an exception, not the norm.

    Palestinians are being colonized. They’re naturally fighting back. The struggle has become more Islamic focused as secular Arab nationalism was completely discredited. Too root of the fight isn’t religious, it’s very, very material.

  28. Feral Finster

    “Palestinians are being colonized. They’re naturally fighting back. The struggle has become more Islamic focused as secular Arab nationalism was completely discredited. Too root of the fight isn’t religious, it’s very, very material.”

    More like secular Arab nationalism (e.g. Sadat, Saddam or Gadhafi) was strangled in its crib. The West will do the same to Syria as soon as it gets the chance.

    The West prefers Arab monarchies, the more senile the better, as such are weak and dependent. This is entirely intentional.

  29. Carborundum

    It’s not that the two state solution has somehow evolved into what we are currently seeing – I’m saying the chance for a two state solution was destroyed (as has a one-state solution) by concerted military, political and economic policy from duly elected Israeli governments. The salient thing about the two state solution was that it was the one with the highest probability of success. In the aftermath of the Oslo Accords they had a window. Not a big one and not, as it proved out, for very long (see the concerted Israeli policy referenced above) but they had one. Since then, every option other than bantustanization has been systematically degraded.

    My view, the desired Israeli outcome is a “no state” solution where Palestine is so weakened that the Israelis don’t even have to bother putting their boot across its throat and Arab Israelis are second class citizens without meaningful power. The same guys that destroyed the possibility of a two state solution have been consistently doing everything they can to deny Israeli Arabs the rights-based equity that is a necessary precondition for a single state solution.

    Bottom line: two state solution, one state solution, it doesn’t matter which you think is superior – it’s all just happy talk designed to occupy rhetorical space while long-running policies of oppression continue to their logical conclusion.

  30. Ian Welsh

    Of course that’s what Israel wants. It’s been obvious for years: they ethnic cleanse if they can, if not, well, they’ve been working themselves up to genocide for a long time.

  31. Diane Mason

    Ian – The last few days, Russia and China have talked about how the I/P conflict didn’t begin on Oct 7, but arises out of the denial of Palestinian statehood that the U.S.-led ‘peace process’ was supposed to lead to. The Chinese FM said that’s a situation that has to end, now. But the Palestinian statehood they envisage is within the context of the two state solution.

    How do you see that playing out? (i.e. that major regional and global players are no longer willing to see the I/P situation go on bleeding under U.S. supervision, but envisage ending it through a solution that Israeli settlement makes extraordinarily unlikely.)

  32. bruce wilder

    “Of course that’s what Israel wants.”

    Yes, and it’s bewildering to me that any of them expect to get it without fatal payback.

    I don’t doubt that there are or have been historically bullies big enough to win a final solution. But, it doesn’t usually work out that way and, quite apart from the sheer inhumanity, why would anyone think that this time should be different?

  33. Eric Anderson

    @Soredemos —

    Oh, well then.

    I guess I didn’t know the two were mutually exclusive — *face-palm*.

    I guess I totally didn’t understand how religious fervor didn’t provide the rationalization to colonize all those “heathens” over the centuries.

    Totally didn’t know every religion that ever existed bellied up to provide those rationalizations — indeed stoke them — for whoever the conquerer du jour was throughout history.

    And, I mean, I guess didn’t understand that it’s ok, say for example, that N. Ireland and England bloodied each other over the years over the same basic issues b/c — well — most of the time they got along. I’ll “both-sides” that conflict too if being a “both-sider” means I don’t cheerlead for one side to kill innocent people because *reasons*.

    One coin, two sides.

    “Religion was invented when the first con-man met the first fool.”
    –Mark Twain

  34. chronologically

    Remember the time when metal detectors, bomb-sniffing dogs, and police and “security” personnel everywhere would be considered weird and bizarre? Even in and around government buildings! And there weren’t any cameras anywhere.

    It wasn’t that long ago.

    This is an excerpt from a book entitled “The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System” by Frank Donner:

    “On April 24, 1981, the subcommittee had another go at the terrorism issue – this time without the redoubtable Senator East, who was conducting a hearing on an anti-abortion measure.

    The hearings, surely the weirdest in a bizarre genre, were preceded by a pack of bomb-sniffing dogs deployed to ensure that the Senate chamber was “secure.” In addition, each person seeking entrance was screened by a metal detector as a further defense against terrorists, and all the witnesses were guarded by police in plainclothes. In the course of the hearings, Senator Denton bared his chest to show that he was not wearing a bulletproof vest.”

    The book can be downloaded by clicking on the “Use the following URL to download: Download now” link found here:

    https://annas-archive.org/slow_download/2fa29d727d61c63f2ddfa62b2dcb3b59/0/2

    The scantly reported Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism was held less than a year prior to the aforementioned subcommittee hearing. The opening session of the Jerusalem conference was called “The Face of Terrorism” and featured talks by early Zionist militia terrorists and later Israeli state terrorists Menachem Begin, Benzion Netanyahu, and Shimon Peres.

    “In January 1974, while covering what the history books call ‘Kissinger’s first Sinai Disengagement Shuttle,’ journalist and author Russell Warren Howe conducted a television interview with former terrorist, then-opposition leader and future Prime Minister Menachem Begin. As he recalled in his ‘Seeing the Light’ column:

    “The red light had come on, under the lens. Without preamble, I turned my shoulder to the camera, stared straight into Begin’s eyes, and asked: ‘How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East?’

    “In the Middle East?” he bellowed, in his thick, cartoon accent. ”In all the world!”

    Howe concluded his article with Ben-Gurion’s words to him in 1968:

    “American Jews! I hate them!” he said in his passionate Slavonic way, at one point in that evening in 1968. ”They’ll do anything for Israel except live in the place!”

    “Perhaps because then I ‘understood nothing,’ I was shocked and reminded Ben-Gurion, ”They’re very generous toward Israel.”

    “Of course,” he responded. ”They feel guilty. And so they should!”

    https://www.wrmea.org/2009-march/russell-warren-howe-1925-2008.html

    “The Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism took place in Israel on 2-5 July 1979 (Netanyahu, 1981, p.ix.). It was in effect a major international forum for the movement against détente.

    Speakers from the US included Senator Henry Jackson and prominent members of the Committee on the Present Danger and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority such as Ben Wattenberg and Bayard Rustin.

    In the closing statement of the conference, Jackson charged that there was now a ‘terrorist international’ which shared a common interest with the Soviet Union ‘in destroying the fabric of democratic, lawful societies all over the world’ (Netanyahu, 1981, p.361).

    The conference’s relentless focus on the theory of Soviet sponsorship of Arab terrorism arguably reflected a powerful community of interests among its participants. If the Israelis benefitted from portraying their struggle with the Palestinians as a dimension of the Cold War, American and European Cold Warriors would benefit from portraying Middle Eastern terrorism as evidence of Soviet duplicity. This was shown most clearly by Republican Congressman Jack Kemp who told the conference that ‘an examination of the Soviet role in promoting international terrorism casts grave doubt on the assumptions about Soviet policy upon which the American, and Western, policy toward the Soviet Union is based, particularly those policies which relate to SALT, Helsinki and Détente itself,’ (Netanyahu, 1981, p.190).

    As in the early Cold War the political warfare coalition of the late 1970s was a transnational one in which a range of actors could advance their local interests within a common hegemonic strategy.”

    https://www.academia.edu/35273421/Offensive_Intelligence_An_Epistemic_Community_in_the_Transition_from_Cold_War_Liberalism_to_Neoconservatism

    The following links provide some reporting on the JCIT done around the time it was held and in the years following. The Phillip Paul piece that Chris Bollyn mentions in his article below is actually the hardest to find. I am unable to locate an actual copy of it, though there are a few pointers to it on the web.

    https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=s8Pm37gg5JkC&pg=PA1#PPP9

    https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/1979/eirv06n28-19790717/eirv06n28-19790717_063-facts_behind_terrorism_jerusalem.pdf

    https://web.archive.org/web/20060823104430/https://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14262.htm

    https://powerbase.info/index.php/Jonathan_Institute,_extract_from_The_%22Terrorism%22_Industry

    https://www.spyculture.com/disinfowars-3-the-ideological-origins-of-the-war-on-terror/

    “With Sharon’s backing, terrible things were done. I am no vegetarian, and I supported and even participated in some of the assassination operations Israel carried out. But we are speaking here about mass killing for killing’s sake, to sow chaos and alarm, among civilians, too. Since when do we send donkeys carrying bombs to blow up in marketplaces?” – Mossad officer, quoted in Ronen Bergman’s Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations

    https://archive.ph/O5Rh4#selection-749.0-749.39

    From the JCIT to 9/11: https://youtu.be/qf1NIovYBgo?t=1423

    https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/anti-semitic-conspiracy-theorist-christopher-bollyn-speaks-brooklyn

    https://archive.ph/Us6hN#selection-463.0-463.88

  35. Soredemos

    @Eric Anderson

    You’re convienently ignoring the fact that a huge number of Zionists were and are non-religious, or how the most religious of Jews, including inside Israel, frequently don’t support the state or its project. You’re sledghammering things to make them fit your model.

  36. Carborundum

    If we’re all in agreement about the desired Israeli end-state, why are we even bothering palavering about means of getting to an alternative that is simply not going to happen? My view, talking about what people *should* do but won’t is an exercise with little practical utility (to wit, something on the order of 90% of academic output related to political economy).

    Bottom line: there are a number of viable stable political configurations here that would work if people behaved the way they “should” – they vary in relative merit depending on when in the historical timeline we postulate people suddenly started acting in accordance with enlightened self-interest and awareness. However, my view, if they’re all just not going to happen barring that spontaneous transformation of the people involved, the ROI on plumbing the potential of those configurations is a lot lower than assessing what the untransformed have done, are doing and are likely to do in the future.

  37. Eric Anderson

    Soredemos:
    The exceptions prove the rule.

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