Israel: Functional Federation or Armageddon?

A Memorandum to Americans, Jewish and Gentile

At a time when the daily news contains stories of bloody and wrenching episodes from Palestine and Israel, attempts to discover how to conclude that continual crisis must be renewed with vigor, and political scientists such as myself ought not to hold back, but to move again and again, in the search for a solution, despite realizing that they are almost certain to fail, and will antagonize many persons, whether at the scene of the strife or far distant from it.

Although I am targeting Palestine-Israel, I am pointing at a larger issue of supreme importance. It is an issue bigger than Palestinians and Israelis, than terrorism and Al-Qaeda, than the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, than Americans and the immediate policies of the United States. But the beginning of the end threatens to be in Palestine and Israel.

The supreme issue is
whether the human species will go the way of cults and barbarism,
or go the way of humanism and science.

For five hundred years, we have fought our way up to a partial understanding of nature and the human mind. We have made of the world something measurably better than it was before, thanks to the natural and social sciences and the philosophers who led them along.

But inside Israel and inside Palestine are the components of the bomb that can destroy this achieved civilization and the promise of a decent life for all people. Unless we defuse the Israeli and Palestinian leadership, they will pursue what they have already begun, a progressive degeneration and depression of mankind. They bespeak the twin evils: chauvinism and religious fanaticism. These evils have been spreading alarmingly in the Third world, in countries split from the communist and capitalist worlds, and are increasingly active in the First World.

Armageddon, the hallucinatory ultimate struggle between the forces of good and evil, told by John in the Apocalypse, is edging toward reality today, not between Jew and Arab, Israeli and Palestinian, nor even between Judeo-Christian and Muslim, nor between rich and poor. The most vicious contenders for power in Palestine are the Israel militant fundamentalists and their Palestine counterparts. What happens there is contagious to other regions. Armageddon today can be seen as the struggle between the autonomous mind of civilization and the ferocious mind of exclusiveness and fundamentalism. You and I are of the one mind; Sharon and Bin Laden are of the other.

We are philosemites, to use a French term, whose friends and relatives are often Jews.

We define "philosemite" (also "judeophile") thus, as a gentile who not only is aware of and knows Jews personally, but also appreciates their existence through history as a group as well as individuals, and who finds them personally, for various reasons, among the more interesting and likeable of one's friends. Such people, among whom the author belongs, feel that their fate is bound up with that of the Jews. They would ordinarily be the first to "correct" their Jewish friends on matters of interest to Jews, except that the friends and the media are usually adverse to such criticism unless it is formulated on a strictly and often impossibly narrow and mannered basis. The large number of people who are not anti-semitic and can "take or leave" their relationships with Jews, are not considered here to be philosemites or judeophiles.

We can appreciate why some 86% of American Jews favor the United States as an honest broker between Palestinians and Jews, differing sometimes from either side, and 69% support the deployment of U.S. observers to oversee a cease-fire agreement, while three-fourths of them believe that America should become involved in the peace process, even if it leads to disagreements with Israel, and two-thirds would be ready to commit troops to the Middle East to keep the peace. And we can understand why half of the respondents considered U.S. relations with Israel were worsened by the events of September 11, whereas only 14% thought they were better. Over half of these American Jews thought the Palestinians should be recognized as a state. The survey results reported here are from mid-November 2001. The survey was sponsored by the Israel Policy Forum, the New York Jewish Week (issue of November 20, 2001), and the Wilstein Institute of Jewish Policy Studies.

Among philosemites a grievance against the Near East policies of the USA has long been evolving We have officially fostered and guarded Israel and Israel supporters in America - 'Israel right or wrong' - until the accumulated and compounding harm done the Palestinian Arabs (not to mention the Christian and alien population, and the Jews themselves) has become intolerable, and the policies must change. The Israelis have been acting worse than their Muslim counterparts, who have mainly suffered. Where once the Jewish spokesmen of the world had been heroes of righteous causes, they have descended over fifty years to become unrighteous expectants and claimants of license on grounds that they are Jews.

What has been termed "The Holocaust Industry" has been blamed for this phenomenon. So vivid are the pictures in the public mind of Western man of the near-extinction of the Jewish people, that calling the word up ends rational discussion of some subjects. The Near East is one of them. We should attend to the works of Norman G. Finkelstein, whose theses has provoked embarrassed anger on the part of many Jews who want unlimited priority given to the Shoah (a more proper term, meaning "catastrophe") in public discourse. See, besides The Holocaust Industry (Verso: 2000), his work of 1995, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict. Also pertinent is Tim Cole's Selling the Holocaust. Palestinians call their expulsion and defeat of 1947-8 also "the catastrophe," Naqba.

Effectively we have turned over American domination of the Near East, not alone of Israel, to extremist Jews, who, with their militarist allies, and their subjected immigrant minions from Russia, are oppressive of practically everyone, including a large population of secular Israelis. The number of secular Israelis, defined as Israeli Jews who do not subscribe to orthodox Judaism in its several forms, is a majority of fully entitled citizens, but does include many "hard-liners" of the "realpolitik school" with regard to the Palestinian nation.

Acting under cover of a mythicized history and the Holocaust (Shoah) memory, the effective governing group has committed acts that the internal opposition, with Jews elsewhere, and the rest of us, might well feel could be undermining the future of democracy in Israel.

By mythicized is meant strong beliefs in various Biblical, Talmudic stories, legends, distortions (such as the Massada "Last Stand"), and other events that are probably unhistorical yet serve to confirm a person in his resolve to build a greater Israel at any cost. Cf. Keith W. Whitelam, The Invention of Ancient Israel.

For instance, the outside world has been led to believe that the Jews are the ever-present major component of Palestine and Jerusalem. The Jewish population of Jerusalem and the region of Palestine has varied greatly in absolute numbers and in relation to other resident Palestinians. In a 14^th century document only 70 Jewish households were recorded in Jerusalem while the Gentile population numbered 2000 families. Opportunities abroad would diminish the number; so would hostile invaders of which there were many. Persecution abroad would send some Jews to Palestine and to other reception centers, such as Istanbul. Even today, after all that has been done to clear out Palestinians, the major sources of the population of Jerusalem, crudely given to help the memory, are native-born Israeli, 20%; native-born Palestinians 20%, Soviet-born 20%, African and Asian-born 20% and the rest of the world 20%. Who belongs in Jerusalem? Who has a birthright there?

To take another case, the Shoah or Judeocide, as Arno Mayer termed it in La Solution finale dans l'Histoire, La Decouverte, 1990, are both superior terms to "Holocaust." Holocaust, in its original meaning, pictures falsely the Jews, who were put to death by various means under the Nazi rule in Europe during World War II, as being sacrifices of their own doing to the Jewish God (YHWH) and runs the risk in a logical analogy of the term to making Adolf Hitler, Der Fuhrer, God. (A recent excellent brief account in French is by by Gerard Rabinovitch of the National Center for Social Research in Paris, Questions sur la Shoah, and see also Hannah Arendt's book on Auschwitz and Jerusalem of a decade ago.,)

A loose meaning of the term allows most people to think of a large roasting fire. This too is historically false and mythical, because a great many Jews were killed by means other than fire or died of hardships imposed upon them. The Holocaust, that is, was neither a sacrifice nor a fire. It was mass murder by the most efficient means available to the Nazi organizers. The Chief Orthodox Rabbi of Jerusalem (and others) has been so specific as to say that Hitler was sent by God to punish the Jews for a long series of offenses over time.

A large guilt comes into play here, for not having "done something" to prevent or stop the judeocide and other Nazi mass killings (although these have been shunted aside in the popular mind by not being of comparable size, as if war prisoners --three millions of them Russian -- hundreds of thousands of Gypsies, and hundreds of thousands of partisans and political prisoners, and helpless enemy or neutral troops and falsely detained civilians need not be remembered, or, for that matter, as if any deliberate homicide does not fall upon its perpetrator with the same gravity). For an American soldier's view of the processes that marked the repression, indifference, psychological hang-ups and command decisions pertaining to the realization of the mass murders (based on correspondence and memoires but not published until 1982), see this author's The Taste of War.

Myth is used by the Israel government also in seizing and holding territory of other groups, denying basic human and property rights to Palestinians and other Jews. The reports of Amnesty International are damning on these matters with regard to Israel. The web sites of the organization carry past and present findings about the abuse of rights in Israel. See www.Amnesty.org. On Nov..23,2001, one reads, for instance, that the UN sponsored Committee Against Torture reports that Israel's policy of closures and demolitions of Palestinian homes may amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in breach of Article 16 of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment which Israel ratified in 1991. AI Index: MDE 15/105/2001,Publish date: 23/11/2001. Non-Jews cannot buy or rent land or houses wherever Jews have bought into or been subsidized to move into or have rented land and houses in any number. Most land in Israel is nationalized. The tragedy is immense, but so is the irony, because practically every discriminatory practice that Jews have suffered from through the centuries has been practiced by them upon the Palestinians and gentiles. Even mass expulsion. And some of the tanks and squads moving through Palestine ghettos conjure up Cossack cavalry pogroms cutting though the old Jewish shtetls.

The roster of civil and human rights that have eroded or become unreliable for secular Israelis has become longer over the years since 1948 and no halt is in sight. The country is still under martial law, as befits the garrison state. Many actions taken against Palestinians such as the blocking of roads and the posting of armored vehicles handicap Israelis going about their daily lives. Worse are such practices as heavy surveillance, which must watch Israelis in order to watch Palestinians. Again, most steps taken to prevent Palestinians from entering Jewish areas inconvenience the Jews with whom they were to deal.

Discrimination against foreigners and potential non-jewish immigrants is legal and common.

Permanent residential status in Israel for a non-practicing foreign Jew or a foreign gentile is ordinarily not easy to obtain, nor is work status, even at the Universities, for gentiles. In order to accept a teaching appointment teaching art history at the University of Jerusalem, the author's daughter had to provide documentary proof that her mother was a Jew.

Israel is violating doctrines of human rights that are generally accepted and enforced in America, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Japan, Canada, and many other nations, indeed, rights that are increasingly proclaimed and enforced by the United Nations, with the help of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The lists of rights generally adhered to in the aforesaid nations are included in the International Bill of Rights of the United Nations, which comes from the original Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 Dec.1948 with the addition of 60 subsequent instruments of human rights. See Daniel J. Elazar, Constitution of the State of Israel, an introduction, commentary and presentation of the "..set of written texts that reflect the political system on which the state is based, its social content, and an expanding constitutional tradition." The distance between the written legal prescription and the conduct of the garrison state is regrettably large in many instances (as it is elsewhere, one hastens to add: see Alfred de Grazia, "Law and Behavior: A Unified Approach to Their Study," Part I, no.3 of Operations in the Social Sciences: Theory and Techniques, www.grazian-archive.com). The need for assembly of basic laws, their expansion, provision of an effective apparatus of employing a constitution, and codification is urgent.

Barbarous passages of the ancient Bible have become laws of a contemporary state, including definitions of citizenship and discriminations that are racist. Though ultra-modern in some ways, Israel observes laws and traditions that are directly subtended from the Old Testament and rabbinical ordinances, such as has evoked sometimes the idea of a particularly literate bedouin tribe. In certain regards, Nazi genealogical superstitions and laws are indicated. Late medical research has demonstrated small DNA differences between some Jewish groups and the general population, including most Jews,but generally Jew and gentile have undistinguishable blood.

The New York Times, though Jewish-owned, expressed grave concern a century ago at the numbers of unkempt Jews who were fleeing their East European ghettos for America, and although its role in the Israel-Palestine struggle has been ignoble, reports a case in which the marriage of an Israel couple is declared null under rabbinical law and their offspring illegitimate because the name of "N" had been cursed forever by YHWH (through the priesthood, of course) in the Bible. And so, too, many others of the name "N."

Women hold a status below the standards of Western Europe, Eastern Europe and America. The International Jewish Women's Human Rights Watch at World Conferences in Vienna in 1993 and Beijing in 1995 called attention to the discrimination against Israeli women in marriage, work, divorce and family affairs.

Israel, then, is not yet a democracy. It is a garrison state. Harold D. Lasswell defined and described the structure and behavior of the "garrison state" first in an article:"The Garrison State," American Journal of Sociology, 46 (1941): 455-468. It is a state whose value distributions are increasingly configured according to the directives of specialists in violence. Its most supportive ideological underpinnings border on logical and historical absurdities, still its behavior, offensive to so many and injurious to Palestinians and Israeli Jews themselves, has not hindered the United States from conducting a set of policies in the Near and Middle East that is costly far beyond the knowledge or imagination of Americans generally.

What have been the costs? Our aim here is not to reflect upon costs to the whole world, but to the United States of America. So, not included are the large costs over 53 years to the dispersed and totally disorganized Palestinian people at home and in exile, and to the adjoining states that have been driven into crises and instability, almost overthrowing the regime of Jordan, and, in the case of the hitherto fairly democratic state of Lebanon, almost destroying it.

The United States government and media, and especially American Jews who have heavily supported Israel in its various crises and adventures, together with the political science, psychology, economics, social welfare, and sociology professions, have been disgracefully indifferent and passive in the face of these calamitous events and aggressions. 84% of the Palestinian people were driven out of their ancestral homes by Jewish force of arms and panic. Palestinians also refer to this set of events as "the catastrophe" as the Jews to the judeocide, shoah meaning catastrophe. 450 out of 550 Palestine towns and villages were emptied of their inhabitants. The idea is horrific that a million innocent people have been kept in economic, social, educational, legal, propertyless, psychological, and political degradation for fifty years in full view of the world community without pinning responsibility upon and exacting accountability from the perpetrators of the continuous disaster or the external interested parties such as the USA and the UN. The Papacy, contrite ultimately, after having been passive during the period of judeocide, has been committing the same offense with regard to the Palestinian suppression, probably because of fear of being accused once again of anti-semitism.

A query may be raised, then, because it will suggest how far from figuring the costs of Israel my present accounting goes: When the Palestinians will have been deemed wronged, will Israel pay reparations to dispossessed Palestinians, as did Germany in the case of communist and Nazi confiscations, and the United States in the case of its evacuation of Japanese-Americans from their homes and businesses in World War II?

Slowly, agonizing facts have emerged: Michel Warschawski, a dissident "peacenik," relying partly upon the Israeli historian Benny Morris, tells us the following: "The war that gave birth to Israel was a war of ethnic cleansing. Entire cities, such as Jaffa, Lydda, Ramleh were emptied of their population, more than 400 villages evacuated, the majority of them destroyed in the months that followed the war. The Israeli historian Benny Morris counted not less than eighty massacres between 1947 and the end of 1948. For almost four decades, Israel has uniformly denied the reality of this war: the massacres, the expulsion, even the concept of refugees." There are two reasons for the success of this denial: Americans, including especially American Jews, were stunned and shamed by the revelations of the Nazi mass murders of Jews that began to be exposed in 1945 and continued for years, and therefore could not recognize related events in Palestine, nor could they imagine the Jews being party to such conduct. ( See Israël-Palestine: le défi binational, Paris:Textuel,2001, Michel Warschawski, with an Afterword by Elias Sanbar, and Benny Morris, The Origin of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1988 ). As many as five million Palestinians would be in line for reparations should a final settlement of the Palestine conflict occur and the jurisdiction of international law be invoked. (See Edward W. Said on The Politics of Dispossession) Ideally the Israeli courts should accept jurisdiction under a law of Israel. Besides monetary damages, there would be property to be returned, compensation for personal injuries and other demands.

The authors of the U.S. Constitution provided for the assumption of the debts of the prior Confederation Government. If Germany, Switzerland and other holders of illicitly seized, purloined property can, many years after the actions, restore to their owners or philanthropic organs the property or its value, it would seem that the Israelis would do the same for the Palestinians. The fact that the process of taking the property and land was not followed by the extinction of the Palestinian population, but by its expulsion, and not by mass murder though by massacres, does not disoblige the state of Israel for its delinquencies. The compensation, to hint at a solution, could be paid for by dismantling Israel's burdensome and threatening nuclear bomb programs.

We begin now with matters that are more subtle and little understood. An unforeseen and little noted item in the bill of complaints has been the loss of internationalism and the incubation of tribal nationalism among American and world Jews. There was a time, which an old man can well remember, when one looked to Jews for leadership in fostering world brotherhood and world unity, when Jews were in the forefront of advocating the amelioration of the conditions of the poor peoples of the world. One turned to Jews for the broadest, the most sympathetic, the wisest of world views.

The focus of Jews internationally has narrowed. Jews have held and increased their prominence in global finance and the media and entertainment. Already the prominence of Jewish philanthropic activities was manifest in mid-20th Century. (See Alfred de Grazia and Ted Gurr, American Welfare, New York University Press, 1961, 126-36, 430.) Yet the figures then do not indicate gifts and expenditures by Jews on behalf of non-Jewish organizations, though they show the propensity to give is stronger among Jews than gentiles; religious breakdowns of the sources of giving to non-Jewish and secular causes are not to be obtained, even today, but it was common knowledge among gentile solicitors and contributors then, as it is today, that disproportionate contributions were regularly forthcoming from Jewish donors. Statistics are almost entirely absent with regard to Jewish over-participation in international reform and charitable causes, in the international labor movement, and in government activities having to do with welfare and civil rights. Fifty-five years ago, Jewish participation in non-governmental reform organizations (NGO's) in world affairs was heavy, but not in the United Nations, which has been for fifty years considered hostile territory. In bureaucratic and elective offices having to do with foreign affairs, Jewish participation was heavy at the middle-level of power, while heavy in influence via pressure groups. By the end of the century, Jewish public office-holding at high levels of appointment and election had risen greatly, reaching far beyond the 3.5% representation of Jews in the general population.

American Jews have acquired enhanced power because so well identified with the spread of American power and wealth in the past two generations. This is common knowledge in the various media professions, but also, several studies have shown to this to be the case. The responsibility of leading American Jews in this connection has become immense. Their stakes are high. If only because, by rising so high in America, "They asked for the job," so to speak. They cannot hand the job to gentiles, wanting to be neutral. They never have been neutral, and they have worked the gentiles into a position where the gentile leadership stands mute and aside, thinking "We must not give any sign that we are anti-semitic. They will handle the problem best by themselves."

A "practical fiction," as semanticists call the device, allows this to happen more readily. Politicians and employees at all levels of government learned over the years of the Twentieth Century, that they could operate with less trouble if they called by the name of Jewish only Jewish pressure groups and the people acting on their behalf, jumping then the five or twelve or whatever degrees of Jewish traits and allegiance a person might be classified as having (such as a scales-psychologist might wish to and be able to measure) in order to fix their minds on the principle that all other Jews were Americans "just as they were." A taboo was established thus, which also spread throughout the corporate sphere as the Century progressed. This was from the first especially a liberal fiction and taboo, but was found to be functional for almost all aspects of running the country. The "failure" of the fiction in the case of the Near and Middle East recently manifested itself, although for a century and more, until recently, the American foreign service and petroleum companies in the Near and Middle East were broadly anti-semitic.

Americans of Jewish descent in the year 2000 numbered about 5 millions. Regarding them, I quote from my own work, "Reconstructing American History, 1400-2000 A.D.," as follows:

But perhaps as many as a million were in elite positions, at the top or in the much larger groups near the top, whatever the arena being considered: science, media, professions, politics, business. The proportion of all leading university professors was probably about one-fifth; media (reporters, editors, executives of major print and broadcast media) again one-fourth; writers, producers, and directors of the top-grossing fifty motion pictures in a recent year 59%; partners in leading law firms in New York and Washington 40%. Of the richest 40 persons in America, sixteen were Jewish in the early nineties. Of the richest 400, 23% were Jews. (Seventy women were among the 400, of whom over 60 had inherited their wealth). Some 7.5% of the senior executives of the nation's largest businesses were Jewish, and 13% of the top executives under 40 years of age.

These were selected pursuits; the same held for every public activity, every associational or voluntary activity that was non-sectarian, many labor unions, and then ten U.S. Senators and 30 Congressmen. Research institutes of all kinds, and the arts and sciences of most types were also heavily weighted with Jews. Jews were the source of about one-third of the financial contributions to the major parties; they were active in practically all successful charities. Given the combined philanthropic, scholastic, and pedagogical penchant of Jews, it was no accident that most of the top fifteen American universities in recent years were on and off presided over by Jews. A major theme in our work, that values agglutinate, such that a person or group scoring at the "x" level in wealth, tends to the same grade in knowledge, power and deference of others, with one's affection rating more erratic. Surveys have found Jews scoring low in the affections of non-Jews (although in personal relations Jews tend to rank affectionate relations higher than do most other groups. Jews who have become college Presidents are not so much appointed for being typically more scholarly than the average gentile college President, as for being better philanthropoids, expected to gather copiously from Jews, who have more, and give more, and whose families are more scholarly and better connected to the founts of power.

The situation has not yet settled down. Before a "true," "normal," and "meritorious" distribution of Jews in all branches of American life were to be accomplished, one might expect the total elite of America in all its facets to be composed one-third of persons partly or altogether of Jewish antecedents.

Returning to consider the Jewish presence in world affairs, we need to distinguish the 'cosmopolitan' or 'globalist' and the more conscientiously involved 'internationalist'. The cosmopolitan is a man of the world at home in many cultures. A globalist is a person who believes that most human activities are more and more extensive geographically and culturally and that this trend should be used to advantage, personal, corporate, institutional and national. The internationalist seeks to add to the traits of the globalist and cosmopolitan a positive seeking for improved relationships in all regards possible among the individuals, groups and cultures of the world.

This is, of course, a logical distinction, and it is also demonstrable. Internationally active Jews have had to become tied to the USA, practically residents. Numerous newly wealthy Russian Jews have quickly connected with the USA, even though they have had to undergo unwelcome surveillance and compromises in their activities as a result.

American Jews have on the whole become less friendly, less considerate, less concerned, with respect to the world, and inclined to ignore, partly out of guilt for what has been happening in Palestine, political and social abuses around the world. They have increasingly failed to understand the resentment against Jews and America that has naturally evolved, not only in the vast Islamic world, but also among Hindus, Africans, and South Americans. What kind of people is it, these observers from the Third World ask, who will sacrifice the interests of a whole suffering humanity for the swollen claims of a small aggressive state? What will happen to us when it comes to our turn to arouse the antagonism of the USA?

Putting aside capitalist behavior, for the moment, we note that since the collapse of the Soviet Union and disintegration of international communism, the outstanding role of Jews as propagators, initiators, defenders and spies of the communist lands has drastically declined. One perceives that they are no longer regarded as sincere helpers by those many third-world non-communists who had hitherto possessed good feelings for communists because of the third-world advocacy presented by the Soviet Union and other communist powers.

It is common for politically aware and active citizens of the Third World countries to project their resentment of US hypocrisy upon Israel. For example, while the US has been tolerating and even furthering Israel's armaments- overloading, human rights abuses, nuclear explosives activity, and external aggression, while giving that nation disproportionate aid of several types, the US has also been sanctioning and criticizing and lending meager aid to the Republic of India with its billion people, mostly quite poor. The number merely of college graduates in India is ten times the total population of Israel, and they are internationally aware, if not fully instructed.

One has to consider, too, the increasing elimination of Jews from the ruling elites of communist nations that was occurring in the decades prior to the collapse of most communist regimes. For example, Jews of the communist states were received, protected and defended when they appeared in third-world nations. The resistence to anti-semitism was considerable. With the downfall of the Soviet Union and world communist parties attached to the Soviet line, and the prominence of the Israel-Palestine conflict, there was no longer this reason for third world political activists and media to support Jews and, vice versa, Jewish globalists and Jewish causes generally tended to be more rejected by them.

Moreover, accompanying the destruction of the Soviet Union, as it attempted with its bureaucratic structure and hopeless incentives to compete in armaments and material production with the capitalist Western powers, was the shriveling of the socialist Trotskyite factions that were, for many third-world and liberal, advanced-economy individuals, a way of sincerely advocating rights of third-world peoples and minorities elsewhere in the world, against both capitalist and Soviet abuses. Whereas after World War II, Jews were prominent in the new communist governments they lost this position gradually as enmity to Israel increased; old anti-semitism surged in the Soviet Union and Eastern and Central Europe.

There is a balance, therefore, to be cast. Politically active and influential Jews have moved out of the political arena as international reformers in some large proportion in the capitalist world, but they have quit the communist world movements also, in some proportion. Given that liberal Jews who are engaged in agitation for world government and international brotherhood have declined in number, yet so have the Jews who are working toward a world that would be united under the banner of communism. Putting aside Soviet sympathizers, though literally acting as internationalizers, as good riddance, one would have to concede that, even so, a large loss in the number of internationalist non-communist Jews has occurred.

And this loss is all the more regrettable at a time when nationalist, junta, ultra-nationalist, sectarian, ethnic, apocalyptic and fundamentalist movements around the world are advancing. ( Cf. Le Monde on the Web, November 21, 2001, an article by the leading Trotskyite theoretician, Daniel Ben Saïd, expresses unwittingly, but very well, the point being made here.) The Lebanon tragedy, in which this precariously balanced and productive center of multi-religious culture (including many Jews) was ripped apart because of its alliances, practically forced upon it by external and internal forces, and the reaction of Israel. Economically, socially, physically, and politically, the nation, instead of becoming a logical, well-prepared partner of Israel, Turkey and Syria in the development and modernization of the Near and Middle East, was culturally reduced by two generations of destruction and decadence.

By eliciting a withdrawal of Jews from world concerns, the direction that Israeli government and society have taken since 1948 has been in part accountable for America's lack of progress toward world unity and brotherhood and to this grievous loss of advocates and activists among Jews must be added the depressed morale for world brotherhood and unity among Christians, secularists, and humanists generally. Seculars and humanists always drew much of their support from Jewish comrades. In the several years after World War II the American movement for World Federation grew and flourished. It included supporters in the Congress. Senator Fulbright was one of them and introduced a favorable Resolution. Then the movement went into a long decline from which it has hardly begun to recover. The Cold War between the USA bloc and the Soviet bloc was the major factor in the downslide of support. But note the interaction of forces: the new state of Israel was recognized and contended for by the USA and USSR, and became highly nationalistic in reflection of the world trend. This turn of events coincided with the cold war sentiments of American Jews, along with most other Americans. This author was active in politics in Illinois, California, New York, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C. and observed first-hand this trend. The deterioration of the "New Deal" agglomeration and prominence in the Democratic Party and the nation both contributed to and was caused by the aforesaid phenomenon. One could witness in the Seventies onward a shift of the more ambitious and alert Jews, a movement toward the "New Conservatism." so-called, as developed for instance in "think tanks" like the Free Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research of Washington.

For this, too, Israel is in some part accountable. There seems to be too little comprehension on the part of Israelis of the ideals which the Jewish people and known Jews represented to intellectual and progressive Americans for a century past. The animated portrait of the Jews who were in the vanguard of the arts and sciences of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, as they change into a portrait of chauvinism and fundamentalism is as distressing to watch as what happens to "The Portrait of Dorian Grey " when the man himself disintegrates.

Christian fundamentalists have now become tough-minded Israeli supporters, some for base material reasons - such as support of media, contributions of money, and permission to use facilities - others because they sense an apocalyptic presence in the Biblical state of Israel. I refer to speeches by the Rev. Jerry Falwell and Rev. Franklin Graham, but a search will reveal many similar statements by others. This line of poor logic and Biblical superstition inheres in Protestant popular religion in America, stemming from an age when "A home needs only one book, the Bible, for it contains everything you want to know." The invocation of an angry Jehovah (YHWH), punishing the country for its sins, spoken from the lips of leading American evangelists as their explanation of the September 11 attacks against the nation, echoes some expressions by leading rabbis of Israel and America as to the causes of the Nazi judeocide.

Worse, American politicians, and to a lesser degree but noticeably, those politicians who are popularly elected, wherever campaign financial contributions, media support, and legal-political skills count - which is to say, everywhere - these aforesaid politicians and, subtending from them, American officials in all areas having to do with international good-will and development, have become less inclined to intervene on behalf of human rights, aid to underdeveloped countries, nuclear disarmament, ecological disputes, control of certain rogue states, cultural cooperation such as in UNESCO, and even in world cooperation in general. Once again, I quote my book, "Reconstructing American History"

Jewish Americans produced in two memorial generations (130 years to 2000) more than any other American component -- relative to numbers, probably 15 times more than the English, Celtic, Italic and Germanic, the largest four from Europe - in the fields of poetry, literature, the performing arts, the fine arts, social and natural science, medicine, law, financial and business practices, banking, philanthropy, social reform, the mass media, including publishing, music (except for African-Americans), and education.

This did not end the Jewish effect, which had probably not yet climaxed as the twentieth century neared its end. The most educated and culturally productive immigration in history came with the Jews who managed to escape the Nazi mass murderers in the years between 1935 and 1945.They came from Germany, Austria, Hungary, indeed from all Europe. Together with those who got out of the Stalinist communist countries after 1945, they numbered over a quarter of a million persons.

Largely owing to its Jewish elements and influences, America was transformed on its more sophisticated levels into the leading cosmopolitan culture by the end of the twentieth century, a culture all of whose leading parts were integrated -- science, arts, literature, learning, social attitudes, global interests, and even religion -- which at the same time was more nationally centered in scope and derivation than the so-called nationalism of the end of the nineteenth century.

The United States government would never have been permitted by its own traditional Jewish intelligentsia to quit the world's cultural organization, UNESCO, were it not for the heavy feeling in that body against Israel. The USA has made itself (in)famous around the world for preaching everywhere about protecting human and civil rights, while siding often with regimes infamous for violating the same rights - Nicaragua, Guatemala, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Turkey, and at least six others, at various times. The career and writings of Professor Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago evidence the path of a refugee from Nazism who showed how to adapt an old fashioned machiavellism and German realpolitik into a clumsy but appealing National Interest theory applicable to a wistfully isolationist but interventionist America, and especially applicable to American policies vis-a-vis Israel and in Israel itself as a rationalization of its conduct. To state it bluntly, Israel has been helped by the U.S. government and American theorists to become both, a machiavellian and a garrison state. The failure of the United States to support the United Nations in a number of regards has been in part attributable to the overwhelming feeling of the majority of nations that Israel should be labeled as a Zionist racist government.

Although Israel stayed in UNESCO, its road there has been rocky. In 1974 UNESCO condemned Israel for obstructing archaeological investigations, for refusing to let it set up offices in Jerusalem, etc. As a member of the USA delegation to the UNESCO General Conference in 1962, the author was subjected to anti-Israel arguments repeatedly at the cost of not discussing world cultural problems. Still in a speech to UNESCO in 1994, Foreign Minister Perez of Israel declared, "An inclination to dominate the Palestine People is not just a violation of Palestinian rights, but a contradiction to the Jewish moral heritage."

The push to protect and defend Israel, quite apart from heavy financial beneficence, has been a handicap to most areas of American involvement around the world. Americans generally wish, more than most nationalities, to be liked by people whom they encounter and with whom they intermingle, and frequently overestimate how well-liked they are abroad. (I might add that this is not so true among American Jews, who, mindful of an age-old experience of antisemitism, are less concerned with whether they are liked, this being one reason explaining their effectiveness in many fields of endeavor.

In 1975, the UN General Assembly of Nations adopted a resolution equating Zionism with racism, which was repealed in 1991. But again, in 2001, The UN World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance of 2001 brought a popular resolution to the fore, condemning Zionism as a form of racism. Unable to stem the tide favoring a resolution to this effect, Israel and the USA quit the Conference on September 4. However, concerned nations within the Conference brought about a resolution that had enough support to defeat the intent of the earlier resolution; it did not mention Zionism; but it did contain the following language, demanding the relief and return of the Palestinian people. The compromise passed by a vote of 51 to 38 on September 8 (note the date in regard to the September 11 Attack), with many abstentions and absences.

"On the Middle East, the Conference called for the end of violence and the swift resumption of peace negotiations; respect for international human rights and humanitarian law; and respect for the principle of self-determination and the end of all suffering, thus allowing Israel and the Palestinians to resume the peace process, and to develop and prosper in security and freedom.

"Expressing concern about the plight of the Palestinian people under foreign occupation, the Conference, in its Declaration, recognized the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent state. It also recognized the right to security for all States in the region, including Israel, and called upon all States to support the peace process and bring it to an early conclusion."

So reported the official Press Release upon the end of the Conference. ( See www.UN.org/WCAR. Jacques Givet's The Anti-Zionist Complex, with its foreword by Senator Pat Moynihan of New York State.) Before dismissing the equation offhand, it will be noted that Zionism and religious Jews have often been at odds on the question whether Israel would be a religious settlement or a secular state. Jews, ordinarily masters of logic and sensitive to inconsistency, have provided on the one hand instances of racial tolerance (at least on the issue of the right to "return" - for different Jewish racial types from Africa, India, and elsewhere), while on the other hand treating the same people intolerantly once returned, and also discriminating in ways indistinguishable from racism against Palestinians, non-Jews, and part-Jews, bringing in forms of racist Lamarckism, and blocking the immigration and citizenship of resident and incoming elements for not being (genetically and religiously) Jewish.

A swelling fact of recent decades, however, has been a focusing of disfavor upon the USA and upon Americans as they move about the world. I do not need to cite my travels extending over 64 years to arrive at this trend, because so many observers have let it be known, where undeterred by censoring media and a sensitive travel industry.

Machiavelli remarked that people generally believed that they were better liked by other people than was generally the fact of the matter. Jews have always provided frequent exceptions to his rule, bordering on paranoia, feeling that they were disliked by others. But practically all observers of U.S. Americans from early times wish pronouncedly more than Europeans at least to be liked -- and instantly upon making acquaintance. In their endeavors to prove this to themselves, they are more likely to see in (or in psychoanalytic language, to "project" onto) others such friendliness. Americans, one might add, number more spendthrifts than other nationalities - what Americans would call generosity (but others would call foolish display) and give often as a reason for this illusion of "being liked."

Ironically, while so wishing to be liked, the American media are permitted to exhibit to their children more than 100 hours of violence per month, and not content with sickening their own children, use their financial and technical muscle to insure than all the children of the world also watch this American violent behavior. The major reason used to excuse the USA withdrawal from UNESCO was the determination on the part of a majority of representatives from both democratic and authoritarian regimes to permit governments to impose restraints (both educational and suppressive) upon the media.

The dislike felt for the American government, especially, reflects several widespread perceptions of American behavior: that the USA is unconscionably biased in favor of Israel; that the USA, in seeking to extend human rights in the world, is hypocritical; that American operators abroad take advantage of the weaknesses of peoples and cooperate readily with hated elites; that the U.S. government, in betraying the dispossessed of the Earth, violates its own traditions and the expectations that people everywhere had come to have of Americans. The more powerful and responsible that American Jews have become, the more they must afford an accounting for their attitudes and conduct toward Israel and Palestine, just as Americans of English, Japanese, Irish, German and Italian ancestry have had perforce to account for their attitudes toward their country of origin when the country's conduct was blameworthy.

The world sees the USA as the only superpower and as the super-imperialist of the world. While Americans wish people would put Israel aside in judging them, the world tends to judge them holistically, often viewing Israel as the node of the trouble. (Moreover, most of the world's elite, in being polite to, or manipulative of, Americans, does not disclose its true feelings about Israel and Jews.)

Elementary arithmetic of power exposes some of the damage that America has risked. Dr. Rashmi Mayur, Director, International Institute for a Sustainable Future, Mumbai, India, writes, in Terrorism and a Dream, following September 11, My personal travels to 84 countries during the last ten years suggest that there are at least 15 to 30 organizations in different countries ready to launch a major terrorist attack anywhere in the world." My own warnings of terrorism are found at www.grazian-archive.com. One should consult Prof. Ted R. Gurr's several comparative and statistical studies of terror around the world and of genocide.

The next several paragraphs are estimates based upon field work and studies of elite structures and distribution of activists in various populations. ( See De Grazia, Deutschman and Hunter, Elite Target Analysis, manual for field workers, Department of State, 1954, released and given limited publication 1965, published on the Internet, 2000, www.grazian-archive.com. )

The question is basically involved with fundamentalism (and its cohort, apocalyptic evangelists). The number of fundamentalist Jews who are behind Israel and pushing American Jews and the United States government and media to policies disfavoring Palestine is on the order of a top elite of 200, a middle elite of 8,000 and a mass of 2,000,000, counting American as well as Israeli extreme fundamentalists. (I am not counting militarists of the elite who are Machtmenschen, men believing only in force for taking and holding what they want; otherwise, add 50 to the top elite, and 2,000 to the middle elite.)

The number of fundamentalist elite who are the top elite of the Al-Qaeda movement of Bin Laden number about 100, the middle elite ("terrorist" activists, cooperative ambassadors, ministers of state, and others) probably numbers 10,000, and its mass is made up of perhaps 20,000,000 fundamentalists.

Sympathizers of the Israeli government among the popular masses of the world number below 200,000,000. Sympathizers of the Osama Bin Laden movement number perhaps a billion, five times as many.

We are not figuring the several billion remaining people (mostly children) into this calculation of the numbers involved in Israel-Palestine American policy. They are affected by the aforesaid American policies - as, for instance, Chinese elite policies shift for better or worse - but they are inactive and apathetic.

Tragically, American policies bring their own contradiction. In favoring extremist, fundamentalist Jews, the American elite favors, perforce and markedly, the development of the enemies of America, among them first and foremost, the fundamentalist Muslims around the world. Second, these same huge numbers of fundamentalist Muslims are in a position to threaten their own elites, who have followed, dutifully if reluctantly, American policies in the Middle East, even though they must meanwhile incite and accumulate more and more mass and sub-elite opposition and possibly breed factions out of themselves that can turn upon them.

Both the Talibans and Bin Laden could be termed ultimate amicides of American war-making against Soviet influence in Afghanistan. The career of Osama Bin Laden (or Oussama Ben Laden) is exemplary. He was trained and employed by the CIA and used against the Russians in Afghanistan along with the developing Al-Qaeda movement and network, which spread into a number of countries, highly secret and often subversive of the countries in which it nested. According to Jane's Information Group, September 14, 2001, his conglomerate of autonomous organisms was implanted in 26 countries, with one even operating in China to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, which later backfired when veterans joined a rebellion for an independent Muslim Eastern Turkestan in Xinjiang.

Then, backed by a huge personal fortune and working through an international ring of banks and foundations, he became head of a virtual government, a functional state, independent of territory. (Query: When does a functional government cease to be a terrorist government, and thereupon acquire the legitimate authority to employ illegitimate terror? If terrorist attacks are discriminate attacks involving back-of-the-line military support and civilian concentrations, then the USA, The United Kingdom, Israel, Iraq, Syria, and Iran might share the label of terrorist governments.)

Bin Laden was quite ready and able to launch appeals to the Moslem masses everywhere to revolt against their governments for cooperating with America and Israel. His appeals lacked important effects, it would appear. But he was competing with the super-power of the world, which itself was busily collecting pledges against terrorism from a coalition of governments, September - November, 2001. ( Cf. Le Monde, September 14 and 20, plus the dossier of articles carried there. Le Monde is the best journalistic source available on the Afghan and the Near East warfare and terrorism, and can be accessed on the Internet. )

The United States is already finding it must pay an increasingly high cost to maintain some of its controls over the conduct of Muslim nations. Worse can happen, should one, two, or ten of the Muslim countries revolutionize in the direction of religious fundamentalism. Then American policies will have not only endangered America itself, but also brought ruin to the democratic, secular, liberal, free enterprise, and female citizens of all of these countries.

Up to this point of our essay, we have not dealt with what many students of Near East problems would have gone to immediately: the costs in dollars of American policies. The thing that seems to matter most to many people , and seems also to them to be understandable, is what the United States has paid in dollars on behalf of Israel. Though in some part justifiable and of positive effect, these expenses have often been harmful and damaging, and they are enormous. The spending has occurred by three major methods:

1) By philanthropic gifts to and investments in the economy, people, and public agencies of Israel by American Jews, as well as Jews everywhere.

This large flow is tax-deductible in large part and the lost taxes are an automatic government -- and taxpayer -- gift to Israel. American laws have been stretched unconscionably to permit this. Perhaps as much as $100,000,000,000 (in y2001 dollars) has gone to Israel from these sources over the period 1947 to 2001. Unfortunately, much of this gift money went to substitute for welfare money that might then be diverted to purchasing arms. Volunteer services of Americans working for Israel at home or in that country could reasonably be priced and added to money gifts and investments.

2) By extraordinary American payments, in several guises, to countries professing grievances against Israel, such as all of the countries of the Near East, and, with the heightening of crisis, an extension of such aid. Military aid and training, direct alliances, economic development assistance, loans on easy terms, outright governmental gifts, helpful purchases (sometimes assisting key influentials and overlooking corrupt deals), the easing of immigration restrictions, and sponsoring cultural cooperation by several facilitating procedures: such are the main guises of these payments. Weapons-makers profit when the USA provides Egypt with funds to protect itself against Israel and Israel with funds to protect itself against Egypt. The needs of Israel may have brought avoidable spending by the American government in the Near and Middle East to the extent of $100,000,000,000 (in current dollar value) in the years since 1948.

3) By excessive military expenditures of the United States in the Near and Middle East.

The military spending of the United States has been larger than it would otherwise have been, owing to the perpetual crisis of the Near and Middle East. Over the fifty-five years at issue, an excessive expenditure for the region, beyond a "normal" military expenditure that might be calculated at about $100,000,000,000 for the region, would occur. Normal expenditures would be attributable to the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the associated need to foster and protect American petroleum interests in the region. An estimate of excessive expenditures would add another $30,000,000,000 to the normal cost.

This analysis of costs in monetary terms can be justified only by submitting it to a panel of experts. Some of the problems of quantifying qualitative data and monetizing various components of voluntary action are dealt with in this author's American Welfare (op.cit.), and taken up again in a later report on voluntary potentials for the Task Force on Voluntary Action of President-elect Ronald Reagan. A typical problem would be to compare the production costs of one suicidal Palestinian fighter (his education and indoctrination against the cost of one Israeli soldier or a squad of them), or the cost of a sophisticated missile being employed to terrorize Palestinians, including the investment and overhead cost. In general, the kind of sociological and pragmatic cost analysis used in this author's works and in this paper has been rarely attended to by economists; one of the effects of this narrowness of economic science, pure and applied, has been the longtime stagnation centered around the key concept of Leontieff's National Accounting and the fetish that I renamed "The Grotesque National Product."

The United States, in all of this time, and until now, has fully confused and masked moral considerations with its huge war machine, letting it be coupled with the powerful Israeli war machine, pretending, as did Russia in Afghanistan and Chechnya, that might makes right. No Arab nation goes to war with Israel without appreciating that if, by some stroke of luck or skill, it were to gain an advantage, the USA would intervene to cancel it. The U.S. 2001 spending budget called for some $350 billions for military preparedness plus $30 billions for the CIA, plus $50 billions for the costs of the post-September 11 "War against Terror," with an extra $200 billions being voted for building a superior warplane. Paying for any single one of the hundreds of attacks against Afghan targets from October to December by American planes, not counting the investment costs of the plane, crew and total backup, up to the time of the flight, cost more than the total day's wage for all employed workers of Afghanistan - a measly $5 million. In a pamphlet distributed in Moscow following the breakup of the Soviet Union, I estimated that the total yearly cost of a decent subsistence for very person in the world would come to far less than one third of the US military budget which is one-third of all nations military budgets put together.

(It should be stressed that we allow ourselves no space here to take up cudgels against the global military spending policy of the USA, nor of the political policies that stand back of them. That is, we are not attacking here the policies and budgets of the Cold War. Nor will we spell out the types of alternative spending that might have occurred if the "excessive and unnecessary" spending in all of the expenditures just discussed were let to flow back into the American civilian economy. Nor will we set forth what could have been done by public spending to relieve the social problems of the world, particularly if directed at ending the fifty-five years of poverty, illiteracy, medical distress, public disorder, and other deprivations of from two to, now, four billion people.)

In the secret councils of the American Defense Establishment, there is an awareness of the possible need for the extra preparedness for Near and Middle East warfare in the event of the extreme Israeli provocation intimated below in this paper. The latest book on the subject of strategies and weaponry of the Near and Middle East is called Third World Warfare, written by Robert E. Harkavy and the venerable Stephanie G. Neuman, who has directed research on the world armaments trade for a generation at Columbia University. (Palgrave, 2001).

Over fifty-five years of time, and converted to present-day dollar values, the total of these three categories might be estimated (with an error plus or minus of up to 20%) at $230,000,000,000. The total of all U.S. public and private aid to the Palestinians outside of Israel, with a population roughly given as the same, namely 4,000,000, might amount to an estimated (with a 20% possible error again) of $1,000,000,000.

In a complex of fears, national ambition, grasping for personal power, and with a shortsightedness on the part both of Israel and the United States supporters and government, Israel was prompted to build a famously strong and effective war machine. If the USA had supplied military guarantees at that point in time, this might have been enough to spare Israel from a huge perpetual burden, from a guilty construction of atomic bombs, from a deprivation of resources that might have taken care of all refugee needs, for reparations and for domestic Jewish immigrant needs, while holding aloft , it is to be borne in mind, the Jewish dream of setting an example of how to run a country, a utopia as good as any country on earth.

I might add that in 1968 I suggested Israel take a place in the European regional government of a putative World Federation, suggesting also that it was practical as well for Israel to become one of the United States or arrange for it a Commonwealth status, such that the country, with its Palestinian inhabitants as well, would enjoy the umbrella of American world power. (See Kalos: What is to be Done with Our World?, Bombay, first publication mimeo 1968, first printed ed., Bombay, India 1970).

This is to say, for every $1 that has gone to the 4 million Palestinians, $230 has been spent "on behalf of" the 4 million Israelis -- a ratio of 1 to 230 in favor of Israel. Probably most Israelis would say that most of the money should have been spent in more constructive ways.

The Oslo agreement of 1993 promised the Palestinians aid of $375 millions and USAID gave around $5 millions a year until 2001, at which time about 30% of the total had not been obligated. For a world conference in Moscow following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the opening of free public discussion, this author prepared and had distributed an appeal for World Union. Included in it were figures on a world income and spending budget for a minimum decent subsistence, education, and health for the world's people. The total estimated cost arrived at was given as $5 trillions (1990 $). Any single country today, employing simple planning and consumption and production controls, should be able to guarantee every citizen a decent minimum subsistence budget. Shortfalls ought to be made up by the USA, Europe and the UN.

Israel is already a garrison state. But only an insane policy would carry to its ultimate logic the garrison state, by ejecting all Palestinians from Jerusalem and Israel, leaving only a small helpless subject land of Palestine and blocking its enjoyment of any kind of prosperity. Americans must therefore look with horror upon the possibility that the rulers of Israel will pursue a policy of provocation intended to cause increased rioting. Israeli policies have already fostered the departure of almost all of the Christians of Jerusalem, from an estimated 60,000 in 1947. Christian denominations have diminished to "skeleton crews" for maintenance and as tourist guides.

The rioting, with amplification provided by the media, would reach a point at which it would be called a Palestinian Insurrection. This would be the signal for the Israel fundamentalists and military commanders to call upon all Israelis to join them in the purification of Israel and the birth of a Greater Israel by expelling all Palestinians.

Israeli retaliation has usually been deemed excessive by unbiased foreign observers (if only because it is useless in preventing further and even increased re-retaliation) and must be considered therefore as prompted by hope of forcing Palestinians into more and more unliveable areas and circumstances until they flee the country. A nation so advanced as Israel can build an atomic bomb (with the aid of a clever espionage agency), but cannot provide figures on how many Israeli presently occupy premises at one time occupied by Palestinians, Christians, and other minor groups. Nor has the same government, so intent upon uncovering the least shard of an archaeological site, kept a list of the burial sites of scores of onetime Palestinian villages and farms.

The more rife the terror, the less people 's belief in any solution. An appropriate hypothesis for Israeli sociological research is offered: The intensity of Palestinian attacks can be correlated with an index of repression, composed of the following elements originating on the part of Israel: incidence of roundups of suspects, actuality or expectation of implantation of Jewish settlements in Palestine territory, changing application of tortures, escalation of psychological warfare in the form of threats and movements of troops, assassinations, blocking of access roads, transportation, job-access, prevention of fishing, bombing of civilians by sophisticated weaponry, destruction of income-producing businesses, cutting off of tax revenues, denial or cancellation of intent to hold serious discourse, denial of passage of Palestinian goods through Israel for export.

In October, 2001, as a result of the Israeli blockade, the unemployment rate in the Palestinian authority rose to over 50%; according to a UN report one half of the population was living in poverty as the result of Israel's punition and retaliations. An index of misery and suffering (a panetic index as espoused by the International Society of Panetics, an American study group of human suffering), were it to be devised, would indicate how the misery of the Palestinians may well have been rising by degrees. That is to say that suffering, or repression, is not an off/on button, but is a matter of degree and is scalable. Ironically, the media who compute baseball records and changes in interest rates exceedingly fine, pay little attention to increasing degrees of misery and suffering of a whole population.

The Israeli government has edged toward expulsive escalation from time to time and certainly has done so since the advent of Ariel Sharon to the office of Prime Minister. In the utterances of extremists can be found advocacy of this very policy of escalation so as to incite Palestinian violence that could then be followed by heavy reprisals, further violent reactions from the Palestinians, until finally the insurrectional stage arrives, whereupon "ethnic cleansing" is called for. One may consult Manfred Gerstenfeld, Apocalyptic Fears Now, Unforseen Risks Tomorrow: Israel's Poorly Predicted Future, Jerusalem Letter, No.449, 1 March 2001. Also Ian S Lustick, "Present Trends and Future Implications," in The Land and the Lord (November, 2001), where in a trenchant study of fundamentalism, an opinion survey of 375 repentants who have entered the community of the Haredi fundamentalist sub-culture, 70% "felt they were living in the beginning of a messianic process." Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky have contributed an important study, Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel.

Following the cue of President George W. Bush relative to the September 11 attack, declaring it (by non-constitutional executive fiat) a war, and having his advisors do likewise, with Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair following suit, and seeing it picked up by the eager press, Prime Minister Sharon of Israel called his struggle with the Palestinians likewise a "war,." and referred to his opposite number in the Palestine Authority, Arafat, as "my Bin Laden." Tony Judt has written a valuable article on America and the War in The New York Review of Books for November, 2001.

The word "war" has largely become meaningless in any formal sense, witness the "War against Terrorism" proclaimed by the American President after September 11, 2001. So has the word "terrorist," which permits no act of violence against the ruling forces, no matter what the provocation or what the impotency otherwise of the terrorist. The Nazis and communist forces have been particularly fond of the word "terrorist", using it to describe all unauthorized violence against the ruling force. Logically, then, there can never be a revolution against tyranny or for cultural independence.

The closer Israel moves toward expulsive escalation, the closer the world moves toward widespread warfare. Islamic states would turn into garrison states. A hundred years of progress toward the modern secular state of equal rights would be lost. They would exert all their force, then, terrorism included, to bring destruction to Israel and the United States. Nor, under the circumstances, would the United States be able to count upon NATO, the European Union, or even Russia for cooperation.

The world's only superpower, would find itself with debilitating warfare on numerous fronts and by numerous arms -- explosive, biological, economic, ethnic, propaganda, assassination and terror, and possibly nuclear bombing. Economic chaos would shatter the world, and the American people would become, to say the least, unhappy and unsettled. America, too, would become a garrison state.

On the other hand, the policy for America and the world, in correcting the injustices and compensating for the damage wrought in some part by a very small country, ought not to be, as so many people of the Near and Middle East would wish, to abolish the nation of Israel. The nation of Israel has a great role to play in the future of the Near and Middle East, once its citizenship is justly defined and equalized, and once the country becomes open to the world. If it can solve justly its internal problems of human relations, it can move out into the world as a leading nation, applying its skills, its intrinsic worldliness, and its global connections to the building of a beneficent and benevolent world.

Therefore, correct policies in respect to Israel are in order. Their rightness should be equally apparent to American Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, Mormons, other religious sects, humanists and secularists. There will be variations on the general themes of policy reforms. But the themes must be determined promptly, held and sustained. Not only the USA, but the UN, the European Union, the Arab league and Russia must involve themselves.

Russia can bring a huge weight to bear on the Middle East, once it determines to do so. Its million recent Jewish emigrants to Israel are not so bitter towards their old country and many of them are in Israel for its immediate convenience, and as a base of operations. Six of the twelve richest men of the new democratic Russia today are Jews. Relations with Israel under Presidents Yeltsin and Putin, the Russian top rulers, have been excellent. Putin pardoned the hundreds of millions of dollars of peculations of which Yeltsin was charged.. The Russian government wants to control or put down the Islamic nations to its south who straddle rich petroleum grounds. The cooperative measures taken by the Russians with the USA in relation to the Taliban government of Afghanistan appear justified by Russia's bitter experience in Czechna as well as Afghanistan.

Once order is restored in the Middle East at the cost of the USA, Russia will be once again encouraging the Israelis to resist Islam and will be seeking and obtaining Israeli cooperation in pressing from two directions, to obtain better oil concessions and outlets. The observer cannot help but imagine that we may be returning to the scenario of the age where British and American companies were moving into the Middle East and the Soviet Union was consolidating its hold on the Middle East and activating communist parties in the region.

A correct and wise and sufficient structural policy would be to introduce a Federation of Palestine, a single Metropolis, with boundaries extending to include all that is today Palestine and Israel. Clearly this in itself would drastically cure, with much more pleasure than pain, one of the most recalcitrant problems of the area, that of the sometimes flagrant and sometimes sneaky implantation of Israeli colonies in Palestinian territory against pledges to the contrary. Under the Federation, Israeli and Palestinians could settle wherever they would find a place for themselves, but the government would not act as their spearhead.

There is good reason to proceed all the way with a single top government and single jurisdiction of all of Palestine. Its advantages would be psychologically, economically, and politically great. Since its boundaries would be historically and practically defensible and no other country could or would dare to combat the arrangement, the combined peoples of the country would be happy with it, just as are the people of Switzerland with their multi-ethnic country, and as the people of Los Angeles are content and relieved with having had their multiple local jurisdictions combined into the government of Los Angeles County, and the people of New York and New Jersey with the Port of New York Authority.

More broadly, a single federated government would replace an administratively absurd condition ,a crazy quilt of borders and settlements, exclusive and semi-exclusive jurisdictions, keeping human beings apart like foxes and geese, economically mad, and inviting violent incursions by police and assaults by air and ground missiles. Their Federation would bring people together, not, as has been for fifty years, the means of prying them apart. Theologian Martin Buber and friends worked along these lines in the early 1920's.

The present political map of Palestine-Israel presents an absurd configuration visually and is such and more on the ground. Our proposal here is for a single Israel-Palestine whose boundaries with the five adjoining states are clear. However, we note MAP 1 at the end of these notes which shows a Greater Israel as envisioned by radical extremists. It was published by the Tourist Ministry and given worldwide distribution although it violates the Oslo Accords of 1993. The Palestinian autonomous lands are not to be seen, nor are any Palestinian cities. Only Bethlehem, a Christian town is marked. It may be a coincidence that the Tourist Minister of Israel was assassinated on October 17, 2001; but in retaliation the Israelis killed 50 Palestinians. (Retaliation is, of course, forbidden by the rules of war, but the Nazis are remembered for having carried out numerous mass retaliations, including ones in which thousands of Jews were murdered for a single terror attack on a German Gauleiter.

MAP 2 shows the present distribution of Arabs and Jews in Israel-Palestine. MAP 3 show the territories occupied by the Twelve Hebrew Tribes at the times of the Book of Judges in the Bible, without showing Philistines or other mingled or subjected peoples. The Hebrews were shortly to be disoccupied by the Assyrians and Babylonians. To make a checkered history more muddled and mythical, some recent research has wanted to place the Promised Land not in Palestine but in Southern Arabia or by the Persian Gulf, contrary to the assumptions made by this Bible-guided author of Moses and the Management of Exodus. MAP 4 shows what the Zionist leaders hoped to obtain as their Promised Land in the year 1938. Obviously, they were modest and unassuming, and, had they been successful, there never would have been a majority of nations voting that Zionism and Israel were racist, as they wanted to do at the Durban World Conference against Racism in 2001. MAP 5 shows the distribution of settlement in Jerusalem.

All residents of the Federation would have full citizenship. The Federation would be governed by a Commission appointed by a two-thirds vote of the Security Council of the United Nations. The Security Council might designate overseers well, if it does not act unanimously but by a two-thirds vote. The UN Assembly, with its majority regularly opposed to important aspects of Israeli behavior, would not be suitable. There is no internal group in Israel-Palestine that in the near future can be trusted to run the country without upsetting the prolonged healing process and constructive conduct that is needed.

The Commission would preside over an advisory Senate chosen by the system of Approval Voting from equal-population geometrically-drawn districts. That is, to reflect equal numbers, and de-emphasize differences, a random census district overlay would divide up the newly bounded Federation, and from each of the districts a Senator would be elected.

The Senate would be advisory, just as the House of Lords of England and other "upper houses" are limited. The equal-population districts, geometrically created, would allow a gradual mutual adjustment and melding of the population, regardless of ethnic and religious differences. Assuming that the Palestinian refugee population would return with a constructive peace, the combined Israel-Palestine Federal Republic's population would number some 12 millions, fairly evenly divided. Israel has drawn fully upon its last large reservoir of immigrants, that from the former Soviet Union. This one-time event has left the only large numbers of non-Israeli Jews resident in the United States, and there is no foreseeable inducements that could get them to emigrate to Israel.

The logic is tough: it would take an unimaginably powerful anti-semitic gentile movement to bring on an "ethnic cleansing" and send American Jews flying to Israel. Given the self-destructive tendencies of fundamentalist and messianic Jews, however, it is not incredible that these true-believers would seek to persuade American Jews to emigrate to a Greater Israel on grounds that they were being subjected to increasing persecution, claims that would be a self-fulfilling prophecy perhaps in that anti-semitism would be bound to increase with such propaganda. But suppose the incredible were to occur, there would result an Israel, cleansed of Arabs, blown up to nine million souls with the advent of the Americans, with no longer any interest on the part of America in their fate except to keep them from disturbing the peace of the Near East or the world, no more of an interest, that is, than had Spain in its admirable large Jewish population after it had expelled them in 1492.

The higher birthrate among Palestinian women has brought a young population, 50% of aged 16 or less, with an annual rate of growth of 3.8%, twice that of Jewish women. Unless the new Federation would take steps to encourage lower birthrates among Palestinians by providing more opportunities for women and advertising a persuasive new life style, the Senatorial districts would tend from this standpoint alone to number more Palestinian voters, but this factor alone would not necessarily reduce the proportion of Israeli Senators nor diminish Israeli influence, any more than the fact that the Jewish vote in America is no more than 4% keeps the representation by Jews in American legislatures at that figure. From the very first elections to the Senate, however, the fundamentalist representatives of both Israeli and Palestinian complexion would be reduced in numbers and power.

The Approval Voting system (invented in the 1970's) is a simple effective way to permit several parties and candidates, yet to emerge from elections with a single well-favored candidate for each district. Again the equal-population districts would facilitate common identity and disfavor neighborhood gangsterism. Two or more candidates appear on the ballot for each district. The voter may vote for one or as many of the candidates as he would be satisfied to represent him. He need only vote for one candidate. His acceptable candidates receive one vote each. The candidate achieving the greatest total vote is declared elected. The process is educative in that it permits several parties but encourages a voter to decide which parties' candidates he would not mind representing him. See Steven J.Brams and Peter C. Fishburn, Approval Voting; also http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/approvalvote/; also Alfred de Grazia, Public and Republic: A History of Representation in America, 1950, also carried on www.grazian-archive.com. Both election system are designed to allow both a grouping of opinons sufficient to run a government and an independent electorate that can mingle at the polls and create new ways of looking at their problems.

Then two States, a State of Palestine and a State of Israel would compose the Federation. Considering the applicability of federalism to the situation, it is surprising that in the beginning and ever since, this potential solution has not been at the forefront. (Warschawski, op.cit., argues for a single state: "the option necessitates a veritable cultural revolution... a new reading of the history of Judeo-Arab relations in Palestine..") The Brit Shalom of the 1920's and 30's, a group of Germans gathered around the philosopher Martin Buber, argued on a behalf of a bi-national state, which provided that Jews and Palestinians would reside in the same space in two communities, avoiding any transfer of populations. The Arab Revolt of 1936 convinced Jewish leaders that two separate territories were needed. The present author would also provide for two States, with the identical geographical jurisdiction, because the people are and will be mixed in habitat, and will be permitted to move about as their situation in life will permit. If the election system and structure of the the two governments are sociologically well-prepared and well designed, peace and order would follow. A single man, Professor James K. Pollock of the University of Michigan, masterminded the German Constitution that was developed under the American military administration of Germany and has worked well.

Presently there promises to be an interminable struggle over bits of land and national boundaries that look like the paths made by jungle animals, with little justification except the power to occupy. Cf. Vincent Ostrom, ed., The Political Theory of a Compound Republic (Nebraska, 1987). There is an old saying in America, "Good fences make good neighbors," which reveals how harmful old sayings can be: Just the opposite has happened in Israel. And the fences must be taken down insofar as they consist of territorial restrictions, actually, territorial war fronts.

Still, there are sufficient differences between Jews, Arabs and others to justify two states on cultural and social and pluralistic grounds. Sacred ground would have to be ruled by the two states together, where there is controversy. This is provided for by the system. For examples, we can look to the German Federal Republic of today, the Kingdoms and Catholic Church, temporal and religious jurisdictions over the same area and people, of the Middle Ages, and, of course, the United States of America.

Each State would have a Council. Under universal suffrage, and using again the Approval Voting System, voters would elect council members from the same districts as are employed for choosing the Senate. A voter would be permanently registered as belonging to one or the other State. A voter could ask for an Israel ballot or a Palestine ballot. An Israeli Council and a Palestinian Council would be thus chosen.

The Council of Israel will be the functional government of Israel. The Council of Palestine will be the functional government of the Palestinians. Like the American State and Federal Governments having delimited, overlapping jurisdictions over all the inhabitants of a State, neither being the superior in those matters that concern the other, so, too, the Palestinian and Israeli states will have circumscribed but final jurisdiction over all inhabitants. This author elaborated this theory as a consultant to the Hoover Commission Task Force on Federalism in 1948, and in Melvin Laird, ed., Federalism. A citizen would at first be registered by origin. The States could accept or reject the person as a citizen, but after both states had completed their registration, any remainders would be given citizenship in one or the other State by lot. Thereafter one may be permitted to change one's State, as he would his foreign nationality, according to the laws of the State.

Each Council would legislate for its own constituency, except on matters designated in a basic document as Federation questions. On Federal questions, the two Councils would perform as in a bicameral legislature. The two versions of a piece of legislation would pass to a Joint Conference Committee of the Federation Councils, which would then report all laws agreed upon to the United Nations Commission.

The Joint Conference Committee has been one of the most successful political institutions employed in the American federal and party government. It accomplishes marvels of compromise and consensus in the interaction between the two branches of the legislature as here it would operate between the two Councils of State. The bitterness and wrangling often seen on the floor of legislatures including the Knesset would be largely avoided.

The Joint Committee would also nominate all judges of courts of general jurisdiction. The Supreme Court and State Courts that would ensue would be harmonized by playing upon both the separate religious and ethnic peculiarities of each State Council and government and tend toward consensus and a new body of law wherever that becomes possible.

The Commission would have the right to veto an unacceptable law, giving its reasons, whereupon the law would have to pass once again with a two-thirds vote of the Councils. The Commission needs to have control over unacceptable laws especially with regard to its own authority and over foreign relations.

The laws of Israel-Palestine would then ensue and be enforced by a single police and military agency. The Israel State will have the military experience and equipment and would be logically the line of defense in a world that is fully Islamic around the State of Israel-Palestine. The Palestinians should therefore run the police force. Both should be equal opportunity employers, and personnel brought in should be able to achieve the highest ranks according to their merits.

The police agency would be under the control of the Palestine Council, the armed forces under the control of the Israel Council. The armed forces could engage in operations only with the advance approval of the Commission. Perforce, Jerusalem would become in its entirety an Open City, largely indistinguishable from Israel-Palestine as a whole.

The nation is compact enough and its population small enough to let Jerusalem be the capital of the metropolis which in effect embraces the whole country, just as Los Angeles with its large population was fortunate enough to be allowed to merge with Los Angeles County, and the City of London with the government of Greater London.

Ultimately the United Nations presence on the Commission would be reduced and abolished, as the two nations came more and more to cooperate and to ask voluntarily for such action.

With the advent of the Federation, the first large task, following the establishment of the government from top to bottom, would be to welcome the return of the first hundred thousand Palestinian refugees, beginning a process that would take four years to complete, bringing in 100,000 persons every two months. Now is the time for a planning agency of the United Nations, and the United States, and the European Union, and a consortium of private foundations, and a world group of architects and planners to prepare the demographic, topographic, construction and occupational designs adequate to this goal. No objective would be so healing of the wounds of 55 years both among Palestinians, sick with hostilities, and Israelis, sick with guilt. This project alone would restore Israelis and world Jews to a leading moral position. Alone it could propel the Palestinians forward in history and make up for their two lost generations.

Sun-Yat-Sen, China's great Liberator, said that to figure out what to do is difficult, whereas to execute the strategy is easy. We should bear this surprising utterance in mind. Dismiss passions, apply modern social science, and organize calmly the solution. Israel-Palestine does not have the kinds of advanced social science that should be invented, developed and employed in nation-building. It can and should set itself the task of developing the scientific institutions for decision-making and management generally, and for the growth of an informed and loyal public. This is an urgent task and if it does not happen quickly in Israel, it should be set up in another country.

The problem of Israel-Palestine is only meaningful in a mystic religious sense, which should have nothing to do with political realities. Stripped of the need to kowtow below all of the icons and idols, the rituals and ruins, the solution in the Near East can be made into a simple analogy like giving responsibility to two corporations, one vegetarian, the other carnivorous, to satisfy a set of needs of their clienteles. It could be as simple as letting people choose one of two or more social clubs to which to belong.

The Garrison State has not produced a highly competent political or public policy science. The mental processes of Jews in their own state apparently can be as brutally deficient as those of anybody else. Since they are only a computer click away, what is said here can be better understood by reference to the chapters on Thinking about Democracy and Liberty and Public Policy in this writer's Elements of Political Science, 1^st ed. Knopf, New York, 1952, internet ed. 2001, www.grazian-archive.com.

The authority and force needed for this operation to bring forth the Federation of Palestine, would be, again simply, a task force composed of practically the same nations that the United States and the United Nations have brought together elsewhere to battle against Iraq and against the Taliban government protecting Osama Bin Laden.

The United States could organize this task force at the behest of the United Nations. Or, after having trained the powerful states of the world in a fatalistic attitude of letting it run the Near and Middle East, the USA could handle the changes on its own responsibility. In order to accomplish this task, the United States must accept a moral responsibility that it has not hitherto recognized. Moreover, it must have the voiced support of American Jews, as well as most other components of the American public.

The Iraq -Gulf War coalition included several allied and concerned nations, but in the aftermath of September 11 2001, carried away by the presumed sympathy for their cause, President Bush and his advisers combed the world to enlist allies in their "war against terror." Since everybody is against "terror" and it costs nothing to be so, the American salesmen were inordinately successful. When it came to carrying the war into Afghanistan, some slippage occurred in the coalition.

In which case, by the time the next generation is born, the people of the Federation of Palestine will have discovered that heaven on earth, or elsewhere, insofar as it may be attainable, does not and should not require expelling neighbors, or shedding their blood.

Alfred de Grazia

France

14 December 2001

MAP 1:
Shows a Greater Israel as envisioned by radical extremists.

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MAP 2:
The present distribution of Arabs and Jews in Israel-Palestine

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MAP 3:
The territories occupied by the Twelve Hebrew Tribes at the times of the Book of Judges in the Bible.

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MAP 4:
Shows what the Zionist leaders hoped to obtain as their Promised Land in the year 1938.

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MAP 5:
Shows the distribution of settlement in Jerusalem.

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