When Victims Rule (pdf)

ISRAEL AND ZIONISM
eradication of Arab Palestine. That is what eventually happened when the
Israeli army entered West Beirut.” [BENVENISTI, p. 198]
Benvenisti also notes the Israeli creation of a place called “Peace Forest” on
the sites of eradicated Arab villages near Jerusalem, utterly destroyed to guarantee
that the inhabitants never returned. “To call it Peace Forest,” he laments, “to take
well-meaning [Jewish] donors and with their money turn all these orchards into
a picnic area for Israelis and tourists is something else entirely. This betrays not
only a lack of sensitivity but is something that must eventually corrupt our youth
… Dehumanization is a contagious disease.” [BENVENISTI, p. 200-201]
Traditional Israeli reluctance to address the facts of history even stretches far
into the distant past. As Elliot Horowitz notes about Jewish massacres of Christians
in ancient Israel:
“After 1967 the reluctance of Israeli historians, especially those linked
institutionally to universities and research institutes, to acknowledge
Jewish violence in the distant past has become even greater than in the
decades immediately following the Holocaust. This is true especially
with regard to acts allegedly committed against non-Jews in the land of
Israel and its environs. One suspects that the resistance to acknowledging
such phenomena in the past has been related to a desire on the part
of many Israelis to see themselves as enlightened and humane occupiers
at present.” [HOROWITZ, 1998 p. 8]
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Israel is a very small nation – in one area its width is only about ten miles;
more than half of its land mass is desert. Only one-fifth of the country is arable.
The Jewish nation has few natural resources; potash is one of them. Even limited
water supplies loom as long-term threats to political stability with neighboring
water-poor countries. Most water is pumped from the “Sea” of Galilee and
its headwaters; water crucial to the Jewish state originates in the heavily Arab
West Bank and in southern Lebanon. “Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza,”
notes Amnon Rubenstein, “are routinely forbidden to dig new wells, deepen existing
wells, or put in water systems that might reduce the water available for
Israel.” [RUBENSTEIN, A., p. 173] Although Israel is rich in religious lore and
tradition, for all practical economic intents and purposes it is physically resource-less.
It must rely of course upon the massive beneficence of wealthy and
influential Jews throughout the world for help – economic contributions, but –
more importantly – world-wide lobbying efforts of governments and peoples
throughout the world to sustain the Jewish state which can never sustain itself,
in drastic contradiction of seminal Zionist plans for the Jewish state. Hence, the
resources of the rest of the world maintain an economic, social, and military
level for Israel which it could never remotely maintain by its own means.
Nonetheless, Jewish and Zionist mythology about the sacredness of the land
of Israel has fostered an extremely strange, and disturbing, paradox. Israeli
Amos Oz notes Jewish myth about the actual land of Israel in Zionist tradition:
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