Israelis Claim Secret Agreement With U.S.
Americans Insist No Deal Made on Settlement Growth
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post
Thursday, April 24, 2008; page A14

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...ml?hpid=topnews

A letter that President Bush personally delivered to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon four years ago has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president's efforts to forge a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians during his last year in office.

Ehud Olmert, the current Israeli prime minister, said this week that Bush's letter gave the Jewish state permission to expand the West Bank settlements that it hopes to retain in a final peace deal, even though Bush's peace plan officially calls for a freeze of Israeli settlements across Palestinian territories on the West Bank. In an interview this week, Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reaffirmed this understanding in a secret agreement reached between Israel and the United States in the spring of 2005, just before Israel withdrew from Gaza.

U.S. officials say no such agreement exists, and in recent months Rice has publicly criticized even settlement expansion on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which Israel does not officially count as settlements. But as peace negotiations have stepped up in recent months, so has the pace of settlement construction, infuriating Palestinian officials, and Washington has taken no punitive action against Israel for its settlement efforts.

Israeli officials say they have clear guidance from Bush administration officials to continue building settlements, as long as it meets carefully negotiated criteria, even though those understandings appear to contradict U.S. policy.

Many experts say new settlement construction undermines the political standing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas -- who is to meet with Bush today at the White House -- and adds to Palestinian cynicism about the peace process. Palestinians view the settlements as an Israeli effort to claim Palestinian lands, and in a meeting yesterday with Rice, Abbas said settlement construction was "one of the greatest obstacles" to a peace deal.

U.S. and Israeli officials privately argue that Israel has greatly restricted settlement growth outside the settlements it hopes to retain in a peace deal with the Palestinians, and Olmert has said Israel has stopped building new settlements and confiscating Palestinian lands.
Housing starts -- not counting the Jerusalem settlements -- have declined 33 percent since 2003, according to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics. But officials say it is politically damaging for Olmert to admit that, so instead he publicly emphasizes that he is adding to the settlements, which now house about 450,000 Israelis.

"It was clear from day one to Abbas, Rice and Bush that construction would continue in population concentrations -- the areas mentioned in Bush's 2004 letter," Olmert declared in an interview with the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, published Sunday. "I say this again today: Beitar Illit will be built, Gush Etzion will be built; there will be construction in Pisgat Ze'ev and in the Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem," referring to new settlement expansion plans. "It's clear that these areas will remain under Israeli control in any future settlement."

In a key sentence in Bush's 2004 letter, the president stated, "In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."

In a companion letter to "reconfirm" U.S.-Israeli understandings, Weissglas wrote Rice that restrictions on the growth of settlements would be made "within the agreed principles of settlement activities," which would include "a better definition of the construction line of settlements" on the West Bank. A joint U.S.-Israeli team would "jointly define the construction line of each of the settlements."

Weissglas said that the letter built upon a prior understanding between then-Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, which would allow Israel to build up settlements within existing construction lines. But Powell denied that. "I never agreed to it," he said in an e-mail.

Daniel Kurtzer, then the U.S. ambassador to Israel, said he argued at the time against accepting the Weissglas letter. "I thought it was a really bad idea," he said. "It would legitimize the settlements, and it gave them a blank check." In the end, Kurtzer said the White House never followed up with the plan to define construction lines. "Washington lost interest in it when it became clear it would not be easy to do," he said.
National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, at a news briefing in January, suggested that Bush's 2004 letter was aimed at helping Sharon win domestic approval for the Gaza withdrawal. "The president obviously still stands by that letter of April of 2004, but you need to look at it, obviously, in the context of which it was issued," he said.

Weissglas said that in 2005, when Sharon was poised to remove settlers from Gaza, the Bush administration made a secret agreement -- not disclosed to the Palestinians -- that Israel could add homes in settlements it expected to keep, as long as the construction was dictated by market demand, not subsidies. He said the agreement was necessary because Sharon needed the support of municipal leaders in the main West Bank settlements. The settlement leaders, he said, focused on the "inner contradiction" of Bush's letter, mainly that it made no sense to have a settlement freeze in places that Bush said would become part of Israel.

Weissglas said he then negotiated a "verbal understanding" with deputy national security adviser Elliott Abrams that would permit new construction in those key settlements; Rice and Sharon then approved the Weissglas-Abrams deal. "I do not recall that we had any kind of written formulation," Weissglas said.

"There is no understanding," said White House National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe.

Indeed, as settlement starts soared after the Middle East peace conference in Annapolis in November, Rice said "the United States doesn't make a distinction" among settlement locations.

Powell said that in 2004, he did not anticipate that Bush's letter would be perceived as a green light by Israel for adding to the settlements. "I consistently spoke against settlement growth, but as you know all I could do is talk against it," Powell said. "There would be no consequences and there still aren't."

It's no secret that the current US Administration supports Israeli regional hegemony, by any and all means. In fact, the current US government would support anything Israel tells them to support.

Public opinion is proving more difficult to mould however. A new generation of Jews and non-Jews alike know a brutal occupation when they see one and they know who controls the MSM. The hardline Zionist opinion shapers and spin merchants are getting a bit worried as they can see reason and logic emerging on the horizon. Watch for the increasingly shrill hysteria as they realise they've lost the debate to common sense.

An individual named Melanie Phillips has revealed where she's coming from. She's got lots of shrill but no logic or compassion as she claims the Palestinians are an 'artificial' people who can be collectively punished because they are a 'terrorist population'.



http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/05/08/8810/

Published on Thursday, May 8, 2008 by The Independent/UK
The Loathsome Smearing of Israel’s Critics
by Johann Hari
In the US and Britain, there is a campaign to smear anybody who tries to describe the plight of the Palestinian people. It is an attempt to intimidate and silence — and to a large degree, it works. There is nobody these self-appointed spokesmen for Israel will not attack as anti-Jewish: liberal Jews, rabbis, even Holocaust survivors.

My own case isn’t especially important, but it illustrates how the wider process of intimidation works. I have worked undercover at both the Finsbury Park mosque and among neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers to expose the Jew-hatred there; when I went on the Islam Channel to challenge the anti-Semitism of Islamists, I received a rash of death threats calling me “a Jew-lover”, “a Zionist-homo pig” and more.

Ah, but wait. I have also reported from Gaza and the West Bank. Last week, I wrote an article that described how untreated sewage was being pumped from illegal Israeli settlements on to Palestinian land, contaminating their reservoirs. This isn’t controversial. It has been documented by Friends of the Earth, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

The response? There was little attempt to dispute the facts I offered. Instead, some of the most high profile “pro-Israel” writers and media monitoring groups — including Honest Reporting and Camera — said I an anti-Jewish bigot akin to Joseph Goebbels and Mahmoud Ahmadinejadh, while Melanie Phillips even linked the stabbing of two Jewish people in North London to articles like mine. Vast numbers of e-mails came flooding in calling for me to be sacked.

Any attempt to describe accurately the situation for Palestinians is met like this. If you recount the pumping of sewage onto Palestinian land, “Honest Reporting” claims you are reviving the anti-Semitic myth of Jews “poisoning the wells.” If you interview a woman whose baby died in 2002 because she was detained — in labour — by Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint within the West Bank, “Honest Reporting” will say you didn’t explain “the real cause”: the election of Hamas in, um, 2006. And on, and on.

The former editor of Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, David Landau, calls the behaviour of these groups “nascent McCarthyism”. Those responsible hold extreme positions of their own that place them way to the right of most Israelis. Alan Dershowitz and Melanie Phillips are two of the most prominent figures sent in to attack anyone who disagrees with the Israeli right. Dershowitz is a lawyer, Harvard professor and author of The Case For Israel. He sees ethnic cleansing as a trifling matter, writing: “Political solutions often require the movement of people, and such movement is not always voluntary … It is a fifth-rate issue analogous in many respects to some massive urban renewal.” If a prominent American figure takes a position on Israel to the left of this, Dershowitz often takes to the airwaves to call them anti-Semites and bigots.

The journalist Melanie Phillips performs a similar role in Britain. Last year a group called Independent Jewish Voices was established with this mission statement: “Palestinians and Israelis alike have the right to peace and security.” Jews including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry and Rabbi David Goldberg joined. Phillips swiftly dubbed them “Jews For Genocide”, and said they “encourage” the “killers” of Jews. Where does this come from? She says the Palestinians are an “artificial” people who can be collectively punished because they are “a terrorist population”. She believes that while “individual Palestinians may deserve compassion, their cause amounts to Holocaust denial as a national project”. Honest Reporting quotes Phillips as a model of reliable reporting.

These individuals spray accusations of anti-Semitism so liberally that by their standards, a majority of Jewish Israelis have anti-Semitic tendencies. Dershowitz said Jimmy Carter’s decision to speak to the elected Hamas government “border[ed] on anti-Semitism.” A Ha’aretz poll last month found that 64 per cent of Israelis want their government to do just that.

As US President, Jimmy Carter showed his commitment to Israel by giving it more aid than anywhere else and brokering the only peace deal with an Arab regime the country has ever enjoyed. He also wants to see a safe and secure Palestine alongside it — so last year he wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. It is a bland and factual canter through the major human rights reports. There is nothing there you can’t read in the mainstream Israeli press every day. Carter’s comparison of life on the West Bank (not within Israel) to Apartheid South Africa is not new. The West Bank is ruled in the interests of a small Jewish minority; it is bisected by roads for the Jewish settlers from which Palestinians are banned. The Israeli human rights group B’tselem says this “bears striking similarities to the racist Apartheid regime”. Yet for repeating these facts in the US, Carter has widely called “a racist”. Several universities have even refused to let the ex-President speak to their students.

These campus battles often succeed. Norman Finkelstein is a political scientist in the US whose parents were both Jewish survivors of the Warsaw ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. They lost every blood relative. He made his reputation exposing a hoax called From Time Immemorial by Joan Peters which claimed that Palestine was virtually empty when Zionist settlers arrived, and the people claiming to be Palestinians were mostly impostors who had come from local areas to cash in. Finkelstein showed it to be scarred by falsified figures and gross misreading of sources. From that moment on, he was smeared as an anti-Semite by those who had lauded the book. But it was when Finkelstein revealed two years ago that Alan Dershowitz had, without acknowledgement, drawn wholesale from Peters’ hoax for his book The Case For Israel, that the worst began. Dershowitz campaigned to make sure Finkelstein was denied tenure at his university. He even claimed that Finkelstein’s mother — who made it through Maidenek and two slave-labour camps — had collaborated with the Nazis. The campaign worked. Finkelstein was let go by De Paul University, simply for speaking the truth.

Are the likes of Dershowitz and Phillips and Honest Reporting becoming more shrill because they can sense they are losing the argument? Liberal Jews — the majority — are now setting up rivals to the hard-right organisations they work with, because they believe this campaign of demonisation is damaging us all. It damages the Palestinians, because it prevents honest discussion of their plight. It damages the Israelis, because it pushes them further down an aggressive and futile path. And it damages diaspora Jews, because it makes real anti-Semitism harder to deal with.

We need to look the witch-hunters in the eye and say, as Joseph Welch said to Joe McCarthy himself: “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

–Johann Hari

©independent.co.uk

*****************************************************************************

Something my brother sent me from brasscheck:

http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/315.html

Very interesting, Terry. Thanks to you (and your brother) for posting this.

As the video suggests, America is in denial. Some on the Forum are in denial-- or in fear of retribution.

The image of America and its branches of power being enslaved by a distant, tiny ally and its vocal diaspora would be highly amusing if it wasn't laced with potentially disastrous consequences for America and the rest of the world.

How many Americans on the Forum will dare to comment on this increasingly apparent truth? Probably not many.

Hard to believe [and not hard to believe] that got taken off of YouTube! To all of those who find some rationalization for Zionist Jews to kick-out of their homes and land and oppress and kill, torture, maim, et al Palastinians who also have a right to live there - equal to and more recent a claim than any Jewish one - that the same logic would grant the USA back to the Native Americans [if they had the military muscle] - that is what it comes down to, isn't it - no morality - Israel nor the USA - only brute power. Bush and the recent Israeli governments are Moaists 'Power comes out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao [A sentiment I think is sick - but they do not.] Power that comes from Moralty and Justice are the only real power - the ultimate power we all can have. The British made the mess; the Americans have kept it going. At this point the Israeli Jews will likely have to stay, but they MUST grant equal status to those people they displaced, return their homes and property and they [the Jews] will have to find a way to coexist and stop being the oppressor. For the US it is just a permanently moored 'aircraft carrier' in the oil region and cynical imperialistic politics - our speciality du jour. In both countries it is the governments, more than the People who are to blame. Many Israelis are NOT in favor of this madness and support groups like Peace Now, just as many in America do not support the current madness - but both populations will have to take the blame for allowing those who claim to be their govenments to stay in that position. WE, the People are the government - if we ever realize it, and take our countries back.....in just about every country. If any People should have learned what oppression and cruelty is like, it would be the Jewish people, of which I am one. Sadly, I can see that many of them did not learn the lessons of history [of WW2] and instead of saying 'never again to anyone' they just say 'never again to us' - that is NOT learning the lessons of history. That is becoming like our former oppressors.

A little on the history of the matter from someone who was there. From today's DemocracyNow.org

Ghada Karmi, Palestinian writer and doctor, one of the hundreds of thousands forced to flee in 1948. She is currently a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. She has written several books about Palestinian history and her own experience, including In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story and, most recently, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: Today is the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel, what Palestinians call the Nakba, or catastrophe, that resulted in the expulsion and dispossession of over 750,000 Palestinians from cities and villages.

Tomorrow, a discussion with Israeli historian Benny Morris. Today, I talk to Palestinian writer and doctor Ghada Karmi, one of the hundreds of thousands forced to flee in 1948. Ghada Karmi is a well known Palestinian writer and medical doctor from Jerusalem who lives in Britain now. She is currently a research fellow at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. She has written several books about Palestinian history and her own experience, including In Search of Fatima: A Palestinian Story and, most recently, Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine.


I began by asking Ghada Karmi what happened to her family in 1948.

GHADA KARMI: I was in a house in West Jerusalem. I had been born in that part of Jerusalem. And I was a child. I was eight, and I didn’t understand actually what was happening. Nobody talked to us really or told us what was really happening. But what I do remember is that everybody was very scared. And I wrote about this in my memoir, In Search of Fatima.

It was a very bad period in my life, because as a child, the things that mattered to me were what was familiar: my home, my dog. I had a lovely—well, a dog, which I loved dearly. We all loved him. He was called Rexy. And the thing that is very vivid in my mind is a scene of the morning that we left the house. It was in April 1948. And I knew that we had to leave the dog behind. And for me, that was the most painful thing I could imagine. I knew I couldn’t talk to him. I couldn’t make him understand that we wouldn’t be away for long, because my mother said, “We’re not going to be away for long. Don’t worry. It’s only because it’s very, very bad now, and we’re going to be back, not to worry.” And they believed that, of course.

But the situation around us was so dangerous. You could hardly go out of the front door, because there were Jewish militias, armed men who roamed the streets, who were in empty buildings, who took shots at people. And it was absolutely terrifying. So my parents thought, “Right, we’ll evacuate. We have a young family. We can’t leave them in this danger. It’ll be a couple of weeks, the whole thing will settle down.”

But for me, as a child, two weeks is an eternity. And as I embraced the dog, I hugged him, and I said to him, “Don’t worry. It’s OK. We will be back. We will. It won’t be long.” But I had a feeling somehow, a terrible feeling, that there was something wrong, and we—maybe we wouldn’t be back. And so it turned out to be.

We left in a taxi, very hurriedly, because the neighborhood was so dangerous. No taxi would come near it, but somehow we got a taxi. It was pretty old. It was very decrepit. And we got into it, and it drove us as fast as possible down to the old city, where there was a big bus depot where you could take transport out of Palestine. So we had a car from there, and we drove over to Damascus to my grandparents’ house, with the feeling—my mother constantly saying, “Look, don’t worry. We’re going to be back in a couple of weeks.” And that’s what we thought. But my memories were—some kind of dread. I don’t know what it was, some kind of child’s intuition—who knows?—that it was—we wouldn’t be—there was something wrong that was very, very serious. And we went to my grand-–

AMY GOODMAN: And who is “we”?

GHADA KARMI: There was my mother, my father; there were three children. I was the youngest.

But the worst part, of course, was that Fatima—was a woman who used to come and clean the house. She was a village woman. She used to look after my—she looked after me. She looked after our house. She used to help my mother cook. And I loved her dearly. She really was my mother, actually. I loved her. And leaving that morning, I left the dog, I left Fatima, in that order, and it was the most terrible thing. I can’t even think about it, it was so painful. And then we went, and we never returned. Israel never allowed us to go back.

Many years later, in the 1970s, just for the heck of it, I wrote a letter to the Israeli embassy in London, where of course we were living. I said I lived in Jerusalem, my house was there, I would like to go back to live there. And he wrote back—they wrote back, and they said, “No, that is not possible for you. You can come in as a—on a tourist visa as a visitor.” And that was it.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you ever?

GHADA KARMI: Yeah, I did. I wanted to find the house. I looked for it desperately in the early 1990s, couldn’t find it, because I didn’t remember. My brother and my sister, who did remember, weren’t with me.

But then I tried again, and I did find it. And we went in. There was a Canadian Jewish family living in it, Orthodox, and they didn’t speak Hebrew. I didn’t speak Hebrew either, but I had an Israeli friend in case I couldn’t make myself understood. So, however, we needn’t have bothered, because they spoke English. And they went—they were very uncomfortable. They didn’t want me to look around. I said, “Can I look around? This was my home.” And they said, “It’s nothing to do with us. It’s nothing to do with us.” In fact, they were tenants. And I went around, but they hurried me out. I didn’t have much time to look around, to relive the memories, to get the feelings, the feelings back, because as a child, you know, it’s the feeling that comes back. You don’t really remember where that chair was, where that wall was, where that—you know. I had to leave, and it was terribly—as you can imagine, it was extremely upsetting.

But then a very strange thing happened. I returned to Palestine in 2005, where I worked in Ramallah for the Palestinian Authority. I wanted to live in Palestine for a while, and I had a visa, and I went in there to do work. I was working for the United Nations. And one day, I got a message from a man called Steven Erlanger, whom I had never met. I didn’t really know who he was, but of course I realized he was the bureau chief for the New York Times, saying “I have read your marvelous memoir, and, do you know, I think I’m living above your old house.” And it was amazing. He said, “From the description in your book, it must be the same place.” Anyway, we arranged to meet. I went over to Jerusalem, and I met him. And indeed, it was my house.

And what had happened was somebody at some point had built a story above the old house, which was of course a one-story place, a villa, typical of that kind of architecture. But somebody had built a floor above it, and that belonged to the New York Times. And the incumbent at the time was Steven Erlanger, who had been moved by the memoir and said, “This is your house?” And I said, “Yes, it is.” And he took me—I remember he took me—he had made friends with the people downstairs, who were not the Canadian Jewish family. They were somebody else. They were really quite nice people, Jewish, and—Israelis, in fact. And they—he told them, “Look, this lady used to live here.” And they said, “Please, come in.” And I had all the time in the world. I went around. I felt terribly sad. He took loads of photographs of me.

And actually, we talked, he and I. I said, “Look. Look at what’s happened. You’ve seen this—you’ve seen me. You know what happened here. How do you feel about Israel now?” And I couldn’t get him to say that what happened in 1948 was an iniquity and an injustice. He didn’t say anything like that. He remained diplomatic, I suppose you would say, noncommittal, very pleasant to me, but it was a very strange episode.

AMY GOODMAN: The narrative in this country of that period when you left was that the Arab governments called on the Palestinians to leave, not that you were forced out by the Israeli government or, before that it wasn’t Israel, by Jewish settlers.

GHADA KARMI: I can’t believe that anybody still believes this narrative. Is that so? I grew up with this nonsense, and I always used to wonder how sane human beings could actually believe that people would get up, leave their belongings, leave their home, their land, their livelihood and just walk away because somebody told them to. Now, of course, later—first of all, this was completely untrue. There was no such instruction. It was not—on the contrary, the leaders told the Palestinians to stay put, not to leave, but then they said, look, get the women and children out, evacuate them temporarily, but the men were not allowed to leave.

And, in fact, when we left in that April of 1948, they stopped our taxi. They stopped it. These were militia, Arab militias. And they said, “Where are you going?” And he said, “Look, this is my wife. These are children. I am returning,” which was perfectly true. He said, “I’m returning the next—tomorrow morning. I just have to take them to my in-laws’ house just for safety, and I will be back.” And they took his name and so on.

So, of course, this was all nonsense. But the thing, you know, that used to get me is that you’d say to friends of Israel and devoted friends of Israel—you’d say to them, “OK, supposing—alright, supposing we, the Palestinians, left either because we were told to or because we just felt like it, why were we never allowed back? Why? People go on holiday. They do. They leave their houses, and they go away for a bit. They go and visit somebody. So, does it mean they can’t be allowed back to their homes?” And, of course, they never had an answer for this.


AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian author and physician Ghada Karmi. She has written the book Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine. We’ll come back to this conversation in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We return now to my conversation with the Palestinian author and physician Ghada Karmi. I asked her how long her family stayed in Damascus, Syria, after they were forced to leave their home in Jerusalem in 1948.

GHADA KARMI: We stayed for just over a year. My father was looking for work desperately, because, of course, by then he was not, of course, allowed to return. He couldn’t come back the next day. That had all gone out of the window. And he was looking for work, because we had no money. He did find work, but he found it in London in the BBC Arabic service, which at that time was developing that service and wanted native Arabic speakers, and—who knows, I always like to think that the British had a kind of attack of conscience about the Palestinians, whom they had sold down the river, and that maybe—

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

GHADA KARMI: Well, you know, it was but for the British authorities in Palestine, there never would have been an Israel. It’s as simple as that. They gave—they allowed the Zionists to come into our country. They allowed them to establish themselves. Without Britain, there would be no Israel, quite simply. And so, I used to think maybe they had had an attack of conscience, and they wanted to help.

No matter what the reason, my father ended up in London, and he preceded us, and then he made plans for us to join him. So in 1949, we left again, and for me, a new wrench from my grandparents, and then we ended up in London. And what an irony. Not just any old London, but in the most Jewish part of London. It was an area called Golders Green. My father didn’t know anything about London. He didn’t know it was Jewish. He just asked for a house for a family, and they told him, “Look, try this area,” which he did. And we turned up. And, lo and behold, we’re surrounded by German Jewish refugees from the Second World War. And my mother used to say, in her more humorous moments, “Well, we might as well never have bothered to move out of Jerusalem.” It’s the same people. Anyway, I mean, one laughs, but of course it was all pretty devastating, all this stuff.

AMY GOODMAN: And what was your relationship with your neighbors, with these German Jewish refugees who had not actually gone to Palestine, but had gone to Britain?

GHADA KARMI: Well, it was very good. Partly, my parents—really, it was quite interesting—never brought us up with the idea that we hated Jews. It was not about Jews. They always said it was the people over there. They meant in Palestine, and they meant the Zionists. They meant the Jews who came over to Palestine determined to take the Palestinians’ place. Therefore, we had no problem with these Jews, whom they considered as just neighbors.

So, not only did the next-door neighbor, who was a German Jewish doctor, became our—he became our doctor, and we were used to that, because in Palestine, actually, the best doctors were German, and they were usually Jewish, but, of course, in my school, many of the girls were Jewish, and I made lots and lots of Jewish friends. And I went into their homes, and I became particularly close to one family, and they had a daughter called Patricia, who has remained my friend ’til today, and she lives in New York, and I’m staying with her now, and she’s been looking after me. It was a very long friendship.

Now, but more seriously, although we got on and we were friendly—and I have described all this in the memoir—there was an important side to this, which I only realized later. I really began to understand about the Jewish imperative to create a Jewish state in my country. Now, I don’t want anybody to misunderstand me. I understood it. It did not justify it. It did not excuse it. But I understood the kind of emotions, the psychology, which was behind the devotion to Israel that I found as I was growing up in London. And that, of course, was amongst the very community—these are European Jews—the very same type of Jew that had started the Zionist movement that had gone to Palestine and had created this settler colonialist state in my country. At least I really—and from the inside, I began to understand the mentality of the Eastern European persecution, the pogroms, the Schtetl, all this stuff, which as a Palestinian, I never ever would have understood. But living there, I did.

AMY GOODMAN: But in addition to that, I mean, these German refugees, these Jewish refugees were refugees from the Holocaust, were the survivors—

GHADA KARMI: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —in—right after World War II—

GHADA KARMI: That’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: —so often used as the justification for the establishment of Israel, that Jews would have a safe place to go, although the movement started well beyond that, but that was the final impetus, the moral sort of justification.

GHADA KARMI: Yes, that’s true, although it may surprise your audience to know that, paradoxically, the Holocaust was not such an issue shortly after it had happened as it is today. It’s amazing. I don’t know—well, we have no time to explain or to analyze why that should be—

AMY GOODMAN: Well, actually, Norman Finkelstein has written extensively about that, how it grew in importance as opposed to faded in importance, in his book The Holocaust Industry.

GHADA KARMI: That’s absolutely right. And that, believe me, is my own personal experience, that it didn’t feature as much in those postwar years, because I remember all my Jewish friends didn’t talk that much about the Holocaust. But there was—there was—but, of course, underlying it, I knew there was this feeling that Israel was a refuge, a place of refuge from persecution, wherever that might be.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about your memoir, In Search of Fatima. Why did you call it that?

GHADA KARMI: You know, Fatima had been, as a real person—Fatima was a real person and also a metaphor. The real Fatima was the village woman who looked after us when we were small, and particularly me, and she helped my mother. She came and cooked and cleaned and such. She didn’t live with us, but she looked after me, and I was very, very attached to her. So for me, leaving Palestine in 1948, I left Fatima, really, who came to represent my childhood, Palestine, whatever that place was, that place of imagination after awhile. Because one’s memories were not very good as a child, it became a place, a country of the mind, and it became Fatima.

And so, in writing the book, I was trying to explain or ask the reader to share with me an experience of seeking for belonging, the search for my identity, who I was, having been wrenched from my roots so brutally in childhood and living in a—as it happened, moving to a society totally different from the one I was born into and, I should tell you, antipathetic to me. British society was pro-Israel. It believed in the Jewish state. It believed in the right of the Jews to establish a state in Palestine. So, for me, this was a double shock, and it led into a whole internal search, and a painful one, for where I belonged. Did I really belong with these English people I had lived amongst for so long? Did I belong in the West? Or did I belong to that place, that place which had become a place of the mind, the Arab world, the Fatima, and so on? So that’s why the book was called that.

AMY GOODMAN: You left Fatima there. And what happened to her?

GHADA KARMI: Well, this is the saddest thing of all for me. We don’t know. Now, we don’t know, because when we left, that was one of the terrible, terrible effects of the Nakba, that it not only took people away from their land and their belongings, it took them away from other people, and you never caught up with the other people. It was a complete rupture. Now, of course, that’s not true in every case. People did eventually find each other. Fatima disappeared into a black hole. We tried to find out what had happened to her. She was a peasant woman. There was no way of getting our letters to her.

AMY GOODMAN: Where did she live?

GHADA KARMI: She lived in a village called al-Maliha, which is just outside Jerusalem. And do you know, when I went back to Palestine-Israel in the early 1990s, I asked to see al-Maliha, and there it was, entirely Israeli, entirely Jewish Israeli. This wonderful little Palestinian village, which had had white houses, fields, a water well, all the charm of a Palestinian village, had now become totally Israeli. But they hadn’t managed to demolish the mosque, because I could see the minaret, which remained a kind of a solitary reminder that this was not a Jewish place. So there we are.

However, Fatima disappeared for years and years and years, and I knew nothing about her. And then in 2005, when I went to Palestine to work, I was determined to find her. I looked, and I looked. I went to the refugee camps, because of course she had gone—we knew she had gone into a camp. In August of 1948, the Israelis destroyed her village. And I knew—we knew she would have gone into a camp. That’s what happened to people. And I tried to find her.

Eventually, I found her grandson. I did. And I found him living in Bethlehem. And he retraced for me her footsteps from when we left her, how she stayed in our house waiting for us to come back, but of course we never could come back, and she was eventually thrown out. And then she and her family had to move, and they kept going on the move, being moved from one place to the other, eventually ending up in caves outside Bethlehem. They lived in a cave. And then they finally got out, and she lived in a house.

And until the 1980s, she kept telling her relatives, “Please look for the Karmis. Please. I want to see them again.” And my father, by then, was a well-known broadcaster on the BBC, so she used to hear his voice, and she used to say, “Surely, we can find him. Surely, we can.” And it was—believe me, it broke my heart when her grandson told me the story. But I never saw her again. And the thought that maddened me was there she was. In the 1980s, for God’s sake, I was an adult, I could have found her, if only I had known, if only she could have got them to look for us. What did they know? You know, how could they look us up on Google? And so, that—there we are. So I did know that she died, roughly when she died.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Palestinian writer, author, Ghada Karmi. Her book after In Search of Fatima is called Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine. Why “Married to Another Man”?

GHADA KARMI: Well, you may well ask, and I know this has mystified a lot of people, the title, and it’s been misunderstood. People have thought it was about matrimonial infidelity. It’s not, of course. It’s a quite—it’s a very serious book. The reason it’s called that is that I’ve taken that out of an anecdote, that at the end of the nineteenth century, when the Zionists in Europe, Jews, group of Jews who formed the Zionist movement, held a very big congress, a conference in Basel in Switzerland, at which they decided that the only way to solve the Jewish question in Europe, the question of persecution, was for the Jews to have a state of their own. So they said, we have to create a Jewish state that can be a refuge for us, where we can be normal people, where we don’t have to be hounded, persecuted, etc. And they decided that that state was to be in Palestine.

Now, they didn’t know what Palestine was like. They were sitting in Europe. They didn’t know about it, so they sent a couple of rabbis to this place called Palestine, and they said, “Let us know if this is a suitable place.” The rabbis went, they had a look, and they sent back this message to Vienna: they said, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Now, of course, it’s clear what they were saying is, yes, the land is very suitable, it’s wonderful, but it’s full of other people, it’s already taken. And, of course, it was taken by my ancestors. I mean, that’s who it was. That’s who the other man was.

And if you think about it, that has been the basis of the conflict ever since, that the Zionists wanted a territory free of non-Jews in a territory full of non-Jews, and therefore, they had to get rid of the non-Jews in order to make it a territory for Jews. Now, those non-Jews, i.e. the Palestinians, of course didn’t want to be dispossessed, they resisted being dispossessed, and hence, you have a conflict.

So, in summary, Married to Another Man, had the Zionists said, “This is indeed married to another man. We can’t go here, because the land is already married. We can’t be bigamists. We’re going to move on. We’re going to look for somewhere else”—they didn’t. They were determined to do it, and they did it at the most enormous cost to us as Palestinians, because we were dispossessed and displaced in order to make room for the Jewish state, and of course it had a tremendous effect on the whole Arab region.

AMY GOODMAN: You advocate a one-state solution. Can you talk about that and why?

GHADA KARMI: Yes. Look, I wrote the book Married to Another Man, because I felt very strongly that, yes, as Palestinians, we will always mourn what happened to us—we mourn what is happening to us now—but we really have to try and see how this can be solved. And that has to come from us, because we are the people the most effected by this conflict. We are the people with the greatest stake in a solution which lasts. And I want to emphasize this. It is entirely possible to think up solutions for this conflict that are temporary, that might work for a short while. There’s no point in that. We want a solution that will be permanent and that will be durable.

And it seemed to me—and in the book, I tried to do it by taking the reader along with me to explain the conflict, to see how so many attempts had failed in the past, to explain why they had failed and to show, therefore, that there is in fact only one way forward, and that is, not to partition the land of Palestine, not to fight over percentages, not to have Israel say, “I’m going to keep my colonies on the West Bank, the hell with the rest of you, and I’m going to keep Jerusalem, and you people can’t come back to your homes.” No, don’t partition the land. We have already got a Jewish—Israeli Jewish community living in the land. We have already Palestinians who live in the same land. But most of their relatives don’t live in their homeland, because Israel doesn’t allow it. And those people have the right to return. Therefore, how are you going to do it? There’s only one way you can do it. That is, if it is one state for all its citizens, not a Jewish state, not an Islamic state, not a Christian state—a secular democratic state. That’s the answer.


AMY GOODMAN: We’ll continue with our conversation with Dr. Ghada Karmi after the break. Tomorrow on our broadcast, a discussion on 1948 with Israeli historian Benny Morris. We’ll also be joined by Tikva Honig-Parnass. She fought for Israel in the 1948 war. But first, to break with the Palestinian hip-hop group DAM.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We go to the conclusion of my interview with the Palestinian author and physician Ghada Karmi. I asked her if she thinks proposing a one-state solution hurts the chances of Palestinians, because it’s less attainable than a two-state solution.

GHADA KARMI: The one-state solution is the only just solution for the Palestinians, so if we want to look at solving this problem from a point of view of justice, we have no alternative except the one state. Justice means that the dispossessed shall no longer be dispossessed. That’s justice.

If what you’re saying to me is, will it will hurt the chances of the Palestinians getting something out of the present situation, that’s a different question. I would have said to you that I can understand that position, if there were any evidence that they are going to get something.

Now, I’m looking around me, and I’m imagining that our intelligent audience is also looking at things like maps and is looking at what Israel does and how Israel behaves and can only come to the conclusion that the creation of a Palestinian state is totally out of reach. And I’m sorry to be blunt, but I think we have to be quite open about this. We mustn’t go on playing this game of the emperor’s new clothes, you know, everybody pretending they’re seeing something which isn’t there. There is no territorial basis on which a Palestinian state can now be set up.

Although I fully understand that there is an international consensus that the two-state solution is the way forward, I fully understand that a lot of work has gone into this, and in proposing the one-state solution I’m not being flippant, and I am not saying that all the work and all the good will and all the effort that’s gone into the two-state solution are trivial and idiotic and we have to forget about them, the problem is we’ve given the two-state solution quite a long time to see if it will work. It hasn’t happened. In decades of talking about the two-state solution, it has not come about. On the contrary, it’s less attainable now than it was in 1967, because Israel has taken so much Palestinian land, so much Palestinian resources, there’s no possibility of it happening logistically. So why would I, as an intelligent human being, continue to back a solution which has been shown not to be working?

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, a one-state solution would mean that Palestinians would outnumber Israeli Jews, which is why the Israeli government would fight it.

GHADA KARMI: Indeed. Of course, that might—it might mean that. But, you see, the whole point of this solution is we don’t have a Jewish state and we don’t have an Islamic state, we have a democracy. If you were to look at the Western liberal democracies today, they have various communities that live together. They don’t go around saying, “Wait a minute, this has to be a white state,” or “this has to be a black state,” or “this has to be a Belgian state.” They’re saying, “We are here, we are citizens.” The moment you get rid of the idea that there has to be an exclusive something for somebody, then you can see your way to having a proper democracy. That’s the essence of democracy.

So what I’m preaching and calling for—and by the way, many others along with me—is not at all bizarre, it’s not outlandish, it is in line with the Western democratic tradition, which has tried to free itself from fascist states, from states which insist on racial exclusivity, to ideas of tolerance, of rights, of democracy, and so on. What is wrong with that? And it’s amazing to me that whenever I propose the solution, people do object immediately by saying, well, that means it’s the end of the Jewish state, or the Israelis won’t have it, or it’s a declaration of war on Israel. This is a peaceable solution. It’s actually about ending the conflict, because if you no longer are—if you don’t have parties fighting over bits of territory, then you end the fight. But if you continue to say, “I have a right, a God-given right,” or whatever it is, “to take this, this, this amount of territory, and you will not have this, this and this,” here’s a recipe for conflict, and that’s what we’ve had all along.

It seems to me that the issue of Zionism, the issue of the insistence on the part of a group to say, “We have a right to a place where only we shall live, and we will exclude others,” seems to me this notion has to be challenged head-on. We must stop accepting the idea of an exclusive state in the Arab region or indeed anywhere else. And I imagine, you know, the Western world would be the first to be up in arms if Hamas managed to establish an Islamic state from which Jews were thrown out. They’d be the first to object. They’d go mad. Well, why on earth are we tolerating a situation which we have now, in which Jews are saying, “We, as Jews, have a right to this territory.” The more so when you remember it’s not their territory. It’s somebody else’s.

AMY GOODMAN: Ghada Karmi, explain what the word “Nakba” means.

GHADA KARMI: The “nakba,” in Arabic, is—it means literally “catastrophe.” Over time, it has acquired what you might call a capital N, which of course we don’t have capital letters in Arabic. But it’s acquired a capital N in a sense that it had become, as you might say, the grand catastrophe or the great catastrophe. That’s what it actually means, because, of course, for the Palestinians, nothing more catastrophic could have been imagined than to be expelled from their home, their homeland, lose everything and never be allowed back. And all that has happened from that time to this has been due to that initial event in 1948.

Today, the Palestinians are divided. They are fragmented. They live in different places. I live in London. Many Palestinians live in other different countries. We have Palestinian refugees in camps. We have people living under occupation in what remains of Palestine. We have people who are citizens of Israel. All these were once upon a time a homogeneous, cohesive society living in a land called Palestine. Now, when I call for a one-state solution, what I’m saying is I want that situation back again, where in that Palestine, where we were one cohesive society, we had Jews, we had Druzes, we had Armenians, we had Circassians, we were Christians, we were Muslims, and we lived together. And what I’m saying is, we want that again. And it can happen again if enough people with enough good will and enough sense of morality and justice help us.

AMY GOODMAN: And your feeling about the big sixtieth anniversary celebration in Israel, everyone from President Bush to Google cofounder Sergey Brin?

GHADA KARMI: Well, I have to tell you, if I were Israel, I would be celebrating. It’s not bad in sixty years to arrive at a point where you have not only taken somebody else’s country, you’ve thrown them out, you’ve kept them out, and you’ve succeeded in it, but you’ve succeeded in becoming rich, heavily armed, powerfully armed, you have nuclear weapons, you enjoy the unstinting support of the world’s single super state of the United States. You enjoy that support in terms of funding, in terms of arms, in political and diplomatic support. There’s not a UN resolution can be passed without the big brother in the United States vetoing it. Fantastic! If I were Israel, I’d be celebrating.

What is shameful, I think, is that the rest of the world that knows what has happened, knows what Israel has done and is doing and is doing to the people of Gaza—is that really something to celebrate? Dispossessing people, tormenting them, humiliating them, occupying them, starving them, as they are in Gaza—is that really something to celebrate? I would say not.


AMY GOODMAN: Palestinian author and doctor Ghada Karmi. Her latest book is Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine. Tomorrow on Democracy Now!, we’ll be joined by the well-known Israeli historian Benny Morris for a discussion about 1948, the founding of the Israeli state. We’ll also be joined by Tikva Honig-Parnass. She fought for Israel in 1948.

Peter, if I disagree with the Inquisition, does that make me a self-hating Catholic? If I disagree with what humans do anywhere. Disagree with the horrible, horrible things my human brothers and sisters do. Does that make me a self-hating human? Chomsky has the correct analysis of the nature of the US-Israel relationship, who is calling the shots, another self-hater too. Chomsky's a two-fer, actually. A self-hating Jew and a self-hating American. Finklestein too, poor guy. Guys like Dershowitz though will love his own as he helps whip his own flock that he helped panic off a cliff. The one who truly hates his own is the one whose responsible for their blood being spilled for no real reason or for an unworthy temporal purpose, i.e. personal gain, power, territory, cash baby.