This book does not oppose and criticize Judaism or Jews, but rather the racist Zionist
ideology and its defenders. All the
tragedy that has happened - and continues to happen - in Palestine is traceable to the application of the Zionist
ideology by its leaders. It is Zionism that causes the Israeli army to fire rockets on
children playing in schoolyards; sprays bullets on women harvesting their gardens'' crops; and makes torture, violence, and skirmishes daily parts of Palestinian life.
Author Israel Shahak approaches Jewish
history from a different point of view in his classic work Jewish History, Jewish Religion, and the Weight of Three Thousand Years.
Throughout the world today, quite a few intellectuals, politicians, and historians oppose Zionism. Various Christian and Jewish thinkers and authors condemn it and the Israeli governments'' Zionist policies, as do various academics in Israeli universities such as the late Israel Shahak or Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, who criticize Israeli violence directed against Palestinians and who maintain that peace can be acheived only when Israel forsakes its Zionist ideology. Noam Chomsky, himself a Jew, has written many books and articles that are highly critical of Zionism and the policies of those countries that support it.
A group of Jewish academics, the self-proclaimed "new historians," has been exposing the "sacred lies" embedded in official Israeli policy, and the truths associated with them, since the early 1980s. Its members, namely, Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Tom Segev, Baruch Kimmerling, Simha Flappan, and Joel Miqdal, are provoking strong reactions from Jews with Zionist leanings. They deal with the following "sacred lies": Arabs are racially inferior to Jews, Israel is a small country trying to survive in a region surrounded by enemies, all Palestinians are terrorists who want to destroy Israel, and these crazy terrorists deserve every kind of retaliation. Tom Segev, for example, one of the most prominent of these "new historians," has this to say of Israel''s "official" history: "Until very recently, we did not have real history in this country; we had mythology."2 This just criticism, once offered only by Muslim academics and scholars, is now being expressed more loudly by many Jewish and Christian academics who are attempting to evaluate history in an unbiased manner.
These people, having witnessed the horrors of the Zionist ideology, see it as yet another of the colonialist ideologies founded in nineteenth-century racism. They give no credence to the myth that Israel is "a small and lonely country, surrounded by enemies who want to destroy it." To the contrary: Israel, through its actions, has proven to be a violent country that follows a policy of oppression and aggression.
Gideon Levy, a writer for Israel''s Ha''aretz newspaper, defends the decipherement of the "sacred lies" in his review of Professor Benny Morris'' book Correcting a Mistake: Jews and Arabs in Palestine/Israel, 1936-1956. After reading the details of the Zionist terror described in the book, and substantiated through eyewitness testimony and secret recordings, Levy wrote:
A majority of Israeli children begin learning Zionist ideology at a very young age. The ideology''s racist interpretations have a very negative effect upon them.
Oh, we were so good (and did so many bad things). We were so right (and caused so many injustices). We were so beautiful (and our actions resulted in so much ugliness). And oh, we were so innocent and spread so many lies - lies and half-truths that we told ourselves and the rest of the world. We, who were born afterward, weren''t told the whole truth; they only taught us the good parts, of which there were many. But, after all, there were also dark chapters which we heard nothing about. 3
Israel Shahak, a Polish-born Jewish chemistry professor who spent 40 years in Israel and passed iticizes Israel''s Zionist anti-human rights policies. In his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion, and the Weight of Three Thousand Years, Shahak describes the extent to which Zionism constitutes a threat to humanity:
In my view, Israel as a Jewish state constitutes a danger not only to itself and its inhabitants, but to all Jews and to all other peoples and states in the Middle East and beyond.4
Ilan Pappe, who says of himself "I am the most hated Israeli in Israel," is a famous Jewish academic who shares the views of the new historians. When asked in an interview why Israelis fail to notice the cruelty done to Palestinians, the answer he gives is quite thought-provoking:
It is the fruits of a very long process of indoctrination starting in the kindergarten, accompanying all Jewish boys and girls throughout their life. You don''t uproot easily such an attitude which was planted there by a very powerful indoctrination machine, giving a racist perception of the other, who is described as primitive, almost non-existing, hostile --
he is hostile, but the explanation given is that he was born primitive, Islamic, anti-Semite, not that someone has taken his land.5
But these thinkers, strategists, and writers have more in common than just their opposition to Zionism. The most important common denominator between them is that each has been accused of anti-Semitism. Anyone who has used historical facts and documents about events occuring in Palestine and then written an article or book criticizing Zionism has been accused of being anti-Semitic. The latest example is the British television channel BBC. The crew members who were preparing a documentary about the 1982 massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, as well as the station directors who broadcast it, were accused of anti-Semitism by the Israeli government.
This, actually, is a technique used by Zionists and pro-Zionists for slandering and neutralizing those who criticize Zionism. Zionists have even devised a term to slander such Jews: "self-hating Jew." This term also is used to describe Jews who criticize Israel, aiming to present them as traitors suffering from some psychological dilemma. Zionists who make such claims, no doubt, seek to sabotage the work of their opponents.
In fact, such race-based accusations, especially when leveled at Muslims, are groundless and illogical, for no Muslim, due to his or her beliefs, can defend any racist thought or viewpoint. Indeed, this is borne out by history. The Islamic world has never seen anything like the medieval European practices of the Inquisition, which grew out of religious fanaticism, and the more recent outbreaks of anti-Semitism (born of racist beliefs) in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Nazi Germany. The clash between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East, which continues until this day, is the result of some Jews'' adherence to Zionism''s racist and anti-religious ideology, not of the actions of Muslims.
Israeli Soldiers Refusing To Serve in Occupied Territory Following the 1967 war, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of Israel''s leading intellectuals, warned that Israel must withdraw from the Occupied Territories in order to stop the bloodshed. He wrote that the only way to avert destruction from the Israelis might be for 500 soldiers stationed in the Occupied Territories to have the courage to say "we don''t want to serve here" and to withdraw.6
In the days when the al-Aqsa Intifada (starting from September 2000) and the Israeli retaliation were growing more and more violent, a group of Israeli soldiers acted upon his proposal. In mid-January 2002, approximately 25 soldiers signed an open letter to the Israeli press reporting that they were refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories. This refusal was not without precedent, for during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, a smaller group of soldiers had refused to serve in the Israeli army, saying that they did