excerpted from the book

Deliberate Deceptions

Facing the Facts About the U.S.-Israeli Relationship

by Paul Findley, 1993, paperback

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All Palestinians-even those in self-rule areas like Gaza and Jericho-are kept as virtual prisoners within isolated and closely guarded cantons where external employment, trade, and travel are tightly restricted... This crippling, demeaning policy remains in force throughout the occupied territories, afflicting all Palestinians like a pestilence. It is reminiscent of the suffering South African blacks experienced in isolated Bantustans before apartheid was dismantled.

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Michael Jansen, "Middle East International", June 10, 1994

Palestinians living in Gaza and Jericho are worse off than were the blacks of South Africa confined to homelands.

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There has been; shift from Ariel Sharon's stark vision of the transfer of Palestinians and outright Israeli annexation of the territories to a more sophisticated concept of quantitative control, selective annexation of the territories to a more sophisticated concept of quantitative control, selective annexation, separation [through closure], and containment of Palestinian population centers within contiguous Jewish settlements.

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on a vast scale.

The United States maintains a pivotal role in Israel's control and exploitation of the occupied territories-the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon, and the Golan Heights-all of it Arab land. Our government provides unwavering financial, diplomatic, and military support while Israel persists in the violation of international law, maintains a tight and often brutal military rule over nearly two million Arabs, and masks all of this behind a shield of deliberate deceptions.

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[The influence of the Israel Support Network] is pervasive throughout government and in almost every aspect of life, private and public, across the United States. On Capitol Hill it is so powerful that no debate worthy of the name ever occurs on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

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former Under Secretary of State George W. Ball

On Middle East policy, Congress behaves like a bunch of trained poodles, jumping through the hoop held by Israel's lobby.

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Each year the U.S. Congress donates to Israel the equivalent of $1,000 for every Israeli man, woman, and child. No matter how sharply Congress cuts other items in the federal budget, gifts to Israel sweep through without restrictive amendment or murmur of opposition.

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Donald McHenry, a career diplomat and former ambassador to the United Nations

Because of the [Israeli] lobby's influence, our government is unable to pursue its own national interests in the Middle East.

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Nazi Germany's systematic attempt to destroy European Jewry, for which the U. S. government had no direct responsibility, is the subject of a national memorial [ Holocaust Museum, Washington, D.C.] while examples for which our government must accept full responsibility-slavery, the slaughter of American Indians, and Israel's violation of Arab human rights-are overlooked.

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Ralph Nurnberger, a scholar and keen observer of Judaism

For many American Jews, Israel has replaced Judaism as their religion.

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Fundamentalist Christians and the Jews who accept Israel as their religion seem constrained to defend it from all criticism. In their zeal they often wrongfully castigate Israel's critics as anti-Semites or as "self-hating Jews." The effect is intimidation. Free speech is stifled and thoughtful study and appraisal inhibited.

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Most of the fallacies about Israel are the work of religious partisans, both Jewish and Christian, who repeat these fallacies so frequently year after year that they are accepted almost universally as fact. For most Americans, this skein of myths defines Israel and constitutes the case for still more U.S. economic, political, and military aid.

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The Balfour Declaration was contained in a letter sent by British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, president of the British Zionist Federation, on November 2, 1917. The declaration had been approved by the British cabinet and said: "His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

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At the time of the 1917 Balfour Declaration there were about 600,000 Arabs in Palestine and about 60,000 Jews.

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On the eve of the 1947 UN plan to partition Palestine, Arabs still were a large majority, with Jews amounting to only one-third of the population - 608,225 Jews to 1,237,332 Arabs.

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The Palestinians rejected the plan [1947 UN Partition Plan] because it granted the Jews more than half of Palestine despite the fact that they made up only one-third of the population and owned only 6.59 percent of the land. In addition, the Palestinians maintained that the United Nations had no legal right to recommend partition when the majority inhabitants of Palestine opposed it.

p7
David Ben-Gurion

There is no such thing in history as a final arrangement - not with regard to the regime, not with regard to borders, and not with regard to international agreements.

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Golda Meir, Israeli prime minister, 1972

We too had our terrorist groups during the War of Independence: the Stern, the Irgun... But neither of them ever covered itself with such infamy as the Arabs have done with us.

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British Major R. D. Wilson reported in 1948

[Zionist terrorists made] bestial attacks on Arab villages, in which they showed not the slightest discrimination for women and children, whom they killed as opportunity offered.

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Zionist acts of terror, carried out mainly by members of two major groups, the Irgun and Lehi, or Stern Gang, included the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed ninety-one people - forty-one Arabs, twenty-eight British, and seventeen Jews; the 1947 hanging of two British soldiers and booby trapping of their bodies; the 1948 bombing of the Arab-owned Semiramis Hotel in Jerusalem, which killed twenty-two Arabs, including women and children; the 1948 massacre of 254 Arab men, women, and children villagers of Deir Yassin; the massacre of scores of civilians at the village of Dawayima in 1948; and the 1948 assassination of UN Special Representative Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden.

Menachem Begin led the Irgun, and Yitzhak Shamir was one of the leaders of the Stern Gang. Both men later became prime ministers of Israel.

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David Ben-Gurion, 1915

We do not intend to push the Arabs aside, to take their land, or to disinherit them.

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Nearly two-thirds of the original 1.2 million Palestinian population had been displaced, turned into refugees. This massive loss was the reason that the war became known to Arabs as the Nakba, the Catastrophe.

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When Israeli scholar Israel Shahak conducted a study in 1973, he discovered that of the original 475 Palestinian villages caught inside Israel's self-proclaimed frontiers in 1949 only 90 remained; 385 had been destroyed. Later studies showed that the total was more than 400.

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Israeli scholar Israel Shahak

[The villages were] destroyed completely, with their houses, garden-walls, and even cemeteries and tomb-stones, so that literally a stone does not remain standing, and visitors are ... being told that 'it was all desert.

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Defense Minister Moshe Dayan told a class of Israeli students in 1969

There is not single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.

[Indeed, the Israelis confiscated 158,332 out of a total of 179,316 housing units.]

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Two major waves of Palestinian refugees have been created by the Arab-Israeli conflict. The first wave resulted from the 1948 war and numbered 726,000, two-thirds of the total Palestinian population of 1.2 million. The second wave came in the 1967 war when 323,000 Palestinians became homeless, 113,000 of whom were already refugees from 1948.

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David Ben-Gurion, Israeli prime minister, 1949

There are no refugees-there are fighters who sought to destroy us, root and branch.

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The United Nations concluded in late 1949 that 726,000 of the 1.2 million Palestinians had been uprooted from their homes and turned into refugees by the 1948 war.

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Israeli historian Benny Morris

Ben-Gurion clearly wanted as few Arabs as possible to remain in the Jewish State. He hoped to see them flee.

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Israeli historian Simha Flapan

Hundreds of thousands of [Palestinians], intimidated and terrorized, fled in panic, and still others were driven out by the Jewish army, which, under the leadership of [David] Ben-Gurion, planned and executed the expulsion in the wake of the UN Partition Plan.

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Israeli historian Simha Flapan

That Ben-Gurion's ultimate aim was to evacuate as much of the Arab population as possible from the Jewish state can hardly be doubted.

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Theodor Herzl

We shall try to spirit the penniless population [the Palestinians] across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country.

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As a result of the uprooting of the Palestinians, there were only 170,000 of them left within the land controlled by Israel at the end of fighting in 1949. These men, women, and children became citizens of Israel and made up about 15 percent of the population.

p95
Israel's influence on the U.S. government has become legendary, primarily because of what is called the Israeli lobby. Despite modest disclaimers about its power, virtually all politicians, newspeople, and others who have experienced the lobby firsthand attest to the overwhelming influence of Israel's supporters in e Congress and in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy.

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Of the myriad pro-Israel groups, none is better organized, more active, or more powerful than AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the major lobby supporting Israel in the United States since 1951.1 Its influence on Congress is such that for more than two decades Israel has enjoyed extraordinary levels of financial aid and special benefits, all of them granted with barely a word of serious discussion. AIPAC is the envy of other lobbies for its easy access to the highest levels of government. AIPAC has about fifty thousand dues-paying members, and, in addition to its headquarters in Washington, D.C., offices in eight cities. Its endorsement of a political candidate usually results in contributions from the nearly one hundred pro-Israel political action committees around the country.

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[American Israel Public Affairs Committee] AIPAC's of a political candidate usually results in contributions from the nearly one hundred pro-Israel political action committees around the country.

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New York Times, 1987

[AIPAC] has become a major force in shaping United States policy in the Middle East... The organization has gained power to influence a presidential candidate's choice of staff, to block practically any arms sale to an Arab country and to serve as a catalyst for intimate military relations between the Pentagon and the Israeli army. Its leading officials are consulted by State Department and White House policy makers, by senators and generals

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Eric Alterman

Without a doubt, AIPAC is the most powerful ethnic lobby to emerge in recent American history. A case can be made that it is, in fact, the most powerful Washington lobby of any kind. AIPAC's influence is felt not merely on the Hill but in the White House, the Pentagon, the state department, the treasury and in a host of buildings in between. And its influence doesn't depend on the assistance of a friendly administration; more often than not, it's the other way around.

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Kathleen Christison, a former CIA analyst, 1988

Under [President] Reagan, AIPAC has become a partner in policy-making .... The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is so pervasive at the White House as well as in Congress

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AIPAC reached a new height of power and influence during the Reagan years... AIPAC so dominated the Reagan administration that AIPAC Executive Director Thomas Dine reported at AIPAC's twenty-seventh annual policy conference in 1986 that relations had never been better between the United States and Israel - and, implicitly, better for AIPAC.

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Secretary of State George Schultz promised AIPAC Executive Director Thomas Dine that the Reagan Administration would

"build institutional arrangements so that eight years from now, if there is a secretary of state who is not positive about Israel, he will not be able to overcome the bureaucratic relationship between Israel and the U.S. that we have established."

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former AIPAC staffer Richard B. Straus in The Washington Post, 1986

American Middle East policy has shift dramatically in favor of Israel.

former AIPAC staffer Richard B. Straus in The Washington Post, 1986 quoted AIPAC Executive Director Thomas Dine

[The special relationship with Israel] is a deep, broad-based partnership progressing day-by-day toward a full-fledged diplomatic and military alliance.

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former AIPAC staffer Richard B. Straus in The Washington Post, 1986

State Department Arabists acknowledge that Arab interests hardly get a hearing today in Washington.

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a former State Department official

We used to have a two-track policy. Now only Israel's interests are considered.

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former Democratic Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland

When an issue of importance to Israel comes before Congress, AIPAC promptly and unfailingly provides all members with data and documentation, supplemented, as circumstances dictate, with telephone calls and personal visits. Beyond that, signs of hesitation or opposition on the part of a Senator or Representative can usually be relied on to call / forth large numbers of letters and telegrams, or visits and phone calls from influential constituents.

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AIPAC does not limit its activities to legitimate propaganda. In 1974 it joined with the American Jewish Committee and other Jewish groups to form a "truth squad" to counter what it called pro-Arab propaganda.

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investigative reporter Robert I. Friedman

[The AIPAC truth squad turned into] a kind of Jewish thought police. Investigators - sometimes overzealous Jewish college students, sometimes sources with access to U.S. intelligence agencies - were used to ferret out critics of Israel, Jew or Gentile, wherever they might be .... Their speeches and writings were monitored, as were, in some cases, their other professional activities. And they were often smeared with charges of anti-Semitism or with the pernicious label of self-hating Jew. The intention was to stifle debate on the Middle East within the Jewish community, the media and academia, for fear that criticism of any kind would weaken the Jewish state.

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Gregory D. Slabodkin, formerly an AIPAC researcher

To date, revelations about AIPAC's blacklisting and smear tactics have barely scratched the surface of the pro-Israel lobby's secret activities... AIPAC operates a covert section within its research department that monitors and keeps files on politicians, journalists, academics, Arab-American activists, Jewish liberals, and others it labels 'anti-Jewish.' AIPAC selects information from these files and secretly circulates lists of the 'guilty,' together with their alleged political misdeeds, buttressed by their statements, often totally out of context.

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AIPAC's [American Israel Public Affairs Committee] new blacklist is a weekly publication called Activities - naming individuals and organizations critical of Israel.

AIPAC's stealth section is currently headed by Michael Lewis, son of Princeton University Orientalist Bernard Lewis. Michael Lewis has said of Activities: "Ultimately, of all the information disseminated from AIPAC, Activities may well be ' the most eagerly sought, read and used to good advantage. 5332

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Gregory D. Slabodkin, formerly an AIPAC researcher

[AIPAC's stealth section headed by Michael Lewis keeps locked up in his office] literally hundreds and hundreds of files on people and organizations that AIPAC deems 'anti-Israel... Nor are politicians the only ones named in Lewis's collection of dossiers. Members of the media, entertainers, and academics are also listed in AIPAC's secret files as among the enemies of Israel.

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Secretary of State John Foster Dulles

I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy [in the Middle East] not approved by the Jews.

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Secretary of State John Foster Dulles remarked about

The control the Jews have over the news media and the barrage which the Jews have built up on congressmen... I am very much concerned over the fact that the Jewish influence here is completely dominating the scene and making it almost impossible to get Congress to do anything they don't approve of. The Israeli Embassy is practically dictating to the Congress through influential Jewish people in the country.

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AIPAC [has had] astonishing success in helping strong supporters of Israel get elected to Congress. It stems largely from its targeting of vast sums of campaign money to politicians voicing support for Israel. Although AIPAC cannot legally give money to candidates, many pro-Israel political action committees take their lead from AIPAC's rating of candidates and funnel their funds accordingly.

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author Edward Tivnan

Few ambitious American politicians could even dream of higher office without the prospect of Jewish money.

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Admiral Thomas Moorer

I've never seen a President - I don't care who he is - stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles your mind. They always get what they want.

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Israel has active relations with many Third World countries, mainly because of its vigorous sales of military equipment and its close ties to the United States, which small countries seek to exploit. Israel at times also acts as a surrogate for the United States in activities in which Washington wishes to conceal its involvement. A dramatic example is the Iran-Contra affair in which Israel shipped weapons to Iran and the profits were used to finance the Nicaraguan Contras in contravention of congressional restrictions.

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Shimon Peres, Israeli prime minister, 1986

We do not sell arms to Iran... The reports are completely unfounded.

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Israel's strategic plan developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s - combating the Arab nations by creating friendly relations with non-Arab nations on the edge of the Arab Middle East and with minorities within the region .. most of all with Iran.

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Iran was the first Muslim nation to give de facto recognition to Israel in 1950. Over the years relations became extremely close: Iran became one of Israel's main suppliers of oil, and Israel joined with the United States in the early 1970s to help the shah of Iran destabilize Iraq by supporting the Kurds.

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Israeli leaders repeatedly sought to influence U.S. policy away from Iraq and toward Iran during the 1980s. This effort helps explain why Israel was so interested in promoting what became the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s under which the Reagan administration sold weapons through Israel to Iran. Such a pivotal intermediary role reinforced Israel's influence in Tehran, continued the enervating war between Iran and Iraq, which Israel saw in its national interests, and preserved a hugely profitable business.

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The CIA was reported to have paid Israel as much as $80 million during the 1960s for "political penetration of newly independent states in black Africa".

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After the 1967 war, Israel was revealed as an occupying power much like the Western colonialists Africa had so recently shed. Moreover, Israel's friendly relations with the white racist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa were resented, as was its support of Portugal's efforts to retain colonies in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. Its voting record in the united Nations generally supporting the West also was resented by Africans. In addition, many Africans were disillusioned by Israel's support of some of Africa's most repugnant regimes including those of Idi Amin in Uganda, Mobutu in ,,,,Zaire, and Bokassa in the Central African Republic.

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former Israeli General Mattiyahu Peled said in the mid-1980s

In Central America, Israel is the 'dirty work' contractor for the U.S. administration. Israel is acting as an accomplice and arm of the United States.

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It was in part the Reagan administration's effort to bypass the Boland amendment outlawing aid to the Contras that motivated Israel to suggest that profits gained from selling arms to Iran be diverted to buying arms for the Contras. This was the heart of the scandal involving Colonel Oliver North and Admiral John Poindexter known as the Iran-Contra affair.

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Israeli scholar Aaron S. Klieman

Israel has offered to share stocks of arms captured in Lebanon, assisted intelligence activities in Costa Rica and Guatemala, and reportedly trained government forces in both of those countries as well as in Honduras and El Salvador to combat antigovernment insurgents .... Israel reportedly is among the largest secondary suppliers to Central America.

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Israel has courted and befriended such brutal despots as General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte of Chile, Roberto D'Aubuisson of El Salvador, General Romeo Lucas Garcia of Guatemala, Jean-Claude Duvalier of Haiti, Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua, and General Aifredo Stroessner of Paraguay,

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The basic nature of the Arab-Israeli conflict has been misunderstood for many years because Israel successfully portrayed it as a struggle between Jews and Arabs. In fact, at its core it is a much more limited and more personal conflict. It centers on the Zionist effort to wrest from the native Palestinians their land and their homes, a relentless campaign that continues to this day.

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David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, 1936

We and they [the Palestinians] want the same thing: we both want Palestine. And that is the fundamental conflict.

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Israel has fought hard over the years to discredit the United Nations largely because the UN has been the leader in recognizing the fundamental nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 1969 the UN General Assembly took the first major step in changing the world's perception of the conflict. It passed a resolution recognizing the Palestinians as a separate people and affirming their "inalienable rights." Resolution 12535 noted that the assembly recognized "that the problem of the Palestine Arab refugees has arisen from the denial of their inalienable rights under the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

... Passage of the resolution marked the beginning of the world's recognition of the Palestinians as a dispossessed people with basic rights under international law.

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Rafael Eitan, Israel's military chief of the staff during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon

When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be scurry around like drugged roaches Lin a bottle.

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Golda Meir, Israeli Prime Minister, 1969

When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian state? It was either southern Syria before the First World War, and then it was a Palestine including Jordan. It was not as though there was a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.

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extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the militant Jewish Defense League, in the New
York Times, 1988

There is no such thing as 'Palestinian people. There are no Palestinians.

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The costs of U.S. support for Israel are enormous and varied. They go beyond the outpouring of dollars from the U.S. treasury and the moral price the American people pay as the result of our collusion in Israel's repression of human rights.

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From both legal and practical standpoints, Israel is not an ally of the United States. There is no alliance treaty of any kind between the two nations. The Memorandum of Understanding of Strategic Cooperation that the Reagan administration signed with Israel on November 29, 1983, is not a treaty and has no force in international law. It merely binds the administration that signs it.

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Previous presidents and secretaries of state had avoided a formal alliance with Israel, although they often acted as if one existed.

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Harold Brown, Secretary of Defense under President Carter

The whole idea of Israel becoming our asset seems crazy to me. The Israelis would say, 'Let us help you', and then you end up being their tool. The Israelis have their own security interests and we have our interests. They are not identical.

p220
On November 330, 1981, the United States, at Secretary of State Alexander Haig's urgings, concluded the Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Cooperation with Israel. The agreement called for U.S.-Israeli cooperation against threats in the Middle East "caused by the Soviet Union or Soviet-controlled forces from outside the region."

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Senator Albert Gore, Democratic vice presidential candidate, 1992

Israel is our strongest ally and best friend, not only in the Middle East, but anywhere else in the world.

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former Under Secretary of state George Ball

Israel has never been prepared to deal with the United States in the manner and spirit expected of an ally. It does not share with us, as its primary objective, the establishment of enduring peace in the area, except on its own expansionist terms. It does not - and is not willing to - consult with us or seek to concert a common policy. It persistently deceives the United States as to its intended moves, often to the detriment of United States plans and interests.

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In 1985, the Reagan administration established a unique free trade zone with Israel. The pact opened U.S. markets to Israeli goods, duty free, in direct competition with such American products as textiles and citrus. It was the first time the United States had ever granted such access to its markets to a foreign government.

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AIPAC Executive Director Thomas A. Dine, 1986

We are in the midst of a revolution that is raising US-Israel relations to new heights... The old order in which Israel was regarded as a liability, a hindrance to America's relationship with the Arab world, a loud and naughty child - that order has crumbled. In its place, a new relationship is being built, one in which Israelis treated as - and acts as - an ally, not just a friend, an asset rather than a liability, a mature land capable partner, not some vassal state.

p225
Israel is not a democracy. It does not have a constitution. It discriminates broadly on the basis of religion and is harsh and often brutal in its treatment of minorities. It is an exclusionary and expansionist state. For nearly a half century Israeli practices have been repeatedly condemned by the world community as violations of international law.

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Israel has neither a written constitution nor a bill of rights, and its government is in part actually a theocracy.

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Israel has neither a written constitution nor a bill of rights, and its government is in part actually a theocracy. According to the Rabbinical Courts Jurisdiction Law of 1953, all Jewish residents came under the authority of rabbinical courts in the areas of domestic and social relations. Thus only kosher meat is allowed in Israel and proselytizing by Christians and others is a crime punishable by five years in prison. A religious judge can order a husband to divorce his wife or deny a divorce to a wronged wife, and a brother-in-law can keep a childless widow from remarrying. Christians or Muslims cannot marry Jews in Israel, and if they are married elsewhere their bond is not recognized by the rabbinical court in Israel.

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To grasp the absurdity of the notion that Israel is like America, one need only contemplate what life would be like if America operated by the Israeli rule book. Under those rules, American Christians, the predominant religious community, would enjoy a highly privileged status. They alone could confiscate the property of non-Christians, carry firearms, buy or lease government property, secure subsidized housing, and enjoy other social benefits. Non-Christians could be shot on suspicion of carrying a gun or Molotov cocktail. Their bones could be broken by police as a means of disciplinary education. Their homes could be entered forcibly without a search warrant, dynamited, or sealed. They would be subject to arrest and incarceration for long periods without due process.

p227
Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, leaders of the two largest Jewish terrorist groups in Palestine before the formation of Israel, have never expressed any remorse about their bloody activities.

p227
Yitzhak Shamir - leader of the Stern Gang terrorist group in Palestine - at the Madrid peace conference, 1991

I have always said, I always say, I am proud of everything I have done in my past. I do not disown a single step .... I am proud of what I have done and I do not owe an accounting to anyone.

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Yitzhak Shamir - leader of the two largest Jewish terrorist groups in Palestine - to an interviewer

There are those who say that to kill [an individual] is terrorism, but an attack on an army camp is guerrilla warfare and to bomb civilians is professional warfare. But I think it is the same from the moral point of view... It was more efficient and more moral to go for selected targets.

p229
Israel Shahak, an Israeli scholar who survived a Nazi extermination camp and now campaigns for Palestinian rights

Israeli soldiers enter a Palestinian library, public or private, gather up all the books, put them in a pile outside and set them on fire. Because they cannot read Arabic, they say, they must burn all books, just to make sure the evil ones are destroyed.

p230
Israeli economist Steven Pault

Economic policy in Israel consists of pork barrel politics run amok .... Whereas most countries have rigorous anti-trust policies and powerful enforcement agencies, economic policy in Israel is decidedly pro-trust .... Production, marketing, export quotas, and water and land allotments are distributed as patronage; they are never auctioned .... Israeli commercial policy is the most protectionist in the democratic world .... Any other country would be subject to international trade sanctions for even a handful of the import restrictions and export manipulations that Israel maintains.

p232
Republican Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming

The world is marching away from socialism, yet we're propping up a basically socialist country, Israel.

p232
Israeli economist Alvin Rabushka

One can question the wisdom of the U.S. taxpayer subsidizing the government of Israel, which in turn uses the money to subsidize its own socialistic economy.

p233
Israelis these days are enjoying a far higher standard of living than ever. This results from massive U.S. aid as well as about $1 billion annually in donations and bond purchases from Jewish supporters abroad. A major share of Israel's defense expenditures is actually paid for by the United States. A study by the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that by 1983 the United States was already paying for 37 percent of Israel's military budget.

p235
Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, 1979

I know you Americans think you're going to force us out of the West Bank. But we're here and you're in Washington. What will you do if we maintain settlements? Squawk? What will you do if we keep the army there? Send troops?

p239
Most [officials in both Congress and the executive branch] recognize the folly of present policy and the need for strong U.S. leadership in the Middle East, but they are so intimidated by the government of Israel and its U.S. supporters that they are afraid to pursue our nation's own best interests.

... There is scant hope that our elected leaders will muster the necessary courage to act until they hear a powerful demand from the countryside. The American people can no longer afford to leave the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the hands of the powerful interests, in and out of government, that have maintained this costly and corrosive collusion for more than a quarter of a century.

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