Where I stand on Israel: A Letter to an American Friend, by Andrew R. Taylor

Yes, I think Meretz is the most enlightened of the Zionist parties, but I am not a Zionist. With the Communist Party of Israel and Hadash, I believe the project of 'creating a Jewish State' in Palestine in the school of Ben Gurion the nice and M. Begin the nasty, turned out to involve Collective Punishment, Systemic Racism, Dispersion of the native population, Refugee Camps like Jenin or Gaza, Detention without habeas corpus, War Crimes... (Read: Simha Flapan's, Zionism and the Palestinians)

What can be done now? With the UN, and the political consensus of the broad Left, I have hoped that a Two State Solution would be possible and I have supported it - but its practicality is radically undermined by Israeli behaviour, Israeli mortar and walls and Israeli segmentation of the West Bank, Israeli racism, and Greater-Israel imperialism. As Tariq Ali wrote in a recent Guardian op-ed piece:

"The only acceptable alternative is a single state for Jews and Palestinians alike,
in which the exactions of Zionism are repaired. There is no other way."

Further, the Palestinians are having babies and Israelis are not, and what will Israel do then in terms of Zionist anti-democratic Measures to preserve the allegedly 'non-racist yet racial' character of their Zionism?

Please think of one more point: you live in and have been bombarded with USA imperialist ideology and extremely restricted, filtered,sound-byte non-analytical coverage of the World in US Mass Media. I watch both USA'nian and Canadian, French and UK News. These are two different ways of seeing the world. You said it was curious that I seemed more up in my knowledge of the situation. It is not odd when you think of the state of the USA media.


On the International Press: Based on living in Canada 40 years and the US for 10 years I have some experience of both realms of media over long periods of time. And I have been an activist since age 30 so I have been an avid, reflective student of issues. The principle that seems to hold true with the TV and Newspaper Press is that the USA as the centre of world imperialism offers a much more incoherent, compressed, fragmented News that is self-censored according to the very narrow American ideological spectrum. CBC, BBC, and Agence France are Establishment centre-left organs -- hardly revolutionary, but they offer extensive interviews from both sides, they are pro-United Nations and have frequent interviews from their envoy to the Palestinians etc. When I lived in Ohio I was unable to find such global coverage anywhere including PBS. As for NPR, its coverage during the Invasion of Iraq was blatantly on page with the Bush-Cheney-Israeli State Line.

Do you really want to get into the arithmetic of Palestinian VS Israeli dead and injured? I can -- and have the data. Let me only say that the civilians killed by Israel since (just picking a point) the Jenin Refugee Camp atrocities are widely disproportionate in comparison to the Israeli civilian dead.

Meeretz is a Zionist reformist party of the Jews. I endorse Meretz as a matter of tactics. It is the most progressive of the other side's political formations. But I am not a Zionist. I agree with the older UN position that Zionism (much of the founding theory and most of the practice) is a form of racism and racial discrimination.

Jews become more important/human than Palestinians in Israeli culture. Is this Israeli racism not the fruit of Zionism ?