http://www.aljazeerah.info/29%20n/Palestinian%20Samir%20Taher%20tells%20Prisoner%20Society%20lawyer%20that%20torture%20began%20during%20the%20first%20investigation.htm

Palestinian Samir Taher tells Prisoner Society lawyer that torture began during the first investigation

PNN, (Bethlehem) Najib Farag Tuesday, 29 August 2006

Palestinian political prisoner, Samir Fahami Ibrahim Taher, has endured one of the latest cases of psychological and physical torture at the hands of the Israeli prison torturers.

The 33 year old Nablus man gave sworn testimony to a Palestinian Prisoner Society attorney describing exactly what has happened to him since arriving in Israeli prison.

Taher was surrounded by seven investigators who screamed at him and called him demeaning names. They told him that they had arrested his wife and said they had an order from the Supreme Court to investigate his death. They accused him of planning resistance operations. Taher denied the charges against him for three days. The Israelis then forced him to take a polygraph.

After that the Israeli investigators bound his legs and hands in an excruciating position and deprived him of sleep for three days. Then he had to take another polygraph. None of these were successful.

During this period the Israelis also severely beat Taher in the head and kicked in various parts of his body. He is still suffering from pain and bruises. The Prisoner Society lawyer says that the bruising is severe, especially around Taher’s eyes. He described them as being large and blue from beatings.

Israeli forces arrested Taher from his home in the northern West Bank on the fourth of this month. Israeli forces arrested Taher’s wife 10 days ago. She is now in the Telmond Women’s Prison. Taher said that he is gravely concerned for her safety, particularly as she may be pregnant.

The Palestinian Prisoner Society says it will follow her case as well.

http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2006%20Opinion%20Editorials/August/24%20o/The%20Real%20Terrorism%20Plot%20By%20Ramzy%20Baroud.htm

The Real Terrorism Plot
By Ramzy Baroud

Al-Jazeerah, August 24, 2006

And yet another menacing terror plot was thwarted 10 August, with the arrest of 24 suspects, all British Muslims. It was an ominous conspiracy aimed at committing "mass murder" on an "unimaginable" scale, British authorities quickly concluded. US authorities hastily joined the action, too claiming a decisive victory over the plotters, thanks in part to the quick thinking of and awesome coordination between US security and intelligence branches. Britain congratulated the US; the US thanked Britain; both saluted Pakistan and its ever-loyal leadership, itself conducting a brutal war against undefined, shadowy groups that emerge and vanish, all too conveniently, and too neatly.

Moments after the shocking announcement, as security threat levels reached their peak in the US and Britain, the debate commenced and it relentlessly continues: Why would a British Muslim choose such a destructive path while living in a democratic society, where change, at least theoretically, is possible through peaceful means?

The media also sprung into action. Ready-to-serve answers were deftly provided by all the usual experts, instantly infusing more conventional wisdom upon a vulnerable public. Attempts to contextualise terrorism within a political milieu were decidedly torpedoed. Despite years of war that seem to have achieved nothing but "mass murder" on an "unimaginable" scale, no one should dare explain the true roots of terrorism; one may explain why poor neighbourhoods in America yield greater crime rates than others, or why abused children become abusers themselves, or even why US soldiers in Iraq often "snap" and massacre entire families, but terrorism that involves Muslims should not in any way be discussed outside its useful parameters of a misguided generation with a radical interpretation of religion: the Islam that produces "Muslim fascists" as President George W Bush termed it.

Very few moderate, or sensible voices are consulted in such debates. British media proves no exception, examining the viewpoints of the utterly fundamentalist or the utterly liberal. The first wants a return to the Islamic caliphate, with London as its capital, and the latter dismisses as hogwash the attempt to examine the government's foreign policy as a reason of radicalisation searing among an already embattled and alienated young Muslim generation.

Expectedly, a letter that was signed by three Muslim MPs and 38 organisations accusing Prime Minister Tony Blair's foreign policy in Iraq, and his support of the Israeli carnage in Lebanon, of "putting civilians at increased risk both in the UK and abroad" hardly changed anything. British Home Secretary John Reid found the mere suggestion of a link unacceptable. Many others followed suit. If anything, the terror plot will strengthen the argument of those eager to harden terror laws, widen the gap between peoples from different religions, but most dangerously give yet more leash to those who champion war as a solution to conflict.

One week before the alleged plot was impeded, 100,000 people in London marched in protest at the British government's position -- particularly that of Blair in support of Israel's war of "self-defence" in Lebanon. Hundreds of protesters threw children's shoes near the doorsteps of the prime minister's residence at 10 Downing Street. They were meant to symbolise the number of children killed in this war, mostly by the Israeli army. I gazed at the impromptu memorial as I held Lebanese and Palestinian flags. Thinking of the tiny bodies of hundreds of children, mingled underneath tons of concrete in Lebanon and Gaza gave me that ever-familiar chill of dejection. Only the nudge of a police officer to my shoulder forced me to move along.

What is radicalisation but a culmination of bitterness, resentment and anger that lurk desperately inside, which often translate to despicable behaviour: terrorism? But if terrorism is killing innocent civilians to achieve political ends, then how else can one explain the American-British war on Iraq with a death toll that has long passed the 100,000 mark? Or the ongoing war in Afghanistan? Or Israel's wars in Palestine and Lebanon, and the funding or abetting of these wars by the US and British governments?

Is it not rational to deduce that "mass murder" in the Middle East, happening at such an "unimaginable" scale, could lead to a culmination of bitterness, resentment, anger and radicalisation that would unavoidably yield terrorism? And since Muslims seem to be the primary target of this mass murder, is it not equally rational to expect that the perpetrators of such terrorist acts might mostly be Muslims?

The insistence on disallowing this argument as one imparted primarily by terror "apologists" is often induced with equal determination to prolong the terrorising wars, of which civilians are the primary victims. A change of course might be understood as bowing to terrorists, as Spain is often accused of doing. Thus the carnage in Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan must continue. This seems to be the underlying logic in refusing to acknowledge the urgency of a fundamental shift in foreign policy, in Britain as well as in the United States.

Those who cautiously attempted to link the terrorist acts of 11 September to America's political, financial and military support of the State of Israel were dismissed, even shunned, whenever they disseminated their logic. Only the drums of war were to be heard. Now, nearly five years later, are we any closer to global peace and tranquillity? How many more lives must be wasted, how much more blood must be shed, and how many more children's shoes must be piled up on Downing Street to realise that cluster bombs don't hold the keys to peace, nor do the torture camps of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay?

One must not accept the logic of those who believe that blowing up innocent travellers is a prudent response to blowing up Lebanese children seeking shelter in a half standing building in South Lebanon, however inhumane. But to continue to pretend that those who carry out acts of "mass murder" at an "unimaginable" scale in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East are not perpetrators of terrorism themselves -- whether directly or by inspiring a cycle terrorist responses -- is to resign to doing nothing in defence of the innocent, British, Palestinian or Lebanese, which, I believe, is equally repugnant.

-Ramzy Baroud’s latest book: “The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle” (Pluto Press, London) is now available at Amazon.com and many bookshops in Britain and elsewhere.

http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2006%20Opinion%20Editorials/August/29%20o/Israel's%20Strategy%20of%20Provocation%20and%20War%20By%20Feroze%20H.%20Mithiborwala.htm

Israel's Strategy of Provocation and War
By Feroze H. Mithiborwala

Al-Jazeerah, August 29, 2006

For all those who are convinced of the perennial threat to the existence of Israel, we must read the interview of General Moshe Dayan, (the legendary Israeli General and Defence Minister and the victor of the "Six Day War of Aggression, in 1967") which he gave to Yediot Aharonot in 1976 and which was only published in April 27, 1997.

On being asked to comment about Syria as a threat to Israel in the 1967 War, this is what Moshe Dayan had to say.

"This was bullshit, Syria was not a threat to Israel before 1967. Just drop it. I know how at least 80 percent of all the incidents with Syria started. We were sending a tractor to the demilitarized zone and we knew that the Syrians would shoot. If they did not shoot, we would instruct the tractor to go deeper, till the Syrians finally got upset and started shooting. Then we employed artillery and later also the air force …. I did that ….and Yitzhak Rabin did that, when he was there."

According to Dayan the Israeli provocation for the war with Syria was greediness for the land. "to grab a piece of land and keep it until the enemy gets tired and gives it to us".

Also consider the following strategy statement by former PM Ehud Barak as reported by Amir Oren in the Haa'retz, January 8, 1999.

"At the moment," Barak admitted, "there is no consensus for an operation against the Syrians except where the terrorists are concerned – (an issue) which under certain circumstances, such as a multi-casualty terrorist strike, or a Katyusha rocket on the Galilee, might lead to consensus….."

With this in mind he recommended that "the necessary infrastructure and plans be prepared for a swift operation, 1967 style against Syria, (an operation) that will develop through a rapid chain of events – a terrorist strike, a strike on terrorists …….it might be possible in indirect ways to influence the forming of a chain of events leading to an anti-terrorist strike."

All we need to do is substitute Syria in the present context by Lebanon to understand the Israeli strategy of provoking war, which brings us to the current Lebanon - Israel conflict.

Israel and the US as well as the overwhelming section of the Western dominated media are projecting this conflict as a war that was provoked by the Hizbullah. They keep on reiterating the myth of the "kidnapping" of the Israeli soldiers from Israeli territory.

Now lets go to the facts that have also been reported in the independent media. Firstly the soldiers were not kidnapped but were "captured" as all soldiers the world over are. Secondly the Israeli soldiers were captured in an intrusion across the "Blue Line" in Lebanese territory as was reported by Forbes ( 12.07.06) who were informed by Israeli officials that "Hizbullah captured two soldiers during clashes, Wednesday, across the border in southern Lebanon, prompting a swift reaction by Israel." This fact has also been further confirmed and vindicated by reports from the London based Independent and Guardian (July 20, 2006).

The tension in the region was definitely being built up over the course of the period that led to the conflagration. Lets us consider a short factual chronology of the events as they unfolded on the Israel-Palestine-Lebanon occupied territories and borders.

1) Since the year 2000, when Israel withdrew from Lebanon but continued to occupy the Sheba'a farms, the UN observers have recorded more that 2400 violations by Israel of Lebanese land, sea and airspace.

2) May 2006 : The Mossad assassinated two Palestinian freedom fighters in an operation in the Lebanese city of Saida. Israel also kidnapped a fisherman, Ahmad Karrami from Lebanese territorial waters. Later on they also aerially bombed Hizbullah strongholds which led to border clashes.

3) Apart from the ongoing repression of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories consider the following incidents:

a) June 9, 2006: Israeli missile attack on a Gazan family on the beach kills 7.

b) June 13, 2006: An IDF missile attack in Gaza kills 9 Palestinians.

c) June 24, 2006: Israel kidnaps a Palestinian doctor and his brother from Gaza.

d) June 25, 2006: Hamas captures an Israeli soldier after an Israeli incursion into the "Green Line" in Gaza.

e) Israel starts aerially bombarding Gaza to which Hamas responds with Katyusha rockets.

f) Hamas demands exchange of prisoners as has been the established precedent of the past. More than 10,000 Palestinian prisoners, including a 1000 women and children continue to languish in Israeli jails.

g) Israel further worsens the situation by kidnapping the Members of Parliament of Hamas while continuing to bomb civilian areas with impunity.

4) July 11, 2006: In an Israeli operation in Lebanese territory, they clash with the Hizbullah in which two Israeli soldiers are captured. Similarly, the Hizbullah bargains for the release of Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails. Israel responds with aerial attacks on South Lebanon, Hizbullah responds with rocket attacks on Northern Israel which finally led to the Israeli invasion.

It is quiet clear to most observers and analysts of this region, that this aggression by Israel was a pre-planned war. Mid-way through the course of the war reports began to appear in the media regarding the Israel's agenda for war and its planning and consent of the US and UK. Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker ( 14.08.06) reported that Israeli officials visited the White House earlier this summer to get a "green light" for the attack on Lebanon. The Bush administration approved the attack to remove the Hizbullah as a deterrent to a potential US bombing of Iran. Even F.A.I.R. – Fairness & Accuracy In Media concluded that the Israeli action "was not a spontaneous reaction to aggression but a well planned operation that was years in the making".

PM Ehud Olmert recently made a statement saying that Israel would eventually declare its borders by 2010. Whilst Bush speaks of his "vision for a New Middle East" and after the massacres of Lebanese civilians, Rice announces that these are the "birth pangs of democracy". Of course the Lebanese government told Rice that they did not need a "mid-wife from hell".

So what are the Israeli-US strategies to impose their agenda for the imperial hegemony of the Middle East and West Asia.

My analysis is the following:

While they create an atmosphere of rising tension that gradually moves into the phase of border clashes then:

1) Launch a full scale War on Lebanon to occupy and annex the territory in south Lebanon till the Litani river. This has been the dream of Ben Gurion. In order to ensure the process of total ethnic cleansing, heavy bombing and destruction of civilian infrastructure is imperative.

The main objective would be to defeat and neutralize the Hizbullah and install a pliant and pro-US/Israeli regime in Beirut.

2) Within the Palestinian territories the repression and massacres would continue.

3) Then under the pretext of the Nuclear issue they would attack Iran and launch a massive aerial bombardment. At the end of which they plan to install a new "moderate" regime in Tehran.

4) During the course of this war campaign they would annex Golan Heights from Syria and if Syria were to challenge, they would be similarly dealt with.

5) During the course of this Regional War they will find the convenient pretext of cracking down upon the Palestinian population and will launch a major war of ethnic cleansing of all Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and also possibly from within Israel itself and push them into Jordan. This is basically the Zionist vision (both within the political and military leadership and in any case they have always morphed) for the solution of the Palestinian problem and a New Middle East.

The above was the real game plan behind the war on Lebanon and it is safe to say that they have failed and miserably at that. The Military and Political invincibility of Israel has been utterly exposed.

The political strategy of the Israeli-US combine was founded on a very simple belief – every time Israel went to War, Israel had to Win. Now the odds against this strategy have definitely mounted.

This very fact gives the opening for the moderate camp within Israel, both within the political and military leadership as well as the civil society to come forward and stake their claim to a just and peaceful solution for the people of Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The relevant UN resolutions and International Laws as well as a framework and consensus to implement the same exists amongst the people, all it now needs is political vision. I will sign off with a statement from Major General (retd) Shlomo Gazit who was the Head of Research at the directorate of Military Intelligence. In discussion with Alan Hart who is the author of a brilliant book "Zionism the Real Enemy of the Jews", one morning over a cup of coffee he said to Shlomo Gazit: "I've come to the conclusion that its all a myth. Israel's existence has never ever been in danger". Through a sad smile Gazit replied, "The trouble with us Israeli's is that we've become victims of our own propaganda".

***

THE INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY AND PEACE DELEGATION TO LEBANON

PRESS STATEMENT

The members of the International delegation addressed a Press Conference at the Press Club of Lebanon in Beirut on August 14, 2006.

We the members OF THE International delegation comprising of representatives from India, Philippines, Brazil, Norway, Spain and France express our solidarity with the people of Lebanon in their resistance to Israeli aggression..

The historic victory of the Lebanese Resistance over Israel aggression has inspired the people's of the world who see in this a reassertion of peoples' power. The resistance has for the first time, broken the myth of Israeli invincibility, its supposed military and political superiority over this region. This victory is a defeat for the US-Israeli designs for a "New Middle East" which is another term for Zionist expansionism and US hegemony that are integral parts of the global imperialist project.

The courageous Lebanese National Resistance led by the Hezbollah and its secretary general Hasan Nasrallah has led to this historic victory. The unity of the Lebanese People across religions and classes and the resilience and resistance of the civil society have also been central to the victory over Israel and USA.

We join Lebanon in mourning the death of all innocent civilians. We condemn the Israeli policy of widespread targeted killings of civilians for ethnic cleansing, as an instrument of state terror. The Israeli attack on civilians is a grave violation of International laws and should be treated as a war crime.

We also express our sympathy for the plight of foreign migrant workers who have been displaced in this Israeli aggression. We demand that the governments provide all necessary assistance. They are an important part of the more than one million Lebanese refugees displaced, leading to a massive humanitarian crisis.

The Israeli policy of "collective punishment" has destroyed civilian infrastructure including residential complexes, entire villages in South Lebanon, bridges, roads, power stations, gas stations. All of this will require billions of dollars to reconstruct. We call upon the international community to help the people of Lebanon in this gigantic task of rehabilitation and reconstruction.

We welcome the ceasefire and call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli troops from South Lebanon. Israel must pay reparation to the victims of the aggression. We call upon the global peace movement, including the Israeli peace movement to resist the US-Israeli aggression.

We also condemn the role of the international media that has been part of the US-Israeli disinformation strategy.

We recommend :

- The setting up of an International War Crimes Tribunal for the trial of Israeli policy makers and the military for crimes against humanity. The International peace movement must facilitate this process.

-The establishment of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.

The withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon including the Shebaa farms.

Withdrawal of Israeli troops from the Golan Heights of Syria.

Release of all prisoners from Israeli jails

- End to the US occupation and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

- End to the US-Israeli threats to Iran and Syria.

The MISSION Members

Comrade Muhammad Salim – Member of Parliament, Communist Party of India (Marxist)

Comrade Kamal Mitra Chenoy – All India Peace and Solidarity Organization and Co-alition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace.

Seema Mustafa : Resident Editor, Asian Age

Feroze Mithiborwala : Forum Against War and Terror

Vijaya Chauhan : Rashtriya Sewa Dal

Walden Bello : Focus on the Global South - Philippines

Kjeld Jakobsen : CUT – Brazil

Herbert Docena : Focus on the Global South – Philippines

Gerard Durand : La Via Campesina – France

Mujiv Hataman : Member of Parliament – Philippines

Kari Kobberoed : La Via Campesina, Norway

German Guillot : Interpreter, Spain

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=14645
Israeli Minister calls for return of occupied Golan Heights to Syria
Date: 21 / 08 / 2006 Time: 12:19

Bethlehem - Ma'an - When Israel attacked Lebanon, some people thought that resistance was faltering and that Israel was going to use force to expand like an octopus, but Israel emerged defeated. Moreover, Arabs have seen that Syria has announced that it is in a state of high alert and redeploying its missiles as it gets ready for war.

Hours after Israeli TV announced the reinforcement of Israeli forces in the occupied Golan Heights, in case of war, the Israeli Minister of Internal Security, Avi Dichter, called on his government to withdraw from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights in return for a true peace treaty.

According to the Israeli minister, "Syria is an important state. The Golan is hugely significant and I am not suggesting that we give up water, because life without water in the Middle East is very difficult. But there is a will for accepted international borders in return for true peace."

There was no official Syrian position regarding these comments and it is still unknown whether Dichter was merely expressing his own views of if there are any secret negotiations underway.

http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=14656
Rationality and Israeli violence by Issa Khalaf
Date: 21 / 08 / 2006 Time: 15:46

Israel's goals in Palestine and Lebanon are inherently irrational. They represent a distorted rationalisation of power and create the conditions for consequences that Israel cannot control

As we witness the unfolding spectacle of ferocious, indiscriminate violence, destruction, and brutality in Gaza and Lebanon, it's difficult to resist the conclusion that there is something terribly wrong with the Israeli state and society. It's as though all moral and psychological constraints and boundaries have been breached, deviancy normalised. Not that state terrorism, deliberate aggression, extreme disproportionate force, and massive violations of international humanitarian law are new to the Israeli state: from 1948, the list is long, the evidence widely available. And anyway, in this case, disproportionality -- a concept actually inapplicable to the evil being rained on defenceless Lebanon or the genocide in Palestine -- implies that Israel is reacting to others' provocations and acts of aggression, as if the Palestine problem began with Hamas and Hizbullah's capture of Israeli soldiers, or as if only Israel has the right to use force to defend itself while its enemies do not, a concept apparently supported by the West, never mind the slavish idiocy of Bush administration pronouncements.

The Israeli self-image of rationality, self- confidence, restraint, pragmatism, and marshal moral superiority are delusions and myths, constructed to protect the Israeli psyche, manipulated by the state to keep alive the specter of existential terror in the Israeli public and to disguise the state's raison d'être, expansion and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and maintain the deeply sociologically and institutionally entrenched Israeli military nature, increasingly blurring the lines between a civilian and military state

In the past five years, one can observe and feel a qualitative change for the worse in Israeli Jewish political psychosis, a turn to the acute. How does one explain the copiously routine, feral, violently racist and bigoted language of Israeli leaders, politicians, bureaucrats, settlers, rabbis, and even academics? The profoundly disturbing disregard for innocent "Arab" life, including children, among Israeli soldiers and the military? The polls that consistently, bizarrely reveal a majority of the Israeli Jewish citizens repelled at living next to or befriending "Arabs"? The rising voices advocating "transfer" of Israeli Arabs or expulsion of the Palestinians? The crazy, unpredictable military rage and terrorism directed at Arab populations? The extremist, self-destructive right-wing drift of Israeli politics?

The Zionist state of Israel seems to be in moral, political, and psychiatric free fall. Unfortunately, its self-imploding, overweening arrogance and terrifyingly dangerous actions are supported by an equally militant government in Washington and a Western world intent on accommodating its violent delusions, not to mention the growing extremism among the organised American Jewish community in support of Israel. This at a time when the principal Arab states and the Palestinians are seeking peace, stability and co-existence, the former's feebleness and inability to defend their people leaving the door open to Islamo-nationalist non-state actors and terrorists.

Those without power increasingly revert to rationality while those with power increasingly rationalise it.

Rational people assume that Israel's behaviour, its "strategy", can be apprehended through reason and political analysis, though its actions in Gaza and Lebanon, apparently meant to cause maximum death and destruction, defy rationality, including when measured against Israel's self-interest. Sure, its actions can be better understood in the context of Zionism's grand design for a Palestinian-free Jewish state in control of maximum territory and its attendant goal (in concert with the Bush administration) of destroying all indigenous resistance and populist, democratic opposition to Israeli military hegemony in the region.

In Lebanon, the apparent objective is to directly destroy Hizbullah, or turn the Lebanese against them, or weaken and politically fragment Lebanon through civil war, or install a collaborative Lebanese government.

Israeli actions are wildly, characteristically disproportionate to the challenges, excluding the peaceful, rational, measured use of instruments for resolving disputes or crises. This has been the story since before 1948. The fury against Lebanon, as in the reaction in Gaza, lacks sensibility, strategic coherence or even calculated utilitarian self-interest, obvious to everyone except those who run the state of Israel, creating the conditions for consequences that Israel cannot control.

The fundamental Israeli goal in laying waste to, and socially and politically fragmenting, Palestine and Lebanon (now that Iraq has been taken care of) is to encourage Islamist extremism in the region and thereby gain Western support in the fight against Islamic terror. While an apparent strategic reason or rationale, it remains fundamentally self-defeating in the long run, contrary to a rational state's calculations for peace, stability, and security for its citizens. Its logic ultimately leads to continual wars and the eventual destruction of Israel itself.

Thus Israel's Palestine-Lebanon (and wider regional) goals are inherently irrational, representing a distorted rationalisation (or in the words of Israeli novelist David Grossman, "mutation") of power -- a distortion of rationality -- the application of which has become a mechanism for its own, nihilistic ends, overturning the modern Western assumption that rationality is universal and constant. This state of affairs obscures, renders fuzzy and indistinct, the domains between reality and fantasy.

And that's where Zionism resides, in states of fantasy, paranoia, denial, schizophrenia, displacement, underlain by absolute power gone amuck. For a time it was fashionable to delineate decades of war, continual states of emergency and existential fear as causes of hate and violence towards Palestinians and Arabs generally. No doubt this is so.

But the problems lie deeper, with a "mutated" power wielded by a narcissistic people with a keen historical sense of both specialness and victimhood, now inheritors of a powerful, exclusionary nation-state, founded through colonial means, predicated on eradication of another nation.

Israel is an ethnic state, with an ethno-religious- nationalist-messianic ideology, based on group identity, not individual rights, whose institutionalised preference is for Jewish superiority, disallowing the possibility of equality for a systematically and sophisticatedly excluded and discriminated against Arab minority. This is far from the system of majority rule based on the principle of moral individual equality, protected through minority rights, rule of law, and civil rights generally found in Western democracies.

Michel Warschawski suggests that these contradictions are dealt with through, one, "denial" leading to schizophrenia (Ilan Pappe also refers to the psychological "mechanism of denial" permeating Israeli society), manifested by the racism and violence and ethnic cleansing and torture and collective punishment of Palestinians and by their general invisibility within Israeli society itself; and, two, through "personalised legislation", that is, the malleability, in the absence of a constitution, of easily changeable electoral and other laws in the absence of the concept of rights in Israel.

Power and its corollary, violence, both physical and psychological, are institutionalised in Israeli state and society. The military, that is, the distorting effect of a culture of militaristic nationalism and the cosy and symbiotic relationship between military and political institutions and leadership of state, has been pointed to by Uri Avnery, Ran HaCohen, Pappe, and Warschawski. A state cannot have apparently liberal minority rights while insisting on the separation of peoples and the institutionalised inferiority of one to the other, a condition similar to Jewish life in Russia of a century ago. Jewish schizophrenia has been transposed onto the Palestinians. Now Israeli Jews are white and European and civilised, keeping at bay genetically and culturally defective and shifty and violent dark skinned Arabs.

The pathological tension between absolute, unconstrained power, aggressiveness, defiance and victimhood, existential fear, and insecurity, produce the violence inherent in the Israeli state. On one level, the stubborn presence of the Palestinians challenges the denial mechanisms and leads to the drive to extirpate the cultural, political, and physical presence of the Other so as not to be reminded of oneself, one's humanity. Israelis are conscious of the fact that their state was created at the original and continuing expense of the Palestinians, through force, but react to this psychosis by denial and violence. Haim Hanegbi expresses the Israeli condition this way:

"I am not a psychologist, but I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds.

"There is something gigantic here that doesn't allow us truly to recognise the Palestinians, that doesn't allow us to make peace with them. And that something has to do with the fact that even before the return of the land and the houses and the money, the settlers' first act of expiation towards the natives of this land must be to restore to them their dignity, their memory, their justness.

"But that is just what we are incapable of doing. Our past won't allow us to do it...Even if Israel surrounds itself with a fence and a moat and a wall, it won't help. Because... Israel as a Jewish state will not be able to exist." (Ari Shavit interview, in Haaretz, with Haim Hanegbi and Meron Benvenisti, 28 August, 2003).

It's as if there is no middle ground for Zionism, no doubt, no introspection: it's our existence or theirs. This psychopathology is made all the more palpable because of the intense moral contradictions: while it has accomplished impressive things, including "Jewish democracy", a place for some Jews to take refuge or to find pride, survival at all odds, and economic and technological development, Israel is a colonial settler society in origin as much as Zionism is also a variant of Jewish nationalism; it is both non-democratic in its exclusion of non-Jews and democratic for its Jewish majority.

Regardless of how one sees it, the end result is, as Israeli observers themselves have commented, a barbarisation, moral decline or debasement, of Israeli society. How could it be otherwise, what with a Zionist ideology that, from its origin, treated the Palestinians with cruelty, disdain, violence, and loathing, traits common to all colonial-settler societies. And with the state since 1948 having so thoroughly indoctrinated Israeli society, through wars and manipulation of existential fears, occupation and relentlessly violent oppression. And with a racist educational system -- which portrays the "Arabs" as inferior, lazy, fatalistic, dirty, easily inflammable, violent and bloodthirsty -- and socialisation of superiority and separation and alienation of Jews from non-Jews, in cities and neighbourhoods, on Jewish owned lands and public domains.

The pathological nature of this indoctrination is illustrated by the cold-blooded murder of the 13-year-old schoolgirl, Iman Al-Hams, by a "Captain R", who was subsequently acquitted and promoted. After shooting her twice in the head, he walked away then turned around and emptied the entire magazine of his automatic rifle, 17 bullets, into her to "confirm the kill". The captain, on tape, "clarifies" why he killed Al-Hams: "This is commander. Anything that's mobile, that moves in the [security] zone, even if it's a three-year-old, needs to be killed."

Journalists and human rights organisations have documented countless cases of Israelis killing children, even for sports and game. Notice, here, the captain's language: Anything that's mobile...needs to be killed . Not anyone who is mobile. Palestinian children are like animals, like anything, like animals they are moving, like animals, not human, they, it, need(s) to be killed.

Captain R turns out to be a Druze, a powerful telling of the sick success of Israeli socialisation and indoctrination. This Druze, historically the marginal outsider in mainstream Islamic society, internalised Israel's ethnic/racial pecking order -- its colonially inherited psychopathology in which the indigenous become animals -- therefore violently displacing his inferiority, as Mizrahi Jews do, onto the Palestinians. Dehumanising, hating and killing Palestinians is the ultimate, disturbed act of belonging and loyalty to a society accustomed to its influential members referring to Palestinians as beasts, two-legged animals, cockroaches and worms, unaware of their own degradation and dehumanisation in the process.

The possession of power fused with acute political and social psychosis, manifested by power's irrational application and self-dehumanising behaviour, betrays a deep-seated fear: while Israel possesses unequalled power and its political/military class was historically confident of its ability to militarily prevail against Arab armies, the country is unceasingly, silently, troubled by the possibility of one day being abandoned by the United States. Without its patron, its power is as nothing, not necessarily militarily, but emotionally and psychologically.

Awesome military might and the myth of invincibility is a tenuous psychological condition, masking Israelis' deepest existential fears that the millions they've dispossessed, killed, and continue to torment cannot ultimately be silenced and will come back to haunt them. But Israel's current elites seem unable to transcend their psychological paralysis: they resist abandoning, even self-critically reflecting on, their worn-out ideological, expansionist aspirations yet fervently desire acceptance of the surrounding peoples, to whom they relate only in the language and logic of absolute violence.

The Israeli/Zionist condition, unchanged, is a sure recipe for widespread regional annihilation.

The writer has a PhD in political science and Middle East studies from Oxford University. This article was first published in the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram Weekly, 18 August 2006