In Defense of the Two-State Solution

by Justin Soutar

As a freelance writer who has been following the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a Catholic perspective for twenty years, it’s heartbreaking to watch what is now happening in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territories, especially Gaza, as the dangerous radical Zionist ideology unleashes its destructive power against hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and the historic Christian community in the Holy Land continues to dwindle toward extinction. No less disturbing is the hard-heartedness of well-intentioned American conservative politicians, TV and radio commentators, magazine editors, and citizens who, blinded by their wholehearted support for Israel, cannot see the naked evil of radical Zionism or the havoc it is wreaking in the Holy Land and the surrounding Middle East.

Radical Zionism is the fundamental root cause of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Without the existence and activity of this century-old ideology and movement, no such conflict would have arisen and persisted so stubbornly. The radical Zionists’ trademark crime of seizing Palestinian property outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders, evicting or killing its owners and tenants, and handing it over to illegal European Jewish settlers has instigated and fueled the conflict while provoking occasional wars between Israel and surrounding Arab nations as well as radical “Islamic” terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians by a handful of Palestinians. In this vicious circle of injustice perpetuated by Israeli and Palestinian extremists, radical Zionists bear greater responsibility, as they initiated the cycle of violence and consistently kill and displace far more innocent people than the radical “Muslims” do.

The radical Zionist ideology and movement were founded by a handful of non-religious European Jewish intellectuals who settled illegally in British-occupied Palestine in the early 1900s, often forcing native Palestinians off their ancestral lands in the process. An offshoot of the mainstream (that is, peaceful and legitimate) Zionist movement, which led to the creation of the modern nation of Israel in 1948 and has generally dominated its politics since then, radical Zionism has much in common with the better-known twentieth-century ideologies of Nazism and Communism: it is fundamentally atheistic, secularist, utopian, racist, violent, and genocidal. Its ambitious goal is to expand Israel’s territory until it includes all of the land that was part of the ancient biblical Kingdom of Israel, which stretched from the Nile River in Egypt to the Euphrates River in present-day Iraq, and to create therein an earthly paradise reserved exclusively for European Jews. The radical Zionist ideologues have used, are now using, and will continue to use any and all means necessary to achieve this goal of restoring the “Eretz Yisrael” (“Greater Israel”), including anti-Palestinian propaganda and economic warfare; the Israeli electoral process; mass forced displacement of Palestinian Muslims, Christians, and Jews; illegal immigration and settlement of Palestinian land; bribery; intimidation; terrorism; arbitrary arrest and detention; military invasion, occupation, and annexation; and mass murder.

In their blissful ignorance of radical Zionism, American conservative commentators cite radical “Islam” as the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East. From the perspective of the radical Zionists, this common misconception conveniently deflects public attention from the elephant in the room. Radical Zionism is the more dangerous of the two ideologies because its followers are more widespread, more professional, better organized and trained, better funded, more secretive, more determined, and more violent. Its adherents in Israel, the U.S. and Europe range from headline-grabbing settler-terrorists to behind-the-scenes intelligence operatives to politicians in business suits. Their visibility, activities, and locations may differ, but they are united in a single purpose: to make the dream of the Greater Israel a reality. The radical Zionist movement of the twenty-first century wields an international terrorist organization of greater reach, destruction, and effectiveness than any radical “Muslim” terrorist network, and it is operating virtually unchecked.

The success and influence of the radical Zionist settler movement has waxed and waned through the years depending on various political, diplomatic, social, cultural, and economic factors. Concomitantly, the methods used to illegally acquire Palestinian land parcels and the number of illegal settlements have fluctuated significantly over time. For much of its existence, the movement was limited to small and scattered groups of European Jewish illegal immigrants living permanently in Palestinian territory with the knowledge, if not always the approval or permission, of the Zionist council or the Israeli government. Israeli leaders unsympathetic to radical Zionism have attempted to halt illegal settlement construction altogether, which allowed the peace process to move forward. On the other hand, during those occasional periods when the radical Zionists managed to gain control of the Israeli government and military, illegal settlement construction boomed, provoking further violent conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

We are in such an unfortunate period now. Following the murder of more than 1,000 Israeli civilians by terrorists from the violent wing of Hamas in October 2023, radical Zionists cunningly played on Israeli citizens’ fears of additional attacks to seize full control of the Israeli government and armed forces. The recent pattern of official Israeli statements and actions clearly indicates the current government’s aggressive and unconditional support for the radical Zionist movement and betrays its genocidal intentions. The current Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is a lifelong radical Zionist who committed terrorist attacks against Palestinian civilians in his youth. His regime is dramatically accelerating the process of establishing the Greater Israel through forced displacement and slaughter of the Palestinian people. The killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and the expulsion of one million more from Gaza is just the tip of the iceberg. Building the Greater Israel will require the unilateral annexation of all Palestinian territory and, eventually, parts of nearby Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Egypt; the obliteration of priceless Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy sites; the massacre of several million innocent Palestinian and other Arab civilians; and the forced displacement of many millions more Arabs into nearby countries and areas. In other words, genocide, a regional war, cultural destruction, and a massive refugee crisis are in the offing, to say nothing of the environmental and economic devastation the war will inevitably cause. These regional hostilities will expand into a world war if the international community intervenes decisively to stop the radical Zionists from founding the Greater Israel, just as it did eighty-plus years ago to prevent the Nazis from establishing the Third Reich.

In the violent conflict of the last two years (not a “war,” properly speaking, as wars are fought by nation-states, such as Russia and Ukraine) between “Islamic” terrorists from the radical wing of Hamas and the radical Zionist-controlled Israeli military, approximately 3,000 innocent Israelis and 65,000 innocent Palestinians have been killed. It is clear from the outrageously disproportionate nature of the casualties—more than twenty Palestinians for every Israeli—which ideology is bloodier, yet American conservative commentators do not sound the alarm about the dangers of radical Zionism, dismissing factual reports of Palestinian genocide by Israel out of hand, blaming radical “Muslim” terrorists for the Palestinian refugee crisis, and denouncing criticism of Israeli policies as “anti-Semitic”. Whenever an Israeli civilian is killed, these commentators speak and write all about it; but when a Palestinian civilian is killed by violence or starvation, they remain silent or mention it in passing, seeming not to notice or care. Are Israelis and Palestinians not both children of God? Has the Creator not equally endowed them with inalienable rights?

During the twentieth century, Turkey slaughtered its Armenians, Germany killed its Jews, and Pakistan butchered its East Bengalis, to mention just a few modern examples of ethnic cleansing. Yet in most cases, the genocidal tyrants were defeated, often at the cost of a bloody war, and the victim peoples survived to realize their dream of self-determination. In the case of the East Bengalis, the independent nation of Bangladesh came to birth on India’s east-central border. The good of natural law ultimately triumphed over the evil of ideology. Taking a lesson from history, this author predicts that the Palestinian people will survive the current genocide and return to their homeland to establish the independent nation that is rightfully theirs.

In 1948, after careful and extensive research, the recently founded United Nations Organization, led by the United States, approved the establishment of the modern nation of Israel with specific borders and with the understanding that within ten to twenty years, a modern nation of Palestine would be established alongside it. Unfortunately, due to the persistent and outsized influence of the radical Zionist ideology, modern Israel has always illegitimately claimed and occupied various portions of territory beyond its internationally recognized borderlines, and the birth of the Palestinian nation has been delayed indefinitely. Meanwhile, demographic shifts during the past eight decades have only strengthened the Palestinian position. The number of Palestinians during this time has grown rapidly, leading to a high population density in the Palestinian Territories, while the number of Israelis has increased quite modestly by comparison. So if anything, the borderlines drawn by the UN in 1948 are considerably more generous to Israel than they were almost eighty years ago.

It has been the position of the Holy See for decades, which this author shares, that the long-proposed two-state solution, with two independent nations of Israel and Palestine existing side by side within internationally recognized borders and the historic Old City of Jerusalem in a special international zone, is the only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bring real and lasting peace to the Middle East. There can be no peace without justice, and there will be no justice for the Palestinian people until the radical Zionist ideology and movement are defeated. Let us pray daily for the conversion of the radical Zionists and of those well-intentioned commentators whose ignorance and silence allow the evil of radical Zionism to grow more powerful with each passing day.

Copyright © 2025 Justin D. Soutar.

Radical Zionism Is the Greatest Threat to Peace in the Holy Land

by Justin Soutar

It's hard to believe that I've been writing about this topic for almost twenty years now. As a young and idealistic new freelance writer way back in 2005, I undertook a broad and intense study of the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict and related Middle Eastern history and culture in order to arrive at the objective truth of the situation. Two years prior, in 2003, Pope John Paul II's strong opposition to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had cracked and broken the glass dome of my neat and tidy view of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that had been shaped by President Bush, Republican politicians, and conservative political commentators, alerting me that something was drastically wrong with that view. So I decided to re-examine the subject with an open mind to determine the root causes of this historic conflict and how it could be resolved. I read almost everything I could get my hands on by a wide variety of authors on all sides of the issue, including historians, journalists, diplomats, and conservative and liberal political commentators, interpreting it all from the perspective of Catholic doctrine and the stated positions of recent popes, especially John Paul II and Benedict XVI. As a result, the realities of the conflict and the necessary steps to a peaceful resolution emerged with crystal clarity. It did not matter one bit that my resulting position on the issue was nearly identical with that of liberal Democratic commentators. What mattered was that I had discovered vital truths about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that few people in the U.S. seemed to be aware of, as they were getting lost in partisan political squabbles, and that the dominant conservative Republican view of the conflict was so ideologically biased and riddled with factual errors that it was an obstacle to peace in and of itself. So, in an attempt to remedy this situation, I wrote and published the book America's Back-Door Enemy: Unmasking the Unknown Terrorists (Tate Publishing, 2009), which is now out of print. (If you would like a used copy, please contact me.)

One of the most important things I learned about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has long been and continues to be ignored and dismissed by ideologically blind conservative commentators in the U.S., was the existence and activity of the radical Zionist movement. This small but vicious group of pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian, European Jewish terrorists and settlers has been around since well before the modern state of Israel was established in 1948, and has grown larger, bolder, more powerful, more cunning, more sophisticated, and more violent in recent years. It has infiltrated and influenced the Israeli military, government, courts, economy, and society through the decades and is currently in control of the Israeli government. It has committed murderous terrorist attacks against tens of thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians and has unjustly evicted tens of thousands more, including many Christians, from their ancestral homes in the Holy Land and surrounding Palestinian territories. Radical Zionist operatives from Israel's intelligence agency Mossad orchestrated the dramatic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, in the United States, which was a "false flag" operation carefully designed to appear carried out by Arab "Islamic" terrorists. The aim of these attacks was to get American policy, and specifically American military involvement, in the Middle East unequivocally on Israel's side. The radical Zionists were successful in getting the U.S. to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein from power, although there was insufficient moral justification for doing so. Pope John Paul's prediction that the resulting power vacuum would be filled by Islamic fundamentalists came true as ISIS unleashed a devastating reign of terror across Iraq from 2014 until 2021.

The goal of the radical Zionist movement, which is one of the most dangerous international terrorist organizations on the planet, is to restore the biblical Greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael) that will stretch eastward to the Euphrates River in present-day Iraq and include Jordan and part of Syria as well. This demonic movement will not hesitate to use any and all means necessary, up to and including the forced displacement and genocide of the Palestinian people, in order to achieve its utopian dream. 

There is extensive media coverage and conservative commentary in the U.S. of terrorist attacks by the radical fringe of Hamas against innocent Israeli civilians and allegedly justified Israeli military responses to these crimes, but we hear precious little about the radical Zionist terrorism and land theft being committed against innocent Palestinian Jewish, Christian, and Muslim civilians with impunity, and when we do, it is not identified as radical Zionist. While the latter crimes provoke the former and the former crimes are used to justify the latter in a perpetual vicious cycle of violence, the radical Zionist movement is the fundamental root cause of the entire conflict. Its utterly godless members refuse to recognize that the Palestinian people have any rights whatsoever, seeing them merely as an obstacle to be eliminated in order to create their own paradise on earth. And they view the surrounding Arab countries as evil enemies of Israel because they acknowledge and uphold the basic human rights of the Palestinian people, their fellow Arabs.

As all recent popes have stated, there can be no peace without justice. Radical Zionism is the greatest threat to justice and peace in the Holy Land and surrounding Israel and Palestine. Therefore, this evil movement must be defeated by prayer, fasting, and the arrest and prosecution of its members. Both the Israeli and Palestinian peoples have the right to a state within clearly defined borders established by international law. The Israelis have had one for 76 years, but despite their relatively low population, at the urging of radical Zionists, they have been illegally and unjustly attempting to expand their state's territory at the expense of the Palestinians. The Palestinians, despite their much higher population, still don't have a state. The following steps are absolutely necessary for a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: 

1. Both sides must renounce the use of violence in any form as a means to achieve their goals. 

2. Israel must withdraw within and officially accept its borders established by the U.N. in 1948. 

3. The long overdue state of Palestine must be established and officially recognized by Israel.

4. The Old City of Jerusalem, including the Temple Mount which is sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, must be placed in the international zone established by the U.N. in 1948. 

 

Copyright © 2024 Justin D. Soutar.

Hillary Clinton at the Witness Stand

This morning, former Senator, former First Lady, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took the witness stand in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol building to testify before the Benghazi Committee regarding her role as Secretary of State during the mysterious terrorist attack of September 11, 2012 that claimed the lives of four American civilians at the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi, Libya. This Congressional investigation, led by Representative Trey Gowdy, represents a noble attempt to probe beneath the Obama administration's inconsistent and unsatisfactory official account of this tragedy in order to find the real answers to the perplexing questions of what actually happened, who was responsible, and why the State Department refused requests for additional security at the Consulate prior to the attack. The problem is that, in its efforts to pierce the administration's thickly woven veil of secrecy surrounding this terrorist crime and get the full truth of the matter to the American people, the Benghazi Committee is up against corrupt and deceitful politicians, a heavily biased mainstream media, and a super-secret spy network from one of America's closest allies in the Middle East.

It would be downright foolish to accept the testimony of Hillary Clinton regarding the Benghazi terrorist attack at face value. As a deeply corrupt, dishonest and power-hungry career politician, Mrs. Clinton has too much at stake to clearly admit to any kind of criminal wrongdoing on her watch as Secretary of State, such as failing to ensure the safety of American diplomatic personnel at an overseas embassy or sending classified information through a private unsecured email server or permanently deleting thousands of emails containing such sensitive information. Why? Because such an admission would not only jeopardize her dream of becoming President of the United States, it would also undoubtedly lead to the discovery of incriminating evidence against her erstwhile collaborators within the State Department, ultimately exposing a massive crime ring within the Obama administration. In fact, for many months now, she and her allies in the administration have been desperately attempting to shut down the Benghazi Committee and destroy Congressman Gowdy's reputation in order to prevent the full story of the Benghazi attack from ever seeing the light of day. Thankfully, these evasive political tactics have not yet proven entirely successful, since Hillary has finally been cornered, forced by Congressional subpoena to testify under oath on the matter. What she had to say, though, was (quite literally) another story.

In their efforts to suppress or deflect attention from the truth and advance their political careers, Mrs. Clinton and President Obama can count on their fluently deceptive and reliantly subservient mainstream media buddies to influence public opinion in their favor by presenting the Benghazi Committee as a cynical Republican political maneuver to destroy Hillary's reputation prior to the 2016 presidential election. This deliberate misrepresentation has produced its intended effect, convincing roughly seventy-five percent of Americans to view the Congressional Benghazi investigation as a politically motivated scheme rather than as the sincerely honest and important fact-finding mission it really is. By discrediting the Committee in the minds of the American people, the mainstream media hopes to diminish the impact of the incriminating revelations about Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration that are certain to emerge from this Congressional investigation.

Corrupt politicians who lie to protect their careers and mainstream media journalists who lie to protect the politicians would be sufficient to make Representative Gowdy's critical job a challenging task to fulfill. However, there is also a third and virtually unknown factor at play in the Benghazi affair that rarely, if ever, surfaces in any of the discussions on the matter, and that is the probable role of Israeli intelligence in producing the anti-Islamic video that allegedly provoked the attack, in the attack itself, and in the Obama administration's cover-up following the attack.

While Hillary Clinton and President Obama may be inveterate liars, some grains of truth are probably embedded in their insistently reiterated story that the despicable anti-Islamic video Innocence of Muslims sparked protests that led to the attack. Based on my years of research into this area, I have little doubt that this video was clandestinely produced by Israeli intelligence agents at the behest of radical Zionists and deliberately released on the Internet to coincide with the eleventh anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Apparently the goal of Mossad, Israel's highly advanced intelligence agency, in secretly creating and releasing this video was to stir up Muslim outrage throughout the Middle East, which would spark violent protests in multiple countries, forming a suitable backdrop for the dramatic act of violence that the agency itself was planning to carry out against innocent American civilians at the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi. The video would then serve as a convenient scapegoat for the terrorist attack--an attack which was carefully designed to appear as if it was carried out by al-Qaeda, with all traces of its true source diligently hidden from plain view.

For a number of years now, anonymous Mossad spies have excelled at the dark art of perpetrating such "false flag" terrorist attacks in selected locations all around the world, including right here in the United States on September 11, 2001, in order to further the radical Zionist agenda of world domination. But just as the Congressional 9/11 Commission was never able to identify the exact details or the real perpetrators of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, so the Benghazi Committee will most likely fail to unearth the actual details or perpetrators of the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi on September 11, 2012. If Israeli intelligence was actually involved in the Benghazi affair, and if Hillary Clinton is aware (as I suspect she might well be) of this highly secretive involvement, she would not divulge any information about it to the Benghazi Committee for fear of certain and swift retaliation from Mossad. Members of an elite, high-tech and global organized crime ring, Israeli spies operate in absolute and perpetual secrecy, and they retain this indispensable cloak of darkness by threatening to kill anyone "in the know" who would even think of revealing their true identity and activities. Such are America's nameless and faceless back-door enemies, who will continue to craftily manipulate our national politics and foreign policy, using terrorist violence when necessary in order to further the godless agenda of radical Zionism.

Article Heritage Series #1: "Radical Zionism Unveiled"

(Note: The following is the first installment in my "Article Heritage Series" that I am now beginning to run here on my blog. This series, which I plan to run every few months for the next few years, will feature a handful of articles from my early days as a writer. Some of these articles have never before been published; others have already been published widely. The article below, which I wrote in 2007 and entitled "Radical Zionism Unveiled," falls into the former category of never-before-published pieces. I had submitted it to a political website in 2008 and the editor expressed some interest in publishing it, but after a considerable length of time I ultimately never heard back from him. I'm really not surprised, because this article contains some highly controversial information about the radical Zionist movement and how this movement has been fueling violent conflict in the Middle East from the early twentieth century up until today. After carefully reviewing this piece, I can say that I stand by what I have written. The information in this article will be disturbing to many people, but it desperately needs to be known if people are to begin to have a clear and accurate understanding of what is really driving the persistent conflict in the Middle East, free from political, ideological, and mainstream media bias. Everyone is familiar with "radical Islam," but few have ever heard of radical Zionism. This secret, dangerous, and powerful religious fundamentalist movement is deliberately yet clandestinely manipulating political affairs in the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy wtih respect to the region; spreading its propaganda through the world's mainstream media; and fomenting and perpetrating unconscionable acts of violence to achieve its evil ends--and it has been doing all of this for many years. People need to know about this radical Zionist movement and how it endangers world peace in order to have a clearer understanding of the situation in the Middle East and how our nation should deal with this situation on the basis of unchanging moral principles and respect for human rights and dignity. People need to know the full truth of what is going on in the Middle East. The recent outbreaks of violence in Egypt and Syria make this article quite pertinent. Here is the article in full as originally written, with just a few minor stylistic edits. For a fuller exposition of the radical Zionist movement and its quest for world domination, please read my book America's Back-Door Enemy. --J.S.)

Radical Zionism Unveiled

by Justin Soutar September 20, 2007

Diehard champions of American support for Israel who believe that the Palestinian people have been the primary antagonists in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can back up their claims with a flurry of recent books. Arguably the two most prominent of these are The Case for Israel, which emerged in 2003 from the pen of noted Jewish lawyer Alan Dershowitz, and The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace by former US Middle East ambassador Dennis Ross, published in 2004 and reprinted in 2005. Whereas the first text is thin and focuses on answering specific questions about Israel, the latter is a richly detailed, voluminous history of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process based on Ross’s memoirs kept during his twelve-year service as an envoy. In 2003 Yaacov Lozovick, director of Israel’s famous Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, published the treatise Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars. Another passionate defense of Israeli policies over the past sixty years is The Return of Anti-Semitism, a rather slim volume authored by Gabriel Schoenfeld and released in 2004. In addition, mention could be made of the larger book The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul by Yoram Hazony. Phyllis Chesler’s The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do about It, printed by Jossey-Bass in 2005, is a sloppy text that has nevertheless drawn significant praise. A better work is Mitchell Geoffrey Bard’s second edition of Myths and Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israel Conflict, which came out in 2001 from the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not mention Never Again?: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism by Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League. With the exceptions of The Case for Israel and The Return of Anti-Semitism, these books present a wealth of historical data, much of it accurate.

However, all these defenses of Israeli policy leave something to be desired: freedom from bias. The information they contain is deliberately selective, and twisted to prove the authors’ points.

For instance, notice that three of the books in the above representative sample contain the word “anti-Semitism” in their titles and warn of a revival of anti-Jewish hatred. Judging by their titles, these volumes would seem only tangentially related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arab-Israeli conflict, after all, is not about the Arabs hating the Jews. It is a dispute over a small piece of religiously significant land between Arab natives and European Jewish immigrants. The Palestinian enmity toward the European-Israeli Jew is not a result of the latter’s Jewishness, but of the former’s longtime unjust forced displacement. Taking a stand against such an unjust policy should not provoke an accusation of anti-Semitism. But in fact, all seven books mentioned above equate opposition to this and other Israeli crimes against Palestinians with hatred of the Jewish people and claim that most of those atrocities have been fabricated by anti-Semitic individuals to provide grounds for such hatred. The authors assert that since the Jewish people are special, they will always be subjected to irrational prejudice, persecution, and marginalization from all other peoples on earth.

In discussing these topics, factual accuracy is vitally important. But it is also crucial to recognize that interpretations of verified facts and conclusions drawn from those facts can be either correct or incorrect, acceptable or unacceptable, logically sound or logically flawed. For example, it is a fact of history that German Jewish bankers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century exerted significant influence over that nation’s economy and, through some methods which were less than honest, contributed to the frequent depressions which plagued Germany during that time. Adolf Hitler concluded from this fact that all Jews everywhere were dangerous to civilization and must be killed. Thus he used one evil, the greed of a few German Jews, to justify a far worse evil, mass murder. Hitler’s reasoning was illogical and must be absolutely condemned by anyone who has a conscience. But to simply reject the factual basis of Hitler’s excuse out of hand as being untrue is to demonstrate puerility.

This brings us to another issue, the issue of bias. Some people do not wish to admit the possibility that certain unpleasant or unflattering facts may be true. So they hide inside their own self-constructed cocoon of pseudo-reality. They refuse to think outside of their own little box. In his classic Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton referred to such persons as maniacs. Bias prevents the open-mindedness needed for sound education and critical thinking.

A particularly irritating bane of the truth-seeker is confusion of fact and opinion. Often opinions are substituted for facts, while in other instances fact and opinion are mixed almost unrecognizably together. Iraq provided a good example of this. It is a historical fact that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction from the 1980s until 1994. The Bush administration’s opinion that Hussein continued to possess such armaments in the early 2000s and was reconstituting his WMD programs was presented to the American public as irrefutable fact. Yet lack of evidence has shown that belief to be a mere opinion. Similarly, we were told that the war in Iraq would greatly benefit the country and trigger a domino effect of democratic revolutions in the region. Most Americans now acknowledge the unpleasant fact that the war has severely damaged Iraq and led to further destabilization of the Middle East. Yet some persisted in their opinion that the war was just and would ultimately be “won”.

Finally, we should realize that politicians, businesspeople, lawyers, and others (even many historians) often distort facts and tell lies in order to promote their self-serving agendas. Corruption and dishonesty frequently go hand in hand. Thus, when reading a book or article, it is a commonsense precaution to ascertain who paid the author to write the work, and which connections that author has, that might pose a conflict of interest.

Getting the truth is a challenging and tricky business indeed. It requires a lot of reading, interpretation, open-mindedness, and critical thinking. We live in a complex and confused world, and perhaps nowhere is complexity and confusion more evident than in the Arab-Israeli conflict. No honest historian can dispute the reality that Jewish persons have indeed been unjustly mistreated many times and in many places throughout the centuries. But by grossly exaggerating contemporary anti-Semitism and labeling criticism of modern Israeli policies anti-Semitic, the above-mentioned writers are helping to advance the sinister agenda of a radical Zionist ideology.

The intellectual and philosophical foundations of this revolutionary Zionist movement were laid by Russian anarchist philosopher Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880 to 1940). He wrote that the Jewish people must take the matter of their survival into their own hands by flooding into Palestine and using mass deportation of Palestinians, violence, and any other means necessary to create a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River.

From the 1920s through 1948, bands of European Jewish immigrant terrorists such as Irgun Z’vai Leumi and the Stern Gang spread bloodshed and destruction across the Palestinian heartland in the name of freedom for the Jewish people. Once the state of Israel was established in 1948, these terrorist networks were dissolved into ostensibly peaceful political parties such as Likud. The power of these factions remained relatively insignificant until 1977, when Likud won the Israeli election. This party managed to hold onto the government for most of the next thirty years. During this period, Israel invaded Lebanon and severely damaged Beirut; illegally constructed thousands of homes for Jewish settlers in, and tightened military control of, the Palestinian Occupied Territories; demolished thousands of Palestinian homes; retaliated in cruel fashion for Palestinian demonstrations known as the Intifada; saw a former terrorist (Yitzhak Shamir of Irgun) attain the posts of foreign minister and prime minister; saw new Jewish terrorist groups such as Kach and Kahane Chai appear; witnessed the assassination of peace-making Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin; and carried on a clandestine nuclear weapons program in the Negev Desert. Unfortunately, the victory of a centrist Kadima party in the 2006 Israeli election has not slowed the pace of Zionist extremism. Another destructive Israeli invasion of Lebanon and continued refusal to acknowledge the Palestinian refugees’ right of return have made abundantly clear that the Zionist extremist ideology is gaining the upper hand.

Since the end of the Cold War and especially since the 9/11 tragedy, radical Zionism has been further developed and craftily popularized by American neoconservatives such as Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Dennis Ross. This ideology says that an elite number of Jews may use all means necessary—including laissez-faire globalization, deception, bribery, intimidation, theft, terrorism, forced displacement of the Palestinians and other Arabs, murder, manipulation of the global economy, violation of international law, and aggressive warfare—to resurrect the ancient kingdom of Israel and ultimately to amass unlimited wealth. This “Eretz Yisrael” in Hebrew, or “Greater Israel”, which would stretch from northeastern Egypt to central Iraq, would be touted as the “salvation” of the Jewish people and thus serve as a humanly constructed, political replacement for the true Messiah’s reign. For Zionist fundamentalists, the current state of Israel serves as the springboard from which to launch their world empire.

Neoconservatism is essentially an Americanized version of radical Zionism which flowered in the 1990s. It calls for the establishment of a “New World Order” in which the all-powerful United States dictates to, and controls the affairs of, the world in order to allow continued concentration of wealth in the hands of mega-corporate tycoons.

Greed is the driving force behind both the neoconservative and revolutionary Zionist ideologies. Particularly, in the relentless drive to seize control of all the vast petroleum reserves in the Middle East and Central Asia, we can observe the malevolent neoconservative and radical Zionist plan at work. The two ideologies are mutually dependent: tiny Israel needs the military power and influence of the neoconservative United States government to sustain the radical Zionist program, while the United States needs Zionist fundamentalism to help secure its power over Middle Eastern oil.

By contrast, classic Zionism is the fully acceptable belief—held by a majority of the thirteen million Jews in today’s world—that the Jewish people have the same rights as all other peoples, including the right to their own state. This Zionist movement does not advocate violence or any illegal or unjust methods in the pursuit of Jewish nationalism.

Old books tend to be good books, and this is the case with books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I would like to highly recommend several such old works that are more informative than the prejudiced and selective volumes being churned out on the subject since 9/11. The first is A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel by Walter Laqueur, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1972. The second is O Jerusalem! by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPierre, published by Simon & Schuster also in 1972. While Laqueur’s book is a scholarly text, the volume coauthored by Collins and LaPierre reads like a novel with its multitude of personal stories and is greatly accessible to the general public (as attested by its sale of 30 million copies to date). Both these classic hardbacks will give open-minded readers the facts they need to properly assess the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In addition, knowledge of the Palestinian viewpoint is essential to attain a balanced perspective of the struggle. I highly recommend the 1990 biography of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat by Janet and John Wallach entitled Arafat: In the Eyes of the Beholder, printed by Carol Publishing Group. A not so old book that is nevertheless miles away from the recent ideological manifestos—in its accurate, concise yet complete content and dispassionate tone—is Palestine/Israel: The Long Conflict by James Ciment, released in 1997 as part of the Facts on File series.

In the context of this discussion, one notable work deserves more than cursory attention. A pamphlet entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was anonymously written around 1897, printed in Russia a few years later, and then widely translated and published in Europe from 1920 onward. This booklet purports to relate the actual verbal instructions given to a new Elder, a new member of a secret group of Jews and Freemasons, in what is now the Czech Republic. The goal of this secret society is to set up a world government by destroying the traditional social order (marriage and family life, civil rights, generosity of rich to the poor) through twenty-five methods (protocols) including control of the media and finance, destruction of religion, world wars, proliferation of destabilizing ideologies such as Darwinism and Communism, staging catastrophes and then using them as excuses for aggression, and the dissemination of pornographic literature. In 1920, a British journalist detected substantial plagiarism from two earlier books by French and Prussian fiction writers within The Protocols, exposing the work as a fraud.

Today The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is rightly condemned as an anti-Semitic publication because it portrays the Jewish people and their religion as evil. At the same time, it would be foolish to assert that, in the midst of its farfetchedness, this tract does not contain some grains of truth. The Jewish religion is good and noble, and so are the vast majority of Jews upon this earth. However, an elite cadre of Jews is indeed pursuing their radical Zionist agenda—subtly, never overtly—using many of the methods described in the Protocols.

The neoconservative contribution to this agenda is the concept of a “New World Order” in which, under the guise of defending freedom and democracy, the United States tramples on every moral and international law as it swells its military arsenal and rules the world by mega-corporate fiat.

All of Protocols 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 21, 22, and 23 as well as parts of 1, 11, and 12 outlined in the Protocols, together with the charter document of the flagship neoconservative organization Project for a New American Century, constitute the fanatical Zionist manifesto.

Even this small group is not responsible for every little problem everywhere on earth; however, it bears varying degrees of responsibility for most of the major international problems. Zionist extremist influence on the world today may not be clear to those who believe Western media propaganda, but it is palpable to the candid independent observer who takes the time to look dispassionately around our troubled globe.

In the beautiful, clean pages of their shiny books, Dershowitz, Ross and the other smooth political writers assert or imply that the great majority of Zionist settlers in Palestine were noble, peaceful people who were unjustly attacked by aggressive Arabs. But the actual situation was more complex. According to Laqueur, while most founders and leaders of the Zionist movement were upright and peaceable men who advocated treating the Palestinians with respect (Laqueur, A History of Zionism, pp. 48, 64, 70-71, 80-81, 111, 117, 138, 149, 166-69, 194, 218-19, 241-42, 252, 337, 419, 471, 538, 574-576), a large number of the early Zionist immigrants behaved in a thoroughly selfish and despicable manner. Laqueur relates how in the late 1800s, a few hundred European Jews seized active Arab farms—not just empty land—and either forced Arab families to abandon them or, if they refused, killed them on the spot. Those instances of theft, robbery and murder, which Laqueur says were common occurrences throughout the history of European Jewish settlement in Palestine (Laqueur, p. 211), led to the suspicion and animosity of native Palestinians, provoking them to retaliate with violence. Moreover, a large number of Zionist colonizers made no efforts to understand the Arabs or respect their culture (Laqueur, pp. 209, 222). Some of the younger men strode belligerently around Arab neighborhoods armed with big sticks, knives, and rifles, displaying an arrogant, contemptuous attitude toward the local people (p. 218).

Neoconservatives and radical Zionists have categorically dismissed all mentions of “apartheid” in reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an anti-Semitic smear. However, a quick look at the facts dispels this argument. Most of the Zionists failed to befriend the Arabs (p. 232-33) or to interact peaceably with them. They rejected the Palestinians’ insistent demand for a representative government that would include them (p. 246). And in their 1948 war of independence, which was fought principally outside Israeli borders (Ciment, Palestine/Israel, p. 68), the Zionist military used force, psychological warfare (Collins and LaPierre, O Jerusalem, p. 551), and even mass murder (Laqueur, A History of Zionism, p. 584) to evict more than 800,000 Palestinians from their home territory both inside and outside the legal boundaries of the state of Israel.

In a particular example of sophistry, Bard states in Myths and Facts that because an Arab census showed only 809,000 Palestinians living within Israeli borders in 1948 and an Israeli census after the war counted 160,000, then no more than 650,000 Palestinian inhabitants could have been displaced. Yet Bard completely ignores the additional hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living outside Israel who were also forcibly dispossessed. According to Collins and LaPierre, the war left Israel holding 500 square miles of Arab territory which contained 114 Arab villages (Collins and LaPierre, O Jerusalem, p. 561). It is common knowledge—except among those duped by the neoconservatives—that the Israel Defense Force purged these areas of Arabs as well.

Moreover, Palestinian Jews themselves endured consistent racism from their fellow European compatriot immigrants (Ciment, Palestine/Israel, p. 49, 120-24). Finally, Israel maintained a decades-long alliance with the infamous apartheid regime of South Africa (Ciment, p. 141).

Another fact meticulously concealed by the modern radical Zionist and neoconservative authors is that the values held by the majority of early Jewish settlers in Palestine were anything but traditional, family-oriented, and Judeo-Christian. Well over half of Zionist immigrants between 1880 and 1930 were card-carrying Communists. According to Laqueur and Ciment, the early settlers were heavily influenced by Bolshevik philosophy (Laqueur, A History of Zionism, p. 246; Ciment, Palestine/Israel, p. 121). Numerous Zionist leaders such as Ber Borokhov were Communist philosophers (Laqueur, p. 275) whose Marxist-Zionist labor organizations (Laqueur, pp. 295-97, 323, 334) established the well-known kibbutzim or collective farms. Some say the kibbutzim were a requirement because the number of colonists was so small that they had to help each other out to survive. While this was partially true, the headstrong early Zionists either refused all Arab assistance or hired Arab laborers to work their fields while they relaxed. Furthermore, children in the kibbutzim were raised apart from their parents in line with the kibbutzim inventors’ goal “to liquidate the family as a social unit, seeing it only as an expression of erotic life” (Laqueur, p. 299). If a Zionist colonizer did not identify as a Communist, he tended to be a Zionist extremist who was constantly engaged in plotting and committing violent acts of terrorism to achieve his ends (Laqueur, pp. 375-76, 528-30, 538, 556, 566, 571-72, 586; Collins and LaPierre, O Jerusalem, pp. 56, 112, 129-33, 141, 215, 267-68, 273-76, 336-37, 546). The Revisionists murdered Arabs (Laqueur, p. 375), Palestinian Jews (Laqueur, p. 409), British authorities (Laqueur, pp. 528, 541), and peaceful Zionists who were their fellow European Jews (p. 317-18, 410). The goal of most Jewish settlers was not simply to better themselves, which is an honorable pursuit, but to accumulate vast wealth (p. 335-36). A Zionist youth organization in Poland named Betar had laid down a system of manly values, but these were “sadly missing in Jewish life” in Palestine (p. 360). In contrast to those who claim that the founders of Israel were champions of freedom, democracy, and peace, radical Zionist leader Aba Achimeir desired to crush freedom and democracy (p. 361) and condoned violence, writing that “any new order establishes itself on the bones of its opponents” (p. 362). Hashomer Hatzair, the most powerful Zionist faction around 1930, was influenced by the atheist philosopher Frederick Nietzsche (p. 486-87). Also, many of the colonizers adhered to fascist principles, on which the Herut party (ancestor of the modern Likud party) was built (Ciment, p. 145).

Radical Zionists and their neoconservative kin allege in another recycled claim that the state of Israel was established on essentially empty, unclaimed land. But in the early 1900s, around 800 Arab villages dotted Palestine (Laqueur, p. 447), with an average population of 1,000 each. The total native Palestinian population in 1880 was 750,000; in 1910, it had grown to 1.2 million, and in the 1940s it reached 1.4 million as admitted by Bard himself.

A corollary to the above assertion is that the Zionist colonization of Palestine was legal. However, throughout the period of settlement the overwhelming bulk of settlers were illegal immigrants. Both the Ottoman Empire (until 1918) and the British administration (1918-1948) set restrictions on immigration into Palestine for the good of the Arab population (Laqueur, pp. 76, 139), which most of the Zionists flaunted contemptuously (Laqueur, pp. 528-30, 566). During the illegal immigration wave of 1904-05, the Jewish National Fund illegally purchased land from absentee Arab landlords, often forcing native peasants off it, and handed it over to the settlers. During and after the Nazi Holocaust of World War II, the numbers of European Jews arriving at the shore of Palestine exceeded 100,000 per year, and nearly all of those who managed to get in did so illegally (Laqueur, p. 529-31, 567). The United States was something of an accomplice in this illegal Jewish immigration wave as, for no good reason, it refused to legally admit more than 6,300 Jews into its own much more spacious land (Laqueur, p. 505-06). Coupled with their aggression against everyone who was perceived to be standing in their way, it is no wonder that the European Jewish colonists’ blatant disrespect for civil authority earned them the mistrust and scorn of Palestinians, Turks and British alike.

Furthermore, all the Zionist organizations and institutions in Palestine—many of which were incorporated into the state of Israel in 1948--were illegal, having been founded by illegal aliens, and thus had to operate underground. The Zionist army called the Hagana, the Jewish National Fund, terrorist networks such as the Irgun and Stern Gang, the Jewish Agency, the Freeland League, Hashomer Hatzair, the International Zionist League, the Palestine Flying Club (which became the Israeli Air Force), and the Zionist post offices were all prohibited by the British. By means of a large-scale campaign of violence, the Irgun, Stern Gang and other terrorist societies succeeded in preventing the British from enforcing their laws and shutting these groups down. The Zionists’ importation of foreign weapons violated British regulations (Collins and LaPierre, pp. 57-67) as well as the UN cease-fire to which the Hagana subscribed in May 1948 (Collins and LaPierre, p. 543).

Zionist representatives even promised the Turkish emperor, Sultan Abdul Hamid, in 1908 that if he would allow Jews to immigrate legally into Palestine, they would become his most loyal subjects. Ten years later, the Zionists shamelessly broke all these promises by mobilizing support against the Ottoman Empire in World War I and welcoming its dissolution after the war.

So Zionist revolutionaries gained influence over Palestine through illegal immigration, land robbery, forced displacement of Arabs, subversive organizations, terrorism, and deception—a far cry from the gleaming picture painted by today’s neoconservative apologists for Israel.

Although the stated purpose of the Hagana was to defend Jewish immigrants in Palestine, this small armed force was implicated in scores of terrorist crimes. Most Hagana criminals escaped justice for their evil deeds; one of them, Menachem Begin, later attained the highest office in the Israeli government.

It has become a sacrosanct tenet of radical Zionism that the Holy City of Jerusalem should be united under exclusive Jewish rule. However, this is not what the Zionist founders intended. Herzl said the Holy Places in Jerusalem should be given extra-territorial status, not be owned by the Jews alone (Laqueur, p. 95). In addition, the Zionists pledged to accept international control of Jerusalem, succeeded in getting the UN to vote in favor of a Partition Plan for Palestine which specified this, and have unashamedly violated their pledge and international law ever since (Collins and LaPierre, pp. 118-19, 301).

Pointing out that only extremists on both sides of the conflict want all of Palestine controlled either by the Israelis or the Palestinians, Dershowitz implies that extremists are not determining the direction of the struggle. But though Israeli fanatics comprise only about five percent of the Israeli population, they wield great clout in Israel, especially with the moral and material support of the United States since 9/11. Their apartheid treatment of the Palestinian people and war against Iraq have been justified to counteract Palestinian terrorism; their own terrorist crimes against innocent Palestinians have been generally tolerated by the Israeli government (Ross, The Missing Peace, pp. 366, 416). Their propensity to violence has paralyzed the Israeli government for decades, making it very difficult for peace-minded officials to cede territory and political rights to the Palestinians. The neoconservative and radical Zionist authors fail to recognize that Palestinian extremism is directly proportional to Israeli acts of injustice.

It is impossible to answer every charge and pinpoint every detail of fundamentalist Zionism in this article. I would encourage everyone to read at least one book praising Israeli policies and one book relating the early history of the modern state of Israel or of the Zionist movement. After reading each book slowly and carefully, decide for yourself which one makes more sense, which one is more accurate, which one provides a more coherent and realistic picture of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The influential neoconservative and radical Zionist writers and speakers of our time are totalitarian ideologues who are absolutely intolerant of dissenting viewpoints because their evil agenda cannot unfold in the presence of informed opposition. Thus they hope to make people forget about the good old books filled with embarrassing facts about the distant and recent past. While they claim to present the “truth” and expose “myths”, these propagandists are hard at work removing all historical, psychological, ethical, and moral barriers to the radical Zionist agenda.

The state of Israel has a right to exist, but not at the expense of a Palestinian state. Israel has the right to national defense, but not to keep Palestinians permanently displaced. The Jewish people have a right to freedom from discrimination, but not a right to discriminate against the Arab people. Palestinian terrorist crimes against innocent Israelis are unquestionably evil, but Israel cannot be divested of responsibility for provoking them. Forcible and total redistribution of all the world’s resources would create a hell on earth, but so will continued accumulation of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The essence of totalitarian extremist Zionism is the failure to accept such important, commonsensical distinctions.

An assault on truth, morality, freedom, and human rights of enormous magnitude, the radical Zionist ideology crumbles under the onslaught of historical and factual accuracy, critical thinking, common sense, and above all, traditional Judeo-Christian moral values. Yet it will not rest until all of its wicked purposes are achieved.

Copyright © 2007 by Justin Soutar.