Jimmy Carter was asked which of the current presidential candidates he thinks most likely to move towards negotiating peace in the Middle East. He still has hopes for Barack Obama, but won't decide who to vote for until he has a chance to speak to each of them privately, "I won't even decide who to support privately until I assess their attitude toward the Middle East. That's the number one issue for me." [1]

Tony Blair has been credited with stating that 70% of the worlds problems with terrorists can be traced back to the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

"On March 10, 1948, in Tel Aviv, eleven men had a meeting in the Red House headed by Ben Gurion. The eleven decided to expel one million Palestinians from historical Palestine. No minutes were taken, but many memoirs were written about that fateful meeting. A systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestine began and within seven months the Zionists managed to expel one half of all the Palestinian people from their villages and towns."-

Dr. Ilan Pappe to this reporter Nov. 8, 2006. [2]

When a leading public figure takes an unexpected position, it's important to pay attention. Uri Avnery is the best known figure in Gush Shalom (the Peace Bloc), a dovish group just outside the mainstream of Israel's peace camp. Avnery's criticisms of Israeli policies regarding the Palestinians are well-known and widely relied upon by people who want an Israeli or Jewish imprimatur for their own comments.

Particular attention thus should be paid to Avnery;'s most recent column, published on the eve of Israel's 59th Independence Day celebration.

Avnery exposes the so-called one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an idea that "will harm [the effort to change the policies of the Israeli government] very much" because "[i]t diverts the effort from a solution that has now, after many years, a broad public basis [two states for two peoples], in favor of a solution that has no chance at all."

More below the fold,

Cross-posted from Evenhanded Democrats

This diary started as a comment in a diary I wrote the other day on a joint interview by Amy Goodman with Norman Finkelstein and Shlomo Ben-Ami.  In the discussion that followed, I argued -- following Finkelstein and Ben-Ami -- that Israel had pursued an intentional policy of ethnic cleansing in order to create a Jewish state.  Kossack JNEREBEL considered that an "extraordinary claim," and requested "extraordinary evidence" to back it up.

What follows below the fold is the compilation of evidence, appropriately sourced, put together to satisfy his request.

In fact, historians of the 1948 war generally agree on the basic point that Zionist armies took advantage of their military superiority over Palestinians and Arab armies in order to carry out a pre-existing objective of expelling non-Jewish peoples from the Jewish state-in-creation.

So, I just finished reading Ilan Pappe's The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, and I have to say it is one powerful book.  Pappe is a Jewish Israeli historian, professor of Political Science at Haifa University, Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva, and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa.  A leading member of the Israeli "new historian" movement, he has published numerous books questioning the traditional Zionist narrative of the creation and development of the State of Israel.

This particular book, while solidly based in archival research, is conceived and written as a polemic, explicitly designed to challenge Israelis' understandings of how their nation came into being and to assign a high degree of historical culpability to the Zionist leadership for the current state of Mideast politics.

For a fuller review, follow me below the fold.

Christopher Brown, a San Francisco writer for the The Electronic Intifada, on December 11, 2006, wrote:

A tenuous ceasefire is holding in the Gaza Strip after almost five months of a heavy dose of "Operation Summer Rain" by the Israeli military.

The showers of missiles, aerial bombardment, military incursions into populated areas over the course of the five month 'rain' storm have left dead more than 457 people, a quarter of them children, and well over 1,000 injured.

Since the Summer Rains began, many in the Israeli peace camp have remained silent about the ongoing crisis in Gaza and the West Bank. However, one voice remains constant in Israeli circles and continues to speak out despite opposition to the contrary.