The 1963 Funk and Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary entry says: Shylock In Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, a revengeful usurer who endeavors to exact a pound of flesh from Antonio's body as a forfeit for nonpayment of a debt. The dictionary doesn't say so, but of course Shylock was a Jew, portrayed by Shakespeare as the totally despicable stereotypical Jewish money-lender. Performance of The Merchant of Venice used to be banned in Israel. I don't know if it still is verboten.

    Lest any of the Israel über alles apologists for the ongoing destruction of Palestinian society by Israel inadvertently misunderstand me, Israel is not unique – except in one regard – among the world's nation-states, all of whom, almost without exception, behave as disgustingly as Israel, lying, stealing, killing, debasing the lives of "their" citizens and anyone else who opposes the drive for more and more concentration of wealth and power under control of the hierarchical ruling class. What makes Israel unique is that it is Jewish.

    Any Jew who believes that the ugly stereotype of Jews as despicable master money manipulators is a thing of the past is deluding him/herself. I am quite certain the stereotype is widely held, having had some unsettling personal experiences that show it, admittedly anecdotal but not to be ignored. You don't have to rely only on the now widely publicized documentation of the influence of Jewish-controlled money in U.S. politics. Just talk with ordinary people, people who don't read the New York Times, the New Yorker magazine, the New York Review of Books, people who never heard of the Mearsheimer-Walt research working paper on The Israel Lobby at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=891198. It's not hard to get an earful of what ordinary people think of Jewish power.

    The uncomfortable fact is that stereotypes gain traction, despite their distortions and exaggerations, because they most often are partially true. Shakespeare was no idiot. He understood the power of that ugly stereotype, and that it was widely held, as did Adolph Hitler. So too did the Israelis who banned The Merchant of Venice. Consider the following “bit” of information from http://www.narconews.com/Issue40/article1644.html on the website of Narco News: Catherine Austin Fitts is a former managing director of Dillon Read & Co, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing in the first Bush Administration, and is currently president of Solari, Inc., an investment advisory firm. Money is her specialty.

    In her article linked to above Fitts writes that the Rothschild family is “considered to be one of if not the wealthiest family in the world.” A bit later she mentions a December 1981 Time magazine story, “The Rothschilds Are Roving”, which describes a decision by the French Rothschilds in response to the nationalization of Banque Rothschild by President Mitterrand to move significant operations and focus to the United States. Time reported that they were changing the name of their aggressive venture capital firm in the U.S., New Court Securities (owned by the Rothschild banks in Paris and London, and ...) to Rothschild, Inc. and were taking over from the then-current CEO.

    To destroy a widely-established stereotype it's necessary to deprive it of even the partial truths that make it credible to so many every-day people. It doesn't matter, for example, how many non-Jewish international bankers and money manipulators are listed in an effort to dissuade the believers in Jewish hegemony over the control of money. As long as clearly identifiable Jews are there too — the Alan Greenspans (long-time Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve System), the Martin Wolfensons (long-time World Bank President and now special representative of the so-called ‘quartet’ of Middle East peace settlement mediators, the Paul Wolfowitzes (former top-level neo-con warmonger promoting U.S./Israeli conquest of the Middle East and now World Bank President) — the stereotype will stick.

    These honored Jewish members of the class of wealthy scum that rules the global financial empire — along with the Michael Millkens (of leveraged buyout "fame"), the Charles Hurwitzes (a "star" Millken pupil, now CEO of Pacific Lumber/Maxxam ravaging ecology for profit), the Henry Kissingers and all the rest — deserve to be reviled and driven out of their smug, deadly, destructive roles. And of course all the non-Jewish wealthy scum deserve the same treatment. I'm concentrating on the Jews only because they serve as a basis for the Shylock stereotype. But all of them — Jews and non-Jews — are equally despicable.

    And so it is for Israel. The stereotype of a Shylock nation-state is not quite correct. Israel did not loan money to the Palestinians. So this is not "a pound of Palestinian flesh" for an unpaid loan. It's even worse. Israel gave nothing to the Palestinians. They owed Israel nothing. It was the dominant nation-states, which were complicit in the destruction of European Jewry, who decided to "give" the Jews part of the Palestinians' flesh, and the Zionist government that has determinedly sought to take the entire body, continually pursuing its greedy deceitful Shylock-like efforts. Naturally, the world's people, as we have learned of the horrors imposed on the Palestinians by the survivors and descendents of the Nazi holocaust, have come to hate the nation-state of Israel.

    There's only one way to get rid of the ugly stereotype — Israel, the Shylock nation — make it untrue, totally untrue, not partially. Stop spewing out lying propaganda about how “democratic” and “non-racist” and “non-apartheid” Israel is because Arab “citizens” can vote, and so on. The incessant lying only makes Israel more despicable. Get out of the trap of believing, and inculcating in your children the belief that Arabs are your “niggers”. Like “our niggers”, they are your brothers and sisters, your fellow human beings. They experience pain and suffering, fear, hunger and thirst, love and hate, just like you and I. Fully sentient human beings. Yes, I'm preaching to you, God damn it!

    This past few weeks — a deluge of e-mails — I brought it on myself. Just past midnight on 8-9 May I sent my “large” e-mail list an “S.O.S. from Gaza”, relaying an urgent request from the Gaza Community Mental Health Program headed, Medieval siege of 1.4 million souls in Gaza. It's at http://pwgd.org/gs/2006/05/11/7-sos-from-the-gaza-community-mental-health-program-gcmhp/, along with some of the initial flood of responses to that e-mail, to a next-day multiply-addressed e-mail to 34 individuals, and to a second “large” list message headed 'Followup on "S.O.S. from Gaza"' on 11 May. By 14 May the "small" list had grown to 43, and I was hopelessly behind, temporarily unable to post the discussion either on my website or on the weblog where other people could read it. And some of it is really interesting. I hope to post much of the discussion.

    During the period of intensive exchanges I was unable to complete a letter to my brother, one of the active participants in the "small" list exchanges, until 29 May. That letter follows, and his response to it.

Oaxaca, 19-29 May 2006

Dear Lawrence

      Your last note, on 17 May, ended, “Maybe we should just agree that we disagree and leave it at that.” If we differed with one another over some minor matter I’d concur with you, but to me it’s not a minor disagreement. You see me as being unrealistic “in terms of understanding both history and human nature”, as shown by my “one-sided” criticism of Israel “unbalanced” by criticism of the Palestinians. I see you as being an unreasoning apologist for the State of Israel in its conquest of Palestine, apparently unwilling to examine evidence that contradicts your apologetic stance.

      But it’s much more than just two old men stubbornly holding on to differing world views. Your role in accepting what you must by now realize is the deliberate, calculated destruction of Palestinian Arab society is on a par with, if not worse than that ascribed to ordinary Germans by Daniel Goldhagen in his book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. In saying this I’m not claiming the scales of the crimes against humanity of the Nazi and Zionist regimes are comparable. Of course they’re not. You seem to believe you need to tell me what happened to European Jewry during the Jewish holocaust. I think I know as much as I need to in order to place that horrific genocide in historical perspective. The Israeli government does not come close to Hitler’s “final solution”, nor, I believe, will it ever go to that extreme of mass open extermination. But, as you perhaps know, and I quote here from The Destruction of the European Jews, by Raul Hilberg,

That year [1941] marks a turning point in anti-Jewish history. In 1941 the Nazis found themselves in the midst of a total war. Several million Jews were incarcerated in ghettos. Emigration was impossible. A last-minute project to ship the Jews to the African island of Madagascar had fallen through. The “Jewish problem” had to be “solved” in some other way. At this crucial time, the idea of a “territorial solution” emerged in Nazi minds. The “territorial solution,” or “the final solution of the Jewish question in Europe,” as it became known, envisaged the death of European Jewry. The European Jews were to be killed.

      The Nazis wanted what they imagined to be a racially pure ‘Aryran’ nation. The Israeli governing elements want what they imagine to be a religiously pure ‘Jewish’ nation, though they realize that at least for now they cannot try for more than a large absolute Jewish majority. The basic ideology of both groups – the Nazis and the Zionist government – is, in this critical regard, identical and, to me, abhorrent.

      The reason I say your acceptance of the deliberate, calculated destruction of Palestinian Arab society is on a par with, if not worse than that Goldhagen ascribes to ordinary Germans is because:
1. You are living in a society in which you have easy access to all the information you would need to understand the reality of the Israel-Palestine conflict, unlike ordinary Germans in the absolute Nazi dictatorship that controlled most of their access to information.
2. Unlike Germans who spoke up against Nazi policies towards the Jews, you risk nothing, absolutely nothing of any consequence if you speak up against U.S. support for the Israeli government or if you otherwise oppose the Israeli government’s actions against Palestinian Arabs. Ordinary Germans who exhibited conscience and courage on behalf of the Jews could well be killed, and it is my understanding that a good number were. Fear of possible consequences undoubtedly silenced many Germans. Americans Jews have no such fears.

      As for your impulse to educate me about what happened to European Jewry, before continuing with my response to specific disagreements, here’s a list of much of what I’ve read that’s related to the Nazi Judeocide and/or to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel & The Palestinians, Noam Chomsky, updated edition, 1999, South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon, Robert Fisk, Fourth Edition, 2002, Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, New York.

Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, Norman G. Finkelstein, Second Edition, 2003, Verso, London and New York.

Israel/Palestine: How to End the War of 1948, Tanya Reinhart, 2002, Seven Stories Press, New York.

Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, 1996, Knopf, New York (read only the first 50 or so pages).

The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, New Edition, 1968, Harcourt Brace & Co., New York.

Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler, Translated by Ralph Manheim, 1943, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston. (read only the first 70 or so pages so far).

The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East, Robert Fisk, 2005, HarperCollinsPublisher, London (read only the first 900 or so pages so far).

Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire. Interviews with David Barsamian, 2000, South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, Edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel, 2002, The New Press, New York

The Case Against Israel, Michael Neumann, 2005, Counterpunch and AK Press, Petrolia, California and Oakland, California, respectively (read only the first 25 or so pages so far).

Healing Israel/Palestine: A Path to Peace and Reconciliation, Michael Lerner, 2003, Tikkun Books, San Francisco, California.

Reframing Anti-Semitism: Alternative Jewish Perspectives, Jewish Voice for Peace, 2004, Oakland, California.

Israel, A Colonial-Settler State?, Maxime Rodison, translated by David Thorstad, 1973, Pathfinder Press, New York.

Dishonest Broker, The U.S. Role in Israel and Palestine, Naseer H. Aruri, 2003, South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (read only first 190 or so pages so far).

The Destruction of the European Jews, Student Edition, Raul Hilberg, 1985, Holmes & Meier Publishers, New York and London (read only first 270 or so pages so far).

The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, Second Edition, Norman G. Finkelstein, 2003, Verso, London and New York.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Revised and enlarged Edition, Hannah Arendt, 1965, Penguin Books, New York.

Orientalism, Edward W. Said, 1978, Random House, New York (read only first 180 or so pages so far).

Taking Sides, America’s Secret Relations with a Militant Israel, Stephen Green, 1984, William Morrow and Co., New York (read only Chapters 8 “America Chooses Sides” and 9 “Remember the Liberty. . . .”).

Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, Updated Edition, William Blum, 2004, Common Courage Press, Monroe, Maine

Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, Michael B. Oren, 2003, Random House, New York (read only scattered bits and “Anatomy of an Accident” on pp. 262-271, his account of the attack on the USS Liberty).

Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, Norman G. Finkelstein, 2005, University of California Press, Berkeley (read only first 40 or so pages so far).

The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity, Tariq Ali, 2002, Verso, London and New York.

The Politics of Anti-Semitism, Edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, 2003, Counterpunch and AK Press, Petrolia, California and Oakland, California, respectively.

“Abba Eban with Footnotes, Review Essay of Michael Oren’s Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East”, Norman G. Finkelstein, Journal of Palestine Studies (Spring 2003), pp.74-89.

The Hidden Alliances of Noam Chomsky, Werner Cohn, 1988, Americans for a Safe Israel, 114 East 28^th St, New York.

Paths in Utopia, Martin Buber, Translated by Ephraim Fischoff, 1949, Beacon Press, Boston.

Culture and Resistance: Conversations with Edward W. Said, Interviews by David Barsamian, 2003, South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Chomsky Reader, Edited by James Peck, 1987, Pantheon Books, New York.

Voices of Refusal and Dissent, Edited by Roane Carey and Jonathan Shainin, 2002, The New Press, New York (read only first 35 or so pages so far).

Live from Palestine: International and Palestinian Direct Action Against the Israeli Occupation, Edited by Nancy Stohlman and Laurieann Aladin, 2003, South End Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (read only first 75 or so pages so far).

Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization, Immanuel Wallerstein, 1995, Verso, London and New York.

      If you think there are or are likely to be important gaps in my knowledge of the Israel-Palestine conflict and want to recommend other sources of information, I’ll be interested to know what they are.

As far as what Ben Gurion may or may not have said, frankly, I don’t think it’s that relevant. What’s relevant is actions, and anyway, Ben Gurion may have made those remarks (or not, I don’t know) for political reasons to encompass support from the political right. To hook into a comment and negate physical actions on the ground, seems to me, rather a weak position.

      First, you acknowledge that you don’t know if Ben-Gurion made those statements or not. Equally significant to me is your assertion that you don’t think it’s relevant. On the contrary, it’s key to answering the question whether the Zionist leadership intended to accept the (eventual) General Assembly’s proposed partition in order to gain recognition as a state, but saw that only as an expedient step leading to conquest of the entire territory and what they called “transfer”, brutal compulsory (in Ben-Gurion’s words) ethnic cleansing of Arabs, to insure a large dominant Jewish majority.

      From what I’ve read I know there’s a ton of evidence that the Zionist leadership was conniving and lying from the get-go, and has never stopped. To know what really happened takes a lot of effort, I admit that and I acknowledge that until about four or so years ago I wasn’t in a position to say very much with certainty, and was unable to challenge you, even though I was appalled at what I was learning from mostly but not exclusively mainstream media about the torments of the Palestinian Arab population.

      Regarding Israeli motivation, i.e. the intent of the Zionist leadership, I gave you evidence and you dismissed it. Did you even read the small part of the Mearsheimer-Walt working paper I took the trouble to send you, and from which I quoted? Look honestly at the absurdity of your position. Barely more than 24 hours before saying Ben-Gurion’s statements were irrelevant, you began your earlier e-mail to me with the supposedly innocent query, “Was wondering if you knew about the Arab conference before I mentioned it to you which took place right after the Six Day War where eight Arab leaders issued what is known as The Khartoum Resolutions of 1967?” Here your focus was on the heads of Arab States shortly after the Six Day War, who declared “…no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it,…” You treated their statement as more relevant than the subsequent peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and Jordan.Yet a day later you belittled my citation of Ben-Gurion, writing, “To hook into a comment and negate physical actions on the ground, seems to me, rather a weak position.”

      That is patently what you did a day earlier when you “hooked into” a statement (The Khartoum Resolution) and continued to “negate physical actions on the ground”, in particular by ignoring the ongoing actions of Israel in seeking to destroy Palestinian society and to transform as much of the area as it could manage into as purely Jewish a state as possible. It is precisely those “physical actions on the ground”, beginning with the initial massive ethnic cleansing in 1947-48, and continuing right up to now, with no indication that they will not continue, which makes Israel even more despicable than apartheid South Africa in the (justified) judgement of most of the world’s people.

      I knew of course that your intent was not just idle curiosity but to show me both how little I knew, and that Israel was, as usual, the victim. You send me what I call factoids, usually without context, that are intended to show Israel’s innocence and “the Arabs’” aggressiveness, as an example illustrates.

      Your last e-mail, of 17 May, begins, as is your style, by picking a tiny piece out of something I’ve sent or quoted, and then supposedly demolishing it and then proceeding with as much of a lecture as you’re in the mood for at the time. In this case you began,

In a message dated 5/16/2006 9:27:27 PM Eastern Standard Time, george.salzman@umb.edu writes:

> Walzer offers no argument or evidence to show that the “Egyptian challenge” to Israel stands on a par with the “clear cases” of aggression cited.

George, Nassar (Egypt) declared a blockade of the Straits of Tiran prior to June 5, 1967 which is Israel’s only water route to its southern port of Eliat. George, that’s an act of war according to international definition. Israel responded with its attack on the Egyptian airforce on June 5, 1967. Israel responded to Egypt’s act of war. George, get real. If the US blocked a waterway to a Central American country, both you and I would assume this is an act of war.

      Aside from your hasty misinterpretation of the bit that you picked out, you completely ignored everything else — and there was a good deal — that I took the trouble to type out and send you. A slothful response. Your supposed refutation of your selected tidbit focuses on the blockade of the Straits of Tiran, which you declared to be “an act of war according to international definition.” Israel then, according to you, responded to protect itself. This is a falsification of history, one that you have, up until now, apparently accepted. You seem to be comfortable with it, perhaps because it portrays Israel as an innocent victim fighting for its very life, a version of events you evidentally favor, an innocent Jewish David against an Arab Goliath.

      Chomsky’s treatment of the Israel-Arab wars deals only briefly with the 1967 war (pp.100-103 and notes 31 through 46 on pp.171-172). That is the part I typed out for your benefit. Have you read it? A more detailed discussion of the 1967 War is in Norman G. Finkelstein’s Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict Second Edition, Verso, London and New York, 2003. I read it two years ago, but hadn’t remembered how much detail Finkelstein provided. As you know from Rod Stackelberg’s e-mail of 17 May 2006, he forwarded my 16 May e-mail to the “small” list (it’s now posted at http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/2006-05-18.htm) to his colleague Wayne Kraft at Eastern Washington University, and sent Wayne’s reply to the “small” list. Wayne’s comments reminded me of Finkelstein’s work, and that’s what I returned to in order to reread his Chapter 5, “To Live or Perish: Abba Eban ‘Reconstructs’ the June 1967 War. Finkelstein’s meticulous account, on pp.123-149, with notes 1-73 on pp.247-259, make it unambiguously clear that the war was instigated and initiated by Israel. I will not make the effort to send you extensive portions in this note, but if you undertake to read the material I already sent you from the Mearsheimer-Walt working paper and from Chomsky, and Chapter 5 of Finkelstein’s book, I will photocopy the latter and mail it to you. Here’s a bit on the Straits of Tiran blockade:

“. . . Eban charged that Israel was being ‘strangled’ by Nasser’s blockade as it was condemned to ‘breathe with a single lung’. ‘The choice for Israel’, Eban perorated, ‘was drastic – slow strangulation or rapid, solitary death.’ ⁴⁹
      “In the real world, the picture was rather less forbidding. The official terms of the blockade barred all Israeli-flagged vessels, and non-Israeli-flagged vessels carrying strategic cargo, from passing through the Straits. Yet, according to the UN Secretariat, not a single Israeli-flagged vessel had used the port of Eilat in the previous two and a half years. Indeed, a mere 5 per cent of Israel’s trade passed through Eilat. The only significant commodity formally affected by the blockade was oil from Iran, which could have been re-routed (albeit at greater cost) through Haifa. What is more, it is not even clear that Nasser was rigorously enforcing the blockade. Rikhye asserts – and the available evidence seems to support him – that the Egyptian ‘navy had searched a couple of ships after the establishment of the blockade and thereafter relaxed its implementation’. Recall, finally, that there was a ‘real possibility’ (Dean Rusk) that the blockade would have been formally lifted or modified after the Egyptian vice-president’s visit to Washington in early June.⁵⁰ ”

      Finkelstein’s analysis of Abba Eban’s reconstruction of the June 1967 War is scholarly and thorough. If you are willing to read it with an open mind I cannot help but believe your understanding of Israel will begin to change.

Monday, 29 May 2006
Hi Lawrence,
      The past two weeks have been wild with e-mails. I’ve not been able to keep up. After writing the above, which I might have even started before the 17th – don’t remember – for some reason I looked up our earlier correspondence and discovered that we had been over some of the same ground two years ago, and that I actually bought and mailed you a copy of Finkelstrein’s Image and Reality then, which had completely slipped my mind. So it’s clear that either you read the part I had referred to and dismissed it, or didn’t read it. Anyway, there’s no use in trying any more to communicate with you about these matters. I ask you once more to please send me Samantha’s e-mail address.
Sincerely, though very disappointed and frustrated, George

Subject: Re: I'm curious
From: Lawrence Salzman <gardveg@aol.com>
Date: Tue, 30 May 2006 15:04:28 EDT
To: George Salzman <george.salzman@umb.edu>

In a message dated 5/29/2006 10:04:17 PM Eastern Standard Time, george.salzman@umb.edu writes:

I asked you for evidence, if you knew of any, to show that the statements were falsely attributed to Ben-Gurion.

Subject: Re: I'm curious
From: George Salzman
Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 08:14:25 -0500
To: Lawrence Salzman

Please send me Samantha's e-mail address. George