My name is Ilan Pappe, I am a lecturer at Haifa University, in Israel. I am a long time activist, for peace, human rights, civil rights; basically, an historian who wrote several books on the Arab-Israeli conflict, focusing particularly on the 1948 events and their impact on the current situation.

Q: So why did you decide to become an expert, or study the question of the Palestinians and the formation of Israel?

I realized at the very early stage that the research of history in the cases of people like myself, or as anyone knows in Israel and Palestine, is not just an intellectual pursuit; that the reality, the realities of conflict are informed by what happened in the past. And therefore I thought that not only historians, professional historians, but the society at large should look deeply into the past if it wishes to understand the present better. And I also understood that the way history is taught, being taught and researched in Israeli academia is very loyal to the Zionist ideology, and it was very clear for me, from the early stage in my professional carrier that writing history books, and teaching history courses about the Palestine past, is also a political act, an ideological act, not just an intellectual act.

Ever since then I am still convinced that my way of activism, which connects my professional history of writing, and my political activity in the present, is tightly closed together and I think this is why I still insist also on continuing researching the past, and being active in the present.

Q: When you began to study this, I mean, what conclusions did you come to about, about the state of Israel and the situation of the Palestinians?

I think what came out is something which I think many, many Palestinians before me realized, but for me it took this individual journey into the past to understand that. I was taught as an Israeli academic that there is a very complex story there, and in fact what you find out is that this is a very simple story, a story of dispossession, of colonization, of occupation, of expulsion. And the more I go into it, the clearer the story becomes, even it becomes simpler, and it also brought me to think of the state of Israel, and the Jewish majority in it, in very much the same terms that I used to think about places such as South Africa, and the white supremacy regime there. So I think this is the natural, main conclusion.

Q: The theory of Zionism was that if Jews had their own state that would be a solution to anti-Semitism, and that they will need a state to really defend Jews. What is the reality today?

Well, the reality is first of all that if you create a Jewish state, even if, and I will come back to it in a second, even if a Jewish state is the only solution for anti-Semitism, definitely it cannot be a solution if that state is being built at the expense of a native population. I mean, the fact that in 1948 the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homeland, dispossessed, did not allow Israel to become a safe place. Or the fact that the Zionists' forefathers decided to create a Jewish state in the midst of the Arab world was also not a good formula to insure security. So the timing and the location of the project of building a Jewish state by itself had the seeds of insecurity. So it could not really solve the problem of anti-Semitism, and as we know, it, in many ways, increased anti-Semitism after the Second World War.

But even more than that, I think that one of the major conclusions of Jews who were not Zionists, after the second world war, was that Jews should take a very active part in building a world where not only anti-Semitism, but basically racism and ideologies of that kind, would not have hold of the people's minds and hearts. And I think this is why you saw, after second world war, many Jews trying to be active in movements such as the civil rights movement, in the socialist movement, and so on; exactly motivated by this belief that the right answer to anti-Semitism was not Zionism but rather an international moral movement.

Of course, there are different versions. One can do it from the liberal side, one can do it from the socialist side, but I think basically it is the same idea. However, I think that these alternatives were weakened by the hold Zionism took over the Jewish story, if you want. Or the Jewish representation in the period after the second world war.

Q: How has Zionism, the ideology of Zionism, affected Israel, and how does the Israeli working class see itself, if you want?

There is a parallel, not the right word, I am looking for. The ethnic origin of the working class in Israel is very distinct. Most of the working class peoples in Israel, ever since the creation of the state, are/were either Jews coming from Arab countries, or Palestinians. These were Palestinians who were not expelled in 1948 and became the Arab minority inside Israel. This correspondence between the ethnic origin of people and their class, socio-economic position in society, informs the role in the state no less than the class-consciousness, so to speak.

So, on the one hand, it was easy, relatively easy, to take the Palestinian working class and to enroll them for instance to the Israeli Communist Party, which was the most popular party among the Palestinians in Israel in the 60s and the 70s. On the other hand, a big failure was with the Jews coming from Arab countries, because they will be asked that their only ticket to be integrated into the Jewish society was to be anti-Arab. And they chose nationalism, nationalism rather than socialism, as the best way of improving their position in life. That meant that the socialist left, so to speak, in Israel, was very weakened by the fact that it really only consisted of Arabs and not of any significant numbers of Jews.

Q: What has been the recent struggle that you've been engaged in at the University -why don't you talk about how that began, and why that happened?

I should begin by saying that I think the very important, precondition for any genuine reconciliation in Israel and Palestine is an Israel-Jewish ability to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing of 1948. I think the Israelis have a mechanism of denial that educated a whole society to totally obliterate from its memory the terrible crimes that the Jews had committed against the Palestinians in 1948, and even afterwards. I am totally convinced that such an acknowledgement, very much like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, is a precondition for any genuine reconciliation, and therefore my main struggle in the Israeli universities is to allow at least the universities to become a source where people can learn about that denied past.

I encourage students to go and research 1948, and one of these students in his research exposed an unknown massacre in 1948, which was another important brick in the story that we are trying to build. He was a very brave student, most of the students of mine and of others do not dare to write about 1948, and he was disqualified for that. And, I struggled against the university, and because of my struggle against it, and my other political activities, which include the call for boycott and divestment against Israel, the university tried to expel me in May, 2002. And had it not been for the international uproar, they probably would have succeeded, despite the fact that I have a tenured position.

I think this is a bad sign, but it is also a good sign. It is a good sign that there is a feeling in the Israeli academia that if someone tells the truth about what happened in the past, people are not stupid and they are not morally corrupted, and they will do something. And I think the major Israeli struggle is to prevent people like myself to have access to the public, and the main struggle of people like myself is to find alternative ways to get to the people. And for some reasons, which are not always positive, but that is the reality. Israeli Jews, like American Jews, would rather hear it from an Israeli Jew than from a Palestinian. Because what I am saying, the Palestinians have been saying from many years, but for understandable reasons it is much easier for the Israeli public to hear me.

Q: What was the massacre that the student of yours described? And what was the excuse or justification for his disqualification?

Right. The massacre was in the village of Tantura, which is south of Haifa, and the largest massacre in the war. The Israeli army used to occupy the Arab villages in the way that usually left one flank opened so that the people could be expelled through that side. In several cases, like in the case of Tantura, this did not happen. They made a mistake, it was not on purpose, and they closed the village from all four flanks. One of the reasons, on the west the village was on the sea, and the Israeli navy blocked the village. So in situations like these, the Israeli soldiers used to massacre the people rather than cleanse them. And about 230 people, mostly young men and middle-aged men, were massacred and the women and children were expelled to Jordan. That is what he exposed.

Why was he disqualified? The student could not find enough archival evidence, because the Israeli army was trying to hide the events. So he did something, which we call a professional historiography, a oral history. So he went to interview both Jewish soldiers who participated in the massacre, and Palestinian survivors. And both confirmed that the massacre took place. Now, they found six places in his master dissertation where he did not, when they checked his tapes of the interviews, what was said in the tapes did not accurately correspond to what he transcribed. But none of these sections of the interviews made any difference to the overall conclusion. And as we all know, even very experienced professors, if you check them very thoroughly with their sources, there will be some discrepancies between their sources and what happened. And on the basis of that, he was disqualified whereas students and veteran professors, who had many more known mistakes in their works, would never be challenged in such a way.

Q: So that was a pretext?

Oh, yes, definitely that was a pretext. The academic authorities wanted to send a message, and they succeeded, unfortunately. They sent a message to graduate students: don't touch that subject because you are going to hurt your career chances.

Q: So this is a forbidden subject?

Yes, this is a forbidden subject in Israel. Any many of my students, who were in the midst on working on 1948, after this incident, decided to change their subject.

Q: And on what basis did they try to expel you from your position?

Well, they had just a long list of accusations, but if I summarize it, it boils down to three main issues:

One, is my accusation against the university in this affair, where I accused the university of moral corruption, and they said that this was disloyalty to the institute and they found in the context a clause which allows them to expel someone on the basis of that.

Secondly, I taught against their authorization a course on the 1948 Nakba, the catastrophe, the Palestinian catastrophe. That was another reason. And thirdly, my support for the idea of boycotting and sanctioning and divestment against Israel.

They learned in the context that you can bring to court for not being loyal to the state, not only loyal to the institution. So, I think, my trial, my would-be-trial - because the trial eventually did not take place - exposed how undemocratic Israel is when it comes to anyone challenging its Zionist character. It is a democracy in the sense that once you are within the Zionist frame of mind, you can really say what you want, and people even will protect your rights to say this. But once you challenge Zionism itself, the democracy ceases to exist and you are being treated as a traitor.

Q: One of your positions is that you are against the idea of a Jewish state, and when you say that you are not within the framework of a Zionism. Is that what you are talking about?

Yes, yes, definitely. Its sort of a bizarre thing, because, as I say, instead of Israel we should have a democratic secular state, this is tantamount to treason in Israel. This is regarded as treason. But on the other hand it is very difficult to take someone within the Israeli context to court and say: "this guy is dangerous because he is for democracy and secularism." And I think, they have been lying for so many years that the indoctrination was so effective that Jews will never come to that conclusion, and once we are there, they found it very difficult to deal with it.

You know, when a Palestinian says he is for a secular democratic state, they will say "Yes, and they don't mean it, we know exactly what they want." But when someone who is a product of the Israeli-Jewish system says it, they are going to check the production line !! How did it happen? That's an abberation and I think they are totally bewildered by that.

Q: And what was the response of the media in Israel to your trial, and their efforts to expel you from your position at the university?

Well, unfortunately, the media, especially in the last five years, was not really supportive of any critical approach and it's very tragic that both the media and the academia, which are supposed to be the most critical segments in a secular society, as against religious institutions, cease to play that role.

I remember that they never played it, but definitely in the last five or ten years they are totally conformist and they support the government; very few voices of dissent, and I was only attacked in the media.

Q: You were on national television?

Yes, but I learnt very soon that the only reason I am invited - so I stopped doing it - was to stage a public trial against me. Nobody gave me a chance to speak, they would bring me to a studio to do a kind of a public trial. So I understood it was an ambush and I ceased to go to television studios because it was useless, and they did not allow me to speak.

The encouraging side of the story is the society itself: I got a lot of emails, of letters and phone calls of support from many many Israeli Jews whom I never met before, and even in the town where I live people used to stop and shook my hand. And I have a feeling, because a lot of people are not aware of it, that there is a kind of a terror, and intimidation of the Jews in Israel. They are frightened of saying aloud that they feel because it is such a closed society, that you are nearly ostracized. It is not like America where you can away to some other places, it is a very closed society, and it affects your family, it affects your career if you are doing something, which is easily labeled as treason.

But I think people really felt that I, and others like me, were voicing what they were feeling. For many. many months now, but still they don't dare to say now because the price is too high.

Q: What was the role of the Histadrut, the Israeli trade union, and your own union at the university?

Well, it goes back to the history of socialism and Zionism in Palestine, which we have to be aware of. Socialism, in the case of Zionism, and the Histadrut is the main organization that fuses together, these two ideologies, socialism and Zionism. There was a very limited interpretation of socialism; it was really employing socialism as a means in the hand of a colonialist movement. Socialism was used to at best, at best, to co-opt Arab workers, but more often to expel them from the labor market. This is true about the Mandatory period, between 1918 and 1948, and I don't think anything changed.

The Histadrut as a general trade union is a body, which does not stand to the workers, or to the unions, but to the Zionist ideology. Without Histadrut, it would have been impossible to colonize the Occupied Territories as a labor market. Without Histadrut it would have been impossible to build the labor market in Israel during the years of occupation in such a way that the Palestinians became really slaves, slave workers rather than equal workers. So, as a union of teachers, or academics, on that level it is even worst. I mean, the Histadrut does not at all dare to take any position against the Occupation, against the government's policies. It pays lip service to the idea of social equality, and so on. But it does not really do anything. It is a sad story.

Q: How are Palestinian workers, Arab workers, treated in Israel?

Very unfairly, very unfairly. I mean they suffer from two levels of discrimination. Until the 1980s, they constituted a very important part of the unskilled working labor market, and the skilled worker market, but more in the field of construction and services and so on. To put it more simply, one can say they did all these jobs that most Israeli Jews did not want to perform. But they were badly paid compared to Jewish workers, and there was a kind of institutionalized system that discriminated against them on every level of workers rights, from the salary down to the insurance policies, welfare system and everything. The things got worst in the late 1980s, because in the late 1980s there was a big immigration of Russians into Israel, almost one million.

Some of them were pushed into the labor market to replace the Palestinian workers from the jobs that they were allowed to have. So the on one hand, you had a glass ceiling that did not allow the Palestinian workers to go into the more attractive jobs, so to speak, and since the 1980s even these limited jobs were not available and were given by private and public businesses to Russian immigrants.

Q: So the future, within an Israeli state, for the Palestinians, is not bright?

Not at all. In fact, it is even dangerous. Israel controls the life of two groups of Palestinians: there are the Palestinians citizens inside Israel and there are the Palestinians under Occupation. These are very two different groups. I think the group under Occupation is under grave threat, there is still a very serious possibility that this people will be ethnically cleansed, once again, and that mass killing will be performed against it.

Here we are really talking about almost genocide, in the future. Although I don't think this will really happen and I hope that the world will not stand aside. But for the Palestinians in Israel, where this danger is not that imminent, the future means even less rights, social rights, civil rights, human rights, than they have now. They still have limited of these, but it will become worst. The Jewish state will become more ethnic, more racist, more exclusive, and anyone who is not a Jew, or is not regarded as Jew, will suffer from it more in the future than he or she suffers today.

Q: When you began this call for boycott and divestment in Israel, first of all, what kind of support did you get? May be you can talk about England, and the reaction of the government, and the Israeli state?

This I don't want to take the credit for it. I did not start it. I think it is very important for people to understand that large segments of the civil society, in the US and in Europe, for many years now, feel that enough is enough with regard to the Israeli policies in Palestine. And I think many good people were waiting for their governments to do it, because all the time there was the talk of the "peace process," the diplomatic effort, and they did not want to disrupt it.

But I think people now realize that the diplomatic effort is helping the Occupation, and is not going to bring an end to the Occupation. And with this realization, there was a lot of energy, especially in Europe, especially in Britain, that people wanted to do something. And they are the ones who brought out the idea of boycott, and similar people in America brought up the idea of divestment; because I think they were veterans of the campaign against South Africa, I think that is where the idea emanated. But when we heard about it in Israel, the most progressive left decided to support it. That support gave a lot of impetus, a lot of encouragement to the people abroad to continue, and when the Palestinian society under Occupation voiced its support for this idea as the best strategy, it really burst out.

In England, a very important group of people belonging to the Association of University Teachers, which is called the AUT, a very important trade union, felt - I think rightly so- that in the campuses of the universities, because you know, England is very close to Israel. Most of the Israelis are Anglophones, they really like England, academics really like to go to England and we have a very good system that allows people to go abroad. Academic institutes encourage people to go abroad, to expand their academic knowledge. And they felt that all these Israelis were coming to the British campuses, for short terms or long terms. They were the experts on the Arab world; they were experts on the human rights and civil rights. I mean the discrepancy between the ideologies they represented, and what they were talking about, was such that it was like having the Israeli embassy taking over the academics in Britain. And they decided, but at least they want to start in England, by an official boycott on anyone who officially represents the Israeli academia.

I don't think they wanted to prevent individual Israelis from coming and talking and dialoguing. I think they were right in pointing to the role of the Israeli academia, as being the main spokespersons, spokesmen for the cause. And they passed a motion for boycott, which was accepted. And the Zionist lobby woke up and put a lot of pressure.

Q: What did they do?

They hired a very important law firm in England that charged the AUT executive committee with anti-Semitism if they would continue. Of course, I don't think they would have won the case, but you can see the AUT executive committee saying to themselves, it is not worth it, we don't want to go, which is a pity, they should have shown more solidarity. But they were really intimidated by this. There was a proper libel suit, and if you know the English law, it is even more difficult to catch someone in England than it is here in Israel. But nonetheless they were intimidated, and even more that they mobilized all the Jewish historians of the Holocaust, and everything. They equated the AUT decision to a decision of the Holocaust denial. This, of course is very stupid, and so on, but it worked on people.

But I must tell you that the AUT people have not given up, they are preparing a new motion, they are trying a new strategy, they are working from one chapter to the other to convince people and the most interesting thing is that the boycott is working, de facto. I mean, the decision of the AUT to retract angered people so much that most of the British members of the AUT actually thought that they did not care whether an official decision was taken or not, they think that it is the right way forward.

Q: Now, the Zionists in the Israeli state, did they have a history of accusing people who are critical of Zionism, of being anti-Semites, or Jews of being self-hating Jews?

Oh yes, I think there are many many chapters from the very beginning of Zionism, from different sources, Jews criticized the idea; it could be from a settler point of view, it could been from an orthodox point of view. I think one of the most telling chapters of this, is the struggle, in a way the unfortunately unsuccessful struggle of Zionism against the Bund in the Jewish international socialist movement in post second world war Europe. As you know, the Jews who survived the Holocaust were in camps, which were called the displaced persons camps. And, in fact, many of the Jewish survivors liked the idea of both the internationalist approach, as we talked about it before, or even the socialist one.

And the Zionists did not only argue with these people, they used a lot of violence. There is a book by an historian, called Yosef Grodzinsky, about this struggle, and in fact what the Zionists did, they recruited young Jews to the Jewish underground, the Haganah, so that these people would not be distracted, and won over by a group of international ideologies, or a group which connected Judaism with an international prospective. And that's just one historical example, and you know we have the history of more non-Zionist groups inside Israel, they are being isolated, like Matzpen, who were spied on by the secret services, and later there was the other group that was imprisoned. Definitely, this is something the Zionists are willing to fight with all the force against.

Q: Did you hear about the role of the AFT, American Federation of Teachers, in opposing this boycott?

Yes, I did, and there was also a role played by all kinds of professional associations in the American academia, like the Political Science Association, and so one. And I was not surprised. I did not really think that anyone in the American trade unions, or labor movements, would follow their British colleagues. I think we need a much more, a lot of groundwork here before this will happen. But it really begs these questions, which I hope, that's another part of the campaign, which people tend to ignore.
It is not just about stopping money into getting to Israel so that the Occupation can continue. I think it is an educational thing, it is to ask American taxpayers, to ask American workers, to ask American human rights and civil rights activists why the only case in the world where you don't voice a clear position, whereas in any other cases you do, is the case of Israel. What makes it so different, and I think the more we will hear the Jews asking these questions, I hope this will convince them that they had it wrong all these years from excluding Israel from the same criteria in which they would judge other cases in the world.

Q: What has been the role of Israel and Zionism, in relation to imperialism?

Well, I think it starts with colonialism, before imperialism. It is very clear that without the adoption of Zionism as a colonialist project by the British Empire, there would not have been a Jewish settlement in Palestine. That's very clear. They needed the British military power, political power in order to start the project, that's very clear. Without it, it would not have occurred. And then I think that it is fair to say that without serving the American imperialism as a front base, I doubt it whether Israel would have existed or survived. So I think that one of the important lessons the Israelis have still to learn, if they are so closely connected to an empire such as the US, and they are not thinking of any alternative ways of existing within a certain society, or certain area, when the empire will fall, they are likely to fall too. This is something most Israelis do not realize unfortunately.


Q: So the role the US is decisive in keeping Israel?

Oh, yes, absolutely, it is decisive. In any way you look at it, from the financial assistance, not only the grants, but also the loans, from the military assistance, from the diplomatic immunity that America gives Israel at the UN through its veto, voting. And we have seen it in times like the 1973 War, when really the Americans were willing to go to a nuclear war in order to save Israel.


Q: Some supporters of Israel in the US would say it is not fair to compare Israel to the apartheid state of South Africa, and that Israel is a democratic state - what is the relationship of apartheid in South Africa to Israel?

I think like many cases in history, there are similarities and dissimilarities. But I think in a general picture, the similarities are more than the dissimilarities. The apartheid in South Africa was a petty apartheid; it had this abusive side to it which included segregation in buses, services and so one, ways of course of dispossession, tortures and so on. This side of the petty apartheid doesn't exist in Israel, there is no segregation on that level. But in many ways, if you include the Occupation inside the apartheid regime in Israel, it is worst than the apartheid in South Africa.

So there are sides to the Israeli apartheid, let's say the external side may seen less threatening and more "democratic", but the essence of the regime is as bad, if not worst in many ways. And I think the most important thing is the land issue. The basic feature for apartheid in Israel is the issue of land, not allowing Palestinians to have any relations to landownership, land transactions, and so on. Many people don't know that the land in Israel belongs to the Jewish people, and because of that it cannot be sold and transacted with non-Jews.

Q: Is that legal?

It's legal, it is part of the Israeli constitution in law that 93% of the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people. Hence the Palestinians who are 20% of the population have only access to 7% of the land, which is of course where they have also to compete with the money and power of the Jewish private sector. But as far as land, as state-owned land is concerned, the vast majority of it belongs to the state. This is the reason why since 1948 you have hundreds of new Jewish settlements, neighborhoods being constructed and not one new Arab village or neighborhood was built. We are talking about an Arab population that has a natural growth which is three times more than the Jewish one, and yet they are limited into a space in which they are not allowed to expand. That is, I think, the worst side of apartheid in that part of Israel. Of course, the Occupation and the regime of Occupation in the West Bank and in the Gaza strip is definitely worse than an apartheid system.

Q: What is the role of the Jewish National Fund?

Very important. The Jewish National Fund has a double role. A historical role in 1948 in turning the villages and the lands from which the Palestinians were dispossessed, into a Jewish land. This, the major role of this organization was historically to make sure that every land and house, and asset taken from the Palestinian side, is not moved to the state, but is moved to the Jewish people so to speak, so that it can never be re-Arabized, if you want, again.

Today the JNF plays a different role. In a way it continues to play this role in the West Bank, where it is an active government agency that tries to dispossess Palestinians, and take their land and transfer it to Jews. Inside Israel it is a very vast landowner; every land that is owned by the JNF is a land that only Jews can have. For example, in the Galilee, where the JNF owns land, there are many settlements, and the JNF can force the settlement, and forces the settlement not to accept any Arabs into their settlement under that law. It is a very important tool of colonization, in the past and in the present. And in the present it is a kind of custodian of the Jewish character of the land, which has many implications for Palestinians.

Q: So it enforces the apartheid regime?

I would say it is the main agency of apartheid in Israel.

Q: The US is interested in pushing its economic policies, privatization, free trade zones, in the Middle East, and also in Iraq. What is the role of Israel in pursuing these policies and pushing them in the Middle East?

I think it is a double role. One is that the Israeli chiefs of the economy, about ten years ago, decided to install in Israel a very extreme model of a Reaganite economy. That by itself serves a lot of American interests. But more important, I think, is the fact that Israel is playing through the American intervention either in Iraq, but also in countries such as Egypt and the Gulf states, and so on, a very important role in solidifying the capitalist system of a new Middle East. The reason that Israel can play such an important role in such a future is both because it has succeeded in selling itself to the Americans as an Orientalist country. That is to say a country, which knows the Arabs well. So if you want to have business in the Arab world, you'd better have some Israeli advisors, or you'd better have your headquarters in Israel because we understand you, and we understand the Arab world.

That's one way.

The second reason is that the Israeli financial institutes, the high-tech institutes, and so one, are so more advanced in that respect, that they will benefit, and are benefiting already, from that kind of capitalist economy, whereas more traditional economic sectors of the Arab world are going to suffer. It is like taking two societies in a very different economic capacity, and imposing them on this free market ideology, which doesn't give equal opportunities but rather says: we are all starting from the same departure point, but of course we are not equal in our resources and abilities. And in that respect the Israeli economic system has such a big advantage that I am afraid, that given the chances, it can really exploit the situation in such a way that would even alienate Israel further from the Arab world.

Q: Are you familiar with the role of Intel building a plant on Palestinian land?

Yes, I think this is one the reasons that the divestment movement in the US targeted several projects, in order to bring the message home to the American public, that it is not just a genuine American policy that supports the Israeli Occupation, that people are making money out of the Israeli Occupation. Caterpillar was one example with these huge machines that were used for 48 years to destroy houses on the one hand, wipe out villages and construct apartheid wall.

And Intel is another place where, we have to understand, there is very limited space in the Occupied Territories. And when that space is confiscated, for the sake of creating industrial plants, these industrial plants are serving two purposes. One is to employ Palestinian workers in conditions which are much cheaper to the employers, than they would be in Israel, because the Histadrut does not provide them any protection as workers. And the other way is because land is so cheap, and when you have a land like Intel in the Occupied Territories, that means they don't pay any taxes. So the profits are very very high if you move a section of your business into the Occupied Territories. This is just a model for the future, it won't end there. This is, I think, a very important part of the American direct support for the Occupation.

Q: Is there any opposition in the Jewish working class to Zionism?

Not really, unfortunately. There used to be. When the Communist Party was active and strong, in the 1950s and 1960s, it succeeded in convincing workers that there is a direct link between Zionism and workers interests. However, as I describe the process by which the working class is made up of Jews and non-Jews who still think that their ticket for integration is through nationalism, and not through working-class consciousness, I think that we have to admit that in this sense there is no good news to report.

Q: The supporters of Israel, left supporters of Israel, basically say that the two-state solution is the only real possibility for Israel, and that's why they push its support in the US. What is your answer to that?

I can see a support for a two-state solution emerging, immediately after the Six-Day war, when Israel did not yet annex the East Jerusalem, did not yet build one Jewish settlement in it. There was a lot of logic of saying that despite, despite the fact that it is only 20% of Palestine could be a basis for a Palestinian state, next to Israel, and that these two states, in the future, would develop in such a way that they might turn it into one state, and even find a way of solving the refugees problem. But this is all water under the bridge.

In 2005, with the number of Jewish settlements, with the Greater Jerusalem becoming one third of the West Bank, and the local, and global, and regional balances of power, I think a two-state solution can only become an indirect way for continuing the Occupation. And as I said before, if we understand that the diplomatic effort has deepened the Occupation, has not brought an end to it, so in the case of the two-state solution we have to liberate ourselves from that paradigm. It can only help the Occupation and the Zionist colonization, and only the beginning of ideas of one-state solution can create a different future there.

Q: The US government has had large numbers of neo-cons, Zionists, Wolfowitz. First of all, what do you think about that role of these people inside the US government, and the whole situation as far as the US expansion of war in the Middle East?

I think that neo-conservatism is mainly a product of the Cold War, and I think as happened in Israel, so in the US, a lot of people benefit economically, sociologically, politically, from a situation of conflict which begins with the producers of arms, and it ends with the people who have a hold on the decision-making apparatus in the name of national security.

And of course this was all lost in a way when the Soviet Union collapsed, and the cold war ended. And I think this group of people were looking for a new bogey man, a new threat to the national security of the US and they found it because of the very strong influence, I think, of Israel among other things, in the Arab world and the Islamic world. Of course, movements such as the Islamic Al-Qaeda did not help. They provided the pretext, and the context for even pushing these ideas even further. And what we have now is the same people, a next generation, who would do all they can to perpetuate the conflict, because they benefit from the conflict. They benefit from situations of wars, of conflicts, and so on, and I think this is what enforces their hold over the American policy making in the world at large, and in the Middle East in particular.

Of course, in the Middle East, they are aided by another group of people, the Christian Zionists which should not be underrated, where it comes from a more deep fundamental religious ideology, when these forces fused together you have a very aggressive American policy in the Middle East which has all the features of the colonialist policy in the late 19th century, and will end in the same way I think. People will learn that you cannot occupy and colonize for too long.

But it is very disturbing because any American action in the Middle East also complicates the relations between the US and the Muslim world at large, and I think destabilizes the world. And when we talk about destabilization, it means that the human societies do not attend to their crucial problems, but rather deal with problems which are made up by people such as the neo-cons. Problems that would not really exist, I mean there is not really that much of a cultural clash between Muslims and Americans, but it serves very well the neo-cons through political scientists such as Samuel Huntington to say that there is a fundamental clash. We are not talking here about two human societies, but rather of "aliens and humans." You know, you go to Hollywood, to the American television, and you can see how the cultural production has come, how the cultural production reinforces these images, which serve the capitalist interests of neo-cons and their allies.

Q: Have you been surprised about the media in the US, the way they present the Palestinian situation and the Israeli situation?

Yes, I was surprised because I remember different chapters in the American media coverage of the Middle East in the 50s and the 60s, which I think was better. But what really surprises me was not so much the bias I was prepared for the bias, I was not prepared for the stupidity, I mean for the superfluous. You know, it is almost like an insult to intelligence the way they describe things there. It is not even by taking sides. I would have understood taking sides, like saying this is a situation: we describe it as it is, but we take the Israeli side. I would have been against it, I don't think it is a fair media coverage, but at least it comes from somewhere. But what we have here is a very simple, childish, way of describing this as a kind of a war between the forces of evil and the forces of good. Almost, there is no difference between Star Wars foes in Hollywood and the way the major TV channels here describe the situation there on the ground. That, as I said, is an insult to intelligence.

Q: The majority of Americans were in favor, initially of supporting the war in Iraq. What was the situation in Israel: is there a growing opposition to this invasion?

I think the support in Israel was even stronger than in America. It was quite amazing to read the Israeli press, and to hear Israelis being very enthusiastic before the invasion of Iraq, and after the invasion of Iraq. If you want, one can define the Israeli sentiment as, "now the Americans will understand that." So don't expect any opposition in Israel to the war in Iraq. There is no opposition whatsoever, there is only support; much more than there is in the US. Of course, I did not talk about the Palestinians in Israel who were totally against the war, or some other Jews. There is an interesting group of Iraqi Jews who signed a petition against the war, showing solidarity to Iraqis for being Iraqis, knowing that the war would kill a lot of Iraqis, but, unfortunately, there was no continuation for that. I was among several dozens of people, we demonstrated against the war, but it is really a pathetic number, it is not very impressive.

Q: Is this economic crisis ,the privatization, the taxes on the Israeli working-class, had any kind of reverberation politically?

It's surprising how we are all waiting for it to happen. Israelis have the widest gap between the haves and the haves-not index of social and economic inequality in the Western World, so to speak, Israel is number one. You would expect that this would produce some sort of social protest, to be translated, and every now and then it was, like in the time of the Israeli Panthers, the Black Panthers movement, and before that. But every time this is done, the Israeli government is doing one or two things: it creates a situation of war so that these social protests will not mature, and that's one of the reasons why the Israeli army went into such a harsh response against the second uprising in the Territories, in 2000, because of the relative calm the social protests were sanctioning , especially in the development towns where most of the African Jews live and work, or do not work because the unemployment is very high. And that's one thing they do.

The second thing they do, they try to employ some kind of election policies- economics, which give a lot of benefit to people for a very short period before elections to silence down people. But I think it won't help them in the long run. Twenty-five percent of the Israelis have a very acceptable, even high standard of living, which is a large number compared to many societies in the Third World. And that gives the Israeli political system some sort of stability. But 75% live very close, if not below, what we call in Israel, the poverty line. And this gap eventually will explode. Now, one of the reasons it does not explode, as I said before, is the Israeli ability to create a continuous situation of conflict, so that you are not allowed to deal with your social and economic problems. But I don't think it will hold water for too long.

Q: What is the role of the Labor Party in this coalition government?

There was a good article today in Haaretz by Gideon Levy who, I think rightly, said to people who are voters of the Labor Party, to vote for the worst people they can. There is now an actual competition for leadership. And he said, "don't vote for anyone who relatively may keep this party alive" and he gave the names. "Vote for these people, they are surely going to destroy the party, once and for ever, which is the only chance for building on its ruins a genuine Labor Party". And this is typical of Levy who always knows how to articulate things better than we all, really summarizes the situation of the Labor party. It's a shadow party of the Likud, it's a party that believes in capitalism, and a free market model of the worst kind; it's support of the Occupation, it has nothing to offer. Any day that this party is alive prevents any other political, genuine political force of socialism from emerging in Israel as an alternative.

Q: That sounds like the Democratic Party.

Yes. I mean I am not a great expert on America, but yes, that's my feeling. I watch the Democrats and the Republicans, within a very limited prism as an Israeli, but definitively it is true, and, unfortunately, of some of the social democratic parties in Europe as well.
THANK YOU.

The poll found that Hamas had been gaining support in previous months and was running neck-and-neck with the secular Fatah party - 30 percent vs. 32 percent - among likely voters. It was distributed within the State Department on Jan. 19, six days before the elections.

The poll found that corruption in the Palestinian Authority was the leading issue among Palestinians, and that 52 percent believed that Hamas was more qualified to clean it up, compared with 35 percent who put their faith in Fatah, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' moderate faction.

Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and is considered a terrorist organization by the State Department, won a landslide victory, throwing American policy into confusion because the Bush administration had anticipated a Fatah win.

"I don't know anyone who wasn't caught off guard by its very strong showing," Rice said on Jan. 29 as she flew to London for talks on the election results with her counterparts from the European Union, Russia and the United Nations. "I think what was probably underestimated was the depth of resentment of the last, really, decade of corruption and the old guard."

Rice said that she had directed State Department officials to determine "why nobody saw it coming ... because it does say something about perhaps not having had a good enough pulse on the Palestinian population."

On Friday, State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said, "I don't think the poll and the secretary's remarks are in conflict. She didn't say we were surprised that they won.

"I think what took people by surprise was the margin of victory," Ereli said. "Nobody foresaw that huge a sweep."

The survey of 1,000 Palestinians ages 18 and over, which had a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, was conducted Jan. 13-15 by a local organization with questions written by the Office of Research, part of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, or INR.

The poll was obtained by the Project on Government Secrecy, a program run by the Federation of American Scientists, a policy research group, which provided it to Knight Ridder.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy, said that while the poll didn't predict Hamas' big win, it clearly showed a trend toward victory for the Islamic militants.

"Either Secretary Rice was being disingenuous or else her department has a serious information-sharing problem, because INR could not have done a much better job of assessing the Palestinian election than they did," said Aftergood. "No one else did a better job than INR. So to profess surprise of the outcome is incomprehensible.

"This is secrecy squared," he continued. "It's one thing to keep secrets from the public. But when the bureaucracy is keeping secrets from itself, policy is compromised."

The election of Hamas demonstrates the collective will of the Palestinian people to rid themselves of a corrupt regime and stand up to Israeli occupation.

What's wrong with that?

Whether it pleases the Tel Aviv chieftains or their patrons in Washington doesn't make a bit of difference. Their duty is simply to support democracy wherever it appears in keeping with their rhetoric.

Israel has made the election a referendum on the Hamas Charter, a clearly incendiary document that undermines their struggle for liberation. Hamas' leaders now have an opportunity to dump the charter and write another based on widely accepted principles of equality and justice. This would be a serious blow to Israel's public relations campaign that has been so damaging Hamas' credibility.

Israel is also demanding that Hamas oversee the disarming of its militias. That will never happen, nor should it. Sovereign nations have a right to defend themselves, just as individuals have an "inalienable right" to bear arms.

Disarmament may be high on Israel's "wish list" but it's a non-starter. Besides, there's no evidence that hostilities were ever mitigated because people of one country surrendered their weapons to another. If Israel sincerely seeks disarmament, then it should be a reciprocal agreement; each side giving up a proportionate amount of their weaponry to a neutral third party. (ie. The United Nations)

We can be quite certain that Hamas would be more than receptive to any "mutual disarmament" plan as it would only diminish the possibility of future aggressive intrusions on Palestinian land.

On the issue of whether Hamas should accept "Israel's right to exist or not"; the question is based on a false premise and, as such, intentionally misleading. It is Israel's ongoing military-presence in the occupied territories that thwarts Palestinian statehood. Therefore, it is incumbent on Israel to honor Palestine's "right to exist" by respecting UN resolutions and vacating the territories consistent with the demands of international law.

This isn't rocket-science. Israel knows what is required to meet its obligations to the international community and is shunting that responsibility off on Hamas. Hamas' Prime Minister-designate, Ismail Haniya, has already said that he would acknowledge Israel's right to exist when Israel withdraws to the "internationally-recognized" '67 borders.

The ball is in Israel's court.

Regrettably, Israel shows no willingness to comply with UN resolutions or to negotiate with their Palestinian counterparts. Rather, the aggressive strategy to annex more Palestinian land in the Jordan Valley, East Jerusalem, and the main settlement-blocks is continuing apace.

Sharon and his chief-advisor Dov Weiglass have already consigned the Roadmap to "formaldehyde" and brushed aside any chance for a negotiated settlement. There is no "partner for peace" among the hard-right Israeli leadership. Both Likkud and Kadima parties believe that the Intifada was the last major obstacle between themselves and the dream of Greater Israel.

Even so, its puzzling that Prime Minister Olmert and his right-wing friends wouldn't celebrate the election results. After all, with Hamas spearheading the government suicide bombings are bound to decrease or Israel will seek revenge on government officials. This puts Hamas in the troublesome position of being forced to distance themselves from the militant wing of the organization. We are sure to see dramatic changes in Hamas (that should be welcome in Israel) as it transforms itself more and more into a political party divorced from the acts of violence which have always undermined its broader objectives. Suicide bombings have always been a public relations disaster for the Palestinians. Perhaps, this will finally turn the page on that mutually tragic chapter.

We should note, however, that recent research by Robert Pape ("Al Qaida's Smart Bombs"; NY Times) proves that suicide bombings do not derive from religious fanaticism but, rather, are the direct result of occupation. Pape's science-based analysis has appeared in the New York Times editorial page and provides detailed statistical evidence of his shocking conclusions. This should dispel the mistaken belief that an aberrant form of Islam somehow fuels the violence. "Islamo-fascism" and "radical Islam" are inventions of western think-tanks which have created the rationale for invading Muslim lands and stealing their resources. Pape's writing disproves the prevailing myth that animates the current "war on terror".

The election of Hamas is one of the few positive developments in the Arab-Israeli conflict in years. It is surprising that Israel is responding so irrationally. After all, it was Israel that isolated Arafat for more than two years in his dilapidated hovel, the Muq'tada, refusing to negotiate with him and dismissing him as "irrelevant". Now, Sharon has refused to deal with his hand-picked, personal favorite Mahmoud Abbas for more than a year.

The message could not be clearer. Israel has no intention of negotiating with Abbas, Arafat, or any other Palestinian leader. It will move ahead with its primary goals regardless of world condemnation, isolation, or war. If Sharon was concerned at all about Abbas' political future he would have made minor concessions that would have made Abbas look good in front of his own people, but he didn't. It simply didn't matter enough to him to do so.

Hamas now faces the same dilemma. They have become the legitimate leaders of a country that doesn't exist. They do not control their air-space or their borders, their roads or their water. Their sovereign rights as a free people have been savaged and discarded for 38 years of brutal occupation.

Where will they turn for help?

Their tormentors in the United States have already demanded a refund of $50 million given to the PA. And, as Amira Hass reports, Israel is threatening to withhold the "$50 to $65 million per month" that they brazenly extort from "Palestinian tax and customs monies." This is the moral equivalent of Donald Rumsfeld charging the people of Falluja for the cluster-bombs that were used to decimate their city.

No one is surprised that Israel and America are threatening to cut off vital humanitarian aid to punish the Palestinians for exercising their democratic right as free people. In fact, it would be surprising if they didn't.

When has it ever mattered in the West whether Arabs were collectively starved to death or simply shot at a checkpoint?

The challenges that Hamas faces do not diminish the magnitude of its electoral victory. Palestine is now a bone-fide member in the community of democratic states. We should be confident that they will make the right choices that best affect the welfare of their people and secure their liberation from foreign occupation.

One month ahead of Israeli general elections, Israeli political parties are vying to woo an increasingly jingoistic Jewish public to their respective camps. As may have been expected, their main tool of attracting voters is hateful anti-Palestinian rhetoric.

This week, a spate of vitriolic, racist and even bellicose statements against the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, coloured the Israeli elections campaign.

The often-base litany started immediately after Hamas's electoral victory on 25 January, when Likud Chairman Benyamin Netanyahu compared the Islamic movement's triumph with Hitler's rise to power in Germany in the mid-1930s.

Netanyahu -- a master of bombastic sound bites -- didn't bother to explain how a ravaged people languishing under a sinister military occupation who have a hard time feeding their own children and a even harder time accessing their schools, hospitals and places of work, thanks to ubiquitous Israeli army roadblocks, can be compared to the nefarious Third Reich which destroyed Europe and caused the deaths of tens of millions.

Netanyahu's analogy drew no negative reactions from Israeli society. Quite to the contrary, leaders of nearly all Jewish political parties, including the Labour Party headed by the purportedly "moderate" Amir Peretz, sought to out-manoeuvre Netanyahu by prominently featuring a decidedly anti-Palestinian discourse in all their proclamations.

Take, for example, Tzivi Livni, the former Likud extremist, who now serves as Israel's foreign minister. Other Israeli parties, especially on the right and the extreme right, continue to argue over which approach should be adopted toward the "so- called Palestinians". The more pragmatic parties, such as the Likud, propose apartheid-like arrangements in the West Bank, where Palestinians are packed in Bantustans and enclaves until they become fed up with their misery and subsequently emigrate.

The more Talmudic-minded parties, such as the National Union and National Religious Party (Mifdal), propose three alternatives for dealing with Palestinians: enslavement whereby non-Jews living under Jewish law are forced to become "water carriers and wood hewers," expulsion, or outright extermination. Interestingly, these "alternatives" encompass not only Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, but Israel's Palestinian citizens as well -- so-called Israeli-Arabs.

Putting Talmudic whims aside, the Israeli government has actually stepped up its efforts to further narrow Palestinian horizons, employing a combination of psychological war, vitriolic propaganda and disinformation, as well as draconian and extremely repressive measures on the ground.

Indeed, while telling the international community that Israel is not interested in starving Palestinian children, Israeli officials have indicated that they are willing and ready to blockade Palestinian population centres and induce a "diet", as suggested by Israeli government official Dov Weisglass last week. In the past, Israeli occupation soldiers, acting like armed robbers in broad daylight, stormed Palestinian banks and seized millions of dollars in cash. Indeed, there is no guarantee that the perpetually nervous Israeli political-military establishment won't do it again to realise the ultimate Israeli goal of bringing the Palestinians to their knees. As if severe economic pressure and acts like seizing Palestinian tax money were not enough, one Israeli security official actually threatened this week to assassinate Ismail Haniya, the next Palestinian prime minister, if a "single terrorist act" is carried out from this point forward. Avi Dichter, former head of the Shin Bet, Israel's chief domestic intelligence agency, said that Haniya and his colleagues had no immunity from assassination.

Needless to say, this must be music to the ears of hundreds of thousands of anti-Palestinian Jewish voters who will not have a hard time choosing a candidate on 28 March. The propinquity of the Israeli elections is certainly a factor in these shrill and hyperbolic statements. Indeed, it is well known in Israel that the most effective way of gaining support among the Israeli Jewish public is by demonstrating one's harshness, bloodiness, and criminality towards the Palestinians. This explains the election by Israelis of such notorious and certified war criminals as Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, to mention just two.

Nonetheless, it seems amply clear that Israel views the election of Hamas by a majority of Palestinians as a clear political challenge. Hamas has been arguing loudly -- and convincingly -- of late that it is wrong to demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel while not demanding that Israel recognise Palestine, ie a Palestinian state within the internationally recognised 1967 borders. Hamas is also asking the international community to pressure Israel to define its physical borders before considering the issue of recognition.

Of course, these intrinsic and most fundamental questions are anathema to Israel which seeks to dilute the entire peace process by claiming that the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem are actually "disputed territories" subject to negotiations and bargaining between the nearly vanquished PA and a dominant Israel that has America at her beck and call. Israel is trying in earnest to stage a propaganda offensive against Hamas and the PA by building up an "international coalition" against legitimising Hamas until the latter recognises Israel and in return of nothing -- just as the PLO formally did in 1993.

In doing so, Israel hopes to have sufficient time to complete its unilateral plans and designs in the West Bank; namely to annex up to 60 per cent of the occupied territory, which will reduce Palestinian population centres to isolated ghettos, cut off from each other and the rest of the world. This, indeed, is the only Israeli prescription for a viable Palestinian state living peacefully side by side with Israel.

In this context, Hamas rightly believes that the upcoming period is unlikely to bear witness to any serious efforts towards a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For his part, Abbas, while on a visit to Yemen this week, vindicated Hamas's posture, saying he understood Hamas's insistence that Israel recognise a Palestinian state on 100 per cent of the occupied Palestinian territories. "I don't blame them," said Abbas, adding rather bitterly, "We recognised Israel in 1989, but look what happened after that."

If you want to understand the policy of a country, look at the map!" advised Napoleon. What he meant was: regimes come and go, rulers rise and fall, ideologies flourish and wither, but geography stands forever. It's geography that decides the basic interest of every state.

Vladimir Putin, heir of czars and commissars, looked at the map. Looked and picked up the telephone to invite the Hamas leaders.

A hundred years ago, the whole expanse from India to Turkey was a battlefield between Russia and the main Western power at that time, the British Empire. Adventurers, spies, diplomats and plotters of all stripes roamed the area. This contest was known as "The Great Game".

In time, the actors changed. The Bolsheviks took the place of the czars; the American empire succeeded the British. But the Great Game went on.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, it seemed as if the game had come to an end. Russian influence disappeared from the region. The Soviet empire dissolved, and what remained was too weak, too poor, to take part in the game. It had no jetons.

And now, with one stroke, Putin has changed everything. Inviting Hamas to Moscow was a gambit of genius: it didn't cost anything, and it put Russia back on the map of the Middle East. While the whole world was still puzzled and confused by the Hamas victory, Putin used the sharp scalpel of unemotional logic and made the first move of a new game.

This way, the new czar of all the Russians exploited the weakness of his rivals. President Bush has got himself into a dismal position. When all the other pretexts for his bloody Iraqi adventure had evaporated into thin air, he raised a new flag: democracy in the Middle East. He imposed new elections on the Palestinians. In these elections, the most democratic one could imagine, the winner was - alas! - Hamas.

What to do? To declare that democratic elections are good only if they deliver the outcome we desire? To boycott the Palestinian [National] Authority, now the "Second Democracy in the Middle East"? To starve the Palestinians until they elect the "right" leadership?

Bush could, of course, recognize the elected Hamas government. But how could he do that? After all, the United States has put Hamas on its list of terrorist organizations - not only its military wing, but the whole movement, including the kindergartens and mosques. Now they are caught up in the "clash of civilizations, the apocalyptic battle between the West and Islam.

Nothing to be done. America is a chess player caught in a position of stalemate - unable to make any move at all.

Europe is in a similar situation. Like a mental patient in a straitjacket, it cannot move its arms. It put on this jacket itself. Under American and Israeli pressure, it put Hamas on its terror list, and thus condemned itself to total impotence in the new situation.

Putin does not laugh often. But now, perhaps, he may be permitting himself a thin smile.

The Palestinians, too, are quite confused. In these elections they surprised themselves, and, no less, Hamas.

Inside Fatah, there are contradictory views about what to do. The good of the Palestinian people clearly demands a wide coalition, which would include all parties, in order to overcome the crisis and prevent a boycott of the Palestinian [National] Authority by the world. But the narrow party interest of Fatah says otherwise: Let's compel Hamas to govern alone. It will break its head; the world will boycott it. After a year or two, the Palestinian public will return Fatah to power.

That's realpolitik, but dangerous. During the one or two years, the Israeli government will enlarge the settlements, build more and more of the [Apartheid] Wall, fix new borders, annex the Jordan valley - the sky is the limit. The reaction of the Palestinian public may be quite different from what the Fatah people imagine.

Hamas is also baffled. It knows full well that the elections were less an ideological breakthrough than a protest vote - more against Fatah than for Hamas. Now Hamas must gain the heart of the Palestinian people, and the people want an end to the occupation, and peace at last.

Hamas does not want the world to ostracize the Palestinian [National] Authority and starve the population. But it cannot change its skin on the morrow of its victory. What will the Palestinians say if it suddenly declares that it is ready to recognize Israel's right to exist, to disarm and annul its charter? That it has sold its soul to Satan in order to enjoy the comforts of power? That it is as corrupt as Fatah?

If Israel and America wanted to lead Hamas towards a path of peace, they would ease its way towards the desired change. They could find mechanisms for the transfer of the money due to the Palestinians. They could be satisfied with an announcement that the new government is based on the Oslo Agreement (which includes the recognition of Israel) without demanding that Hamas humiliate itself in public. They could agree to a hudna (armistice) for the transition period and put an end to all violent action by both sides. Hamas can be disarmed by including its fighters in the official security forces. And, of course, and most importantly - prisoners could be released.

But the present Israeli government shows no interest in making it easy for Hamas. And if the Israeli government is not interested, what American politician, if not bent on suicide, can say otherwise?

In Israel, the Hamas victory has not given rise to sorrow and lamentations. On the contrary. Israeli leaders could hardly hold back from dancing in the streets.

At long last, it has become perfectly clear that "There is No One to Talk With". If Yasser Arafat was no partner, and if Mahmoud Abbas was no partner, Hamas is the mother of all no-partners. Nobody can rebuke us for going on with "targeted killings", destroying the Palestinian economy, building walls, breaking up the West Bank territory, cutting off the Jordan valley and generally doing whatever we feel like. And if, with God's help, Palestinian terrorism starts again, we can say to everybody: "We told you so!"

But in Israel, too, there is a lot of confusion. Under American pressure, Ehud Olmert was compelled to transfer to the Palestinian at least once the revenues that Israel has collected on their behalf. He was immediately attacked for "surrendering" to Hamas. Even this small act of surrendering stolen money has caused a political storm. The Israeli election, due to take place in 24 days, casts its shadow on everything.

Now comes Putin's daring step. He makes it easier for the Hamas leadership to moderate its stance - if it is ready to join the political game. He also makes it easier for the government of Israel - if the government of Israel wants dialogue and peace. And, above all else, he is announcing that Russia is back in the Great Game.

Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist