The uninitiated should be warned that Nawwaf Al-Zaro's book will produce the kind of vertigo suffered when the mind undergoes a profound paradigm shift, a disorientation akin to that experienced by Dante when, having descended through the narrowing circles of Hell, he clambers over and under the hairy groin of Cerberus at the still point of the turning world and what had been 'down' becomes 'up.' To those who have not yet heard the voice of Palestine, the record of massacre and atrocity contained in this book will sound shocking, even improbable. I remember having the same uneasy response to the first of Bishop Huddleston's pamphlets on Apartheid in South Africa some thirty years ago, before Steve Biko had cried out for the assertion of Black Consciousness, and while Nelson Mandela was still in prison.

From Deir Yasin to Jenin documents the hundreds of massacres and assassinations carried out by Israel against the Palestinians up to, during and since its foundation in 1948. The book, staggering in its cumulative effect, puts paid finally to the 'crazed lone gunman' explanation often used by apologists for the Zionist state to account for atrocities like the massacre by Baruch Goldstein of worshippers in the Ibrahimi Mosque on February 25, 1994, and many others. What Al-Zaro forces us to realize by documenting the consistency of the phenomenon of massacre as Israeli policy is the intrinsically genocidal nature of Israel as a colonial settler state designed only for Jews. In addition, he forces us to see that Israel has targeted the leaders of Palestinian resistance from the beginning, often subjecting them to torture and mutilation before inflicting death, and frequently killing indiscriminately anyone who happened to be in the way. Among the victims of "extra-judicial execution" --carried out by what in all other parts of the world we call "death squads"--have been Palestinians of great vision and talent, from Ghassan Kanafani, the gifted writer who was murdered together with his niece by means of a car-bomb in Lebanon in 1972, to the poet and patriot Kamal Nasser, executed together with two other Palestinian leaders in their homes in Beirut by a death squad using frog-men and helicopters in 1973.

This important document, From Deir Yasin to Jenin, comes to us at a propitious time. Palestine is at a crossroads, suffering an intensification of genocidal violence thinly disguised by Ariel Sharon's pathetic attempt to cloak its barbarism under the rubric of the American-led war against "terrorism." Well-meaning people who, out of sympathy for the Jewish people after the tragedy of their mass murder in Germany, have until recently chosen to see the tiny struggling Jewish homeland as incapable of wrongdoing, have been rudely awakened. Until recently much of the world has been blinded to Israeli crimes by massive pro-Zionist propaganda. A constant stream of books and Hollywood blockbuster movies, perceived through a mist of biblical legend-- Exodus, Shoa, Yentl, Shtetl, Schindler's List, The Diary of Ann Frank, Sophie's Choice, etc.-- has created the public perception that the Jewish people are the only ones ever to have suffered, though Hitler's victims included Gypsies, Poles, Russians, the mentally ill, as well as anyone who opposed his program of genocide and ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, books and films which tried to show a more balanced view (like Hannah K by Costa Gavras) have been vilified and strictly censored. Hannah K opened in New York to be closed after a single showing.

A very recent example of the silencing of the Palestinian voice is contained in a small article by Chris McGreal in The Guardian Weekly (Oct. 24-30, 2002) reporting that the Simon Wiesenthal Centre demanded that Jack Straw recall Sherard Cowper-Coles, British Ambassador to Israel, for saying: "Israel has reduced the West Bank and Gaza Strip into a vast concentration camp." Simon Wiesenthal spokeman Shimon Samuels, complained to Jack Straw: "If substantiated, we urge the prompt recall of Mr. Cowper-Coles for Holocaust revisionism, banalisation of the memory of its victims, and endoresement of the most extreme voices of Palestinian anti-semitism." Sadly, Mr. Cowper-Coles, like many others who actually go to Occupied Palestine and see appalling oppression with their own eyes, was forced to recant. McGreal quotes him as denying that he had used such terms "nor would I ever do so." Thus we see the specious equation of Palestinian resistance to a brutal illegal occupation with anti-Semitism, precisely the tactic exposed by Norman Finkelstein in his important book, The Holocaust Industry. I offer this as a typical example of the kind of pressure that is brought to bear on anyone who speaks the truth about Israeli occupation policy. In fact, if the ambassador or any other visitor to the West Bank and Gaza had failed to see that they have been turned into a vast concentration camp, he would have to be certifiably blind.

Fortunately a new literature has sprung up, including many important books by Jewish as well as Arab and other scholars, in which basic issues and misconceptions underlying the problem are addressed in dynamic and healing new ways. In addition to the book by Finkelstein already mentioned, there are Marc Ellis's Beyond Innocence and Redemption, Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky's Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Regina Sharif's Non-Jewish Zionism, and Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht's The Fate of the Jews. In biblical scholarship, revisionist theologians and historians have radically altered the reading of biblical myths on which the claims to land justifying Zionist settler colonialism have been based, like Rev. Michael Prior's The Bible and Colonialism, Keith Whitelam's The Invention of Ancient Israel: the Silencing of Palestinian History, Thomas L. Thompson's many books on new findings in biblical archaeology. Most stunning of all is the entire opus of Edward W. Said, a Palestinian in exile whose scholarly work has created a context in which the Question of Palestine can at last be addressed.

Most importantly, it has been possible to arrive at the basic understanding that the colonial settler state is intrinsically genocidal, thus allowing Israel to be perceived in its true light rather than through the idealizing myths of biblical claims to exceptionalism. The importance of this development cannot be overemphasized, since even people like the heroic Sara Roy who have taken courageous stands documenting the ravages of the Israeli occupation, seem to waver when it comes to facing the fact that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians. Though Roy has spent months in Palestine and has done pioneering work on the economy of the Palestinians (The Dedevelopment of Gaza, for example) and has witnessed the brutal facts of Israeli occupation, in her recent statement widely published on the Internet entitled Living with the Holocaust: The Journey of a Child of Holocaust Survivor, she nevertheless felt obliged to deny that Israel's occupation is genocide. Even though she lists all the atrocities of dispersion, dispossession, torture, land confiscation, illegal settlement, etc., she nonetheless concludes: "Israel's occupation of the Palestinians is not the moral equivalent of the Nazi genocide of the Jews. But it does not have to be. No this is not genocide, but it is repression, and it is brutal." (Dec. 9, 2002)

Evidently Roy is using here a definition of genocide which makes it impossible to apply the term to any other case except the Jews. Ward Churchill argues that this restricted definition has been preached by Holocaust exclusivists like Cornell's Stephen T. Katz in order to prevent the application of the term genocide to the Native Americans, the Gypsies, and of course the Palestinians-in short, to any other group except the Jews... This restricted definition is patently inadequate and must be changed -- and fortunately it is being changed. Israel's occupation of Palestine is, no matter how painful the realization may be, absolutely and unequivically genocide, one which is going on under the very eyes of the world.

Maxime Rodinson's book, Israel: Colonial Settler State (1973) goes a long way to establishing that of the various forms of colonialism, settler colonialism-- that characterized by the importation of a foreign population into an area with the concomitant subjection and then annihiliation and/or dispersal of the indigenous population -- is intrinsically genocidal. There has also been a more recent major elaboration of the scope and meaning of genocide as it applies to the Palestinian and many other people, in a book by a Native American academic Ward Churchill. In his brilliant book on the genocide by European settlers and soldiers against the entire Western Hemisphere, Churchill, a professor at Colorado State University, in A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Franciso, City Lights Books, 1977) articulates Raphael Lemkin's definition of genocide. In doing so, Churchill points out that Holocaust exclusivists--like Cornell's Stephen Katz--have completely misrepresented Lemkin's careful definition of genocide (in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1946). Lemkin's definition makes it very clear that the actual physical annihilation of every single member of a group is not the only or necessary character of genocide. Lemkin says in one place:

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition , in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone after removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor's own nationals.
( Axis Rule p. 82, quoted by Churchill, p. 68)

In another section Lemkin says:

Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves… The objectives of such a plan would be a disintegration of political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.
( Axis Rule, p. 79, quoted by Churchill p.70) (My emphasis)

If we apply this definition to the Palestinian situation, as Ward Churchill does, (the first entry in his Index under 'Palestine/Palestinians, gives various page numbers; then his second entry is 'Israeli genocide of, 74, 398n89'), it is self-evident that the definition fits. The context in which this application occurs is the explanation of the motive for the Holocaust exclusivist position of Stephen Katz and others. Churchill says:

The factors motivating exclusivists to conduct themselves as they do have been analyzed elsewhere. They concern the agenda of establishing a 'truth' which serves to compel permanent maintenance of the privileged political statues of Israel, the Jewish state established on Arab land in 1947 as an act of international atonement for the Holocaust; to forge a secular reinforcement, based in the myth of unique suffering, of Judaism's theological belief in itself as comprising a 'special' or 'chosen' people, entitled to all the prerogatives of such; and to construct a conceptual screen behind which to hide the realities of Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population whose rights and property were usurped in its very creation.(pp.73-74)
(My emphasis; In this passage, Churchill makes many references to other authors, a scholarly apparatus too lengthy to reproduce here.)

If this more inclusive definition of genocide is adopted, then, it become obvious that the Palestinians constitute a whole people who have been condemned by history to be ethnically cleansed to make way for the restoration of the promised land to the Jewish people, the "Chosen People" of Yahweh. The outcome of this religious view can be heard in the Baptist radio evangelists who mindlessly praise Israel for fulfilling divine prophecy! On the other hand, through a more secular perspective, like that of Maxime Rodinson, Palestine is the victim of a colonial settler state which is intrinsically genocidal, and therefore has an innate right to resist.

In his introduction to Rodinson's Israel: Colonial Settler State, Peter Buch remarks: "It is... incredible that the colonial-settler character of Israel has not been widely recognized by world public opinion, even among those who normally sympathize with the colonially oppressed." (p. 18).

In the discourse of post-colonial studies, it has become increasingly apparent that the colonial settler state is intrinsically genocidal. This realization was not arrived at over night--it has taken years of dialectic in the face of formidable imperialist powers which attempted to silence all opposition and which claimed the right of colonization under the rubric of Social Darwinism.. The arguments justifying Israeli genocide against the Palestinian -- like those which justified European genocide against the indigenous populations of the Western Hemisphere -- have been exposed for the racist delusions that they are.

But Nawwaf Al-Zaro reminds us that however Palestine is perceived from outside, the Palestinian people have their own perspective. The voice through which that perspective is expressed speaks through this book, so powerfully that we recognize it as strange, because Palestine is an entity whose voice has until recently been silenced as Edward Said has said repeatedly in books like Culture and Imperialism and The Question of Palestine. The tones of this book are not the modulated accents of disinterested academic discussion, but the strident tones of outrage and justified condemnation.

The Israeli poet and peace activist Yitzhak Laor (someone I trust having seen him in Ramallah with a few comrades get tear-gassed, beaten up and arrested for protesting the closure of Birzeit University twenty years ago), has made one of the most profound and ominous indictments of Israeli occupation poliicy. In a recent article in the London Review of Books, Laor said:

The Israeli agenda is way ahead of what critics of Israel abroad manage to grasp in their sometimes too careful language. I have just seen Edward Said on the BBC's Hard Talk trying to explain to Tim Sebastian that Israel is destroying Palestinian civil society. That is true, of course, yet it is already an understatement. What is being destroyed, every day, every night, by guns, by undercover units, by raids and manhunts, by arbitrary orders, by rapid military trials, by kidnappings and numberless arrests without trial is something greater than "civil society". We are shown the "events": suicide bombings, bombardments of civil neighborhoods, assassinations of political activists or terrorists. What we do not see is the undermining of the idea of society itself. (Dec. 4, 2002)

In light of these developments on the question of Palestine, it becomes clear that the most murderous form of terrorism is not the violence used by victims of oppression for their own liberation, but that waged by colonial settler states, i.e., official state terrorism which poses as legitimate force to quell any resistance to its power. The perpetrator of the assassinations and atrocities documented in From Deir Yassin To Jenin is the colonial-settler state of Israel, aided and abetted by the United States whose own genocidal past and present it has yet to confront.