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Gideon Levy, Miko Peled, and Ilan Pappe describe a process they went through to become critics of Zionism and Israel. See their YouTube interviews.

Charles de Gaulle. Momoirs of Hope: Renewal and Endeavor. Analysis of internal French political situation in the 1950s. The French Army was brutal in repressing Algerian independence. One reason was that they were “haunted by fear of another Indochina, another military reverse . . . felt a growing resentment against a political system which was the embodiment of irresolution.” (15) Vietnam In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy committed to being militarily involved in Vietnam. “In South Vietnam, after having encouraged the seizure of dictatorial power by Ngo Dinh Diem and hastened the departure of the French advisers, they were beginning to stall the first elements of an expeditionary corps under cover of economic aid. John Kennedy gave me to understand that the American aim was to establish a bulwark against the Soviets in Indo-Chinese peninsula. But instead of giving him the approval he wanted, I told the President that he was taking the wrong road.” (265) “You will find, I said to him, that intervention in the area will be ban endless entanglement Once a nation has been aroused, no foreign power, however, strong, can impose its will upon it. . . . even if you find local leaders who in their own interests are prepared to obey you, the people will not agree to it, and indeed do not want you. The ideology which you invoke will make no difference. Indeed, in the eyes of the masses it will become identified with your will to power. . . . the Communists will appear as the champions of national independence, and the more support they will receive . . . Now you want to take over where we left off and revive a war which we brought to an end. I predict that you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire, however much you spend in men and money.” The goal of the US and other countries should be to help the impoverished of Asia not control their countries. (256) Arab - Israeli Conflict David Ben-Gurion represented the epitome of Israel. Although France was not part of the creation of modern Israel. “I could not fail to be attracted by the grandeur of an enterprise which consisted in re-establishing an autonomous Jewish nation in a land which bore the traces of its fabulous history, and which it had owned nineteen centuries earlier. . . . But while the existence of Israel seemed to me to be more than justified, I considered that a great deal of caution was called for in her handling of the Arabs. . . . It was at their expense and on their lands that Israel had set herself up as a sovereign State. In doing so, she had wounded them in their religion and their pride. For this reason, when Ben Gurion spoke to me of his plan to settle four or five million Jews in Israel, which could not contain them within her present frontiers, and revealed to me his intention of extending these frontiers at the earliest possible opportunity, I urged his not to do so.” In the future Israel will be hated for this. (265-266) Iran - de Gaulle had yearly meetings with the Shah of Iran. De Gaulle believed that the Shah was a good leader who kept his country united and independent and wanted to economically progress. (264-265)

David Ben-Gurion. Memoirs. Unlike the Germans after World War II who claimed they were following orders committing the atrocities they did are not like the Jews. “For us, right and wrong are between the individual and his own conscience. The Jew who commits evil must, therefore, act in defiance of what his inner being affirms as right. So he carries an extra burden of wickedness.” Tell it to the Arabs!! (15-16) Forgetting the huge Jewish contribution to world civilization Ben-Gurion relates that although other countries have had a thousand or so years to develop the Jews will do so in time. What is he talking about? His and the Zionist version of a Jewish state. (17) Throughout history “creative” Jews were isolated. Therefore, they need their own “national community.” And Israel is it. (21-22) This is ahistorical. Tell it to Moses and all the other Hebrews who have influenced the world with their thoughts. He continues his rewriting of history and his selective memory of facts by writing to Charles dee Gaulle that the Jews are the most persecuted people in the world. De Gaulle referred to the “Jews as an aggressive people” after their crushing of the Arab Armies during the Six-Day War. (20) People in Ben-Gurion’s home town of Plonsk, Poland greeted Teodor Herzl as a “messiah.” (34) Although Plonsk would send “the highest proportion of Jews to Eretz Israel from any town in Poland of comparable size” Ben-Gurion did not experience anti-semitism. The goal was to rebuild the Jewish homeland. (36) Ben-Gurion arrived in Palestine in 1906 and was disappointed at the city of Jaffa. Tel-Aviv, next door to Jaffa, became a modern city, however. (47) Israeli propaganda says that they made the desert bloom. Ben-Gurion recounts seeing “hundreds of Arabs” walking to work in the fields. (50) “Half the immigrants woh came to Palestine in those early days took one look and caught the same ship home again.” (52) Working in the fields was hard but it was the lack of sleep that affected the Zionists most. Also, the “nomadic Bedouins” stole from their camps as well as the Arab camps. (56) Claiming that Israelis “abhor war and military things as ends in themselves. Nevertheless, the IDF is a source of deep national pride.” It brings a diverse country together. Israelis would gladly “live in peace” with their neighbors. But the military is necessary for Israel’s survival. (66-67) The Arabs should accept Israel. (69) Ben-Gurion states his readiness to negotiate with Arab nations. “Israel has indeed remained true to the ideas of peace and love of mankind on which the Bible rests.” (70) He also uses the Bible as justification for the establishment by Europeans of the State of Israel in Palestine. However, as Miko Peled states in his many lectures (see YouTube) the Bible is not an historical document. So many people don’t realize or accept this. I had a very well known professor decades ago whose first question to us was, ‘how many of you have read the Bible?’ While opinions split I sided with those who did not view him highly. Israel built its nation on its own “sweat, on digging the soil with our own hands, fertilizing, planting, harvesting . . .” (70) “It is again possible to say categorically that not a single bullet or act of violence have Israel or the Jewish people in the twentieth century enforced their claim to this land. . . . We have resorted to force in defense only.” (70) The Arabs in Israel have benefitted from the Zionist development of the land. “The Arabs, like ourselves, no longer die of malaria, no longer live out their days in near starvation, unemployment, hopelessness. More and more, they are integrating themselves into the Israeli population, what with their representation in Parliament, the enrollment of their young into our system of compulsory education, the emancipation of their womenfolk and their presences as volunteers in the military. . . . our relations with the Arab minority is more of mutual respect.” (71) Ben-Gurion claims that the “the Balfour Declaration [of 1917] acknowledged Israel’s right to exist.” (71) Not so fast, the right recognized was a “homeland for the Jewish people” not a an exclusive Jewish state. As Miko Peled has noted the Balfour Declaration was made by white, European men who had never been to Palestine and, no Arabs were involved in the decision. I’ll leave it to Miko Peled to debate this. I do not have the fortitude to do so. Ben-Gurion writes that in 1947 the Jews received “the rump We didn’t think that settlement very fair since we know that our work here deserved a greater assignment of land.” We didn’t, however, press the point . . . We had, therefore, absolutely no designs on Arab assigned areas.” (71) Nasser’s threatened Israel in 1967 facing Israel’s “most populous, built-up and flattest area, Israel’s single most vulnerable territory.” (73) He claims that the Syrians threatened “Kibbutzim from the Golan Heights, killing Israeli civilians every day.” (73) However, years later Moshe Dayan stated unequivocally that the Israelis provoked Syrian attacks. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/1999-12/24/099r-122499-idx.html) May 15, 1948, Egyptian bombers flew over Tel Aviv to attack the new State of Israel. “The infant nation was in a life-and-death struggle against seven better equipped, numerically superior, British trained - an in some cases led - Arab armies invading its meagre territory from every side. With inadequate weapons, farm implements, their bare hands and indomitable spirit, the Israelis sent the enemy reeling.” The plan had been to take over Israel by May 25th, however, the Israelis revealed by June 10th. Israel would extend its territory before “an armistice signed with the Arab powers in 1949.” (79) Claims the British aided Arab military build up while the Jews, under the Mandate of the League of Nations, forbade them from also building an army. (79-80) Ben-Gurion forgets Orde Wingate’s training of the Haganah in 1930s. Ben-Gurion understood that the Arabs were hostile to Israel. However, his understanding of Palestine was skewed. He denies Palestinian nationalism. Writes that “in 1948 it was the Arab powers and not the Jews who exhorted the local Moslem population to leave their homes and their land. We asked them to stay and help us build a modern country.” (83) These refugees are “stunted, embittered, and I fear half-crazed . . . due to the tragic error of their parents.” (84) Agrees with Miko Peled (YouTube.com presentations) that the Zionists had 45,000 soldiers and others who were in “private armies.” (85) In April 1948 the “Arabs had cut off the water supply to the modern Western sector of the city [Jerusalem] where the Jewish population predominated.” Ben-Gurion compares this to the Roman siege of 70AD. (86) The British were of no help; in fact, they disarmed the Jews and gave the weapons to the Arabs. (87) This is a theme of the film Exodus. “Israel has always remained true to its founding principles of representative government, an independent judiciary (the true safeguard of any democracy), the guarantee of civil rights for all citizens, freedom of speech and of the press, freedom of worship and a fundamental belief in the dignity of the individual.” (90) “Moreover, the Jews are the only inhabitants of Canaan-Israel since the time of Joshua, in the fourteenth century BCE, to prosper in this place and to make the earth prosper.” (111) This is an expression of ‘we made the desert bloom’ instead of the Zionists took a blooming land. Herman Melville visited Jaffa wrote, “Here is the impeccable nudity of desolation. . . . No other land could dissipate so quickly the romantic expectations of the Jews. . . . In the vacuum of Jerusalem’s dead antiquity, the Jewish immigrants will be like flies who have elected to live with an empty skull.” (112) This, too, is the belief that the Arabs in Palestine did not contribute to civilization. “Before the Jews, the Canaanite tribes were prosperous along the Mediterranean seaboard and there a few interior settlements. But the Hebrew arrival brought importance to the Negev and hill area. From Joshua’s time on, the history of the Land of Israel was one of steady development. That development always stopped abruptly when conquest put an end to Jewish power.” (113) So, only the Jews can develop the area? “Islam in its arrogance built the Mosque of el-Askar on the site of the razed Second Temple, of which only the Western Wall remains today.” (114) Ben-Gurion denies any destruction of non-Jewish churches or mosques. (114) He claims that Jewish nationalism predates Arab nationalism, including Palestinian nationalism, by four thousand years. So, Palestinian nationalism is “highly artificial, emanating from British inspiration.” The British used divide and conquer techniques to cause conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. (116) Criticizes the Arab accusations of atrocities by the Israeli armies. “Arab atrocities against Jews extend back to 1921.” (167)

Edward G. Gray. Crucible of the Nation. This book is about the history and significance of the Mason-Dixon Line. Established by surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon from 1765 to 1767. (2) The area had been used by native Americans for trade and travel for centuries. (3) Following the 1780 Pennsylvania passage of an “act for the gradual abolition of slavery,” the Mason-Dixon “Line became a boundary between slave states and free states.” (9)

Cassidy Hutchinson. Enough. Praises Liz Cheney as a true leader. (xii) Declares Donald Trump “uniquely unsuited” to handle the coronavirus epidemic. “He lacked empathy and was stubborn and impatient.” He appeared “erratic.” (72) Hutchinson was concerned that Trump would appear to be pressuring local election officials. (191) Hutchinson’s boss, chief of staff Mark Meadows nevertheless instructed Hutchinson to “put together gift packages for Cobb County election officials and workers, each stuffed full of expensive White House memorabilia. . . . but I managed to talk Mark out of sending them.” (191) Trump wanted secret service protection for his adult children after he left the White House. Unheard of. (192) Trump was angry at Meadows for not pursing election challenges. So, Meadows asked Hutchinson to type up a “one-year security memorandum for POTUS to sign . . . that’ll make him happy.” (192) Before the New Year Hutchinson believed that Meadows “seemed more prepared to embrace a plan for the vice-president to reject states’ electoral votes.” (192) Nevertheless, as time went on Meadows stated that it appeared that Trump knew he had lost the election but still wanted to try and change the results. (195) Rudy Giuliani told Cassidy Hutchinson that the march on the capitol on January 6 would be “great. The president is going to be there. He’s going to look powerful.” (196) Mark Meadows told Hutchinson that “things might get real, real bad on January 6.” (196) Trump would immediately flip from knowing he lost the election to say “he’s going to stay in office.” (196-197) Hutchinson did not like the idea of being associated with QAnon Marjorie Taylor Greene. (198) On January 6 Hutchinson was amazed at the numerous Trump supporters on Capitol Hill. (203) “For days, our colleagues were blaming Antifa for violence that could break out today. A few days ago, Mark [Meadows] told me the president agreed.” (204) Because Kayleigh McEnany “gawks at the crowd” someone said “there is no way Biden won.” (208) Later, another person told Hutchinson, “no way these are our people. This is definitely antifa.” (217) So many of Trump’s aides believed this. Hutchinson was physically drained and traumatized by the events. (218) Nevertheless, Hutchinson feels loyalty to Trump. She decides toward with him in Florida. (219) Secretary of Treasury Mnuchin planned to meet with Mark Meadows about invoking the 25th Amendment to the Constitutions which would “remove him [Trump] from power.” (223) Trump’s antics on January 6 angered Alyssa Farah Griffin. (223) Hutchinson supported impeachment proceedings against Trump after January 6. (226) On January 15 the MyPillow guy, Mike Lindell said “we can still win.” Hutchinson writes, that Trump didn’t “want this nut around anymore.” People wanted Hutchinson to get Lindell out of the White House. (228) Lindell planned for Trump to declare martial law. He stated, “No one cares about the president. No one here is loyal to him.” He used profanity and was ordered out by Pat Cipollone. (229) Hutchinson was told by Mark Meadows that many Trump people considered her a “leaker” and so may not be welcome to Trump’s Florida office. Her fury exploded. (230) She felt lucky to be leaving. (232) She believed the knives were out for her. She needed a break even if Trump had been reelected. (240) “Matt Schlapp formed a “legal defense fund” to “pay attorney fees for people subpoenaed by the January 6th Committee.” (263) She was concerned that strings would be attached to accepting such aid. (263) Spoke to a lawyer named Stefan who advised her that it would be all right to say “I don’t recall.” Hutchinson quickly distrusted Stefan. (273) She studied the Russia investigation testimony to get an idea of how to behave. (275) She wanted to be “honest and helpful” but that seemed to go against the advice of Stefan. (277) “I knew my loyalties should have been to the country, to the truth, and not to the former president, who had made himself a threat to both.” (278) Alyssa Farah Griffin continued expressing her distrust of Trump. (284) She read All the President’s Men several times and identified with Alexander Butterfield. The two communicated with each other and this gave Hutchinson strength. (285) Hutchinson was used to Trump’s temper outbursts which shed light on “how his volcanic temper and egotism had lit the match that set his followers’ torches ablaze.” (307) She writes in capital letters that she “HAD ADORED THE PRESIDENT.” This changed as she saw him and his followers “threatening the country’s constitutional order.” (308) She felt like she was in prison with all the subpoenas and “turmoil.” (315) “Trump doesn’t care if you dispute him or call him a liar. Only silence bothers him. Being ignored drives him mad.” (331) Alyssa Farah Griffin defends Hutchinson in the media. So does Mick Mulvaney.

Ilan Pappe. Out of Frame: the struggle for academic freedom in Israel. Pappe tells us of the intense “indoctrination” of academia by what he calls “Israeli ideology.” “Powerful as the Zionist grip is on one’s thoughts and life, as an Israeli Jew, one hour have extracted yourself from its hold, you cannot understand how you could ever have been captivated by its lure, logic or vision.” Mount Herzl in Israel sits on “two villages that were depopulated in July 1948 during Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine or in the local jargon “Israel’s War of Independence.” (3) Young Israelis don’t know who Herzl was! (3) Another village named after Herzl “was built on the ruins of several Palestinian villages.” (3) Famed Jewish philosopher Martin Buber disagreed with the political, military Zionist goals and “sense of moral superiority” Israelis held. He believed that “an internal revolution” was needed to “heal our people of their murerous sickness and causeless hatred. . . . how great was our responsibility to those miserable Arab refugees  in whose towns we have settled Jews who were brought from afar; whose gardens, orchids and vineyards we gather; and in whose cities that we robbed, we put houses of education, charity and prayer while we babble and rave about being the ‘people of the book’ and the ‘light of the nations’.” (4-5) Today, Israelis believe in “Herzl’s message: Zionism and the settlements of Israel was a miracle.” (8) Herzl was “openly and proudly, a colonialist. . . . He often spoke of colonizing Palestine as the master plan of Zionism.” (9) Herzl had no sympathy for the Arabs. They “should be expelled unnoticed and discreetly and circumspectly.” (10) While expressing concern for the native inhabitants of Palestine he actually began the “double-talk” of future Zionist and Israeli leaders used to fool “the world for so many years.” Pappe cites Herzl’s diaries.” (10) In the 1950s Haifa’s mayor eradicated what he could of the “Arab past.” (13) British policy toward the Arabs was hostile. There was “a collusion between Israel, Jordan and Britain that almost wiped out the Palestinians.” (16) Pappe cites his own book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1948-1951, to prove that Britain was not the enemy of Zionism and Israel.” (17) Later, Pappe came to understand that the Palestinian version 1948 Arab-Zionist conflict was correct. (20) Israel established a layer of “denial and distortion. The villages from which the Palestinian population was evicted in 1948 were renamed and resettled in a matter of months.” (22) Pappe received death threats and was called a traitor following publication of his thesis as a book, Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict. He did not have tenure and believes that many critics did not read his book. (23-24) Benny Morris who was one of the first to question the Zionist narrative of the 1948 war “rejected . . . many Palestinian points, such as the depiction of Zionism as a colonialist movement or of the 1948 expulsion as an ethnic cleansing operation.” (38) In the fall of 2000 there was another Intifada. “Within two years, critical voices in academia, in the electronic and printed media and in other sites of cultural and knowledge production were silenced.” Israelis had closed their minds and the “militarization of public space occurred.” (40) Jewish identity now revolved around the military. It used the military requirement for young people to indoctrinate the society. (42) Israelis media created “the mythology of Israeli heroism in the battlefield, even when the raw material was spun out of bloody reprisal operations against a civilian population in the 1950s. These heroes would become the core group from which many future leaders of Israel would emerge: Yitzhak Rabin, Binyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Brak and Ariel Sharon.” (43) During the Oslo Agreements the media began to assert itself against the military censorship. (44) Nevertheless, “the number of former-generals in politics and the media grew, and with it their influence on the public space.” (44) A myth created during the Intifadas was that they were terrorist acts and the media accepted the military’s belief. “The early demonstrations in the Intifada were therefore reported as assaults on soldiers and not as the peaceful protests and marches against the occupation that they really were.” (50) The media also perpetrated the lie that the 13 Palestinians killed by Israel during the Intifada were terrorists. Israeli troops supposedly used their weapons when they were in danger. The fact that these and many more Palestinians killed by the Israeli military were unarmed was not revealed to the Israeli public. Another myth promoted was that the Palestine liberation Organization (PLO) was part of al-Qaeda. (51) Foreign media became targets of the military and the Israeli media did nothing to protect them. (55) In March 2002, during Operation Defensive Shield, while attempting to show an Israeli army with a “human face” the Israeli media showed an Israeli army destroying walls and terrorizing women and children. (55) Pappe has a subtitle of one of his chapters, The Intellectual Eunuchs and Tamed ‘Peaceniks’. He tells of Benny Morris joining the consensus of Israel’s founding and speaking against his original writings. (57) After the Six Day War liberal Israeli activists accepted a two state solution to the conflict. After the Second Intifada these same activists “publicly and privately confessed how wrong they had been to trust the Palestinians.” (58) Leaders of the Israeli left “warned long before the al-Asqa Intifada that if peace were not achieved in Camp David, war would reign instead. This was not an analytical statement, but a condescending threat to the Palestinians.” (60) The Oslo Accords replaced “Israeli occupation with another form of control.” (61) All political views in Israel believed that Israel was Palestine. The fewer Palestinians the better. “The argument was about tactics, not goals.” (61) The right-wing settlers on the West Bank hated the Oslo Accords and the Israeli ‘peace camp’. They also “preferred to use force to impose the Zionist reality over all of Palestine.” (62) Pappe struggled “against Nakbah denial in my homeland.” (63) Israel successfully removed the issue of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war, the Nakbah, to such an extent that they refused to allow their diplomats to discuss it or its consequences and causes for the contemporary conflict. (65) Things are different now. (66) Under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon the government “initiated the systematic removal of any textbook or school syllabus that referred to the Nakbah, even marginally.” (66) “After 2000, the expulsion to many in the political centre to be an inevitable and justifiable consequence of the Zionist project in Palestine.  If there was any lament, it was that the expulsions not complete.” Even Benny Morris thought more Palestinians would have been expelled. This aided the “Israeli plans for further ethnic cleansing.” (67) Teddy Katz lived on a kibbutz near Haifa and enrolled in Ilan Pappe’s class about the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the University of Haifa. He studied his kibbutz action in the 1948 war. (71) He found that the “Kibbutz was built on the ruins of an Arab village is called Zeyta.” The government evicted these people after the war “I because the site was coveted by the kibbutz movement for its fertile soil and convenient location.” However, the Arabs new location was also desired by the kibbutz because they didn’t like seeing “from their windows those who had been dispossessed in order to give them a home.” So, the Arabs moved again. (71) Kzatz found that Jewish military units murdered “possibly up to 225” people at Tantura who were unarmed and had surrendered. The Alexandroni Brigade committed this act but they disagreed that they did commit this act. “The association of Alexandroni veterans decided to sue Katz for libel. . . . There were many Palestinian survivors, but there testimony did not count in Israel.” (73) The University of Haifa erased Teddy Katz from its enrollment and he was threatened and harassed. (74) Pappe learned that the “Alexandroni Brigade veterans were regularly meeting the managers of the university, I knew that normal academic procedures and ethics were not being followed in this case.” (75) At this time Katz was in his mid-50s and consequently suffered a stroke. (76) As a result, Katz signed an apology. Later, he would retract his retraction. (77) Nevertheless, Pappe researched on his own and more than confirmed Katz’s conclusion. “The Alexandrondi veterans did not dare to sue me . . . they knew that I would not crack under the pressure of a trial.” (88) As a result Pappe “became a pariah in my own university community. Old colleagues and friends canceled invitations to take part in seminars, symposia and conferences which had been sent to me before the affair broke out.” (90) At this point in Israeli history McCarthyist tactics were used “in Israeli academia and the media.” Continuing this censorship, "the director of the library at Haifa University formally removed Katz’s dissertation from the shelf of MA and Phd theses.” (82) Ephraim Karsh is a historian whose work is considered by too many as unreliable. He vilifies the “New Historians” as being “pro-Palestinian, and hence suspect as professionally inept.” (84) Israelis turned the Palestinians into Nazis. (91) In May 2002 Ilan Pappe was brought before an academic court in which the accusers demanded his dismissal from the university because of my position on the Katz affair. The accusers viewed “themselves as the guardians of national history. . . . Most important, the history of 1948, especially of the ethnic cleansing, is directly connected to the peace process today ad to the shape of any future solution.” (92) For the 2002 to 2003 academic year Pappe proposed a course at the University of Haifa about the Nakbah. Palestinians as a subject had been “introduced only in the 1980s - not out of empathy for the plight of the Palestinians, but as part of an intelligence effort to ‘know the enemy.’” Pappe’s course, considered heresy, had many students. (93-94) Pappe walks with Fatima who remembers the 1948 Nakbah. Her village is gone, replaced with a kibbutz “tourist bungalows,; the village graveyard is now a “car park.” (110) At the time of the Nakbah Fatima knew “that the British were leaving and that the Jews were occupying nearby villages at a frightening rate.” The Arab countries did not help despite “their rhetoric.” (113) Fatima had hidden from the armed Jews who had Arab villagers pile bodies and who were then shot and piled on top of the bodies. (115) later the Israelis buried the bodies with bulldozers which in later years the area would be covered with pine trees. (121-122) An Israeli man named Yaacov found old letters from his father-in-law who had been a Jewish officer in the 1948 war. “One of the entries detailed the frenzied events that ended with the slaughter of all the men and male teenagers in Fatima’s village.” Following a press release more soldiers came out of confess to “atrocities committed by the Israelis in the 1948 war. Massacres were revealed, tales of rape and loot were exposed, and the initially confident and condescending official Israeli responses soon replaced with indignation, panic, and in some more thoughtful Israeli circles, remorse.” (117-118) The Battle for the Historiography of 1948 - Pappe proposed a historiographical conference on 1948 a the University of Haifa. However, his desire to include Udi Adiv nixed the project. “In the early 1970s Adiv had been found guilty of spying for Syria and Palestinian groups and was sent to jail. After his release in the early 1980s, he completed a PhD thesis at the University of London under the supervision of Professor Sami Zubadia, one of the world’s leading scholars on the Middle East. Adiv’s thesis was on Zionist historiography and particularly that of 1948. Pappe believes “that Adiv was a victim of the regime’s ideology rather than” a traitor. (125-126) Pappe would later present documents to a large group of people who met at his home. The first document recounts an Israeli commander in 1948 telling already expelled Arabs to move again. One Arab called it “racism.” (135-136) In another case, Pappe recounts that Israeli soldiers looted and stole anything of value the Arabs had. (139) Pappe finally broke with Zionism and the brutal policies of the Israeli state toward the Palestinians during the Lebanese War of 1982. Even some senior Israeli army officers abhorred the invasion of Lebanon. (144) However, many Israeli generals wanted a big war not an incursion into Lebanon. They wanted this to maintain Israel’s deterrence and to prove to themselves that they could fight a war. (145) In 2005 the Gaza’s resisted the “Israeli strategy of creating a prison camp” of Gaza. They launched missiles into the Negev desert which was also a response to the Israelis arresting Palestinians. (151) Israel responded with massive airstrikes. The goal “was to weaken the community’s support for the rocket launchers.” As we learned from World War II bombing stiffens resistance to the bombers. Ugh! (151-152) Zionism stiffens. (156) The Israeli population wholeheartedly supports the army’s “carpet bombing of civilians.” All wanted more war. (159) Gaza’s used to work in the homes and clean the streets of the people of Tel Aviv. (167) Israeli hatred for the Gaza’s knows no limits. 100 Palestinians were killed by the Israelis in 2008-2009 “merely for getting to close to the fences.” From 2000-2009 they killed 3,000 Gaza’s. After the 1967 war Israelis stole Gaza’s water. (168) Israeli academia portrayed the Palestinians as demons “if it was led my Hamas.” (171) Zionism ceased to be about finding a safe place for Jews in Europe once they decided to colonize and dispossess Palestinians. (180) Since the 1930s Zionist policy in Palestine has “been made by generals.” The entire Israelis society is “geared to service in the army. . . . Israel indeed became an army with a state.” (184) “Atom bombs are still considered in Israel a doomsday weapon to be used only in case of imminent defeat of the Jewish state.” (189)

Theodor Herzl. The Jewish State. Originally published in English in 1896. Herzl was a Austo-Hungarian journalist. He founded modern Zionism, the basis for the modern State of Israel. “Theodor Herzl was the first Jew who projected the Jewish question as an international problem.” The idea of renewing Israel had been “slumbering in Jewish memory for two thousand years.” (7) Herzl’s work “was the revelation of a mystic vision with flashes and overtones of prophecy.” (9) This intrigued Jewish intellectuals and made Jews “conscious of their origin and destiny.” (9-10) We will read later that many Jews thought this insane. In fact, Herzl acknowledged this saying, “I know it sounds mad; and at the beginning I shall be called mad more than once - until the truth of what I am saying in recognized in all its shattering force.” (43) At first Herzl believed that Kaiser Wilhelm would influence the Sultan of  the Ottoman Empire to allow a Jewish state to be created in Palestine. This did not happen. He then approached British Prime Minister Joseph Chamberlain. It was here that Jewish settlement in Uganda was proposed but rejected by the Zionist Congress. (14) Later he and others would consider settling in Argentina. (38) Because of the antisemitism in Europe Herzl believed the Jews homeless that this “must come to an end.” (16) Herzl met British novelist Israel Zangwill who introduced him to “prominent, influential Jews of whom he made immediate converts. . . . Palestine alone came into the picture for a national concentration of the Jews.” (44) Another writer stated that the Germans would like to protect Jewish migration to Palestine. (47) He would finally meet the Kaiser in Palestine. (51) However, the Kaiser changed his mind. Herzl remained undeterred. (52) Herzl did not impress Baron Edmund Rothchild who did not “believe it possible to create political conditions favorable for a mass immigration of Jews.” (55) Herzl felt is necessary to prove to the wealthy Jews that mass immigration to Palestine was possible. (56) Cautiously, Herzl did not mention creating a Jewish State. (56) “Everyone of Herzl’s ideas were met by protests and public excitement. The protests were usually launched by Jews.” (57) The Jewish Congress meeting at Basle agreed, “Zionism seeks to secure for the Jewish people a publicly recognized, legally secured home (or homeland) in Palestine.” (59) Herzl wrote a novel about Zionist migration to Palestine. The novel shows a Jew visiting Palestine in 1898 which is “dead land.” In 1923 he returns to find it “thoroughly alive.” (63) Nevertheless, Herzl proclaims that the Arabs and Jews will “live side by side in friendship.” (63-64) Herzl came to understand that “attempts at colonization” failed. (95) “The Jews have dreamt this kingly dream all through the long nights of their history. Next year in Jerusalem is our old phrase. It is now a question of showing that the dream can be converted into a living reality.” (96) He was revolted by the German phrase Out with the Jews (101) Although later Zionists spoke of tilling the land Herzl found this “an extraordinary mistake” because that would require the Jews to go back in time regarding technology. (103) “Let the sovereignty be granted us over a portion of the globe large enough to satisfy the rightful requirements of a nation.” (110) Although Herzl disagreed with Jews going to Palestine to till the land he quickly describes Zionist immigration as a slow process with the poorest among the Jews going Palestine till the land, "construct roads, bridges, railways and telegraph installations; regulate rivers; and build their own dwellings; their labor will create trade, trade will create markets and markets will attract new settlers, for every man will go voluntarily, at his own expense.” (111) Jews of higher economic standing will follow the poor, according to Herzl. (112) There remained a decision as to go to Palestine or Argentina. So much for Tomorrow in Jerusalem. (114) “The land which the Society of Jews will have secured by international law must, of course, be privately acquired.” (120) The new Zionist home for the Jews will be founded voluntarily. Hmmm. Tell that to your descendants. (151) “The Jews, once settled in their own State, would probably have no more enemies.” (191)

Alison Weir. Against Our Better Judgment: the hidden history of how the U.S. was used to create Israel. “Historians have documented that Zionists sabotaged efforts to find safe havens for Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany in order to convince the world that Jews could only be safe in a Jewish state.” (30) “There was even a certain amount of collusion between Zionists and Nazi leaders.” (31) President Harry S. Truman supported the creation of the State of Israel based on the votes he could get in the 1948 election. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, Secretary of State General George C. Marshall, and presidential advisor Clarke Clifford opposed making international decisions based on domestic concerns. Forrestal was outraged and feared that our country was in danger. (45-46) Zionists pressured delegates at the United Nations General Assembly to vote for partition of Palestine to such an extent that delegates changed their minds. After an impassioned speech opposing partition as racist, theocratic, and archaic the delegate changed to support the Zionist cause. (50)

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/06/henry-kissinger-obituary-myths-00130266

https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/01/henry-kissinger-snake-oil-salesman-of-gangster-realism/

https://www.yahoo.com/news/henry-kissinger-only-cared-one-165154970.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-19872410