It is today a bit of a stretch to point to what should be done with the reality that the seizure of virtually all of the Palestinian land has made so impossible.
![]() Salem-News.com writers, Professor Bill Cook and Kourosh Ziabari |
(TEHRAN FNA) - We are used to hearing every day that a Palestinian citizen is killed by the Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip, or that Israel has begun constructing new settlements on the lands it has stolen from the Palestinians. Although the illegal actions of Israel against the people of Palestine and its continued occupation of the Palestinian lands predates some 60 years back, the future of Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs precise and in-depth investigation and study.
Prominent American academician Prof. William Cook believes that since Israel was created in 1948, the United Nations and the international organizations have failed to bring it to justice and hold it accountable for its criminal actions and policies. According to Prof. William A. Cook, the Israeli regime’s treatment of the Palestinian people is unjustifiable, indefensible and discriminatory.
“America’s poor suffer the consequences in Philadelphia where schools have no money to care for the deprived Americans, and that is but an example of what happens when we dedicate the tax payers’ money to slaughter and mayhem in a land we claim must defend itself when we can’t even identify the boundaries of that state because it refuses to identify its borders as they are continually growing as they inflict further genocide on the people of Palestine,” said Prof. Cook in an extensive interview with the Fars News Agency. William A. Cook is a professor of English at the University of La Verne. William A. Cook completed his Ph.D. at Lehigh University where he also got his Master’s degree. He has been the university’s Vice President for Academic Affairs for 13 years. Prof. Cook has extensively written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and defended the confiscated rights of the Palestinian people. His writings have appeared on such news websites and magazines as Al-Jazeera, Foreign Policy Journal, Palestine Chronicle, Counterpunch and Al-Manar. He is the author of such books as “The Rape of Palestine: Hope Destroyed, Justice Denied,” “Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East Policy” and “The Chronicles of Nefaria”. What follows is the full text of FNA’s interview with Prof. Cook about the roots and origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel’s non-compliance with the international law in respecting the basic rights of the Palestinian citizens and the genocidal policies of Israel in the Occupied Territories.
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MacMichael goes into considerable detail as to the process by which this unification could be established. However, it is not necessary to go into such detail since the outcome of its intent, as we know, never materialized. But I will quote the preamble of the plan to demonstrate that there were Jews and Arabs that believed cooperation was possible and desirable.
His Royal Highness the Emir Feisal, representing and acting on behalf of the Arab Kingdom of Hedjaz, and Dr. Chaim Weizman, representing and acting on behalf of the Zionist Organization, mindful of the racial kinship and ancient bonds existing between the Arabs and the Jewish people, and realizing that the surest means of working out the consummation of their national aspirations, is through the closest possible collaboration in the development of the Arab State and Palestine, and being desirous further of confirming the good understanding which exists between them, have agreed upon the following Articles… (Feisal-Weizman Agreement, Catling files, “Jewish Approaches to the Question of Jewish-Arab Co-operation during the period 1919-1941).
MacMichael makes the point in his report that this effort could afford “the fullest guarantee for the carrying into effect of the Balfour Declaration with assurance of Jewish immigration, “without prejudice to the rights of the Arab cultivators”, and complete freedom of worship.
In 1952, Dr. Weizman died and these words from his obituary in the New York Times confirms the above and points to the answer you seek in this first question.
At the age of 27 Dr. Weizmann had dared to criticize Herzl as “too visionary,” and in 1900, at the Fourth Zionist Convention, he emerged as the leader of the Democratic Zionist faction.
This group opposed both the political Zionists, who wanted political guarantees for the establishment of a Jewish home in Palestine, and the practical Zionists, who wanted to settle Jewish colonies in the Holy Land without regard to political guarantees. Dr. Weizmann helped reconcile their differences. In 1906 he met Balfour, who was on an electoral campaign, and convinced him that Palestine rather than Uganda, British East Africa, which had been offered by the British, was the proper homeland for the Jews. His efforts led to his appointment as chairman of the first Zionist Commission, established in March, 1918, and recognized by the British as an official advisory body on all Jewish questions. He appeared before the Paris Peace Conference in support of his cause.
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Perhaps the most insidious of the strategies employed by the Zionist Consultancy and its agents comes via encroachment on the civil rights of Palestinian and Jewish citizens.
That encroachment comes stealthily out of the dark recesses of a spider’s hole, the Red House, where the Zionist eleven of the Consultancy held its clandestine meetings, where the strategies that were to guide the affairs of the nascent Jewish “state” were hatched. Parallel this image then, between the years 1930 and 1948, with the situation in the United States since World War II, as Jewish forces asserted their control from lobbies in Washington D. C. that began to encase America’s governing organizations in a web of interlocking deceptions that effectively took control of America’s policies in the Mid-East.
The eggs hatched behind the closed doors of the Red House emerged as executives of the various organizations established to provide for the welfare of the ever-increasing Jewish community in Palestine. Initially, Chaim Weizman and David Ben-Gurion, worked with the Mandate forces by forming the Jewish Agency, the former serving as president and the latter as chairman, to serve the needs of this new community as it entered Palestine, legally providing personnel that could speak the languages of the various Jews arriving, arranging jobs for them, and orienting them to their new homeland. Clandestinely, the agency served the purposes of Zionist ideology through the Consultancy, where Ben-Gurion also served as chief executive…
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The second part of your question, “Do you consider this newly-created state legitimate and sustainable?,” requires a more nuanced answer. Once the British determined that they could not control the Zionist forces aligned against them in what the Zionist leaders of the Jewish Agency called an all-out war against the British control of immigration, the matter was turned over to the UN in 1947. This resulted in the Partition Plan and Resolution 181.
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Is this sustainable? For the Zionist purpose, Yes; for the US Congress, Yes, at the moment but there are signs of dissent; for the American people, No, but only to avoid war with Iran not to further the cause of the Palestinians; yet, that may come in time; for the world communities, No, and I hope and trust that they will force this issue to the UN and the International Court of Justice as it must go there to force resolution. Can you imagine the Zionist government closing down the “settlements” in the West Bank and Jerusalem? Does legitimacy mean ultimately absolute control and justice submission to it? Is that 21st century civilized behavior? The answer to your question, is it legitimate? To respond to this Kourosh, I revert to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Dr. Grim as he answered young Ned’s question ‘Where did I come from’:
“Only one thing I am well aware of, --it was not to be happy. To toil and moil and hope and fear; and to love in a shadowy, doubtful sort of way, and to hate in bitter earnest, -- that is what we came for. Whence did you come? Whence did any of us come? Out of darkness and mystery; out of nothingness; out of dust, clay, mud, I think, and to return to it again. Out of a former state of being, whence we have brought a good many shadowy revelations purporting that it was not a very pleasant one. Out of a former life, of which the present one is hell!”
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Hamas has been condemned by the Bush and Sharon administrations for using bombs strapped around the body as terrorism against innocent civilians. Yet these same men find the use of “flechette” bullets that scatter pellets of death into multiple civilians legitimate weapons to use against Palestinians. They find no problems using missiles fired into crowded city streets or the use of cluster bombs in Iraq as legitimate weapons of war. Both accept as legitimate weapons for use in civilian areas high altitude bombing whether from F-16s or Apache helicopters. Yet such use anticipates civilian deaths and is, therefore, deliberate slaughter and cannot even be placed in the category of “collateral damage.” The day Sharon left Washington, having conferred his blessings on Bush, Israeli tanks again fired into a crowded Gaza neighborhood in Rafah and killed six civilians including children. This is terrorism.
Why is it that these two men can act like terrorists and not be condemned for it? Because a definition has been designed that excludes them as heads of state and terrorism cannot be applied to states. Therein lays the power of words. But the world has not been fooled. Consider the UN resolutions condemning Israel for such acts: 252 (1968) calling on Israel to rescind measures that change the legal status of Jerusalem, including the expropriation of land and properties; 446 (1979) calling upon Israel to abide by the Geneva Convention regarding the responsibilities of occupying powers, especially “not to transport parts of its civilian population into occupied Arab territories”; 465 (1980) calling on Israel to cease construction of settlements in Arab territories; 471 (1981) calling on Israel to prosecute those involved in assassination attempts of West Bank leaders; 799 (1992) calling upon Israel “to reaffirm the Fourth Geneva Convention in all occupied territories since 1967, including Jerusalem, and affirms that deportation of civilians constitutes a contravention of its obligations under the convention”; 1405 (2002) calling on Israel to allow UN inspectors to “investigate civilian deaths during an Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp; 1435 (2002) calling on Israel to withdraw to positions of September 2000 and end its military activities in and around Ramallah, including the destruction of security and civilian infrastructure; and these are only a few. These words were written in 2003 before the condemnation by the UNGA of Israel when it considered the Goldstone Report or the condemnation of Israel when it invaded Lebanon.
These resolutions describe terrorist activities, activities supported by the Bush administration including vetoing such resolutions. Given the severity of the actions challenged by the UN, one would think Bush would rush to the UN demanding that Israel be brought before it for defying its resolutions, something he used as a “gimmick” to take his “war” to Iraq. But deception and hypocrisy are the modus operandi of this administration, not openness, honesty, and reason.
Without morality there is no justice, without justice there is no peace, without peace there is nothing to meld people together, nothing to give love and compasscompassion a chance, nothing to dissemble the absoluteness of words that give license to slaughter those who will not obey, nothing to make absurd beliefs in “chosenness” for some to be served by others (donkeys), historical rights to others lands, “democracy” for some, “security” for one by denying it to others, “friendship” while spying on friends, “right to defend our people” while destroying the innocent that have no defense—such is the amorality that rules when International Law is ignored, yea, mocked and ridiculed.
Q: Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions IV stipulates that “it is illegal to colonize occupied land or transfer non-indigenous population to that land.” This illegal conduct is exactly what Israel has been doing for some 6 decades. Israel’s settlement constructions on the Palestinian lands and the Occupied Territories starkly run counter to this internationally-recognized law. Who is responsible for holding Israel accountable while it continues to violate the law and build illegal homes on the lands it has seized from the Palestinians?
A: You ask, who is responsible for holding Israel accountable while it continues to violate the law? We know this: Israel will not hold itself accountable; it has the “right to defend itself.” That in their mind is unquestioned truth, absolute justice in the international community, and trumps every other right or assumed right. Since they abide by no other courts of law, UN or otherwise, they write and impose their law on everyone, everywhere. And we might note that they offer no such logic to their neighbors or they go to war to “defend their right’ as happened when they invaded Lebanon in 2006. A note of irony here: Israel argued it had a right to attack Lebanon because two of their soldiers were kidnapped by terrorists; how ironic that the Jewish terrorists in July 31, 1947, fighting the British Mandate authority kidnapped two British officers, hung them, and booby trapped their bodies. Needless to say Israel does not call this terrorism.
We also know this: the United States has become incrementally their “godfather,” protector of the Israeli State by agreements wrought by coercion on the American peoples’ representatives. Yet the US proclaims that any “arrangement” or agreement between the Israelis and the Jews must be done by these two peoples with US oversight as broker. That justice would suggest that these are not equal partners attempting to reach agreement but rather a thief that has commandeered the land of the other and offers to accept some accommodation of land swap that continues in existence what the Zionists have confiscated without reparation or return to internationally agreed upon borders realized in 1967, receives no negative comment in the American press or rebuttal in the international community.
If then we remove Israel and the United States as potential problem solvers to this dilemma, we must turn to the originators of the problem, the United Nations. Yet for 65 years that organization has not been able to bring Israel to justice in the international courts. Why? The US veto is not a satisfactory answer. If, as is the case, virtually two thirds of the member states have consistently found Israel in violation of their resolutions, then it is incumbent on the membership to act. Since they cannot change the role given to the US as a permanent member of the Security Council, they must go around that fact.
They could vote to remove Israel’s membership in the body that they have defied for 65 years. One would assume time has expired to allow Israel to act in accordance with the laws of the international organization. This would not prevent Israel from acting as it does, but it would notify the people of the world that this is a rogue state bent on destroying international order and agreement of rights to all peoples, including through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the right of Palestinians to have a country, the most fundamental right of all. This isolation would make it increasingly difficult for Israel to ignore their neighbors, all 194 of them. Perhaps a world-wide vote on this might be executed by the UN. Let the people of the world determine if Israel is a true participant in the matters of world affairs; let the UN determine that it is a united body that treats all its members equally.
Consider the injustice that could be righted by this action. After Israel invaded Lebanon, it was the UN that had to foot the bill of reconstruction for that illegal invasion. Why? After the invasion of Gaza in 2008-9, it was the UN communities that had to come to the aid of the distraught Palestinian people. Why? After the attacks without provocation of member states development projects, Israel bombs what they determine are for them potential threats, not based on any proven matter, just Israel’s speculation. No reparation, no accountability, not before the law nor the resolutions of the UN. Why? Why does the world community sit idly by and let the US and Israel act with impunity? Who is responsible? We are, all of us in every nation on the planet.
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This is the Haaretz commentary: “The underlying basis of (this) terrorism lies in the territories. Nowhere else. The main motivation for the war against us is the aspiration to shake off the cruel yoke of the occupation. The checkpoints, the humiliations, the suppression and the mass imprisonment are the true infrastructure of terrorism.”
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Kourosh, I’ve written many articles about the deprivation imposed on the Palestinians by the occupiers; when I visited Palestine some years back, I went to the home of a family whose house and shed were completely surrounded by the wall, on all four sides. Their children had to go through gates to get to school, at the pleasure of the IDF. What is not visible when one walks through the streets of the small towns is the inner corrosion of those imprisoned not by walls but by the reality of the humans who do this. I have reason to feel the way Dr. Grim sees the world.
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A: I have no way to justify Israel’s conduct in its treatment of the Palestinian people. I do not know how to justify in my own mind such treatment. Indeed, it was that treatment by Sharon and his obsequious lap dog, George W. Bush that drove me to write against this combined terror inflicted in my name by my government. America’s poor suffer the consequences in Philadelphia where schools have no money to care for the deprived Americans, and that is but an example of what happens when we dedicate the tax payers’ money to slaughter and mayhem in a land we claim must defend itself when we can’t even identify the boundaries of that state because it refuses to identify its borders as they are continually growing as they inflict further genocide on the people of Palestine.
I edited The Plight of the Palestinians: a Long History of Destruction to bring to the world the truth about these lies. I focused on the first ten years of this century, this new 21st century to show the horror of what Israel and the US were doing to a defenseless people. I was armed, to use a military image as seems appropriate here, with 500 pages of seized evidence by the British Mandate forces in Palestine that gave in blatant terms the original intention of the Zionists when they entered Palestine to eradicate the Arab population; their words, their intent and their proposed methods of carrying it out. It was and continues to be “slow-motion genocide.” The Introduction to that book demonstrates this conclusively. The articles that fill the book, over 20 authors of world-wide renown, demonstrate that what was true of the original Zionists continues now.
The original title for that book was “As the World Watches: Genocide in Palestine.” The MacMillan board changed that as we came to publishing hour. One does not stir the calm unnecessarily. But they did not change its content or its cover. It does what I intended, expose the truth to all who will listen. It is not a best seller. But you can help, Kourosh, Have fifty more people buy the $89 text and I can get it out in soft cover for a modest price.
Needless to say many object to the term “genocide” because the courts have not said Israel commits genocide. But how can the courts determine such if they cannot bring Israel before the courts with the US vetoing that step. I publish in The Plight the UN definition of Genocide. Any child can tell that the actions taken by the Zionists against the occupied people breaks the laws defined as genocide.
Under the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide adopted in 1948, genocide was defined in Article 2 as:
…any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[1] What more can be said? I believe that both the United States and Israel are guilty of Genocide under this definition. I do not believe any human with a conscience can remain silent and accept “complicity in genocide.”
Q: Some political analysts and academics consider Israel an apartheid regime that is treating the Arabs and Palestinians in a discriminatory manner through adopting measures and passing laws which deny them their basic and essential rights, such as the right of Arab-Israeli citizens in the Occupied Territories to join their families in Israel. Such policies represent apartheid, that is giving special favor to one group of people above all other groups based on certain criteria. What’s your viewpoint on that? Is Israel an apartheid regime?
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I do not need to itemize the apartheid nature of the state of Israel; it’s well documented. I contributed to that in 2003 “Israeli Democracy: Fact or Fiction? And again in “The Real Axis of Evil,” 2006, and in many articles published before and since. The problem isn’t that it is not in existence, it is that we do nothing to condemn it.
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The answer to your second question, Why is it so?; it requires a dip into the political reality that controls the American system. Thomas Jefferson argued with John Adams about the good and the bad of the open democratic system that gave power to the people to consent to who would govern them. He noted that three things can destroy democracy: a pseudo-Aristoi, organized religion, and corporations. We have all three operating now. The rich elites of the corporatocracy that runs the country have vast amounts of wealth.
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Q: Earlier in March this year, US President Barack Obama traveled to Israel and urged the Israeli leaders to recognize the right of the Palestinian people to have a state on their homeland. “Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land,” he said. As you noted in your article, President Obama asked the Israelis to put themselves in the Palestinians’ shoes. Do these statements indicate a rift or disagreement between the US President and the Israeli leaders? It’s said that the US government is strongly opposed to the settlement constructions, but cannot convince Israel to abandon the constructions. What’s your take on that?
A: You raise a question that has plagued me since that speech. I supported Obama when he ran because it appeared that he was going to reverse the Bush’s disaster. He entered the American stage like a rock star; the people were weeping in expectation that the forces of good had somehow taken root in America in the form of this man who represented a horrific past that we want to deny but can’t. As a member of the African American lineage it seemed possible that through him we would find release from that mental pain. That talk in Cairo glowed with anticipation for a new path in the world, an America that did not speak as an empire, but as a friend and counselor.
But then it seemed to collapse as he failed to end the torture and imprisonment without charge at Guantanamo, then the failure to erase the Patriot Act, then the toughening against the whistle blowers as they brought forth undisclosed information to the American people, then the removal of the rights to trial and disclosure of evidence, then the virtual uncontrolled use of drones and the continued funding of the state of Israel. What we thought might happen did not. He lost the confidence of those who backed him even before he ran for a second term.
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It is too early to know how this will play out, but should it free America from the shackles that have bound it to this rogue state, I would find it a blessing for the American people. I have years ago declared my own personal declaration of independence from the Bush administration and I have found it difficult to recognize a distinct change in the Obama administration until their new effort to negotiate with the world and not go it alone dragging our chains behind us, chains tied to a state that does not in my opinion share what America brought to the world with its declarations of the rights of humanity and its recognition of equality for all humanity.
Q: Several rounds of peace talks have been held between the representatives of the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli regime.
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A: No. That’s the answer to your question, can such talks yield significant results? Much of what I have said in this interview replies to this question. I published an article in The Plight of the Palestinians by Dr. Jeffrey Halper, “The Problem with Israel,” which provides detailed evidence that Israel has refused to negotiate in good faith over an extended period of time dealing with approximately 19 “peace talks.” It’s a matter of window dressing; they talk and build and confiscate as the world watches. America cannot be a fair broker for peace; that’s a ruse. Let me explain my take on this supposed peace process. I delivered a paper in Cairo in 2006, just after Hamas became the elected authority for the Palestinians. Here is what I proposed and it still stands. “Hamas can force Israel and the United States to sue for peace by presenting to the United Nations a “Plan for Peace in Palestine”.
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It is today a bit of a stretch to point to what should be done with the reality that the seizure of virtually all of the Palestinian land has made so impossible. But if the world communities forced the UN to act, then the starting point has to be what that body has determined and not changed.
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari
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The Plight of the Palestinians: a Long History of Destruction is a collection of voices from around the world that establishes in both theoretical and graphic terms the slow, methodical genocide taking place in Palestine beginning in the 1940s, as revealed in the Introduction. From Dr. Francis A. Boyle’s detailed legal case against the state of Israel, to Uri Avnery’s “Slow Motion Ethnic Cleansing,” to Richard Falk’s “Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust,” to Ilan Pappe’s “Genocide in Gaza,” these voices decry in startling, vivid, and forceful language the calculated atrocities taking place, the inhumane conditions inflicted on the people, and the silence that exists despite the crimes, nothing short of state-sponsored genocide against the Palestinians.