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The Case Against Israel (Counterpunch) | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Neumann
Publisher: AK Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Rating:  43 reviews
Sales Rank: 265025
Media: Paperback
Pages: 200
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.3 x 5 x 0.6
ISBN: 1904859461
Dewey Decimal Number: 909
EAN: 9781904859468
ASIN: 1904859461
Publication Date: February 1, 2005
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Product Description
The Case Against Israelargues that Zionism was responsible for the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians and that Israel is responsible for its perpetuation. The argument rests on widely accepted factual claims and impeccable sources. It avoids rhetoric and gratuitous moralizing. There is no attempt to blacken Israel through association with colonialism, imperialism, or racism. Instead, Neumann's argument emphasizes the fateful Zionist quest for Jewish sovereignty in Palestine. This quest-not the massacres or plans for transfer or other blots on Zionist history-made violence inevitable and compromise impossible. The prospect of Zionists gaining the power of life and death over all inhabitants of Palestine had to be seen by the Palestinians as a mortal threat. They responded accordingly. The tragic consequences of the quest for sovereignty did not follow all at once, but in two stages. The Zionists established a sovereign Jewish state in 1948. Had they been content with that, peace might have followed the 1967 war, when Israel could have backed the creation of a Palestinian state in the occupied territories. Instead, Zionists pushed to extend Jewish sovereignty, this time through the settler movement. The settlements were a renewed mortal threat to the Palestinians and once again necessitated a violent response. The only solution is for Israel to withdraw, unilaterally, to its 1948 borders. Michael Neumann was born in 1946, the son of German Jewish refugees. He graduated from Columbia University with degrees in European history and English literature, followed by a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Toronto. He teaches moral and political philosophy at a Canadian university. He has written What's Left?, a critique of 1960s radicalism, and numerous articles relating to the Israel/Palestine conflict. His academic work includes The Rule of Law: Politicizing Ethics as well as articles on utilitarianism, rationality, and rights.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 38 more reviews...
 Justice is served! February 6, 2006
JH (Toronto, Canada)
123 out of 165 found this review helpful
This is the fairest book you can buy in the Israel/Palestine conflict. It puts to one side all the spectacular stuff - the atrocities on both sides, the wars, the accusations of racism. You're left with what Neumann considers the key issues - land and sovereignty over the land. Even if you disagree with his conclusions, I guarantee you you'll have
a clearer idea of your reasons than before you read the book.
 Powerful Analysis, Questionable Conclusion May 22, 2006
Dana Garrett
119 out of 170 found this review helpful
In many respects Michael Neuman presents the most powerful and concise arguments against Israel's domination of the Palestinian people in print. He deftly shows that although Zionism was a minority movement at its inception--as it is today (most of the world's Jews do not want to reside in Israel)--the bulk of Zionist planning and thinking was always intent on establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, one that either "transferred" Palestinians from the area or repressed their ability to achieve political parity, much less control, in the nation that would be named Israel.
Neuman is at his best on examining Israel's expropriation of the west Bank and Gaza and on how acquiring those territories provided Israel with the opportunity to settle the question of a Palestinian state once and for all. Israel could have unilaterally decided that the occupied territories would become a Palestinian state by working with Palestinian groups amenable to such a plan. (Israel could make the same decision today.) But Israel acceded to the wishes mostly of religious fanatics who settled in the occupied territories by the tens of thousands. Neuman cuts through all the nonsense about how Israel required the occupied territories as a security buffer to protect itself. If that is so, why would Israel allow its citizens to settle in area that it considered its first line of defense? Israel's occupation of the occupied territories (indisputably contrary to international law) can be summed up in two words: land grab.
Neuman correctly realizes that Israel is able to occupy the territories, colonize them, and deny the Palestinian people their fundamental human rights only because the of the United States' support, both financial and diplomatic. Neuman believes that the best way to sever that support is by showing that the USA/Israel alliance was born entirely out of the Cold War and continues merely out of habit. The USA, he argues, isn't thinking clearly. It no longer possesses a valid strategic reason for its support of Israel and, in fact, might be jeopardizing its strategic interests by continuing the support. I believe that Neuman's analysis goes off the rails on this point.
In a debate he is carrying on now with Norman Finkeltein, Finkelstein correctly points out that Israel represents for the USA a "stable and secure base for projecting U.S. power in this region." Neuman incorrectly believes that such a base must involve the actual deployment of US troops in Israel (although Israel always presents that possibility for the USA). Israel can act as a proxy force in the area and, more powerfully, as a well-armed threat of a proxy force for USA interests.
I suspect that Neuman believes the USA will never be convinced to sever its support for Israel's dominance of the occupied territories for reasons of justice, but only for reasons of strategic interest. He could be correct, but it places him in the position of making arguments that are not very convincing.
An Attempt at a Balanced View of Israel and Zionism January 14, 2007
Gordon C. Duus (Glen Ridge, NJ USA)
75 out of 90 found this review helpful
I always considered myself pro-Israel. But I struggled to see how the West Bank and Gaza settlements could be considered fair to the Palestineans. When I raised the issue with my pro-Israel friends, I was surprised that they were so angry at my even bringing it up. I also found it peculiar that they had so many arguments to justify the settlements, none of which I found persuasive. As I questioned their responses and pointed out how one-sided they were, completely ignoring what I thought were legitimate Palestinean positions, they practically accused me of anti-Semitism. I could not understand why an open discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of each side's positions in the Israeli-Palestinean conflict would make me anti-Semitic. I found it interesting that they essentially refused to answer when asked what they would do if they were Palestinean.
Then it dawned on me. The presentation of this issue in the American media and throughout our society is so one-sided and imbalanced that any attempt at a balanced and reasoned analysis appears pro-Palestinean. So I sought out a book on the issue which went through all of the issues my friends had raised in support of Israel to see how they held up to a more informed scrutiny than my own. This book provided just what I was looking for.
The author, Michael Neumann, is a Jewish professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. After a thoughtful and fair discussion of each side's positions, his ultimate verdict is that "Israel is the illegitiate child of ethnic nationalism. The inhabitants of Palestine had every reason to oppose its establishment by any means necessary. No one is required to submit to a sovereignty from which they are excluded, much less a sovereignty arrogated to one ethnic group and excluding all others. Given the life-or-death powers of the proposed state and the intentions of its proponents to maintain ethnic supremacy within its borders, the Palestineans were justified in taking the project as a mortal threat, and, therefore, to resist by any means necessary.***It is admirable to fight those who come to dispossess or dominate you rather than flee."
Neumann's point is not to argue that Israel has no right to exist, but that the Palestineans can fairly be said to have given up something if they agree to recognize Israel at its pre-1967 borders, and that Israel could be said to have succeeded even if it permits all of Gaza and the West Bank to become a sovereign nation ruled by the Palestineans without Israeli interference. And that under such a mutually satisfactory approach, peace is possible, assuming both sides agree that peace is the goal. This book showed me that I am pro-Israel, but that I disagree with the ardent Zionists.
 reply to the 'Inconsistent March 3, 2006
R. Michael Neumann (Peterborough, Ontario, Canada)
60 out of 80 found this review helpful
I wasn't hoping my book would win me a Mr. Congeniality award, and I won't complain about the obviously hostile reviews. But I do complain about the reviewer who accuses me of inconsistency ('Inconsistent'). Because he seems reasonable and moderate, someone might actually believe his wild claims.
(...)I by no means adopt a fascist definition of the state; I adopt a definition from the decidedly unfascistic Lawrence Krader, Max Weber and Robert Nozick, one which is quite standard among political theorists.
It is entirely false that I claim for the Palestinians a right of self-determination; I merely claim for them a right of self-defense which I explicitly say is available to everyone, including Jews.
Do I "forcefully argue that Palestinians have a right to self determination because they are a separate people"? I say: "...before the Zionists came, there were a bunch of people who lived in the area. Whether they were called Palestinians, whether the area was called Palestine, whether the people in this area considered themselves a people, Palestinian or otherwise, are all questions without the slightest importance when assessing Zionism." And, 'many pages' on, when I 'argue against the Jordanian option for the Palestinians', I say "Nor does any of this have anything to do with whether the Palestinians are in some cultural or anthropological sense a `people'."
(...) I leave it to others to explain how my book can be both "a consistent summary of Neumann's writings" and 'inconsistent'.
Refutation of "Logic" March 7, 2006
Book_Wyrm (San Francisco, Ca USA)
54 out of 76 found this review helpful
Logic Says:
"In theory, it could be that Israelis have no right to live in the West Bank or anywhere else, and that the land they own is stolen. In practice this is not the case, but suppose it were. Well, given the good use that Israelis have put that land to, I would certainly not recommend that this land be taken from the Israelis, especially if the intent were to do so to misuse it. Instead, I'd make the Israelis pay for that land. The land is worth more to them than to others. Why not get full value for it and let those who really want to improve that land do just that?"
This is the logic used by a reviewer above. Forget about the Palestinians who lived there in 1948, forget about the UN Resolutions demanding Israel return to its pre 1967 borders. Forget about the Wall that they (Israel) disingenuously claim is just a fence between neighbors, albeit 20 feet high, reinforced steel and concrete and divides the West Bank into disconnected Bantustans. Forget about right and wrong, legal and illegal, because Israel is making good use of the land! The Palestinians were ALREADY making good use of the land, they were living on it, they did not force anyone off the land so that they could claim ownership by force, they were just there, living the way their ancestors had, for generations.
Using this logic, I could argue that Germany should be given back Poland, invaded in 1939, because they made better use of Poland than the Poles. Give Zimbabwe back to the white Rhodesians, they were doing a much better job than the Robert Mugabe, whose government is obviously incapable of feeding his people as well as the white farmers that he dispossessed. We could call this new theory of ownership the Best Use Doctrine. Politicians would love it. All they would have to do is invade a country they coveted, improve on it for 40 or 50 years, and it's theirs. If they say that they are making better use of it than the former residents, they get to keep it! No need for impartial observers to decide what "better use" means, the new tenants' claim is ample proof. There might be a few more wars as a result of this new doctrine, but politicians love wars as much as they love stealing land, and their wealthiest supporters and client states will already be either on the land or in the weapons trade, so everyone would be smiling, except the former residents, who don't matter anyhow, because they clearly did not value their homeland enough to make the best use of it. What a brave new world that will be!
This is the case Michael Nuemann destroys in his book. He makes the legal case for the former residents of the land known as Palestine, and pretty much dismantles the rhetoric used by Zionist's such as Alan Dershowitz, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History who are short on legality and long on the "historical and religious title to Palestine by the children of Israel" argument that plays well at first blush but dissolves under the weight of international law.
Nuemann's book sets out the case for the Palestinians, that they were expelled from their land forcefully, with the stated objective of that action being the formation of the State Of Israel, a state for Jews, set up along Zionist principles. This is historical fact. Unfortunately for Palestinians, Zionists such as David Ben Gurion were not satisfied with the 1948 borders, they were after the Greater Israel, and that meant that the Palestinians were to be completely ousted from their land, by force of arms. This is the crime, and the result is the long struggle that has set the present day Arab and Muslim world on the road to violence in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, in Lebanon, Algeria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Chechnya. The fundamentalist suicide bombers, international terrorism, al Qaeda, and the millions of deaths over 90 years of Arab Muslims against Western Christians are all symptoms of this core issue. The Palestinian issue is the crystallization of Arab suffering from Western invasions, from the Crusades of the Middle Ages to Iraq in 2003.
I am NOT blaming Israel for the entire clash between Arabs and the West. What I AM saying is that the Palestinian struggle has kept this conflict between East and West on the Arab street, always there, a constant struggle that gave Arabs looking for excuses for violence an easy target for jihad, a distraction from poverty, an issue for mullahs wanting influence and power, a way to get back at the West for past grievances. All of this is magnified by today's 24 hours-a-day cable news, especially al Jezeera, and makes the issue of Palestinian rights a centerpiece for Arab anger, and it will remain there until political solution is found.
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