The events of the past weeks in Palestine have been a near-total triumph for Zionism in the United States. Political and public discourse has so definitively transformed Israel into the victim during the recent clashes that, even though over 200 Palestinian lives were lost and 6,000 casualties have been reported, there is unanimity that ‘Palestinian violence’ has disrupted the smooth and orderly flow of the ‘peace process’. There is now a small litany of phrases that every editorial commentator either repeats verbatim or relies on as an unspoken assumption: these have been engraved in ears, minds and memories as a guide for the perplexed. I can recite most of them by heart: Barak offered more concessions at Camp David than any Israeli Prime Minister before him (90 per cent of the territories and partial sovereignty over East Jerusalem); Arafat was cowardly and lacked the necessary courage to accept Israeli offers to end the conflict; Palestinian violence has threatened the existence of Israel—all sorts of variations on this, including anti-semitism, suicidal rage to get on television, sacrificing children as martyrs; an ancient ‘hatred’ of the Jews burns in the West Bank and Gaza, where the PLO incites attacks against them by releasing terrorists and producing schoolbooks that deny Israel’s existence.

The general picture is that Israel is so surrounded by rock-throwing barbarians that even the missiles, tanks and helicopter gunships used to ‘defend’ Israelis from them are warding off what is essentially an invasive force. Clinton’s injunctions, dutifully parroted by Albright, that Palestinians must ‘pull back’, give us to understand that it is Palestinians who are encroaching on Israeli territory, not the other way round. In the US media, Zionization is so thorough that not a single map has been published or shown on television that would risk revealing to Americans the network of Israeli garrisons, settlements, routes and barricades which crisscross Gaza and the West Bank. Blotted out completely is the system of Areas A, B and C, which perpetuates military occupation of 40 per cent of Gaza and 60 per cent of the West Bank, in keeping with the Oslo ‘accords’. The censorship of geography, in this most geographical of conflicts, creates an imaginative void—once deliberately fostered, but now more or less automatic—in which all images of the conflict are decontextualized. The result is not just the preposterous belief that a Palestinian attack on Israel is under way, but a dehumanization of Palestinians to the level of beasts virtually without sentience or motive. Little wonder, then, that the figures of dead and wounded regularly omit any mention of nationality—as if suffering were shared equally by the ‘warring parties’. Nothing is said of house demolitions, land expropriations, illegal arrests, beatings and torture. Forgotten are the ethnic cleansing of 1948; the massacres of Qibya, Kafr Qassem, Sabra and Shatila; the defiance of UN resolutions and flouting of the Geneva Convention; the decades of military invigilation and discrimination against the Arab population within Israel. Ariel Sharon is at best ‘provocative’, by no stretch of the imagination a war criminal; Ehud Barak is always a statesman, never the assassin of Beirut and Tunis. Terrorism is invariably on the Palestinian, defence on the Israeli, side of the moral ledger.

Ever since September 28 there have been an average of anywhere between one and three opinion articles a day in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe. With the exception of perhaps three pieces written with sympathy for the Palestinians in the Los Angeles Times, and two—one by an Israeli lawyer, Allegra Pacheco; the other by a Jordanian liberal who favours Oslo—in the New York Times, every such article—including the regular columns of Thomas Friedman, William Safire, Charles Krauthammer et al.—has vociferously supported Israel and denounced Palestinian violence, Islamic fundamentalism and Arafat’s backsliding from the ‘peace process’. The authors of this relentless tide of propaganda have been former US military officers and diplomats, Israeli functionaries and apologists, regional experts and think-tank specialists, lobbyists and front men for Tel Aviv. The unspoken premise of this total blanketing of the mainstream press is that no Palestinian or Arab position on Israeli police terror, settler-colonialism, or military occupation is worth hearing from. In fine, American Zionism has made any serious public discussion of the past or future of Israel—by far the largest recipient ever of US foreign aid—a taboo. To call this quite literally the last taboo in American public life would not be an exaggeration. Abortion, homosexuality, the death penalty, even the sacrosanct military budget can be discussed with some freedom. The extermination of native Americans can be admitted, the morality of Hiroshima attacked, the national flag publicly committed to the flames. But the systematic continuity of Israel’s 52-year-old oppression and maltreatment of the Palestinians is virtually unmentionable, a narrative that has no permission to appear.

What explains this state of affairs? The answer lies in the power of Zionist organizations in American politics, whose role throughout the ‘peace process’ has never been sufficiently addressed—a neglect which is absolutely astonishing, given that the policy of the PLO has been in essence to throw our fate as a people into the lap of the United States, without any strategic awareness of how American policy is dominated by a small minority whose views about the Middle East are in some ways more extreme than those of Likud itself. A personal example can illustrate this contrast. Some time ago the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz sent over a leading columnist, Ari Shavit, to spend several days talking with me. A good summary of this long conversation appeared as a question-and-answer interview in the August 18 issue of the newspaper’s supplement, basically uncut and uncensored. I expressed myself candidly, emphasizing the expulsions and killings of 1948, the right of the refugees to return, and the record of Israel as an occupying power since 1967. My views were presented just as I voiced them, without the slightest editorializing by Shavit, whose questions were always courteous and un-confrontational. A week later, Ha’aretz published a reply by Meron Benvenisti, ex-deputy Mayor of Jerusalem under Teddy Kollek. At a personal level, it was full of insults and slander against me and my family. But Benvenisti never denied that there was a Palestinian people, or that we were driven out in 1948. Certainly, he said, we conquered you—why should we feel guilty? I responded to Benvenisti a week later, reminding Israeli readers that Benvenisti was responsible for the destruction of Harit al Magharibah in 1967, in which several hundred Palestinians lost their homes to Israeli bulldozers, and probably knew about the killing of several of them. But I did not have to remind Benvenisti or the readers of Ha’aretz that, as a people, we existed and could at least urge our right of return. That was taken for granted.

What is not so widely realized is that neither interview nor exchange could have appeared in any American newspaper, let alone any Jewish-American journal; and if, per impossibile, there had been such an interview, the questions would have been crude hectoring of the sort: why have you been involved in terrorism? why will you not recognize Israel? why was the Mufti of Jerusalem a Nazi? and so on. Whereas a Zionist like Benvenisti, no matter how much he may detest me, would never deny that there exists a Palestinian people which was forced to leave in 1948, a typical American Zionist would maintain that no conquest took place or, as Joan Peters alleged in a now all but forgotten prize-winning book of 1984, From Time Immemorial, that there were no Palestinians with a life in Palestine before 1948. Every Israeli knows perfectly well that all of Israel was once Palestine, that—as Moshe Dayan said openly in 1976—every Israeli town or village once had an Arab name. American Zionist discourse is never capable of the same honesty. It must ceaselessly maunder about Israeli democracy making the desert bloom, completely avoiding the essential facts about 1948 which every Israeli knows in his or her bones. So removed from realities are American-Jewish supporters of Israel, so caught between ideological guilt—after all, what does it mean to be a Zionist, and not emigrate to Israel?—and sociological swagger—is this not the most successful community in US history: supplying Secretary of State, Defence, Treasury, and successive heads of the National Security Council in the Clinton Administration?—that what often emerges is a frightening cocktail of vicarious violence against Arabs, the result of having no sustained direct contact with them, unlike Israeli Jews.

For all too many American Zionists, Palestinians are not real beings, but demonized fantasms—fearsome embodiments of terrorism and anti-semitism. A former student of mine, a product of the finest education available in the United States, recently wrote me a letter to ask why, as a Palestinian, I let a Nazi like the Mufti of Jerusalem still determine my political agenda. ‘Before Haj Amin,’ he informed me, ‘Jerusalem wasn’t important to Arabs. Because he was so evil he made it an important issue for Arabs just in order to frustrate Zionist aspirations, which always held Jerusalem to be important’. This is not the logic of someone who has lived with or has any personal experience of Arabs. It is no accident that Zionism, nurtured in the United States, has generated the most fanatical aberrations of all in Israel itself. Not for nothing were Dr Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians quietly praying in the Hebron mosque, and Rabbi Meir Kahane, Americans. Far from being disavowed by their followers, both are revered to this day. Many of the most zealous far-right settlers in the West Bank or Gaza, clamouring that ‘the land of Israel’ is theirs, hating and ignoring the Palestinian inhabitants all around them, also come from the States. To see them strutting contemptuously through the streets of Hebron as if the Arab city were already theirs is a frightening sight.

But the role of these immigrants is insignificant beside that of their sympathizers at home. There the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—AIPAC—has for years been the most powerful single lobby in Washington. Drawing on a well-organized, well-connected, highly visible and wealthy Jewish population, AIPAC inspires an awed fear and respect across the political spectrum. Who is going to stand up to this Moloch on behalf of the Palestinians, when they can offer nothing, and AIPAC can destroy a congressional career at the drop of a chequebook? In the past, one or two members of Congress did resist AIPAC openly, but the many political action committees controlled by AIPAC made sure they were never re-elected. The only Senator who once remotely tried to oppose AIPAC was James Abourezk of South Dakota, who resigned for his own reasons after a single term. Today, virtually the entire Senate can be marshalled in a matter of hours into signing a letter to the President on Israel’s behalf. No-one exemplifies the sway of AIPAC better than Hillary Clinton, outdoing even the most right-wing Zionists in fervour for Israel in her avid clawing for power in New York, where she went so far as to call for the transfer of the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and the grant of leniency for Jonathan Pollard, the Israeli spy serving a life sentence in the US.