TRANSLATE THIS ARTICLE
Integral World: Exploring Theories of Everything
An independent forum for a critical discussion of the integral philosophy of Ken Wilber

Jeff MeyerhoffBald AmbitionJeff Meyerhoff, M.A., L.S.W. is the author of "Bald Ambition: A Critique of Ken Wilber's Theory of Everything" and other essays on integral theory. He majored in economics and sociology and has studied philosophy, psychology, politics and spirituality. He's been employed as a social worker for the last 25 years. His weekly radio show, "The Ruminator," is archived at www.wmfo.org. His blog is www.philosophyautobiography.blogspot.com and his email is [email protected].


From: Integral Thoughts on the Middle East Conflict

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JEFF MEYERHOFF

The Rationalization
of Domination

A Reply to Ray Harris on the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Jeff Meyerhoff

Introduction

In a recent article, "Integral Notes on the Israel/Arab Conflict,"[1] Ray Harris argues that the central motivating cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict is the three monotheistic religion's mutually exclusive narratives of identity. The fundamentalist versions of these narratives result in a championing of one's own tradition and a demonizing of the other's tradition. Since the monotheistic religions, in their fundamentalist forms, are developmentally inferior to the narrative and the social reality of secular democratic pluralism, we should support secular democracies over theocratic states. An integral political understanding of the Arab-Israeli conflict must apply what he terms the "prime directive." This means that the highest social development for the greatest span or number must be sought. Support for Israel, despite its deficiencies, should be paramount because it is the only secular democracy in the region; while Palestinian civil strife and Hamas's radical Islam indicate that a Palestinian state would be unruly and repressive. We have to face the "inconvenient truth" that the Middle Eastern Islamic theocracies are repressive, especially of women and religious minorities, and rejecting of a Jewish state in their midst. Harris writes that, "There is no resolution to such exclusionary narratives. In integral terms they must be transcended. But I would argue that the devout of all faiths cannot transcend their narratives because to do so would be to deny their exclusive claim on the truth and they will resist (violently) any such attempt. Indeed, what we see today is the rejection of syncretism and modernism by fundamentalists of all three monotheistic faiths."

I'll show that Harris's view is seriously mistaken and un-integral, despite his extensive knowledge of the subject. It ignores the centrality of the material causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict, most importantly, land. My focus on the material conditions makes better sense of the historical conflict and better agrees with the historical record. Harris perpetuates myths of Muslim irrationality, when, in reality, it is a matter of how people have always acted when they are in positions of strength or weakness relative to the necessities of life. Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs - a staple of humanistic and transpersonal psychology - suggests the primacy of physiological and safety needs and motivations and so confirms the centrality of material conditions for understanding the Middle East conflict.

A consistent position is available that opposes radical Islamic states, US and Israeli intransigence and Israeli and Palestinian terrorism, but that supports the security of Israel and the Palestinian's right to self-determination.

The Un-Integral Integral Theory

Harris describes his analysis as "integral," yet the piece is oddly un-integral. After a perfunctory acknowledgement that the Arab-Israeli situation is "complex," Harris makes the un-integral assertion that "in its essence it is, I believe, a conflict between competing narratives of identity - in short, if you exist then I cannot exist." To my mind, it is an odd integral theory which focuses upon one central cause. Isn't the point of an integral understanding to see how multiple causal factors determine events?

In addition to the un-integralness of Harris's "integral" approach, is the problem of his picking the wrong causal factor to concentrate upon. A much more satisfying and commonsensical understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian-Arab conflict results from focusing on the struggle over material conditions such as land, water, wealth, security, power and who gets how much of each. This is typically what peoples fight over, even when they use religious or ideological rhetoric to justify their positions or mobilize the masses. People of fundamentally differing religious beliefs have lived together peaceably during some historical periods and fought each other at others, there must be some other reason why they choose to fight.

Harris's focus on mutually exclusive religious identities and narratives as the central difference is not supported by the historical record. In direct opposition to Harris's view that "the principle motivation for Arab resistance to a Jewish presence, let alone a Jewish state, was not, as many believe, because of Zionist ambitions but because it was simply unthinkable that Jews not be subject to Muslim rule", Middle East scholars Joel Beinin and Lisa Hajjar tersely state that

"The conflict between Palestinian Arabs and Jews is a modern phenomenon, which began around the turn of the 20th century. Although these two groups have different religions (Palestinians include Muslims, Christians and Druze), religious differences are not the cause of the conflict. It is essentially a struggle over land."[2]

There is a large scholarly literature that supports this view. Norman Finkelstein, citing two exhaustive studies of Israel and Palestine, writes that

what spurred Palestinians' opposition to Zionism was not anti-Semitism, in the sense of an irrational or abstract hatred of Jews, but rather the prospect - very real - of their own expulsion. ‘The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession', [Benny] Morris reasonably concludes, ‘was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism.' Likewise, in his magisterial study of Palestinian nationalism, Yehoshua Porath suggests that the ‘major factor nourishing' Arab anti-Semitism ‘was not hatred for the Jews as such but opposition to Jewish settlement in Palestine.'[3]

Israeli historian, Simha Flapan, also attributes Arab rejectionism to material causes:

It is certainly true that the Arabs of Palestine were opposed to the [1947] UN Partition Resolution. They saw it as imposing ‘unilateral and intolerable sacrifices' on them by giving the Jews, who constituted 35 percent of the population, 55 percent of the country's territory. Furthermore, it cut off the proposed Palestinian Arab state from the Red Sea and from Syria and provided it with only one approach to the Mediterranean, through the enclave of Jaffa.[4]

And a century ago, Ahad Ha'am, a prescient Zionist writer, observed about the Jews in Palestine that

"The Arabs...understand very well what we want and what we do in the country; but they behave as if they do not notice it because at present they do not see any danger for themselves or their future in what we are doing...But when the day will come in which the life of our people in the Land of Israel will develop to such a degree that they will push aside the local population by little or by much, then it will not easily give up its place."[5]

Ha'am was observing that as long as the Jews were not posing a material threat to the local Arab population, the Arabs chose not to notice, but predicted that once the Jews become a material threat trouble will begin. So despite the presence of what Harris would call their religious enemies, Ha'am says that the Arabs "behave as if they do not notice."

It's a significant and startling omission that in Harris's entire piece the word "settlement" is never used; the Israeli settlements being the main colonizing thrust of their attempt to annex the West Bank and expropriate Palestinian land.

Who's Rejecting Whom?

Harris asserts that there is a mutual rejectionism because both sides demonize the other in their religious narratives. While it is certainly true that there are strong hatreds on both sides, is it true that there has been a "mutual rejectionism?" Flapan concluded - based on then newly released archival materials - that "There is, however, a good deal of evidence that Arab leaders and governments were ready to negotiate a solution to the conflict before, during, and after the [1948] War of Independence."[6]

Harris rightly decries the anti-Semitic extremism of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, but we learn from Flapan that

when, in the wake of the UN [Partition] resolution [of 1947], the mufti of Jerusalem called for volunteers for his Army of Sacred Struggle, the majority of the Palestinian Arabs declined to respond. In fact, prior to Israel's unilateral Declaration of Independence, many Palestinian leaders and groups wanted nothing to do with the mufti or his political party and made various efforts to reach a modus vivendi [a temporary agreement] with the Zionists. But [David] Ben-Gurion's profound resistance to the creation of a Palestinian state significantly undermined any opposition to the mufti's blood-and-thunder policies.[7]

Harris asks "what might have happened if the Arabs had chosen a political solution rather than violence and war?" The answer: they did; "from the end of World War II to 1952, Israel turned down successive proposals made by Arab states and by neutral mediators that might have brought about an accommodation."[8] And the diplomatic record over the last thirty years is notable for Palestinian and Arab overtures that have been met by US and Israeli rejectionism. Finkelstein summarizes the facts:

Except for Israel and the United States (and occasionally a US client state), the international community has supported, for the past quarter-century, the ‘two-state' settlement: that is, the full Israeli withdrawal/full Arab recognition formula as well as the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The United States cast the lone veto of Security Council resolutions in 1976 and 1980 affirming the two-state settlement that were endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and neighboring Arab states.[9]

Finkelstein then goes on to list some of the many UN votes on the issue and the lop-sided results, with the US and Israel standing virtually alone against the world community.[10] This historical record directly contradicts Harris's statement that "Muslims do not want to allow even one, small Jewish state," a view that Simha Flapan termed "The myth of Arab intransigence."[11]

This is not to say that there isn't a great deal of anti-Semitism in Arab countries, nor to say that the Israeli Jews are bad people. Israeli and US rejectionism makes sense when seen in historical context and when shorn of First World, self-congratulatory moralizing. In looking at how powerful states throughout history conduct themselves we would expect that the party with the better position militarily and materially would not want to negotiate; that they would do all they could to accumulate more for themselves. Their strength is in might not right and so they avoid talk and use their force to get what they want. It's the job of the weaker groups in any situation to resist them.

Motivations

Harris's focus on religious narratives and identities as the central force in the Middle East conflict suggests a particular motivation of the parties involved. Harris says that "What this suggests to integral theory is that motivations are important and that the theory can only support actions taken for integral reasons".

He's right, understanding motivations is important and in integral theory there are two leading lights who have theories of individual development which point to the material or physical conditions as the most important human motivators. This dovetails with my emphasis on material factors in explaining the Middle East conflict. In Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs the religious narratives which Harris emphasizes would correspond to the developmentally later, third and fourth levels of social and esteem needs, respectively.

Before examining whether those upper-level needs are being met, we should see whether the more basic, first and second level, physiological and safety needs are being met. According to Maslow, who Wilber incorporates into his integral theory, the primary need is for food, water and shelter. The next level of need is for safety and order in one's environment. Only after these are secured can a person work on establishing the third level, social needs of love and acceptance. After these social needs, come the fourth level esteem needs of gaining status and acceptance in one's community; the honor and pride that Harris says is the determining factor in the conflict.

In Harris' two main examples - the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the Shia and Sunni in occupied Iraq - the material situations are desperate, have been for a long time and have gotten worse in the last five years. And the desperateness is directly related to the actions of the occupiers. The US-UK enforced UN sanctions were devastating to the Iraqi economy and its people[12] and the US-UK invasion and occupation have worsened the economic and security situation so that Maslow's primary and secondary needs are perilously unmet. In the occupied territories, the Israeli stranglehold on the Palestinian economy has brought it to the verge of collapse and the targeted assassinations, rounding up and torturing of suspects, killing of civilians and demolition of houses makes for a terrifying domestic environment.[13]

A less influential theory of development - but perhaps more relevant to the present discussion - comes from Ken Wilber. Incorporating Maslow, Wilber too referred to a developmental hierarchy or sequence of needs that are satisfied by certain "foods." In Up from Eden Wilber describes what happens when people are deprived of their primary "foods."

If physical exchange is distorted...it forms a distressed base upon which feeling and thinking are built. [And in a footnote he continues] These material distortions - in rich and poor alike - then tend to reproduce themselves on higher levels...In the poor oppressed, this reproduction leads to thoughts and feelings of depressive helplessness, hatred or bitterness, low self-esteem, etc. In the rich elite, it leads to thoughts and feelings of overblown, undeserved, and unrealistic self-esteem, to imperialism, elitism, socialitism [sic], etc."[14]

Maslow's and Wilber's hierarchy of needs fits much better with my approach which asks first about material conditions: Are people eating enough?; Who gets what material goods and how much?; Are people safe? An integral theory in concert with Maslow and Wilber should look to the "ontologically primitive"[15] material conditions and see their influence on the later developmental stages.

So in concert with a social analysis which first looks at the economic and security situation, an individual analysis should first look at whether basic needs are being met.

The Prime Directive

With unintended irony Harris writes that "In much of my writing I emphasise the prime directive, that integral theory demands solutions that allow the greatest developmental potential for the greatest number. This means that we support the solution that offers the best chance of honouring the prime directive." The irony here comes from Harris's mistaken use of the phrase "prime directive." As any Star Trek fan knows the real definition of the fictional prime directive is: do not interfere in developmentally less advanced societies.[16] So to abide by the real prime directive the US should not send billions in aid and weaponry to Israel and Israel should not occupy, dominate and expropriate Palestinian land.

Islamic Repression and Islamic Pluralism

Harris says that the integral "prime directive" is the greatest development for the greatest span. Since Israel is a functioning democracy and relatively free in contrast to many repressive Arab regimes, our allegiance must be with Israel. Further, he asserts that countries with theocratic states inevitably exclude minorities whose religious narratives oppose the reigning religion's narrative. So Jews cannot live in the Arab states but Arabs can live in Israel (admittedly, as second-class citizens). It is important for Harris's argument that Islamic societies are constitutively repressive because of Islamic dogma and the states organized in accord with it. Yet there is counterevidence to this claim.

The historical record provides examples of long-lasting Islamic societies that did not find that religious minorities must be excluded or destroyed. In Charles D. Smith's Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict we learn that beginning in 638 A.D., Palestine under "Muslim rule was generally unobtrusive, to the point that construction of new churches and synagogues was permitted. Friction among the religious communities and the official sanction of violence against one group or another were infrequent."[17] So too, the subsequent "Ottoman society was pluralistic, similar in its inclusion of different peoples and faiths to its Byzantine and Arab predecessors but on a larger scale."[18] Smith quotes Braude and Lewis's Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society in which the authors write that "For all their shortcomings, plural societies did allow diverse groups of peoples to live together with a minimum of bloodshed. In comparison with the nation-states which succeeded them, theirs is a remarkable record."[19]

In Christians and Jews under Islam, Youssef Courbage and Philippe Fargues tell a tale of Muslim tolerance of religious minorities, punctuated by harsh treatment usually engendered by conflict with the West.[20] "The Jewish community, which had been accustomed since the time of the Roman and Byzantine empires to the difficult condition of a minority, found within itself the moral resources and the ability to survive for a very long time under the Muslim power. This stable relationship, however, flourished in a favourable international context."[21] Interestingly for our own time, when Islamic fundamentalism is portrayed as an eternal monolith, Courbage and Fargues describe "Periods of fast decline occurred after major episodes of European penetration, even where there was no open alliance between indigenous Christians and invaders. Each confrontation of this kind has been followed by a revival of Islamic fundamentalism"[22] the instances of which they go on to describe, ending with "the current growth of Islamic neo-fundamentalism after the creation of Israel."[23]

Finally, Bruce Masters, in his Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, describes the relative success of pluralism under Islamic rule and law until economic and cultural changes brought from the West in the nineteenth-century increased tensions and conflict between sectarian groups.[24]

I cite this history not to advocate a return to theocratic rule - democratic secular societies are certainly superior for protecting minority rights - but to demonstrate that there is a more variegated Muslim history than Harris allows and that economic and territorial conditions play a large role in determining the behavior of those Harris depicts as driven to repression by religious dogma and zealotry.

Harris uses this blanket negative view of the monotheistic religions, and Islam in particular, to dismiss the legitimate rights of Palestinians to self-determination. He uses a straw man leftist position to make his one-sided, Israel-only stance look like the only reasonable alternative. In a revealing passage he writes that "I know that many well-meaning progressives assume that a free Palestinian society will be democratic and support human rights. Unfortunately I see no evidence of this. In my view in taking an anti-Israeli stance in the name of human rights they are in fact acting against the expansion of human rights in the region by supporting the cause of oppressive patriarchal Arab traditionalists."

Why must "progressives" be assigned this crude stance? And why is their stance necessarily termed "anti-Israel?" The consensus international position which Israel and the US have rejected for the last thirty years gives Israel the right to its secure pre-1967 borders and a state for the Palestinians in the Gaza and the West Bank. How is supporting that "anti-Israel?" Certainly an independent Palestine could become theocratic, but that is true of any nation and it is no reason to deny a people their self-determination. And it is the Israeli government's terrorism that has been the greater violator of human rights as compared to the crimes of Palestinian terrorism. But Harris is right to speak out against the great repression and violations of human rights in most of the Arab states stretching from Libya to the Taliban's Afghanistan.

He dismisses the aspirations of the Palestinians for their own state because "based on the current evidence [of Hamas and Fatah conflict], that any new Palestinian state will quickly become a failed state that will descend into an Iraq like civil and sectarian war." No acknowledgement here that both of these peoples are under foreign occupation and in dire economic circumstances. For Harris, because he doesn't see the Palestinians creating a secular democratic state, their rights don't matter. He writes: "if there is to be no secular, democratic Palestinian state then what is the point?" What's the point?! The point is that even if the worst-case scenario occurred and the Palestinians set up a theocracy they could be their own masters, develop their own economy, have some security and national integrity and possibly develop greater freedoms. In a recent poll, a large majority of Iraqis in Baghdad, Najaf and Anbar said that the situation in Iraq was better under Saddam's repressive rule than under the current occupation.[25]

Harris says about the recent fighting between Hamas and Fatah that "Unfortunately I think this outcome was entirely predictable, not because of the alleged neo-colonial influence of an alleged Zionist/US conspiracy, but for wholly internal reasons." So the wholly external reasons of the humiliating, economically strangling, murderous, unjust occupation in violation of international law, aided and supported economically, militarily and diplomatically by the most powerful country on Earth, who acts with the occupier to veto any UN resolutions attempting to redress the dire situation, is dismissed as "an alleged Zionist/US conspiracy" and has had no effect because the Palestinian civil strife is occurring for "wholly internal reasons." Perhaps, in like fashion, the Shia and the Sunnis would be fighting now even if the US and UK hadn't invaded and overthrown their government and disbanded their security forces. Great leaps of imagination are certainly necessary to maintain as blinkered a view as this.

Harris's aversion to Hamas' policies is certainly understandable, but their policies and actions need to be seen in relation to their opponents. Noam Chomsky has summed up the comparison this way:

"Personally I'm very much opposed to Hamas' policies in almost every respect. However, we should recognize that the policies of Hamas are more forthcoming and more conducive to a peaceful settlement than those of the United States or Israel.... So, though the policies of Hamas are, again in my view, unacceptable, they happen to be closer to the international consensus on a political peaceful settlement than those of their antagonists."[26]

"the Palestinian's easy resort to violence"?

To maintain Harris's skewed integral view of the Middle East conflict the facts are made to fit the worldview. He writes that "the Palestinian's easy resort to violence has only harmed their cause."

Was it an "easy resort to violence" or have the Palestinians shown admirable restraint in the face of a brutal occupation? The human rights abuses and micro-control of the occupiers is well-documented. Palestinian terrorist acts get big press, while the much more destructive Israeli state terrorism goes underreported in the US. Throughout my years hearing about this conflict I have continually heard of "Palestinian terrorism" and "Israeli retaliation." Don't the Palestinians - the occupied people - ever "retaliate?" And don't the occupiers ever terrorize the vulnerable people subject to their rule? In fact, the Israeli's have killed far more innocent Palestinian civilians than the Palestinians have killed Israelis. Take a recent example. In the US, the cause of the Israeli bombing of Gaza in June of '06 was routinely reported as being triggered by the "kidnapping" (Why not "capturing?") of an Israeli soldier. Yet a day prior, two Palestinians, Mustafa and Osama Muammar, were abducted by the Israel Defense Force and imprisoned, along with hundreds of other Palestinians being held without charge. Why wasn't the abducting of the Palestinian civilians the "cause" of the latest Israeli attack? Abducting civilians is considered a greater crime than abducting members of an occupying military power, but in the topsy-turvy, Orwellian world of Israeli-Palestinian relations the much more destructive actions of those in violation of international law are reframed as understandable defensive reactions.

Another example giving a broader comparison of the relative carnage is the unprovoked Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. "Israel proceeded to massacre a defenseless population, killing some 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese between June and September 1982, almost all civilians. One might note by comparison that, as of May 2002, the official Israeli figure for Jews ‘who gave their lives for the creation and security of the Jewish State' - that is, the total number of Jews who perished in (mostly) wartime combat or in terrorist attacks from the dawn of the Zionist movement 120 years ago until the present day - comes to 21,182." [27]

Harris is right to decry the repressiveness and brutality of the Islamic theocracies and theocratic-democracies. And it is true that when religious fundamentalists gain power a repressive society is common and should be opposed. But there is much more variation in their international behavior then he allows. For example, despite some execrable statements of Iranian President Amadinejad, Iran has made credible offers of negotiation about nuclear power which the US has rejected, while Israel's hundreds of nuclear weapons are tacitly accepted.

It should also be remembered that the secular, industrialized democracies have no problem committing horrific acts of terrorism. And, because of their exponentially greater firepower, they kill many times more people. The unnecessary bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombing of German cities and their civilian populations at the end of WWII, the destruction of an estimated 1.5 million Southeast Asians during the Vietnam War, the US-UK invasion of Iraq and the estimated 600,000 deaths that have resulted and, most recently, the killing and dispersal of civilians by the Israelis in the wholly unnecessary Lebanon invasion in the summer of 2006.

Conclusion

Ray Harris's well-intentioned piece is an unwitting and disturbing First World rationalization of domination. As is typical of these rationalizations it focuses on ideological or narrative elements rather than material conditions. In identifying motivations, Harris jumps to the ideologically more comfortable "higher" Maslovian stages of esteem and identity. This is a common approach for wealthy First Worlders who want to avoid a discussion of the basic issues of who is getting what material goods such as land, food, water and security.

The powerful and dominant usually find a way to clothe their dominance in righteousness or self-defense; intellectuals shouldn't be helping them. Harris finds a slightly new approach to rationalize the mighty over the weak using integral theory. His flinty and facile, PC-denying, inconvenient truths are actually the slightly reconstructed nineteenth-century hubris of bringing civilization to the barbarians.

One can support Palestinian's rights to self-determination and a secure Israel while opposing Israeli and US intransigence. This does not mean that the repressive Muslim-Arab regimes in the Middle East shouldn't be legitimately opposed, nor that we don't condemn Palestinian terrorism as a crime, nor that the US and Israel are some strange, evil entities.

In fact, there is a certain immoral logic to this. The US and Israel are the most powerful actors and they want to control the land (in Israel's case) and the region and its oil (in the US's case). It's what we'd expect when we look at the real material causes of the actions of state actors. It's how powerful states have acted throughout history: they press their advantage to get what they want. The job of the disadvantaged and weak - and their supporters - is to oppose them, whether the weaker were Jews in Germany and the Soviet Union, Palestinians in the occupied territories, native peoples in Central and Latin America, or the black South Africans under apartheid. Jimmy Carter's mainstream-cracking book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, and the slanders he's incurred for it, is a slight indication of an opening for a change in the destructive US policies towards Israel and the Palestinians.

REFERENCES

[1] At http://www.integralworld.net/harris30.html. All quotes from Harris are from this article.

[2] "Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Primer," The Middle East Research and Information Project, at http://www.merip.org/palestine-israel_primer/intro-pal-isr-primer.html

[3] Finkelstein, Norman, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, 2nd edition, (New York: Verso, 2003, p. xiii. Much of the counterevidence in this piece is derived from the so-called "new historians" who arose in Israel in the late eighties and nineties. Ilan Pappe describes ‘the "new historians"...as scholars accredited by official academia, [who] challenged the conventional thinking from within the system....[T]he Israeli "new historians" deal primarily with elite politics and adhere to a positivist methodology.' "Post-Zionist Scholarship in Israel," in The Struggle for Sovereignty, edited by Joel Beinin and Rebecca L. Stein, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 152.

[4] Flapan, Birth, p. 57.

[5] Finkelstein, Norman, The Rise and Fall of Palestine, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p. 1.

[6] Flapan, Simha, The Birth of Israel: Myths and Realities, (New York: Pantheon, 1987), p. 203.

[7] Flapan, Birth, p. 58.

[8] Flapan, Birth, p. 10.

[9] Finkelstein, Image and Reality, p. xvii.

[10] Finkelstein, Image and Reality, p. xviii.

[11] Flapan Birth, p. 203

[12] See Joy Gordon's impassioned and well-researched account, "Cool War," Harper's Magazine, Nov. 2002, at http://www.harpers.org/CoolWar.html?pg=1

[13] See Jeff Halper's "The 94 Percent Solution: Israel's Matrix of Control" in Beinin and Stein, Struggle for Sovereignty, pp. 62-71.

[14] Wilber, Ken, Up From Eden, (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1981), p. 267.

[15] Wilber, Eden, p. 268.

[16] "The Prime Directive prohibits Starfleet personnel and spacecraft from interfering in the normal development of any society, and mandates that any Starfleet vessel or crew member is expendable to prevent violation of this rule." Okuda, Michael and Okuda, Denise, The Star Trek Encyclopedia, (New York: Pocket Books, 1994, 1997), p. 385.

[17] Smith, Charles D., Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, (Boston: Bedford/St.

Martin's, 2001), p. 9.

[18] Smith, Palestine, p. 10.

[19] Smith, Palestine, p. 10.

[20] Courbage, Youssef, and Fargues, Philippe, Christians and Jews under Islam, (London: I.B. Tauris Publishers, 1997).

[21] Courbage and Fargues, Christians and Jews, p. 43.

[22] Courbage and Fargues, Christians and Jews, p. xiii.

[23] Courbage and Fargues, Christians and Jews, p. xiii.

[24] Masters, Bruce, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

[25] Reported by UPI, Dec. 29, 2006. ‘The results of the poll conducted by the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic Studies and shared with the Gulf Research Center, has a margin error of +/- 3.1 percent. The ICRSS is an independent institution "which attempts to spread the conscious necessity of realizing basic freedoms, consolidating democratic values and foundations of civil society."' "Nearly 50 percent of the respondents identified themselves only as "Muslims"; 34 percent were Shiites and 14 percent, Sunnis." http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20061229-101021-1168r

[26] Interview with Noam Chomsky, "American Linguist Noam Chomsky: Hamas Policies Are More Conducive to a Peaceful Settlement than Those of the U.S. or Israel," May 23, 2006 http://www.memritv.org/Transcript.asp?P1=1152

[27] Finkelstein, Image and Reality, p. xxiii.



© Jeff Meyerhoff 2007




Comment Form is loading comments...