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A New Book Makes a Solid Case for Israel and Zionism

By Marco den Ouden

May 30, 2024

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A Review of The Classical Liberal Case for Israel by Walter Block and Alan Futerman; Springer, 2021, 470 pages.

 

When Hamas launched a terrorist attack on a music festival and nearby community on the Israeli side of the Gaza border on Oct. 7, 2023, I, like most people in Western democracies, supported absolutely Israel’s right to defend itself by seeking to destroy Hamas once and for all.

I was asked to review a new book supporting both Israel and Zionism, The Classical Liberal Case for Israel by Walter Block and Alan Futerman. Block’s fellow anarcho-capitalist and notorious panderer to the alt-right, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, came out with a review blasting the authors and drumming Block out of the libertarian movement. No fan of Hoppe’s, I expected to like Block and Futerman’s book, and I do. I found myself very much persuaded by the logic and the heaps of evidence the authors included to bolster their case. But I also read with a critical eye, and one of my friends, an ardent peace activist, sent me a couple of news articles that had me investigate further. What I found was disturbing. Not by what Block and Futerman argue so much as by what they left out, namely a concerted and successful effort by Israel’s racist, fascist, Kahanist right to co-opt Netanyahu’s government. Currently two rabid anti-Arab Kahanists, both of whom make the founder of the terrorist Jewish Defense League and the racist and since outlawed Israeli Kach party look like a piker, are in Netanyahu’s cabinet. There were other issues as well, but this was the most disturbing. I had a review of well over 5000 words divided into a discussion of Block and Futerman’s book followed by a critique based on the elements they chose to ignore. I opted to publish the critique as a stand-alone essay called The Battle for Israel’s Soul without mentioning the book.

Now I am presenting the other side of the story: Block and Futerman’s compelling case for the moral right of Israel to exist and the moral right of the Jewish people to have a homeland, namely Zionism.

Walter Block and Alan Futerman’s book, The Classical Liberal Case for Israel, is a remarkable book. In a world where Israel is routinely condemned for its mere existence, the authors offer a rousing defense of both the state of Israel and of Zionism.

In a world where Israel is routinely condemned for its mere existence, the authors offer a rousing defense of both the state of Israel and of Zionism.

The book is carefully laid out with eight chapters and a conclusion, each chapter building on and reinforcing the earlier arguments. But the core of their argument is outlined in Chapter 5: The True Nature of Anti-Zionism and the BDS Movement. BDS stands for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The movement is aimed specifically at Israel and investments in Israeli stocks or at American and international companies that do business with Israel. It purports to be anti-Zionist, not anti-Israel. But, the authors argue, anti-Zionism is merely the “modern politically correct face” (199) of antisemitism. Even though there are many countries that are totalitarian and commit egregious crimes against their own and other people, BDS ignores all those and focuses exclusively on Israel. Israel is the only villain in their worldview.

The chapter focuses on connecting anti-Zionism to antisemitism. What is antisemitism? In her book, Antisemitism: Here and Now, Deborah Lipstadt notes the view “often attributed to” the liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin. “Imagine that someone has done something that you find objectionable,” she writes. “You may legitimately resent the person because of his or her actions or attitudes. But if you resent him even an iota more because this person is Jewish, that is antisemitism.” (14) Lipstadt also agrees that antisemitism today often masquerades as anti-Zionism.

Block and Futerman go on to outline three things that distinguish anti-Zionism: Demonization, Double-Standards and Delegitimization. First Israel is demonized. These are standard antisemitic tropes regurgitated as Anti-Zionism. Jews are out to control the world. Jews control the financial system and the banks. The Jews control Hollywood and the media. Jews use Christian blood to make matzoh. In the modern version of that last it is now the blood of Palestinian children, but the antisemitic trope remains. Just the details have changed.

Then double standards are applied. Other countries with significant crimes against humanity, including crimes against Arabs and Palestinians are treated differently than Israel. Such transgressions are routinely ignored or minimized. Only Israel is singled out. As an example, the authors note that the United Nations has 68 resolutions condemning actions by Israel compared to only 67 for the rest of the world combined.

Source: UN Watch, page 231 in the book

 

Some of the worst rights violators in the world barely pass muster for condemnation by the UN. Iran, for example, has only 6 resolutions against it by the UN. North Korea only 9. The most resolutions against it other than Israel is Syria with 20.

The UN whitewashes or ignores the most egregious human rights violators in the world. Few can match the brutality of Iran.

Let’s take the case of Iran. Block and Futerman do not discuss this in their book, but it serves to exemplify the way the UN whitewashes or ignores the most egregious human rights violators in the world. Few can match the brutality of Iran. While the death penalty is on the way out in many jurisdictions, it has increased in some, and Iran is one of them. According to a 2015 article in The Economist, Iran is believed to have the most executions per capita of any state. Iran Watch reported that 142 executions were carried out in May 2023, the highest number for that month since 2015. 307 had been carried out in all to the end of May setting it well on a pace to having over one execution a day. What are the crimes you can be hanged for in Iran? Wikipedia lists forty, including a half dozen sexual crimes including incest, fornication, prostitution, homosexuality, adultery and the catch-all, sexual misconduct. Then there are specifically religious and political crimes that warrant the death penalty: political dissidence, rebellion, apostasy, blasphemy, and “spreading corruption on Earth.” It was the latter that enabled the issuance of a Fatwah (death sentence) against Salman Rushdie for writing a book deemed blasphemous. It was the latter that enabled the persecution of the Baháʼí Faith.

Canadian human rights activist Payam Akhavan, a former Iranian of the Baháʼí Faith (his father had the foresight to get the family out of Iran before the Islamic revolution), recounts the persecution, torture and executions of many they left behind including that of his friend Mona. At sixteen, Mona Mahmudnizhad wrote a high school essay questioning the oppression of the Khomeini regime. “Why don’t you let me be free . . . to say who I am and what I want? Why don’t you give me freedom of speech so that I may write for publications or talk on radio and television about my ideas? . . . Why don’t you push aside that thick veil from your eyes?”

That essay got Mona arrested, imprisoned and tortured for eight months, including lashing the soles of her feet with cables, the bastinado. She refused to confess to any crimes, including the charge of spying for Israel. (The Baháʼí World Centre is located in Haifa, Israel as they are persecuted in Muslim countries as apostates.) She was offered the choice of conversion to Islam or death. She rejected Islam. On June 18, 1983, Mona and nine other Baháʼí women were taken to a polo field in Shiraz where her father had been hanged three months earlier. All ten were hanged one by one from a crane. Not a long drop hanging where death is instantaneous. They were painfully strangled. Mona was the last to be murdered. She was just seventeen. Also, under Sharia Law, apparently virgins cannot be executed. That may have resulted in prison guards raping her before she was executed (see The Guardian report).

Israel, meanwhile, has free speech and many dissidents. Anti-government protests are common. There has been only one execution in Israel’s history, that of Adolf Eichman in 1961. And yet the brutal, misogynistic, censorious state of Iran has been criticized by the UN a scant six times while Israel has been chastised by the UN 68 times. What the hell?

Many known rights violators are completely ignored. For example, the following nations have not one resolution against them from the UN: Cuba, China, Iraq, Russia, Venezuela and Somalia among others.

Why the disparity? Why is Israel singled out? Why the double standard? Why are horrid regimes routinely whitewashed or ignored while Israel, a liberal democracy with 20% of its population made up of Arabs who receive the full rights of Israeli citizenship, is condemned?

The other part of the 3 Ds is Delegitimization, the argument that Israel is an illegitimate country, a usurper of Palestinian land. The authors argue forcefully for the legitimacy of the state of Israel as a Zionist enterprise.

They provide considerable documentation to support their charges. The attempts at delegitimization take the form of denying recognition of Israel as a legitimate state. Of accusing it of expropriating Palestinians, of being tools of British or American imperialism. All these charges, the authors deny and refute.

The basic thesis of their book, they state, is that “The Land of Israel was built up and developed by Jews who were unjustifiably expelled from their homeland thousands of years ago and are now back to reclaim their lost property and add to it by building and developing otherwise virgin land. It is really as simple as that.” (xxvi)

The authors’ arguments take the following progression. In Chapter 1 they argue that some parts of ancient Judea are demonstrably of Jewish origin. There is clear evidence of Jewish homesteading and they cite various sources, including the Roman statesman Cicero, to back this up. They also contend that there are Jews alive today who can be genetically traced to these ancient Jews. Hence these modern Jews have a rightful claim to ancient Judea. The only civilization that might have a prior claim are the Canaanites but there are no extant living progeny of the Canaanites that can be proven.

In Chapter 2—Zionism—they argue that Zionism, the political movement promoting a Jewish homeland state, namely the country of Israel, is justified on a number of counts. They point out that emigration to Palestine took place long before the 1948 UN partition that created the state. “It arose from the spontaneous actions of hundreds of thousands of Jews who returned to Zion in order to build their homes, and only much later their state.” (37) Cultural Zionism preceded political Zionism.

“It was a purely classical liberal and libertarian enterprise,” they continue, “the hard journey to living free in the land of their forefathers, to thrive once again free from coercion.”

They challenge the idea that “the Jews somehow stole the land from Arabs,” arguing that Jewish migrants to Palestine purchased land from existing owners, some of them absentee landowners. They purchased uncultivated land, and in many cases, land that had been regarded as uncultivable. And they homesteaded unowned (government-owned) land. They argue that the Jews are the indigenous peoples of the country now known as Israel.

Chapter 3 on The Palestinian Fiction Factory, the longest chapter in the book at 70 pages (excluding bibliography) argues that claims that Palestinians were expropriated and/or forced from their land are false.

Their basic argument is that Jewish migration from Europe was a spontaneous movement beginning in the late 19th century. It intensified under both the Turks and the British Mandate as a result of persecution in Europe, including the events in Germany that would lead to the Holocaust. Jews were officially hampered in their efforts to settle. But they went ahead and settled and organized their own land registry, which used modern surveying methods as against the disorganized methods then extant.

The claims that Arabs were dispossessed, they argue, are false. First of all, claims that Arabs owned most of Palestine are false.

The claims that Arabs were dispossessed, they argue, are false. First of all, claims that Arabs owned most of Palestine are false. Claims of Arab ownership are distorted because proponents of this theory divide land into Jewish-owned and all the rest, which they claim is Arab-owned. In fact, most of it is government land and unowned [individually] according to libertarian philosophy.

Moreover, they claim that Jewish land was either bought at exorbitant prices, much of it from non-resident Arab landowners, or it was homesteaded on land declared as uncultivable. Jewish entrepreneurship turned much barren land into productive farmland. As a result, there was an influx of Arabs, increasing the Arab presence in the area. They were drawn by Jewish wealth and the opportunities it presented. So, far from ethnic cleansing, Jewish settlement encouraged Arab immigration into the area.

All Jewish land was either purchased or homesteaded, they aver. None was forcibly taken from anyone.

Most interesting is the authors’ attack on the so-called New Historians, dissident Israelis who oppose Zionism. Such anti-Israel Israelis, they argue, are dupes used by antisemites to promote their case against Israel statehood.

The most prominent of these New Historians is Ilan Pappé and their attack on him is devastating and convincing. They allege that Pappé is motivated by ideology, not facts. They quote him from his own writings: “I admit that my ideology influences my historical writings . . . Indeed, the struggle is about ideology, not about facts. Who knows what facts are? We try to convince as many people as we can that our interpretation of the facts is the correct one, and we do it because of ideological reasons, not because we are truth-seekers.” (Emphasis added by the authors; Ilan Pappé, A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, 11–12, cited on page 111)

On the other hand, Benny Morris, one of the founders of the New Historian movement, but more committed to relating an objective account, refutes much of his and other New Historian accounts in his later writings.

Section 4 of the chapter on The “Expulsion” Plan discusses the immediate aftermath of the UN declaration. It argues that Israel’s Arab neighbors launched an aggressive war to destroy Israel and that Israel had the legitimate right to self-defense. The Arab aggressors warned Arabs resident in Palestine to flee for their own safety. Many did. The objective of the war was Israeli genocide, to wipe Israel off the map.

Israel encouraged Arabs to stay. Arabs who opted to stay in the state of Israel now comprise twenty percent of the population. So, who is ethnic cleansing who, they ask.

But critics of Israel ignore this fact and accuse Israel of practicing ethnic cleansing. On the contrary, Israel encouraged Arabs to stay. Arabs who opted to stay in the state of Israel now comprise twenty percent of the population. So, who is ethnic cleansing who, they ask.

Regarding alleged massacres of Arabs such as Deir Yassein, “there was no policy of massacres, and Israeli authorities investigated and even condemned such incidents.” (emphasis added) (Benny Morris in Kramer et al., “Counter-Error: Separating Fact from Fiction in the Middle East,” The Washington Institute, October 27, 2016, page 95)

The authors also note the absence of mention by the New Historians and other anti-Israel writings of the association of the Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini of Jerusalem with the Nazis. He met with Hitler in 1941 and “concluded the pact of Jewish genocide in Europe and the Middle East, and immediately afterward.” (The authors in a footnote, page 96)

Chapter 4: Peace Process ≠ Peace—Here the authors argue that the various peace plans offered over the years were mere subterfuge by the Palestinian leadership. These leaders never had any intention of agreeing to a two-state plan.

They note that the original UN partition proposal offered the best two-state plan the Palestinians ever were offered but it was unilaterally rejected by surrounding Arab states who invaded en masse to wipe Israel off the map.

The first major subsequent attempt at an accord was the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. Back-channel negotiations with Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the largest anti-Israel group, were facilitated by Norway. These ended with the Oslo Accords and a Declaration of Principles signed at the White House in 1993. But the PLO never changed its original charter which called for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. The PLO morphed into the Palestinian Authority (PA) which continued with this policy. The authors put forward several supporting documents to bolster this contention including quoting from the PLO’s own charter. The objective is to “turn Israel into another Arab state.” (page 134)

Part of the PLO commitment was to end attacks on Jewish civilians. This did not happen and attacks intensified after the Second Intifada in 2000. “To this day the families of the suicide bombers receive payments from the PA,” the authors write (with a link to relevant footnotes), “and even Jihadis inside Israeli prisons obtain salaries from this source, which means that the PA incentivizes and rewards attacks against Israelis.” (135) By 2016, the PA was giving $300 million a year or 7% of its budget to terrorists and their families. This is equal to 22% of the foreign aid the PA receives.

Jihad or holy war is promoted in schools and in the media in Palestine and indeed, throughout the Arab world. “The amount of hatred being promoted by the PA is hardly equaled by any other organization today,” assert the authors. (141) Yet the PA is promoted as the moderate side. The malicious propaganda from Hamas is even worse.  (See Amir Ahmad Nasr’s biographical book, My Isl@m, for a firsthand account of this sort of indoctrination.)

It wasn’t until the election of Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister in 1998 that Israel’s official appeasement policy was changed. Instead of offering more and more concessions to the Palestinians only to have Palestinian commitments to security and an end to terrorism continually violated, Netanyahu vowed “If they give, they shall receive; If they don’t give, they don’t receive.” In other words, violence will be met by violence, peace by peace. (143–144)

Netanyahu was replaced in 1999 by Ehud Barak who offered the PLO everything they wanted. Arafat rejected the offer. According to Dennis Ross, chief negotiator for the US in the discussions, the reason for Arafat’s rejection was “the critical clause in the agreement specifying that the agreement meant the end of the conflict. Arafat, whose life has been governed by that conflict, simply could not end it. ‘For him to end the conflict is to end himself,’ said Ross” (145)

“The ‘Two State Solution’ is not a peace formula, but a recipe for eternal war,” note the authors. (181) Ultimately, they argue that rather than a two-state solution, trade between Israel and Palestine should be encouraged. They cite Bastiat’s maxim: “When goods do not cross borders, armies do.” But Palestinian law expressly forbids such trade, as do the Oslo Accords. In fact, for a Palestinian to sell land to a Jew is a capital offense in Palestine. (I was skeptical of this claim but checked and it is, in fact, true.)

“The key is to ‘break the Palestinian will to fight’ (Pipes 2009b),” note the authors quoting Daniel Pipes. “Only when they understand that Israel is here to stay, will they be willing to abandon their weapons and continual war.” (182)

Chapter 5: The True Nature of Anti-Zionism and the BDS Movement—I covered this chapter above, so I’ll skip on to:

Chapter 6: Critique of the Classical Liberal Case for Anti-Zionism—the authors critique Murray Rothbard’s analysis of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

While lauding Rothbard as the colossus of the libertarian movement who “practically created the entire philosophy of libertarianism,” they disagree with him on the issue of Israel and Zionism.

Rothbard sees Israel through a single lens, the lens of strict libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism. But, they argue, the situation calls for a real-world analysis, not a hypothetical one. As such, Israel must be looked at by comparison to other countries, and most notably by comparison to her Arab neighbors. While Rothbard does call for choosing sides in a war, “Rothbard begins his analysis on the wrong foot. There was no state of Israel that could be blamed for the detestation of the Jews on the part of the Arab population before the birth of the state of Israel in 1948.” (254) And the anti-Jewish sentiment and violence towards Jews preceded the formation of the state by decades.

The authors note that Rothbard’s position is that Zionism was an offshoot of British imperialism. That the British vowed to ensure the Arabs a “land free from Turkish domination,” but their real goal was to create a Jewish state. But this is untrue, the authors argue. They cite Ilan Troen’s 2011 study which argues that the first forty years of Jewish migration to the area took place under the Ottomans. It had nothing to do with imperial expansion. In fact, the Jewish immigrants were thought foolish to want to settle such unproductive land. The charge of imperialism is a canard promulgated by “revisionist scholars who have wrenched a concept out of context in keeping with their own ideological agenda.” (cited on page 254)

Even Benny Morris weighs in that “The settlers were not the sons of an imperial power, and the settlement enterprise was never designed to politically or strategically serve an imperial mother country or economically exploit it on behalf of any empire.”

While they acknowledge that the Balfour Declaration supported the Zionist enterprise during the British Mandate, in fact, according to Charles Bard, the British reaction to waves of Jewish immigration in the 30s following the rise of the Nazis was to restrict such immigration to appease the Arabs. In 1936 the Brits promised to create a Palestinian state within ten years as “it also forbade land sales to Jews in 95 percent of the territory of Palestine.”

The authors argue that Rothbard is totally wrong in his analysis of events post-partition in 1948. “Contrary to Rothbard, the Jews accepted the partition and the Arabs who already lived in Jewish areas were an integral part of the new State of Israel (and treated as such).” (264) Today 20% of the population of Israel is Arabic.

But at the time of partition, “seven Arab armies invaded Israel after it was completed. Why should Israel be blamed for the resulting situation when it was only defending itself from outside attack?” (265) Moreover, Rothbard offers “no explanation of why and how a new state built virtually entirely on homesteaded or purchased areas, labored on and developed by Jewish majorities, constitutes an aggression against the collective of Arabs of the entire Middle East.”

They also contend that the Jewish organizations Haganah, Etzel and Lehi, established before the partition, “were private armies and/or police forces, which Rothbard and other libertarians favor. It is quite strange that he opposes voluntary, privately financed defense organizations when he continuously defended the very opposite point of view.” (266)

The authors then discuss the Deir Yassin massacre. Claims about fatalities, they allege, are contradictory. In short, the authors downplay Deir Yassin and accuse Rothbard of hypocrisy by saying nothing about Arab massacres of Jews or that “Israeli authorities begged the Arabs not to leave the new Israel.” (269)

Nevertheless, many Arabs fled their homes as a result of Arab propaganda on the radio. They feared being caught in the crossfire and they feared being branded traitors in what they were sure would be an Arab victory. The authors suggest that Arabs who fled the area should be regarded as traitors. “These people were aiding and abetting the enemies of Israel.” (273)

Chapter 7 on The Methodology of Anti-Zionists continues the argument against libertarian criticism of their position by looking at the arguments of Jeremy Hammond who took their ideas to task after reviewing pre-publication statements of their case in various publications. The authors rehash a lot of their prior arguments, and I won’t go into them here.

Chapter 8: To Be a Free Nation in Our Land in which the authors discuss the evolution of Israel from a predominantly socialist state to a thriving capitalist state. “After the State of Israel proclaimed its independence on May 14, 1948, the chosen economic approach it followed was that of socialism and interventionism. This lasted for a full three decades.” (379) So begins this chapter. “The Kibbutz was the ideal.” And an agrarian approach to the economy prevailed. Central planning was seen as essential to Israel’s survival.

They quote George Gilder: “In a general enthusiasm for public ownership of the means of production and finance, the government through the 1990s owned four major banks, 200 corporations, and much of the land. Israel’s taxes rose to a confiscatory 56 percent of total earnings, close to the highest in the world, stifling even those private initiatives that managed to pass through the country’s sieves of socialism.” (“Silicon Israel—How Market Capitalism Saved the Jewish State,” City Journal, Summer 2009, page 380)

This changed in 1977 when Menachem Begin’s Likud Party was elected, ending decades of socialism. But the changes were only moderately successful. A bout of hyperinflation in 1984 had the coalition government of Shimon Peres of the socialist Labour Party and Yitzhak Shamir, Begin’s successor, introduce the New Shekel, creating a stable currency that continues to this day.

“But,” the authors aver, “the radical change that turned Israel from a poverty-stricken agricultural exporter to a high-tech superpower is largely the work of one man: Benjamin Netanyahu.” (382) He became prime minister in 1996 and started implementing radical changes to the economy. He “rendered Israel an economy open to business and investment.”

Even bigger changes were implemented when Netanyahu became minister of finance in 2003 under the administration of Likud PM Ariel Sharon. “Netanyahu applied a fully integrated package of economic policies in the direction of dramatic liberalization, deregulation, and tax reduction that facilitated extraordinary growth.” (383)

The authors discuss Netanyahu’s reforms in some detail. The graph below indicates the impact of Netanyahu’s reforms.

 

By all economic metrics, the improvements have been phenomenal. Many are shown in graphs in the book.

The authors conclude: “In improving the economy of the nation, Netanyahu has done more, far more, than attain for its people greater creature comforts, as important as these are. He also immeasurably improved their chances of survival as a nation. For a more efficient economy also leads to greater military power. If Prime Minister Netanyahu would have done nothing else for his country apart from promoting economic freedom, he would properly be credited, also, for strengthening it militarily.”

Israel has repeatedly been the victim of suicide bombers and rocket attacks by Palestinians.

As I noted earlier, I also found a lot to disagree with, points I elaborate on in my separate essay, The Battle for Israel’s Soul. But this essay looks at the positive points they make, points that should be noted and bear repeating:

  1. Zionism was a cultural movement long before it became a political one. Jews started emigrating to Israel, their historic homeland, from the late 1800s on, decades before the creation of the state of Israel.
  2. No land was usurped from Arabs. It was either bought, often at exorbitant prices, or homesteaded on unowned land deemed uncultivable.
  3. Arab antisemitism was rife before the creation of the state of Israel. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem himself was a virulent antisemite and concluded a pact with Hitler to exterminate the Jews.
  4. When the state of Israel was created, its seven Arab neighbors launched an immediate war against the new state, expecting a quick and easy victory. Israel was, from day one, a victim of aggression by its Arab neighbors.
  5. Decades of peace talks and attempts at a two-state solution have been consistently rejected by Palestinian authorities, no matter how favorable the deal was for the Palestinians.
  6. Israel has repeatedly been the victim of suicide bombers and rocket attacks by Palestinians.
  7. The Palestinian Authority pays and incentivizes Palestinian terrorists to the tune of $300 million a year or 22% of its foreign aid budget.
  8. The Palestinian Authority forbids trade with Israel and selling land to an Israeli is a capital crime.
  9. Hamas uses human shields and builds missile launch sites and tunnel hideouts under and near schools and hospitals and other areas populated by civilians. It uses its citizens to create martyrs.
  10. Anti-Zionism in the form of BDS is completely one-sided. Only Israel is targeted. Egregious tyrannies and dictatorships are completely ignored.
  11. There are double standards in the treatment of Israel, even by its parent and creator, the United Nations. Israel has been condemned by the UN more often than every other country in the world combined. The violent, fascist, repressive, misogynistic state of Iran has been censured a mere six times by the UN compared to 68 times for Israel. Russia the invader of Ukraine, Cuba the operator of extensive repressive political prisons (See Against All Hope by Armando Valladares), and China the largest mass-murdering regime in the history of the world, have never been censured by the UN. Not once!

These are just a few of the points that Block and Futerman make. Despite some drawbacks that I pointed out in my other essay, this book deserves a hearing. It makes many vital and important points about the history and the philosophies governing both Israel and its neighbors.

In the grand scheme of things, Israel is a beacon of civilization in a swamp of repression and hatred.

 

 

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