Zizek describing Hezbollah and Hamas as "fascist" is no surprise - the flip side to his contrarianism is that, when in doubt, he just repeats liberal banalities because that's what he essentially believes. However, I encounter this sort of nonsense from people who ought to know better, and I think we all do. And after seeing this resentful "yeah, well..." sort of reply from Alan Johnson to the Hamas minister Bassem Naeem, one starts to realise how the liberal theodicy of the Middle East conflict relies upon this canard. After all, Johnson is not the sort of nasty person to deny the Palestinians their rights (those being constrained to what is deemed compatible with the continuation of Israel's existence as a Zionist state). And since he is the sort of person who thinks Israel would as soon have peace as perpetual war, there must be some reason why it has so far failed to materialise. Extremists 'on both sides' obviously contribute to the impasse, but the real story is that Hamas plots genocide against the Jews. Can't trust 'em - not 'partners for peace'.

The ideology of Hamas is not obscure. An offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood, the main goal of the organisation is to eventually replace Israel with an Islamic Republic on the whole of historic Palestine. Its most vociferously expressed conviction in its early years was the belief that Israel could not be won over through negotiations and concessions, and that only a military jihad could succeed. This in fact constituted a departure for the historically quietist Muslim Brothers, but in truth it was the first intifada and the way in which it was crushed that galvanised the organisation. Two key figures inspire Hamas' ideological orientation. The first is Sayyid Qutb, whose doctrinal contribution became a staple of Brotherhood ideology in the course of struggle with the Nasserist state. Qutb articulated a right-wing variant of Third Worldist discourse, rejecting both socialism and American-style capitalism. Like ideological confederates such as Mawdudi, he sought to renew Muslim societies from the weakness that had allowed them to be overwhelmed by colonial powers by resuscitating their moral power. Reacting against the chimera of a distinctly Western weltanschauung, comprising nationalism, secularism and liberal democracy (cf Mawdudi), Qutb regarded the unconditional sovereignty of God as the basis for such renewal. If you're an Anglo-American writer in need of a justification for perpetual war, the technical term for this doctrine is "Islamofascism".

Still, as Zizek himself has pointed out (on Haider v Blair), fascism is not just a bundle of elements (anti-socialism, anti-modern reflux, patriarchy, corporatism, etc), it is a particular articulation of those elements. In my view, it is far better to see Qutb's doctrine as a conservative form of anti-colonial nationalism, in which the plane of nationhood is transferred to the Umma. Realistically, Qutb's ideal state would probably not have differed that much from Nasser's, except for added religious trappings. Were it not for the failure of the Free Officers to accomodate the Muslim Brothers in the corporatist Egyptian state, indeed, Qutb would have been happy to support that state - he had himself been a supporter of the Free Officer rebellion. Mind you, the British had no problem deeming even Nasser a "fascist" when he nationalized the Suez Canal, because only a fascist would do something to annoy a declining empire. The second key figure for Hamas, is 'Izz al-Din al-Qassam, an important figure in the Palestinian resistance to the British occupation who was killed in the build-up to the 1936-9 uprising. In fact, Qassam had form as an anti-colonial fighter, which career he began when Italy invaded Libya in 1911, and continued with the Syrian revolt against the French Mandate. His contribution to the Palestinian struggle was to form 'Black Hand', an underground resistance movement which - of course - the British Empire considered a 'terrorist' outfit. The anti-colonial lineage is crucial, and this is recognised in Hamas ideology.

The Muslim Brothers emerged as a serious force in Palestine particularly after the 1967 war and during the Israeli occupation. In this time, the rising profile of religion in politics and daily life saw the number of mosques soar, particularly in Gaza, where the number rose over the first twenty years of occupation from 200 to 600. This was the main vector through which the Brothers established a presence, aside from using zakat to supply alms to the needy and so forth. When the first riots of the incipient intifada erupted in December 1987, several of the Brothers based at the Islamic Centre in Gaza met to discuss a response. They started to publish propaganda leaflets calling for action against the Israeli occupation, and formed the original nucleus for what would become known as Hamas (short for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya or "Islamic Resistance Movement") in 1988. For nice liberals, this is the moment of disaster, but I actually think that hitherto quietest bourgeois Islamic nationalists throwing themselves into the resistance is a good development, not least since the PLO was increasingly bankrupt politically and militarily since its expulsion from Lebanon in 1982. In fact, it should be said that older members of the Brotherhood were quite trepidatious about getting involved in the uprising, since they still maintained that Palestinians needed to be educated in Islam before they could be ready for a full-scale rebellion - it was the younger generation who drove the evolution of Hamas into a serious organisation of resistance.

Hamas' goals, as explained in its Charter, are congruent with those of the Brotherhood, but place far more emphasis on the specific Palestinian problem, and less on reforming society along Islamic lines. The organisation certainly considers the whole of historic Palestine an Islamic waqf, or trust, but this is really a religious form of Palestinian nationalism. In fact, what was distinctive about Hamas in the 1990s was that while the PLO were retreating from the mainstays of Palestinian nationalism and popular armed struggle, Hamas conspicuously held to them. Of course, simple tactical flexibility has ensured that it has always differentiated its long-term goals from short-term aims such as establishing a state on Gaza and the West Bank. So it wasn't that weird for it to declare a willingness to arrive at a ten year truce with Israel based on a two-state settlement. Although Hamas is usually equated with suicide attacks, it has always been pragmatic about the use of force, deploying it in much the same way as secular Palestinian groups such as Fatah and the PFLP. It cooperated with the PLO over the Oslo negotiations process, for example, despite its misgivings. And though Hamas has always rejected the PLO's inherent right to lead the Palestinians, it has also opposed intra-Palestinian bloodshed and sectarianism and has, even before its velocitous rise since 2000, sought to forge a coalition with the organisation on an agreed platform.

The key point that has animated liberal critique of Hamas, aside from violence, is antisemitism. Without question, the early Hamas doctrine held that the defense of Palestine was part of a resistance not only against imperialism or Zionism but against essentialised blocs of Judaism and Christianity, who they depicted as engaged in an existential battle with Islam. They drew on claims from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to interpret their struggle as one against Jewish world domination. In a reductionist way, you could see this as the result of 'false consciousness', or a simple lack of class analysis. True enough, if your oppressors tell you that they represent the world's Jews, that they are the Jewish state, and you lack the conceptual apparatus with which to disentangle such nationalist myths - because you are subject to your own variant of such mythology - then the antisemitic conspiracy theories might be alluring. And this reductionist interpretation is certainly better than the even more reductionist take, which is that Islam is inherently antisemitic because of its dangerous proximity to Judaism which produces a narcissistic recoil (actually, in that highly culturalist assessment, Zizek might well have drawn consciously from Huntington or even Michael Ignatieff). I think there is also an element of subverting the morality through which Israel asserts its dominance, namely its claim to represent the victims of the Nazi holocaust. If Israel were the culmination of a conspiracy, there would be no need to defer to the tragic recent history of a People of the Book. As Edward Said never tired of arguing, this style of denunciation is a hateful inversion of logic. The proper way to undermine the legitimacy of Israeli oppression is to point out the structural similarity between Israel's racism and European antisemitism, between its modes of domination and those of European states. I need hardly add that the antisemitism in the Covenant is, however inexcusable, in no way equivalent to European antisemitism, which was not even remotely a reaction to oppression. Such analysis will hopefully become passe, at any rate, if Bassem Naeem's simple and straightforward repudiation of antisemitism is representative of Hamas' current direction. And what then will be left for the defenders of Israel, as its ministers draw on the metaphors of the Shoah to describe its atrocities against Palestinians? As increasing numbers of Jewish people reject Israel's claim to represent their interests? As Hamas defends Palestinian democracy and Israel and its allies attack it and undermine it?

Would it be better if the Left were stronger than the Islamists in Palestine? Unquestionably, if it was a Left worth its salt. If, that is, it was a Left unlike any that people like Alan Johnson or his conferes would accept. By no means do I think Hamas has the answers. As things stand, much - not all - of the Palestinian Left is taking a sectarian approach to Hamas while broadly aligning with a decrepit and corrupt nationalism that will surely bring them down with it. One would hope in the minimum for a renewed spirit of Palestinian unity, but that of course depends upon the nationalist wing evacuating itself from the imperialist camp. In the meantime, I fear that Hamas are currently the only serious resistance movement in Palestine, for all their shortcomings. The libidinised appropriation of the language of anti-fascism by liberal apologists for Israel both disgraces that tradition and helps isolate and vilify the major obstacle to Israel's successful wiping of Palestine from the map.

There is a growing argument in favour of a one-state settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict, largely as a result of the failure of Oslo and the intensifying occupation policies that accompanied it. In this vein, there was a brief 'to do' over the question of a one-state versus two-state settlement in Palestine over at the Democrats Diary. There is also a debate on Counterpunch beginning with a highly defensive and bitter attack on the one-state idea by the very sharp Michael Neumann, and now followed up with a counter-point by the former CIA analyst Kathy Christison. I think it's worth discharging some of the acrimony over this question, because our role as pro-Palestinian activists is not necessarily to work for one kind of settlement or the other: it is to strengthen the Palestinians as much as we can, in part by disabling Israel's major patron, so that they can decide what deal to accept and under what conditions. If the two-state argument is mistaken, as I think it is, there is no space for sectarian moralising about it. The fact that some in the pro-Palestinian movement - only a minority but loud enough to be damaging at times - take the view that all two-staters including Noam Chomsky are sell-outs and so on has made it more difficult to have a serious discussion. It also sets a massive elephant trap for activists to fall into. If we spend all our time anathematising others in the movement, we will achieve even less in the future than we have in the past despite what are undoubtedly improved prospects for mobilising opinion. So, I should say the following: to be a 'two-stater' is not the same thing necessarily as a liberal Zionist, since the latter acknowledges no injustice other than the 1967 war and is committed to the moral value of having a Jewish nationalist state, while the former need not be; to be a 'one-stater' is not to be ethereal, aloof and moralistic, neither to foreclose options nor foreswear temporary and unsatisfactory compromise, since a single Palestinian state is a long term goal, the road to which can be marked by many half-way houses; 'one-staters' do not have a monopoly on justice any more than 'two-staters' have a monopoly on political realism.

Well, from the above, it is clear that there are a number of concurrent and apparently incompatible criteria at work in this argument. Justice demands that what is a racist-nationalist state should be abolished by one means or another; that the effects of ethnic cleansing should be reversed as far as possible; and that Arabs and Jews should live together as brothers and sisters. Realism stipulates that such demands are incoherent, moralistic, historically disembodied, almost certainly unattainable, and a diversion from the one true settlement, which is that aimed at by the PLO since 1988, endorsed by the UN, the ICJ, and formally accepted by every actor including Israel - a Palestinian state based in Gaza and the West Bank, with some settlement for the refugees. The argument from justice has a set of historical facts, and an analysis, but no clout; the argument from realism has a concrete plan, a blueprint that Israel could accept and that would potentially stop the bloodshed and provide relief for the Palestinians. This is an alluring story, but there's something oddly disquieting about it. For a start, if 'realism' is so hostile to moralism, why does one detect its tincture in the claim (repeated in Neumann's piece) that 'realism' is a 'real world' solution aimed at ending 'real suffering' in the 'here and now', whereas pursuit of one-state would keep the slaughter in motion. Isn't this exactly the language of strident urgency that liberal imperialism activates in order to suppress rational discussion of the latest 'intervention'? Further, when an argument is raised against unwieldy utopianism and maximalism, there is usually straw flying amid the feathers. What if compromise and settlement turns out to be the utopian option? What if those who consider the long-term survival of the Israeli polity in its current Zionist form a viable option are the idle fantasists? If analogies to previous debates suggest themselves - those between sensible colonialism and anti-colonialism; those between abolitionists and ameliorists - it is because the terms of 'realism' are so familiar. Finally, the argument from 'realism' seems to overestimate the value of legal opinion and 'consensus', in part because it happens to be convenient in conventional arguments to say 'we have the legal consensus, all actors are committed to this in theory, the UN backs it, the PLO has gone out of its way to make it happen, conceding much and receiving little, and only America and Israel's refusenik stance thwarts it'. But diplomacy and law are the products of power, and the relevant centres of power do not at present support even a two-state settlement. How practicable, as opposed to utopian, is a two-state settlement?

Let me take my lead from the 'real world'. In the West Bank, Israel has imposed a "settlement grid", as Virginia Tilley puts it, a network of Jewish Only roads and settlements as well as a 'separation wall' which will eventually incorporate about half of the West Bank into Israel. The colonies and roads are protected by IDF troops, the separation wall by border guards. And the whole system from Jerusalem to Jericho populated by approximately half a million Israelis, many of them fanatics armed to the teeth. It contains 450 roadblocks, 70 manned checkpoints, and 300 kilometres of segregated highway. It is designed to be irreversible. It is designed to make 40% of the West Bank inaccessible to the Palestinians. It is designed to fragment its landscape and eliminate the basis for a viable polity. The settlements have not ceased to expand, and there is no reason to expect that they will in the prevailing circumstances. Israelis will have added motive to try and move into these frontier zones because it is one area where the Israeli state provides a real welfare system of sorts. On top of this, Israel goes to great lengths to frustrate any possible basis for economic development in the Palestinian areas. Not just by withholding tax revenues so that Palestinians can subsidise the occupation; not only by imposing a blockade; not only by stealing land and destroying olive groves; but also through its discriminatory water restrictions, which has had a devastating impact on agriculture and on domestic consumption. We can add to this the impact of movement restrictions on the right to work. This is a policy, as Sara Roy puts it, of de-development. B'Tselem's 2002 report on Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank concludded that Israel's aim was both to rule out the possibility of an independent sovereign state and "drastically restrict the possibilities ... for economic development, and for agriculture in particular". The result of economic restrictions and fragmentation is a system of disarticulated micro-economies attached to the Israeli one, not a potential national economy. The fact that Palestinian society has not completely collapsed in the face of this onslaught is a miracle of resilience. Aside from being a long-term and vitally important national project for Israel, pursued so far with great success, the occupation and colonisation of the remaining Palestinian territories provides the Israeli Defense Force, perhaps the most important power bloc in the Israeli state, with rentier motivations for continuing with the occupation.

As figures such as Virginia Tilley and Tony Judt have argued, even the mere fact of half a million armed colonists with a strong body of support within Israel proper militates strongly against a two-state settlement. This may not be 'irreversible', but any reversal would not originate in the Israeli power structure, which has no interest in it. Further, whatever supposed international 'consensus' exists, it is totally absent in the centres of US power, which are almost entirely supportive of the most aggressive wing of the Zionist movement. Gaza is an interesting case in point. Here, we were supposed to be witnessing a unilateral withdrawal, a peace gesture, and end to the occupation of that part of Palestine as the basis for a future settlement. At the initiative of Ariel Sharon, the settlements were taken apart and the settlers removed to their astonishment and grief. Tears flowed all the way from Gush Katif to the Jordan Valley. What next? Would Sharon really disengage from the West Bank that he was able to so triumphantly reinvade in 2002? Was he really a peacenik, despite all appearances? Dov Weisglass revealed all: it was an attempt to sidestep a peaceful settlement with an imposed Israeli one backed by the US, which would avert Palestinian statehood or any deal for the refugees. The new 'Kadima' coalition ('Avanti' in Italian) that Sharon helped to found has pursued this solution relentlessly: the growing settlements in the West Bank, especially those contiguous with the separation wall; the fostering of civil war and the destruction of Gaza; the planned reduction of Gaza's already heavily infringed territory through ethnic cleansing, and so on. The movement for a two-state settlement could once boast a coalition uniting the PLO with reform-minded Israelis, but that has been decisively defeated for the time being. Indeed, given the Israeli state's hostility, the Palestinian leadership's corruption and opportunism, and the absence of serious regional allies for the Palestinians, it is hard to see how it ever stood a chance. Israel, as Neumann acknowledges, will not accept such an outcome. So the criticism of the one-state solution, that it lacks a supporting agency capable of enforcing it, also happens to apply to the two-state solution.

Let us suppose the increasingly improbable anyway. Suppose that with a two-state settlement in mind, based on UN resolutions 242 and 338 (both formulated when there was much more chance of their being successful), the Palestinian movement acquired reserves of strength and clout hitherto denied it. Let us say it acquired the ability to force an Israeli retreat from the West Bank, and end to the occupation of Gaza, the creation of a unified state with East Jerusalem as its capital, and some kind of settlement for the refugees. Such, the two-state argument says, is eminently possible, though most of its advocates acknowledge that it would not be justice. I agree that it is possible, at least, and that it would represent an improvement in the condition of Palestinians. It would go some small way to meeting the claims of justice, and by ending the war, it could undermine some of the key expansionist agents in Israeli society. It could even open up new possibilities for critical and post-Zionist thought to emerge in Israel, although there is no evidence from past partitions that this is likely to be the case. On the contrary, it would seem to bolster the logic of Zionism and potentially lead to the expulsion of Israeli Arabs who are already in an embattled position. And so long as the United States wished for a strong Israel, the latter would have the resources to defensively recuperate its military position. It would still have its nuclear weapons, a string of bought Arab regimes, a powerful intelligence service and an aggressive posture toward the region as a whole. It could easily formulate or provoke a pretext for re-invasion and annexation. Statehood is no protection from Israeli aggression as surrounding states have discovered. After all, the basis for present-day Palestine in the two-stare vision is territory taken from Jordanian and Egyptian occupation in 1967. And should Israel embroil itself in any regional war that could threaten its own existence, it is sworn to massive retalitatory attacks possibly using its nuclear weapons - the crazy Samson Option. So, the question is, without fundamentally altering the Zionist polity, would a two-state settlement be the basis for peace and stability, even if not for justice, that it is claimed to be? On the basis of the foregoing adumbrations it seems dubious.

At present, there is a de facto one-state solution of sorts in operation (not de jure in the areas of occupation). It is a state of segregation, pass laws, despotism for Palestinians and a thin veneer of democracy for Israelis. Most of those living in it lack the rights of citizenship, and many who do are essentially second-class citizens. It is a 'democracy' but a Herrenvolk democracy, a "Jewish and democratic state" which all political parties in Israel are prohibited from challenging. So, Israel is constitutionally committed to maintaining that formula - the majority of citizens within the state must be Jewish, even as it expands. To grant citizenship status to the Palestinian majority living in the territory controlled by Israel would violate that fundamental principle. The Law of Return, by allowing a massive level of immigration, including of those who aren't in fact Jewish, provides one source for a continued majority in an expanding Israel. Ethnic cleansing strategies and potentially genocide are logical outgrowths of that basic commitment, and we saw one such example in the recent attempted annexation of south Lebanon in which Israel tried to drive out the Lebanese population and take the territory under occupation. For some years, discussion of a one-state solution was seriously curbed in Palestine because the Fatah leadership saw it as being subversive of its diplomatic efforts. The rise of Hamas as the chief beneficiary of the second Intifada, coupled with Israel's policies designed to thwart a two-state settlement, may well have opened up discussion. Recent polling evidence suggests a much stronger level of support for a one-state solution among Palestinians than ever before (70%). It is acquiring support among leading Palestinians too. Ziad Abu-Amr, a former PA minister, and Sharif Elmusa have recently come out for such a settlement. But that would require abolishing the basic structures of the Israeli polity, and implementing Arab-majority rule. How could such a state of affairs be arrived at? I would point out, first of all, that the Palestinians alone lack the structural capacity to overthrow Zionism. They are not a labouring majority whom Israel tries to exploit, but a nationality that Israel is trying to destroy. No Palestinian COSATU will bring Israeli industry to its knees. The odd rocket or suicide attack isn't going to do it either. Secondly, and I am sorry to break this to some of the more naive sects, the Palestinians cannot rely on the solidarity of the Israeli working class, any more than they can rely on the ICJ or Fatah's diplomatic prowess. There is no movement from within to abandon Zionism: on the contrary, 94% of Israelis polled assert that Israel must maintain its Jewish majority. Thirdly, it seems obvious to me that the only contiguous population with an interest in solidarity with the Palestinians is the working population of the Middle East - but they have to free themselves of their mainly US-imposed dictators before they can really help free Palestine. In short, it would require a revolt across the entire region. This is a regional problem, and it must have a regional solution. There is nothing else coming down the pipeline, so far as I can see. Certainly, an international consensus, with regular chronicling of Israel's outrages by the UN or the ICJ, with diplomatic initiatives by those presently helping impose the misery, with international solidarity movements operating under increasing restrictions, and with marches in the street by those far removed from the action - all this can only go so far, and probably never as far as the supposedly very practical two-state settlement.

We have heard from people like UN Special Rapporteur John Dugard, who says that the Zionist regime is worse than apartheid. The Israeli historian Ilan Pappe now argues that Israel is pursuing a genocidal policy in Gaza. The Israeli government's open threats of ethnic cleansing and mass violence in civilian areas alongside the repeated sieges, the imposed starvation, the mass imprisonment and the killings, coupled with a deep-rooted perception of Palestinians as a 'demographic threat' and, well, everything else, could be seen as adding weight to this view. But if the Israeli strategy is genocidal, this is the latest degenerate stage in an ongoing counterinsurgency war, the character of which is not well understood even by our own gluttonously free press. Well, this is what can be said about the ordinary run of the mill war, when there isn't a major theatre attack, a mass crackdown, a re-invasion, an annexation or another country to bomb: Israeli troops repeatedly use indiscriminate violence, deliberate violence against civilians including against minors, they use civilians as human shields, they detain tens of thousands illegally, and they torture and rape prisoners. If you're a B'Tselem, Amnesty, or even Human Rights Watch worker concerned with Israel/Palestine, you encounter daily, grinding brutality that is rarely if ever reported. Let me give you only a few examples. Here are some excerpts from the latest B'Tselem report on human rights in the 'Occupied Territories':

Of those killed in 2007, at least 132 were civilians who were taking no part in the hostilities at the time they were killed. As for another 50, we were unable to determine the relevant circumstances. According to these figures, approximately 35 percent of the Palestinians killed in 2007 in circumstances known to B'Tselem were civilians not involved in the fighting. In 2006, 348 civilians uninvolved in the fighting were killed (54 percent). Illegal behavior of an individual soldier and his commander is not the only cause for the high number of Palestinians killed who were not taking part in hostilities and posed no danger to security forces. The primary reason for these deaths is Israeli policy, set by the army’s top echelon: illegal easing of the military's rules of engagement, approval of operations that constitute disproportionate attacks, and failure to carry out independent investigations in cases in which innocent Palestinian civilians are killed.

...

Another example of illegal expansion of the rules of engagement is the establishment of “death zones” in areas close to the Gaza perimeter fence. According to testimonies given to B'Tselem, certain units are ordered to open fire automatically at any person approaching the fence, without giving prior warning and regardless of the circumstances or the identity of the person. This practice is particularly grave because of the lack of demarcation, by signs or otherwise, of the area in which entry is prohibited. In 2007, security forces killed 55 Palestinians who tried to cross the Gaza perimeter fence or were near the fence, in some cases even at a distance greater than 100 meters. Of these, at least 16 were unarmed and not engaged in hostilities, including four minors.

...

In 2007, B'Tselem documented in detail 74 cases in which security forces beat (by punching, kicking, clubbing, or hitting with rifle butts), humiliated, or threatened Palestinians. The perpetrators were soldiers (in 41 cases), Border Police officers (27 cases), and members of the regular police (6 cases) ... B'Tselem’s monitoring of demonstrations against the Separation Barrier since 2004 indicates that about 1,000 demonstrators have required medical treatment due to injury from rubbercoated metal bullets, beatings, or tear gas inhalation. Over 320 of these people were injured in 2007.

...

More than 6,000 Palestinians from the West Bank were detained in 2007 by Israel’s security forces. A significant majority of them were subsequently interrogated by the Israel Security Agency on suspicion of involvement in "hostile terror activity". In these interrogations, the ISA, together with the Prison Service and Israel Police, routinely use prison conditions and interrogation methods that individually constitute forbidden ill-treatment.

...

The phenomenon of soldiers using Palestinians to perform dangerous military tasks or to protect soldiers from gunfire (in other words, using them as human shields) continued in 2007. Until mid-December, B'Tselem documented 10 such cases, although it is likely that this represents a minority of the cases that occurred.

These are conservative estimates based on documented cases, but they clearly describe the systematic use of indiscriminate killing, beatings, mass imprisonment, torture and the use of Palestinians as human shields. I quoted some other examples of Israel's regular brutalisation of civilians here. I want also to comment specifically on the treatment of Palestinian children before moving on, because the deliberate harming of children in any war is indicative of its degeneracy - and is used as an indicator of such in most other wars. The arrest and long-term detention of children is typical. For example, in the months of February to May 2002, 8,500 Palestinians were arrested in the West Bank, 10% of whom were children. The circumstances were characteristic of an Israeli crackdown: door to door house searches, with the rounding up of anyone who the soldiers deemed a threat. The children, like their relatives, were frequently beaten before being arrested, handcuffed, blindfolded for long periods of time, denied access to medical treatment which they needed, and subject to physical and psychological torture. One fifteen year old boy described being beaten for an hour, his legs trampled on, then thrown from one corner of the room to another for fifteen minutes, then sprayed with cold water, then tied to iron steps which caused him to fall and injure himself, then punched in the face. He also had cigarettes stubbed out on his body and was struck with a steel ruler. That's just one example. (See Catherine Cook et al, Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel's Detention of Palestinian Children, Pluto Press, 2004). The deliberate baiting and shooting of children has also been reported. Chris Hedges wrote in 2001 of this practise by Israeli soldiers at an Israeli colony ('settlement') near the Palestinian refugee camp Faqah:

It is still. The camp waits, as if holding its breath. And then, out of the dry furnace air, a disembodied voice crackles over a loudspeaker.

"Come on, dogs," the voice booms in Arabic. "Where are all the dogs of Khan Younis? Come! Come!"

I stand up. I walk outside the hut. The invective continues to spew: "Son of a bitch!" "Son of a whore!" "Your mother's cunt!"

The boys dart in small packs up the sloping dunes to the electric fence that separates the camp from the Jewish settlement. They lob rocks toward two armored jeeps parked on top of the dune and mounted with loudspeakers. Three ambulances line the road below the dunes in anticipation of what is to come.

A percussion grenade explodes. The boys, most no more than ten or eleven years old, scatter, running clumsily across the heavy sand. They descend out of sight behind a sandbank in front of me. There are no sounds of gunfire. The soldiers shoot with silencers. The bullets from the M-16 rifles tumble end over end through the children's slight bodies. Later, in the hospital, I will see the destruction: the stomachs ripped out, the gaping holes in limbs and torsos.

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered - death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo - but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport. (Chris Hedges, 'A Gaza Diary', Harper's Magazine, 1 October 2001).

El Salvador, Guatemala, Sarajevo, and Algeria - those are instructive comparisons. At any rate, this is just to indicate some of the dimensions of Israel's barbarism that are usually unnoticed or, more accurately, suppressed. It is a routine grind of racially aggravated terror and humilitation, increasingly accompanied by various systems of explicit segregation, including 300 kilometres of roads exclusively for Israeli colonists in the West Bank. To it can be various forms of economic blockade, with predictably devastating effects. As to its roots, I have already argued that the reason for Israel's resemblance to apartheid South Africa is because of their emergence from a very similar historical complex of causes - colonialism and race ideology in particular. The attachment to race theory, for example, was presumably why it didn't seem odd for Zionist leaders to be inviting Adolf Eichmann to visit Palestine in 1937; why Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Likudism, so admired Mussolini (who was himself pro-Zionist); why Mossad was working with the Gestapo to arrange Jewish deportation from Germany at the behest of Reinhard Heydrich in 1939, later a chief architect of the Nazi holocaust (he gave his name to one of its chief components, Operation Reinhard); and why the Haganah (the Zionist paramilitary which formed the core of the IDF) was receiving arms from the SS. It was, all of it, part of the same murky world of colonial domination, racist mysticism (the blood and soil kind) and volkish nationalism.

And the techniques of repression that I have described are rooted in, specifically, the British colonial rule over Palestine, with which the Zionists periodically collaborated, and in the inheritance by the Zionist leadership of Britain's counterinsurgency war, which continues. Some of the key training for Zionist paramilitaries before 1948 was in supporting British colonial repression of the Palestinian Arab national liberation struggle in 1936-9, just as fascism was ravaging Europe and the Gestapo, Wehrmacht and SS were refining their own techniques of counterinsurgency. The collaboration in the repression had started as the revolt began in 1936 with the formation of the Jewish supernumerary police, which was 1,240-strong, but expanded over the next two years so that by 1939, it numbered 14,500 men. The training they received was usually passed on to thousands of others who were not included in the force. The Special Night Squads were a notoriously brutal manifestation of this collusion. Orde Wingate, a senior British army officer and Zionist, organised these. His role in formulating Israeli military doctrine is still commemorated. He is credited with having inculcated the principles of surprise, offensive daring, deep penetration and high mobility, and one of his most notable pupils was Moshe Dayan. He also taught them torture, on-the-spot executions, mass detention without trial, black flag operations. All of which was perfectly normal for the British. In general, British strategy was that any suspicious-looking "Johnny Arab" who looked suspicious could be shot out of hand, while beatings were given out routinely during raids. And the British were not shy of drawing on their extensive history of counterinsurgency in India. Charles Tegart, who had controlled special branch in the Calcutta police, was requisitioned to Palestine during the revolt, where he provided his expert assistance in the formation of Arab Investigation Centres (forebears of Facility 1391) where Palestinians would be tortured. However, the Special Night Squads acquired a justified reputation for brutality of a kind that would be familiar in today's death squads, including the Special Police Commandos for example. (What does is it say about the world's military and intelligence classes, that 'special' for them always means particularly gruesome murder and torture? For most of us, I suspect, 'special' is a wine-drenched sunset or a kind of fried rice). Aside from this valuable tutelage, at any rate, a further 50,000 Haganah troops were trained by the British army during World War II.

It is useful in that context to consider the Zionists at the height of their success, with the Arab armies easily defeated, and at least 700,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed through a system of terror, massacres, the destruction of villages, and dispossession based on a detailed plan implemented throughout 1948. It had been in these operations, beginning with Operation Nachson, that the various Zionist paramilitaries had first bonded together in a single effort. From that unity, that brothership of blood, was forged the IDF. By 1949, the plan had been more or less fulfilled. But the techniques which they had learned during the 1936 revolt and after would continue to be invaluable. As Ilan Pappe describes it in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), there was little let-up in the humiliation of, and attacks on, Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinian men were held in pens after systematic search-and-arrest operations, before being moved to concentrated prison camps. The category of 'suspicious Arab' was the basis for many of the arrests, as remains the case today: they closed off cities or towns, started searching the houses, and selected their victims. They took them off to be brutalised, subject to forced labour, or summarily executed. Former Irgun, Stern Gang and Haganah troops were employed as camp guards, and they were - despite occasional formal recriminations - allowed to get away with murder, including the Kfar Qassim massacre in which 49 Palestinians lost their lives. In the towns and villages were Palestinians remained, they were frequently subject to on-the-spot murder, as in Jaffa where Red Cross discovered a pile of bodies and were told by Israeli authorities that the people had been shot for not obeying the curfew between 5pm and 6am (during which time Israelis took the opportunity to loot Palestinian property, thus compounding the earlier waves of expropriation). They were forced into ghettos, as in Haifa were the 3-5,000 Palestinians who remained after 70,000 Palestinians were expelled, were driven into tiny living quarters in the city. ID cards were issued to help restrict and control their movement. They were also subject to rape. One case describes how soldiers had wanted to rape a girl, so they killed her father, wounded the mother, and allowed at least one soldier to assault the girl. Another girl, twelve years old, was kidnapped by soldiers in the Negev in mid-1949, had her head shaved, and was raped and tortured for several days by 22 soldiers in the platoon until one of the men killed her. In general, the Palestinians were subject to martial law, based on the British Mandate's emergency regulations imposed in 1945, which limited rights of expression, movement, and organisation, a status that ended only formally in 1966. And all the while, the theft of the land continued, as did the expropriation, vandalism and desecration, while the refugees were prevented from returning.

That was the Zionist movement and state in its moment of triumph, when the 'threat' of Palestinian self-government had been decisively defeated. They required no Hamas to goad them into it. It was the behaviour of self-confident promulgators of the Iron Wall - a doctrine fit for a Duce - schooled in technique by the most vicious bastards to have ever enslaved a quarter of the planet.