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AN IMPORTANT HISTORY OF JEWISH DISSENT OVER ISRAEL’S TREATMENT OF PALESTINIANS

Allan C. Brownfeld, Editor
Issues
Spring - Summer 2024

“Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978”  
 
By Geoffrey Levin  
Yale University Press  
320 pages - $38  
 
At the present time, Israel’s treatment of Palestinians is very much in the news,  
not only what is taking place in Gaza, but developments in the occupied West Bank  
and within Israel itself. Many are unaware of the fact that American Jews have a  
long history of debating issues relating to the rights of Palestinians.  
Significant Jewish voices have been harshly critical of Israel’s approach to  
Palestine’s indigenous population from the very establishment of the state in  
1948.  
 
In “Our Palestine Question,” Geoffrey Levin, assistant professor of Middle  
Eastern and Jewish studies at Emory University, recovers the voices of those Jews  
who first called for an honest reckoning of the plight of Israel’s Palestinian  
population.  
 
In the Introduction, Levin cites the visit in 1953 of Rabbi Morris Lazaron, an  
early leader of the American Council for Judaism, to the Shatila refugee camp.  
There, he witnessed “firsthand the suffering of Palestinian families who had lost  
their homes during the war that accompanied Israel’s creation in 1948. The  
‘illimitable misery’ of the refugees, to use Lazaron’s words, had a decisive  
impact on the former head rabbi of the prestigious Baltimore Hebrew Congregation.  
After his trip, Rabbi Lazaron began calling on the Israeli government to  
recognize the right of Palestine’s Arab refugees to return to their prewar homes  
and urged the Jewish state to admit 100,000 of them into the country  
immediately.”  
 
American Jews Deeply Unsettled by Israeli Policies  
 
Levin points out that, “Ever since an estimated 750,000 Palestinians lost their  
homes amidst Israel’s birth in 1948, there have been American Jews deeply  
unsettled by Israeli policies toward both the Palestinian refugees and Arabs  
living under Israeli rule. These critics of old did not consist only of a few  
stray rabbis like Morris Lazaron but in fact extended well into the American  
Jewish establishment—-including leaders and staff members of the American Jewish  
Committee (AJC). The collective amnesia with regard to this history has been  
complete…”  
 
Zionism, as implemented in Israel, Levin points out, “contradicted some of the  
core values that American Jews had championed in their push for an inclusive  
America…Israel prioritized Jewish interests over the needs of non-Jews born in  
the lands it controlled. This was clear in its immigration policy which welcomed  
all Jews while preventing Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes…  
Until 1966, Israel’s Arab minority, despite receiving Israeli citizenship in  
1952, faced many onerous military government restrictions that Jewish Israelis  
barely knew about.”  
 
Slowly, Levin notes, American Jewish organizations began to yield their autonomy  
to the Israeli state. What this required, he argues, was that “these  
organizations turn away from a distinctive American Jewish identity as a  
historically, dispossessed minority that has thrived in a liberal secular state  
and instead adopt the values of Israel, a country premised on meeting the needs  
of an ethno-national majority…Is the core of Jewish identity remembering that ‘we  
were once strangers in the land of Egypt’? Or is it all about maintaining a  
restored Kingdom of David.”  
 
Refugees Are Denied the Right to Return  
 
After 1948, there was a Jewish state that ruled over a non-Jewish minority group  
and denied refugees the right to return to their homes on the basis of religion  
and ethnicity. This, Levin writes, “created a sense of cognitive dissonance for  
these American Jewish organizations.” In the case of the then non-Zionist AJC,  
Levin points out, its concern “stemmed in part from its leadership’s belief that  
Jews were solely a religious group…But it also came amidst fears that Zionism  
would potentially raise doubts about American Jews’ loyalty to the United States…  
this concern prompted AJC president Jacob Blaustein to compel Israeli prime  
minister Ben-Gurion to ‘clarify’ that Israel made no claims on the political  
loyalties of non-Israeli Jews in an agreement known as the 1950 Blaustein-Ben-  
Gurion ‘exchange of views.’”  
 
Today, many are unaware that Jewish Americans have a long history of debating  
issues related to the rights of Palestinians. In this book, Levin recovers the  
voices of those Jews who first called for an honest reckoning of the plight of  
the indigenous population of Palestine. He highlights the role played by the  
American Council for Judaism, which was established in 1942 by a group of Reform  
rabbis unsettled by their denomination’s endorsement of Zionist aims. The  
Council envisioned Palestine’s future as a nonsectarian democracy for all its  
citizens. It encouraged U.S. leaders to coordinate with the U.N. to settle  
displaced Holocaust survivors in countries throughout the world.  
 
Levin tells the story of a number of Jewish Americans who embraced Palestinian  
rights, including academic Don Peretz, journalist William Zukerman, Rabbi Elmer  
Berger, philanthropists James Marshall, and Lessing J. Rosenwald.  
 
Dissertation on Palestinian Refugees  
 
In the case of Peretz, he arrived as a 26-year-old in Israel, a young U.S. Army  
veteran on his way to deliver aid to recently displaced Palestinians as part of a  
mission for the Quaker-affiliated American Friends Service Committee. When he  
returned to New York, he enrolled in Columbia University and began work on his  
doctoral dissertation on the Palestinian refugee question. He was soon hired by  
the AJC, then proclaiming itself a “non-Zionist” group, and became the  
organization’s first Middle East consultant. He was told to put together an Arab  
refugee relief initiative with humanitarian aims. Levin points to the fact that,  
the government of Israel soon became aware of this project and that, “Israeli  
diplomats would initiate a quiet campaign to undermine the AJC refugee relief  
initiative and its creator, with the aim of ejecting Peretz from the  
organization.”  
 
Peretz detailed Israel’s inflexible position and its blaming of the refugee  
problem on Arab leaders ordering evacuations of Palestinian towns and villages in  
1948, for which no evidence was ever provided, and Israel’s own “new historians”  
later showed was without any foundation. As a result of constant Israeli  
pressure, the AJC ultimately ended its relationship with Peretz and joined other  
Jewish organizations in embracing Zionism.  
 
Levin also tells the story of former Yiddish journalist William Zukerman, who  
started an English-language newsletter supported by the American Council for  
Judaism and to which Peretz would become a regular contributor. Zukerman’s  
concern about Zionism went back many years. In April 1934, he wrote in the  
Nation that, “Jewish fascism was poised to take over the Zionist movement.” In  
the Jewish Newsletter in September 1950, he wrote: “The question of the Arab  
Refugees is a moral issue which rises above diplomacy…The land now called Israel  
belongs to the Arab Refugees no less than any Israeli. They have lived on that  
soil and worked on it…for twelve hundred years…The fact that they fled in panic  
(during the 1948 war) is no excuse for depriving them of their homes.”  
 
Zukerman’s Jewish Newsletter  
 
Zukerman’s Newsletter, writes Levin, “stood as the only Jewish newspaper in the  
United States that consistently and sympathetically covered the Palestinian  
refugee problem throughout the 1950s. Israeli archival sources show that future  
ambassador Avraham Harman and other Israeli diplomats pushed for a concerted  
campaign to isolate Zukerman who they claimed was confusing Zionists through his  
nuanced journalism. Their effort succeeded in minimizing Zukerman’s profile in  
the American Jewish press, depriving mainstream Jewish readers of any credible  
voice critiquing Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.”  
 
Israel viewed Peretz and Zukerman as critics to be eliminated, and American  
Zionists fell into line. “Israeli diplomats,” notes Levin, “felt compelled to  
act against American Jewish dissenters…His (Zukerman’s) case proves that the  
diplomatic discussions about Peretz were not isolated incidents but rather part  
of a pattern that actually preceded the Peretz affair and involved other high  
ranking Israeli diplomats. Not only did Zukerman’s relative moderation in the  
Newsletter’s early years fail to inoculate him against Israeli criticism, but the  
fact that parts of the mainstream Jewish community accepted him made Israeli  
officials view Zukerman as particularly ‘dangerous’ and inspired them to act  
against him.”  
 
A significant portion of this book deals with the role played by the American  
Council for Judaism. Levin writes, “Ideologically, the Council emerged from a  
long history of Reform Jewish rejection of Jewish nationalism…In 1885, leading  
Reform rabbis meeting in Pittsburgh released a statement that, among other  
things, distanced themselves from the protocol-Zionist movement emerging in  
Europe…The document declared, ‘We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a  
religious community.’…These Reform Jews…claimed to feel fully American and  
conceptualized Judaism as a religion, not a nationality or race.”  
 
Formation of American Council for Judaism  
 
When the Central Conference of American Rabbis moved toward embracing Zionism in  
1942, a group of rabbis met in Atlantic City, New Jersey to formulate a response.  
“They soon decided to form a formal organization,” writes Levin, “which they  
called the American Council for Judaism. the name reflected the rabbis’ emphasis  
on ‘American’ as their only national identity and as ‘Judaism’ as solely a  
religious identity. The rabbis then selected one of their youngest and most  
enthusiastic members, thirty-four-year-old Elmer Berger of Temple Beth-El of  
Flint, Michigan to serve as the Council’s executive director.”  
 
Berger’s early works, Levin shows, expanded on Classical Reform arguments. His  
1945 book, “The Jewish Dilemma,” exemplified the Council’s ideology. Divided  
into three parts, the book put forth a narrative of Jewish history that  
“idealized ‘prophetic Judaism’ and Jewish integration. Berger argued that Jews  
did not comprise a race or a people at all, but merely differed from others in  
terms of their religious creed…In a second book published in 1951, ‘A Partisan  
History of Judaism,’ Berger expanded on this critique, bemoaning ‘the tragic  
acceptance of Hitler’s racist twaddle’ in America as playing into the hands of  
Zionists. Instead of responding to Nazism by further embracing democratic  
ideals, Berger accused Zionists of accepting ‘Hitler’s decree of separatism and  
trying to make of it a virtue and to use it as political capital to win a  
‘Jewish’ state. In short, this pillar of Council ideology portrayed Zionism as a  
betrayal of Jewish history and religion, provincializing Judaism’s universal  
message.”  
 
In 1949, Council president Lessing J. Rosenwald sent an open letter to American  
religious groups calling for Arab refugee “repatriation” and “resettlement,”  
urging interfaith cooperation in a program to cope with the ‘desperate flight of  
some 750,000 refugees who have been rendered homeless by the recent hostilities  
in Palestine.’” He issued this call along with a letter to Secretary of State  
Dean Acheson urging greater aid for Arab refugees.  
 
American Friends of the Middle East  
 
Rabbi Berger was active in Americans Friends of the Middle East (AFME), which led  
to his relationship with Fayez Sayegh, who headed the Arab Information Office in  
New York. Berger also became close to Dorothy Thompson, the prominent anti-Nazi  
journalist who later became an advocate for Palestinian rights and was a leading  
member of AFME, which was partially financed by the C.I.A. to counterbalance the  
weight of the pro-Israel lobby.  
 
The first term of President Eisenhower, Levin points out, “marked the pinnacle of  
Council influence in Washington, aided by the administration’s hopes of forging a  
partnership with Egypt, which it presumed required pressuring Israel to make  
concessions. In April 1953, Council president Lessing Rosenwald met with an  
‘extremely attentive’ President Eisenhower who gave ‘the impression that what he  
heard was in general agreement with his views.’ The meeting may have contributed  
to the sentiments behind Eisenhower’s October 1953 observation that ‘the  
political pressure from the Zionists in the Arab-Israeli controversy is a  
minority pressure. My Jewish friends tell me that except for the Bronx and  
Brooklyn the great majority of the nation’s Jewish population is anti-Zionist.’  
Secretary of State Dulles, on his first tour of the Middle East, reportedly took  
with him Council material that Rosenwald had given Eisenhower. Upon his return,  
Dulles’s speech calling for a more evenhanded U.S. policy toward the region  
‘contained passages that bore a striking resemblance to Council proclamations.’”  
(Quotes from “America’s Great Game” by Hugh Wilford)  
 
During the Eisenhower administration, Levin writes, “A close relationship  
developed between Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian and  
African Affairs Henry Byroade and Berger. Berger had a hand in two of Byroade’s  
speeches in 1954. Byroade called on Arabs to accept Israel’s existence and on  
Israel to “drop your conqueror attitude and see your future as a Middle East  
state and not as a headquarters of worldwide groupings of people of a particular  
religious faith who must have special rights within and obligations to the  
Israeli state.’ This statement echoed the typical Council rhetoric.”  
 
Breira Opposes an Israeli Occupation  
 
Also discussed is the group Breira, which attracted left-wing Jews including Noam  
Chomsky and Israeli Knesset member Uri Avnery. Breira, Levin points out, was the  
“first national American Jewish organization to openly oppose Israel’s occupation  
of the West Bank and Gaza…Breira spoke openly about the needs of the Palestinians  
while attempting to maintain legitimacy in the broader Jewish community by  
arguing that Palestinian statehood served Israeli interests. With a very active  
fifteen hundred members, including over a hundred rabbis, and chapters in cities  
throughout the country, the group had some success. But as Breira’s image  
increasingly became identified with the Palestinian question, it faced growing  
pushback that would ultimately overwhelm it.”  
 
Founded in 1973, Breira—-the Hebrew word Breira literally means “choice” or  
“alternative” —-quickly attracted attention. Levin notes that the group won the  
support “of many rabbis and other Jewish communal professionals, including former  
American Jewish Congress Rabbi Joachim Prinz, a co-organizer of Martin Luther  
King’s 1963 March on Washington, who agreed to join the group’s board…Rabbi  
Balfour Brickner of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and Rabbi Arnold  
Wolf, a Yale University chaplain known for his civil rights advocacy, who became  
chair of the organization.”  
 
In December 1973, Breira spoke publicly of the need for Israel to make  
territorial concessions and “recognize the legitimacy of the national aspirations  
of the Palestinians.” The group soon moved toward openly supporting a group of  
Israeli dovish voices that increasingly supported negotiations with the PLO. In  
late 1974, Arnold Wolf—-writing as a member of Breira’s advisory committee, as he  
had not yet been named the group’s chair—-published a short article in Sh’ma  
titled “Toward Peace with the PLO” outlining the case for negotiations and what a  
two-state solution would look like. He called on American Jews to promote  
constructive dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians. Should another war  
come, Wolf argued, “Israel must have proven …that no stone was left unturned in  
its search for peace. The last, the heaviest, the most unyielding stone is the  
PLO. American Jews could, if we have the strength, help to raise it while there  
is still time.”  
 
Breira Faces Resistance  
 
Levin provides this assessment of the difficulty Breira faced in opening the  
Jewish community to constructive dialogue: “The initial Breira position of  
‘introducing’ the American Jewish community to Israeli dovish views may sound  
modest, but at the time, even this appeared challenging. Earlier in the  
seventies, future Breira members faced considerable resistance from mainstream  
Jewish groups when organizing tours for Israelis. For example, in 1970, when  
left-wing Knesset member Uri Avnery came to the United States to tour Jewish  
institutions, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) sent fliers critical of Avnery to  
those who had agreed to host him, prompting almost all to cancel. Later, that  
year, Rabbis Michael Robinson, and Everett Gendler failed to persuade the Jewish  
Peace Fellowship to sponsor a national speaking tour for Israeli pacifist Uri  
Davis. Similarly, when Israeli Arab Fawzi El-Asmar was on his way to North  
America for a speaking tour, a Commentary article by Alan Dershowitz justifying  
Israel’s ‘preventive detention’ of El-Asmar was circulated widely among Jewish  
groups leading to many cancellations.”  
 
Though Breira came to an end, in part because of the influence of the Israeli  
government to isolate it from the organized American Jewish community, similar  
organizations slowly began to come into being. Levin notes that, “Breira, the  
first national American Jewish organization to openly oppose Israel’s occupation  
of the West Bank and Gaza, was far from the last of its kind. Other groups with  
similar platforms that emerged after Breira included New Jewish Agenda…  
established in 1980, Americans for Peace Now, established in 1981; and J Street,  
created in 2007…Breira remains an American story…it is also part of the Israeli  
and Palestinian histories, not only because it aimed to influence those two  
peoples, but also because Israelis and Palestinians influenced it…”  
 
In his concluding chapter, Levin recalls the day, October 19, 2001, when seventy-  
eight-year-old Don Peretz received the Middle East Institute award in a televised  
event: “As the mainstream American Jewish community had never celebrated Peretz,  
it seems appropriate that the honor took place at a meeting of the policy-focused  
think tank that had published Peretz’s earliest research on Israel/Palestine.  
After being introduced by Assistant Secretary of State William Burns (now  
Director of the C.I.A.), Peretz thanked the distinguished audience…He quoted a  
speech that he had heard more than half a century earlier…Judah Magnes’s 1947  
welcome address to Hebrew University students, which the university president had  
delivered only weeks before the outbreak of a war that reshaped the trajectories  
of Jewish and Palestinian histories.”  
 
Force And Violence Is Idolatrous  
 
Quoting Magnes, Peretz stated: “What is the duty of the man, more especially of  
the teacher, who thinks the method of force and violence to be a savage and  
idolatrous belief? Is there room for that man in our society? Is it his right,  
or even perhaps his duty, to express an opinion which may differ from the  
majority decision of official institutions? Is one to sanctify these majority  
decisions above every other sacred thing? More than that, is there not laid upon  
the man the sacred task, despite majority decisions, to warn the people, to  
teach, to point to its error—-nay, perhaps even its iniquity—-when its words lead  
to the destruction that may overtake the people of the land?” The speech  
concludes: “Is there no place in our society for those who dissent from the  
decisions of the majority and who, conscious of their collective responsibility,  
obey the command of conscience by lifting their voice, not for murder and  
destruction, heaven forbid, but for peace and understanding among the peoples?”  
 
Peretz did not merely mention Magnes but, Levin notes, “He had selected a  
quotation from him about the crisis of dissenters who felt that their society had  
chosen the wrong path. Is there room, they asked, ‘for those who dissent from  
the decisions of the majority and…obey the command of conscience by lifting their  
voice…for peace?’ Peretz made his speech an ode to Magnes, but he could just as  
well be speaking of his own experience.”  
 
Don Peretz  
 
This book ends, writes Levin, as it began, “recalling the story of Don Peretz.  
From the 1940s through the 1970s, Peretz had links to nearly every American  
Jewish effort supportive of Palestinians. In summer 1948, Peretz became involved  
with a transnational network of dovish figures including Hannah Arendt, Judah  
Magnes, Hans Kohn and James Marshall, a group that after Magnes’s passing morphed  
into the Judah L. Magnes Foundation, which funded scholarships for Arab  
university students in Israel.”  
 
Later, Peretz worked for the AJC on its Arab refugee initiative and wrote on  
Palestinian affairs for William Zukerman’s Jewish Newsletter. After 1967, he  
served on the steering committee of New Alternatives for the Middle East along  
with Noam Chomsky and then joined Breira’s executive committee. Peretz  
befriended Rabbi Elmer Berger and Norton Mezvinsky, who served as executive  
director of the American Council for Judaism. Peretz wrote the forward for Elmer  
Berger’s final book.  
 
Levin believes that members of contemporary pro-peace Jewish groups would feel  
that they have much more in common with Don Peretz than with the average Jewish  
American of Peretz’s generation who, in most cases, donated to Israel but never  
spent much time there. Today, Levin declares, “There are many young American  
Jewish ‘Don Peretzes,’ and many of them are at work in groups that might be  
considered Breira’s successors.”  
 
Dismissing Today’s Critics  
 
In Levin’s view, “Rather than being acknowledged as proud, well-meaning Jews  
drawn to examine Israel out of interest in their own Jewish identity, this  
generation’s Breiraniks are dismissed not as ‘Don Peretzes’ but as ‘Elmer  
Bergers.’ Berger…stood as the most prominent Jewish figure of the era to  
outspokenly support Palestinian rights without first having sympathized with  
Zionism or feeling some connection to the land.”  
 
From Elmer Berger onward, Jews supportive of Palestinian rights have been  
criticized as being disconnected from Jewish identity. In 2018, Naftali Bennett,  
then Israel’s Diaspora affairs minister and later its prime minister declared  
that “Israel and the Diaspora are in the throes of an unprecedented crisis.  
We’re used to being told that it’s because of prayer rules at the Western Wall,  
the Palestinian issue and other ideological controversies. It’s not correct.  
There’s a terrible problem of assimilation and growing indifference of Jews  
overseas both to their Jewishness and to Israel. That’s the entire story.”  
 
Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk sharply disagreed, insisting that  
it was Bennett’s “extreme policies” that alienated American Jews from Israel.  
Levin points out that, “Israeli officials have…been wary of American Jewish  
support for the Palestinians. Judging by Israeli archival files available from  
the 1950s and 1960s, however, earlier generations of Israeli officials had much  
greater tact and nuance in addressing the issue, courting anti-Zionist Jews  
rather than banning them from the country. During Israel’s precarious early  
years, prior to the christening of the ‘special relationship’ and long before the  
rise of a powerful, right-wing brand of Christian Zionism, the stakes…in managing  
Diaspora relations often seemed much higher; America’s Jewish community was then  
even more central to Israel’s attempts to marshal support in Washington…For all  
of Zionism’s rhetoric about global Jewish peoplehood, when it comes to political  
decision-making…the Jewish state has operated in a remarkably conventional  
manner. The Jewishness of non-citizens gives them no real political power…Israel  
had no respect for…diasporic dissent.”  
 
Palestinian Question: Israel’s Major Dilemma  
 
Gerald Levin concludes this way: “Whether Israelis wish to admit it or not, the  
Palestinian question has always been their country’s most central, if not  
definitional, dilemma. At the same time, Israel’s role in Jewish communities  
elsewhere in the world has only continued to expand, a development that has meant  
that as the Palestinian question marches forward unaddressed, the circle of  
American Jews critiquing Israeli policies has grown larger and larger. Just as  
previous generations of Jews found a renewed sense of communal purpose in their  
support for Israel, some American Jews today see their support for Palestinian  
rights as a meaningful extension of their Jewish identity. Rather than being a  
countercurrent in American Jewish politics, Palestinian rights advocacy has  
become a realm of Jewish politics in and of itself. And despite enduring uproars  
over it, it will define the transitional relationship between Jews even more as  
time goes on."  
 
Geoffrey Levin wrote this important book before Hamas’s October 7 terrorist  
attack and Israel’s massive response which has, at this time, already killed tens  
of thousands of Palestinians, largely civilians, among them thousands of women  
and children. This, in turn, has led to charges that Israel is violating  
international law and may be guilty of “genocide.” American campuses have  
erupted in demonstrations on behalf of Palestinian rights, with large numbers of  
Jewish students participating. Respected organizations such as Human Rights  
Watch and Amnesty International have characterized Israel’s treatment of  
Palestinians as “apartheid.” In Israel, the human rights group B’Tselem has also  
used the term “apartheid” to characterize the manner in which Palestinians have  
denied basic legal rights—-and the right to select the government under which  
they will live—- in the West Bank, which has been illegally occupied for more  
than fifty years.  
 
Geoffrey Levin’s book focuses precisely on the question now confronting the  
world, that of Palestinian rights. Still, many Americans remain unaware of the  
fact that American Jews began debating about Palestinian rights even before  
Israel’s founding in 1948. This book recovers the voices of Jewish Americans,  
who, in the early decades of Israel’s existence, called for an honest reckoning  
with moral and legal rights of Palestinians. These often-forgotten voices felt  
drawn to support Palestinian rights by their understanding of Jewish history,  
identity, and ethics. Israeli diplomats viewed any American Jewish interest in  
Palestinian affairs with deep suspicion and repeatedly interfered in American  
Jewish life to silence any criticism. They succeeded in keeping Palestinian  
rights off the American Jewish agenda. That success has finally come to an end.  
 
Israel Forbade Palestinian Refugees from Returning  
 
The history of what happened to the Palestinian people after the creation of  
Israel is little known in America, by either Jews or others. After a series of  
acts of Zionist terrorism, more than 800,000 Palestinians left their homes. In  
violation of international law and numerous U.N. Resolutions, the Israeli  
government forbade the refugees to return to their homes and confiscated their  
properties. Several thousand Palestinians who remained in the new country saw  
their homes and villages destroyed or confiscated without compensation. In the  
early 1950s, the Knesset adopted legislation authorizing the expropriation of  
land belonging to Palestinians. These properties were transferred to the control  
of the Jewish National Fund.  
 
The Israeli government explained the exodus of Palestinians to the calls by Arab  
leaders for the population to leave. This is the version of history promoted by  
American Jewish organizations and taught in Jewish day schools. Israel’s “new  
historians,” among them Benny Morris, call this Israeli propaganda, based on no  
evidence whatever. Others have described this as ethnic cleansing. In fact,  
most of the inhabitants of the abandoned towns and villages fled just before the  
assault of Zionist forces or were expelled from their land.  
 
Geoffrey Levin has performed a notable service in bringing to life for a new  
generation of Americans of all faiths the courageous Jewish voices who defended  
the rights of Palestinians and stood against the Jewish establishment, which  
persisted in adopting an “Israel, right or wrong” position. These voices appear  
increasingly prophetic as developments in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza unfold.*  



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