Anti-Zionists deny Israel's right to exist.

Byline: PAUL BESSEMER For The Register-Guard

IN A LENGTHY PIECE in The Register-Guard's Sept. 22 Commentary section, M. Reza Behnam claims that "many features of the (Palestinian-Israeli) conflict have never been well understood in the Western world."

The contents of his article make a compelling case for this claim, for what follows (and precedes) his statement is a slew of factual errors, oversights and selective history that add little light to the issue.

Behnam claims that the 1917 Balfour Declaration was the beginning of "the construct of the modern state of Israel," while not specifying how. Two paragraphs on, he claims that it was at the First Zionist Congress in 1897 that the organization's first president, Theodor Herzl, "firmly put into motion his idea of forming a state for Jews."

Well, which one is it? Is Behnam aware that the city of Tel Aviv was founded in 1909?

Apart from the fact that early (and not entirely successful) Zionist efforts to immigrate and establish agricultural settlements had already been under way for some 15 years by the time of the Zionist Congress, Behnam fails to mention that until World War I the main European patron of the movement was not Britain, but Germany, and that before his untimely demise, most of Herzl's efforts to negotiate were with Berlin's ally, the Ottoman Empire.

After the failure of such efforts, Herzl was desperate to find an alternative. While he resignedly consented to the scheme of Jewish settlements in Uganda, it provoked bitter debate at a subsequent congress, where it was adopted by a slim margin - and even then, only as a temporary stop (it was described at the congress with the German term "Nachtasyl," or "overnight refuge").

Incidentally, while both Turkish Sultan Abdulhamid II and his Young Turk successors refused to grant Herzl the right to settle Palestine, both encouraged Jewish immigration to upper Mesopotamia, where it was hoped that industrious European Jews would further economic development, help strengthen political control over this impoverished area, and act as a foil to the restive Arab, Armenian and Kurdish populations there. Self-colonization: Imagine that!

Behnam also states that the "seeds of the conflict were thus sown when World War I drew to a close," and that "tensions rose and fell in Palestine in almost direct proportion to the ebb and flow of Jewish immigration."

That's one way to put it - but it's the reverse of the truth. Arab opposition to Zionism and Jewish immigration manifested itself already in the first decade of the 20th century. Since, as Behnam himself pointed out, the Jewish population in Palestine in the first decades of the 20th century was small, both in absolute numbers and in ratio to the total population, and since the Zionist movement purchased the land upon which its members settled, the issue for the Arabs cannot have been that of land theft. Rather, it was general opposition to Jewish immigration and opposition to the prospect of a future Jewish political entity.

In short: No to Zionism, no to more Jews. The riots, massacres and uprisings of 1920, 1929 and 1936-39 were generally unprovoked (unless you consider the mere presence of Jews a provocation), and were directed as much against general British policy of allowing Jews in as against the Jews themselves. The fact that the British responded each time by limiting Jewish immigration was not lost on the Arab leaders.

More accurate, then, would be the inverse of Behnam's claim: Jewish immigration rose and fell in almost direct proportion to the ebb and flow of tensions.

Behnam claims that the state of Israel owns and controls "at least 93 percent of the total real estate in Israel," which he subsequently states as having all been taken from Palestinians. While the new Jewish state certainly expropriated (or "assumed ownership of," if you will) large tracts of land and property belonging to the refugees, in terms of actual pre-1948 registered land ownership, this figure is exaggerated.

But in Behnam's world view, which he has repeatedly made clear in his anti-Israel letters to The Register-Guard, and according to which the entire land of Palestine/Israel belongs to the Palestinians and Israel has no right to exist, this no doubt makes perfect sense. Furthermore, while Israeli land laws certainly do discriminate in favor of the country's Jewish population - as does Israeli government policy - his claim that this Merkarkaieh Israel, or state land, is for exclusively Jewish use is belied by the reality on the ground.

Behnam then claims that "before the 1947 United Nations vote, the Balfour Declaration, and the World Zionist Organization's plans to create an exclusive Jewish state, Palestine was a land of basic religious tolerance and tranquility." It seems that since mentioning them at the beginning of his piece, he seems to have already forgotten that the three events mentioned occurred over a span of half a century. Or maybe he hasn't. After all, the important thing for him is not a specific event, but Zionism as a whole, and the simplistic (and wrong) supposition that the absence of Zionism equals the absence of ethnic or religious strife.

Indeed, in the next paragraph he states that "birthing a nation upon another existing nation was fraught with inevitable strife ... because of the tiny geography" of Palestine. Since he proposes, as part of his "transparent and imaginative solution" to the Palestinian-Israeli strife, that, in addition to the establishment of a Palestinian state, all Palestinians (no doubt meaning the refugees from 1948 and their descendants) be allowed to "return to their place of origin," one wonders what he would do with the Jewish population of Israel-Palestine, whose "tiny geography" makes strife "inevitable."

"Transparent and imaginative solution" indeed: It's not hard to see through it, and to understand what sort of fate he has imagined for them.

Indeed, while Behnam attempts to use measured and enlightened prose, speaks of an "enduring peace effort" and proposes a "solution" to the conflict and expresses concern for having "the past finally rectified" and for dispelling "fiction and mythology" (what can you expect from a political scientist?), his intention is clear. He complains throughout the piece about how the Jewish state received more than its rightful share of Palestine, never mentioning that each time Israel conquered lands was in response to hostilities begun by the Arabs, who refused to countenance Israel's existence and attempted to destroy it.

He claims that "before the recent military reoccupation, the peace process has cemented Israel's control" (of the West Bank and Gaza, presumably). The question of why they felt the need to reoccupy these territories if they had already cemented their control is apparently lost on him. Furthermore, he totally ignores land-for-peace offers (including to the Palestinians) made by Israel over the last three decades (and taken up by Egypt and Jordan) and claims that, in the last century, only Japan's occupation of Korea lasted longer than that of the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza. (I can't think of a more inappropriate comparison: Did the Koreans attempt to invade Japan and deny its right to exist?)

Yet, after this litany of complaints against Zionist intransigence and unwillingness to compromise, he prefaces his peace proposal with the following demand: "U.S. policy-makers cannot, now or ever, justify the creation of a state based on racism and exclusion into a region that has resisted it since its inception. Jewish persecution in Europe should not have brought persecution upon the Arabs of Palestine." In short, "Israel, roll over and die. Jews, leave!"

Zionism has had its racist, megalomaniacal and belligerent aspects, just like most nationalisms and ideological movements (Arab nationalism and Islamic radicalism not least among them), and any realistic solution will have to be accompanied by a general letting go of such notions. This, hopefully, will allow for the necessary steps to a full peace: territorial compromise, compensation for those dispossessed (Jewish as well as Palestinian refugees) and a recognition of the other side's right to exist and govern itself.

The Register-Guard headlined the Behnam piece "Israel must move beyond its Zionist origins," but since he has made it so painfully clear that he opposes any sort of Jewish political sovereignty in the Middle East, what he is really asking for is for Israel to move beyond its existence. That's not a just and amenable peace, at least not according to the standards of the international community and the United Nations. Actually, it's closer to conquest and annexation - precisely what he spilled so much ink accusing the Israelis of.

No, Israel doesn't need to move beyond its Zionist origins, but Behnam needs to move beyond his bad intentions. Neither Israel nor the Palestinian Authority (or what's left of it) are currently governed by elected leaders who can be said to have crossed the threshold (and a plague upon both of their houses!). But there are many others on both sides who have.

I hope to see Behnam there, someday, but I'm afraid he'll have to leave much of his baggage at the door.