The book has some relatively brief instructive stuff about the history of anti-semitism, anti-semitism in Europe, the Israeli Disinvestment campaign and a moving article by Yigal Bronner about Palestinian suffering.
One of the longest essays is by Alexander Cockburn. The latter gentleman has been involved in plenty of combat over the years with Zionist intellectuals and their libels, from the Commentary crowd to the New Republic. He discusses an article about him in TNR by an individual named Frank Foer. Comrade Foer discussed Cockburn's recent discussion of various stories circulating around, including that of the Israel Spy Ring and the harassment of an Arab scientist by a Jewish scientist, Dr. Philip Zack. The latter has been suspected in the post 9-11 anthrax scare which he, the scientist, may have perpetrated in order to blame it on Arabs. Foer allowed that Cockburn didn't exactly endorse these stories but since there wasn't even any credibility to them, it proves Cockburn is an anti-Semite because he spread them. Foer claimed to have done a Lexus Nexus search about the allegations against Dr. Zack and found nothing. Cockburn notes that such a search actually reveals articles on the subject from the Hartford Courant, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Salon.com. Anthrax samples and other biological agents had gone missing, about the same time Zack was videotaped sneaking into the lab after hours. He and another scientist voluntarily left Fort Detrick after they constructed and sent a poem to the Arab Scientist, filled with racist stuff and a drawing of a camel with various sexual appendages on it. On the Israeli Spy ring, Foer implied that only the right wing libertarian site Antiwar.com was spreading it, but in fact that story was covered in a four part series by Carl Cameron on FoxNews, also covered by Le Monde, and Jane's Defense Weekly. Cockburn makes an interesting point about the reaction to the 1989 revelations of Billy Graham's conversations with Richard Nixon. In one of them, the two men agree that Jews are bringing down the nation because they are producers of immoral tv shows and movies and incline towards the left. This sparked great outrage but in the same revelations Graham was quoted as arguing for the bombing of all the dikes in North Vietnam, which would completely obliterate the North Vietnamese economy and kill about a million. This advocacy of war crimes gained no outrage. Arthur Seys Inquart was hanged at Nuremburg for implementing such policies in Holland. Of course, Cockburn notes, the U.S. did such a thing during the Korean war, bombing dikes in order to flood rice fields in order to induce starvation.
Jeffery St. Clair writes about the U.S.S. Liberty attack by Israel, of June 8th 1967.. 34 U.S. sailors on that vessel were killed in the attack, and 170 plus wounded, many seriously. That attack was very notable in that Robert McNamara and his lieutenants blocked any plane from the U.S. sixth fleet from coming to defend the ship and it took about twelve or sixteen hours for any U.S. aid to come to the ship, some hours after a Soviet ship offered the crew assistance. James Ennes, one of the survivors in his 1980 memoir, pointed out the fact that the Israelis had jammed the ship's communication was classified as top secret by the initial Navy investigators-obviously the Israelis knew they were attacking an American vessel for one cannot jam the communications of someone of whose identity you are unaware. The initial Pentagon claim that it was all just an unfortunate accident but this caused some bureaucratic murming. The judge Advocate General of the navy and the navy's legal officer both reached the conclusion that Israel had purposely attacked the ship. The last two constructed a report about their conclusions but it was classified as were CIA, NSA, and other agency's reports that the attack had been ordered by Moshe Dayan. The co-leader of the Navy report that claimed it was all just an accident, admitted to the Navy Times in 2002, that he knew that the attack on the Liberty was intentional but that he had covered it up on orders from superiors. Ennes claims that the pilot of the first Israeli plane, Evan Toni, sent to attack the Liberty told him that he had recognized that the Liberty was an American vessel and had informed his superiors of this by radio. They had ordered him to go forward with the attack but he turned around and flew back to base where he was arrested for disobeying orders. Dayan had wanted to kill everyone on the ship and blame it on the Egyptians. Israel also probably didn't want the Liberty, an intelligence ship to discover its plans to break its cease fire and occupy Syria's Golan Heights. Also, in Al Arish on the Sinai Peninsula, the largest tower in which the Liberty was using to coordinate itself, Israel was in the process of executing about 1000 Egyptian and Palestinian POW's. The U.S. for its part already had a close alliance with Israel, and didn't want to offend them. Many powerful people wanted to remove the ban on arm sales to Israel and the Liberty affair was a nuisance. Since then the Pentagon has relentlessly persecuted the survivors of the attack and any effort to remember the victims has been smeared as anti-Semite.
Jeffery Blankfort has a rather clumsy essay where he tries to refute Noam Chomsky's thesis that the power of the Zionist lobby is greatly exaggerated. He implies that the U.S. would not support the oppression of the Palestinians if the Israeli lobby wasn't so vicious towards our politicians. He conveniently misses some of Chomsky's main evidence....He misses how Chomsky shows that both Labor and Likud support the subjugation of Palestinians while Israel controls the best part of the occupied territories. The only difference between them is tactics: Labor has the rational Allon Plan, where Jewish settlements take all the best land and maybe Palestinian population centers can elect their garbagemen; Likud despite its racist rhetoric thinks the same thing but has crazy schemes to build settlements in the most god forsaken places in the territories. The George H.W. Bush-Yitzhak Shamir combat of 1991 was simply about putting the boorish too blatant racist Shamir in his place. It was only about minor issues.. The labor party won the 1992 elections and put into effect the Allon Plan style Oslo accords-not dissimilar to the 1989 Shamir-Peres Plan that Bush supported.
