By Arjan el-Fassed (Electronic Intifada 02/2001)

• "Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East" rather than a democracy for Jews, a colonialist and a religiously exclusive state. Even Jews (of denominations other than Orthodox and/or of Sephardi origin) are discriminated against in Israel.

• "Israel made the desert bloom", but no mention of the sources of water such as the headwaters of the Jordan river, Sea of Galilee and the lakes above it that were being used to irrigate Arab lands, which now, as a result of water shortage, were turning into desert. See page 131 of Cockburn Dangerous Liaison, 1991. (Of course not to mention the erasing of 418 Palestinian villages and uprooting of 726,000 and enslaving the rest, as part of blooming the desert.) Also noted is Israel's systematic uprooting of tens of thousands of Palestinian trees, 50,000 since the beginning of the Oslo "Peace Process" alone (See article by Gideon Levy 'A tree grows in Palestine' and 'Olive trees becoming casualties in Mideast' by Michael Browning and Larry Kaplow, (American-Statesman 11/28/2000), and 'Do you remember the tree that you planted?' by Gideon Levy (Ha'aretz 02/11/2001)

Chapter 1 of The Palestinian Catastrophe:

The 1948 Expulsion of a People From Their Homeland
by Michael Palumbo, 1987

I shall not expel them from the land in one year for fear that the land will become a desert... I shall expel them slowly before they multiply and possess the land. --Exodus 23, 29-30 'There is no hope that this new Jewish state will survive, to say nothing of develop, if the Arabs are as numerous as they are today." So spoke Menahem Ussishkin, at seventy-five, one of the oldest and most respected Zionist leaders. His audience on the afternoon of 12 June 1938 was the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency, which was considering a plan by the British administration to divide Palestine between Arabs and Jews. For decades there had been strife between the two ethnic groups in the mandate territory and now the British administration was considering partition as the best way to end the conflict between the Jewish colonists and the indigenous Arab population. But partition would leave over 200,000 Arabs in the proposed Zionist state, and the leadership of the Jewish community in Palestine was grappling with the problem of how best to get rid of them.
None of the members of the Executive disagreed with Ussishkin when he stated: 'The worst is not that the Arabs would comprise 45 or 50 per cent of the population of the new state but that 75 per cent of the land is owned by Arabs.' This land was desired for the waves of Jewish immigrants who would populate the Jewish state. There were many other reasons why the Zionists wished to get rid of the Arabs. Ussishkin claimed that with a large Arab population the Jewish state would face enormous problems of internal security and that there would be chaos in government.