In his collection of thirty-two articles by almost as many authors, The Plight of the Palestinians: A Long History of Destruction, William Cook provides a devastating assessment of Zionist violence against Palestinians.

Relentlessly told are one atrocity after another, one act of deception after another, one broken treaty after another, one surprise attack after another, one policy reversal after another - all of which are described with both effective immediacy and an adequate sense of historic context.

The articles themselves extend from Francis Boyle's "Israel's Crimes against Palestinians," published in August, 2001, to Ilan Pappe's "The Necessity of Cultural Boycott," published in June, 2009, spanning almost a decade of Israel's sixty-year campaign to force the departure of Palestinians from the West Bank.

Cook's long introduction is especially useful in its exploration of events during the late forties when Israel established itself as a Jewish state, the one and only specifically denominational nation in the advanced industrial world.

Relevant to Zionist intentions at the time, Cook discusses such matters as the Haganah Oath, the Red House, Catling's Top Secret "Memorandum of the Criminal Investigation Department of July 31, 1947," and the Deir Yassin massacre as well as those of Saliha, Lod, Dawayima, and Abu Shusha. Regrettably, he neglects to mention the Zionist sound trucks that were reported to have circulated among Palestinian villages after the Deir Yassin massacre, warning that the same could happen to them as well.

The single issue that keeps recurring in the articles is whether Israel has been intentionally pursuing the genocidal destruction of Palestinians. The word "genocide" actually occurs in the titles of eight of the articles (one quarter of the total), and the flood of information contained therein - as well as most of the rest of the articles - suggests the choice of the word is in fact reasonable, not hyperbolic.

Cook recounts how Raphael Lemkin coined the word "genocide" in 1944 by linking the Greek word "genos," referring to a tribe or race, with the Latin suffix "cide," meaning to kill. Cook also quotes Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonasson's more expansive definition of the word to suggest the destruction of culture, language, religion, political and social institutions as aspects of genocide that may fall short of total annihilation. And in fact the reference to "genocide" throughout the text is not limited to total annihilation but includes other modes of extreme repression, and appropriately so.

It seems obvious by now that Zionists do not exactly seek to exterminate Palestinians, merely to get rid of them - ie: either to "transfer" them to nearby Muslim nations or to sequester them in "cantons" (Ariel Sharon's word) equivalent to American Indian reservations minus the gambling casinos. In the words of Steven Lendman, "slow-motion genocide" would be involved, something presumably better and more "humane" than the Nazi gas chambers, but nevertheless despicable.

The Plight Of The Palestinians

Jews must not rent homes to "gentiles". That was the religious decree issued this week by at least 50 of Israel's leading rabbis, many of them employed by the state as municipal religious leaders. Jews should first warn, then "ostracise" fellow Jews who fail to heed the directive, the rabbis declared.The decree is the latest in a wave of racist pronouncements from some of Israel's most influential rabbis.

In October, Shmuel Eliyahu, the chief rabbi of Safed, delivered a ruling, signed by 17 other rabbis in the city, telling Jewish residents not to sell or rent property to members of the country's Palestinian Arab minority, who make up a fifth of the population.

His followers turned words into deeds by attacking Arab students in the city and threatening to burn down the homes of Jewish landlords renting to the students.

Similar edicts have recently been backed by dozens of rabbis in Tel Aviv and nearby Bnei Brak, a suburb of 150,000 mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews. They have threatened to "expose" any Jews who rent to "foreigners" -- in this case, a reference to migrant workers and African refugees who are crowded into neglected neighbourhoods in the centre of the country.

Israel's Racist Rabbis