Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords.

The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them.

In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B.

The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians.

Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories).

In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long.

The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.

John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector.

The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace.

Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago.

Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid.

Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority".

Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations.

"Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."

Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops.

“All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.

Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive.

Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him.

“I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.”

Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay.

“It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.”

He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?”

Illegal annexation

Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community.

Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect.

“After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote.

Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation.

Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce.

Extreme poverty

Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower.

While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line.

“How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”.

“Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked.

“You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS.

Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities.

Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn.

Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank

Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent.

“Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found.

Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population.

To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones.

It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services.

“Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER).

Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”

Alarm bells have been ringing around the neighborhood pretty much nonstop since July 13, when President Barack Obama sat down to talk Middle East policy at the White House with a pack of leaders from a dozen American Jewish organizations. The meeting was supposed to help buff up Obama’s relationship with the Jewish community, which is bubbling lately with resentment at the president’s aggressive peace-processing. By reaching out to the community’s customary spokesmen, he hoped to build rapport and perhaps recruit a few backers for his policies. Instead, he unleashed a whirlwind of attacks against himself, his administration and the Jews who met with him.

The critics accuse Obama of unfairly singling out Israel by demanding a unilateral settlement freeze, without requiring reciprocal Palestinian concessions, and disregarding past American promises to permit some construction. They say he is trying to curry favor with the Arab world, breaking a long-standing presidential tradition of siding automatically with Israel. Some say he is threatening the important legacy of former President George W. Bush. I didn’t make that one up.

Martin Peretz, the editor in chief of The New Republic, wrote on his blog that he was “sick and tired” of Obama’s “hectoring” of Israel. He was particularly offended by the president’s condescending advice to Israel, “via some 15 American Jewish leaders,” to “engage in some serious self-reflection.” Heaven spare us.

Even the politically correct New York Times op-ed page carried a jab at Obama – its sole commentary on the July 13 meeting – by Aluf Benn of the dovish Israeli daily Haaretz, no less. Benn accused Obama of mistakenly talking to American Jews rather than the Israelis he should be wooing. After all, why would an American president care what American Jews think?

Sneering at American Jews appears, in fact, to be one of the unifying themes in the backlash. Numerous critics say Obama is using – or being used by – a pair of turncoat Jewish aides, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, whose goals are “to suppress the American Jewish community” and to change Israel’s agenda from stopping Iran “to ‘peace in our time’ in Palestine,” as Israeli journalist Amnon Lord wrote on the Bitterlemons website.

Another frequent complaint is that the president or his buddies deliberately skewed the Jewish delegation by inviting Americans for Peace Now and J Street, “Israel-bashing groups” whose very “Raison d’être is to force Israel to make additional unilateral concessions,” or so former World Jewish Congress firebrand Isi Leibler wrote in The Jerusalem Post.

But the problem with American Jews may run deeper than a few strays, columnist Caroline Glick warned in The Jerusalem Post. Israelis are wondering, she wrote, whether American Jews have already “abandoned Israel in favor of President Obama.” A Post survey in June found that only 6 percent of Israelis “view Obama as pro-Israel,” while a May Gallup tracking poll found that 79 percent of American Jews “support the president.”

Actually, given those numbers, Obama’s critics might want to take a second look at suppressing the American Jewish community.

Indeed, more than a few commentators have flatly accused Jewish organizational leaders – or American Jews at large – of betraying Israel and toadying to Obama the way they toadied to Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Holocaust. That’s right, folks: Nazi collaborators in the Roosevelt Room. What better place for a president to court Jews?

These are troubling charges. That is, they would be, if there were anything serious behind them. But there isn’t much there. Mostly they are just one-liners deployed to buy time for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while he figures out how to placate Obama without breaking up his government coalition. At best the charges fall apart upon scrutiny. The rest should be handled with rubber gloves.

The most repellent of these is the sliming of Axelrod and Emanuel. It’s not a new tactic; it was used by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir against Jewish officials under the President George H.W. Bush, Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller and Dan Kurtzer, to the point where Kurtzer, an Orthodox Jew, couldn’t go to synagogue without being harassed. The same sort of nonsense was thrown at Jewish aides to President George W. Bush, including Elliott Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz. It was vile then, and it’s vile now.

The truth is that every president hires whom he wants, meets with whom he chooses and, if he’s responsible, seeks a balanced foreign policy. Israelis and their friends got spoiled by the last president’s reckless unilateralism and contempt for world opinion. Obama is trying to walk it back, and so he must.

If there is a substantive argument in all this, it’s the claim that Israel is being pressured for concessions while the Arab side is not. Obama himself conceded the point at that meeting. He’s now pressing Arab states for gestures to help Israelis get the medicine down. But freezing settlements doesn’t depend on that. Israel is already committed to “freeze all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements).” It’s written in black and white in George W. Bush’s “road map,” which Israel signed in 2003 – and which Avigdor Lieberman reaffirmed this past April 1 in his maiden Knesset speech as foreign minister. Israel was able to put off the freeze because the Palestinian Authority wasn’t honoring its commitment to crack down on terrorists. Now the Palestinians are cracking down, and Netanyahu is making up excuses.

As for Obama being the new Roosevelt, we should live so long. FDR, if memory serves, was the guy who defeated Hitler and saved the world, after the Japanese convinced congressional Republicans to let the US join the war. If Obama has any tricks like that up his sleeve, bring ‘em on.

Has the Arab League finally broken its taboo on ties with Israel by sending a delegation to Jerusalem? Depends who you ask. The Israeli government has declared Wednesday's visit by the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan a historic landmark on the road toward acceptance of Israel by the Arab world. "In the past, the Arab League has opposed dialogue, normalization and any contact with Israel, and this is the first time the Arab League has authorized a delegation to visit Israel," said Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev. Not so fast, say the visitors. The Egyptian government released a statement on Saturday saying that the foreign ministers are not, in fact, representing the Arab League in Jerusalem, but only their own countries — Egypt and Jordan are the only Arab League countries that have full diplomatic relations with Israel, and the League's position is that normalization of ties can only occur when Israel agrees to withdraw to its 1967 borders.

So what are Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit and his Jordanian counterpart, Abdulelah al-Khatib doing in Jerusalem? Well, the Arab League did, in fact, ask Jordan and Egypt to formally present its peace proposals to Israel. And his government's last-minute case of stage fright didn't stop Abul Gheit from going through the motions of the day's protocol and pleasantries. But the Egyptian identity crisis may be a sign that Arab enthusiasm for a renewal of peace talks with Israel is fading even in those countries that once supported it.

The Arab peace initiative began in 2002 as a Saudi proposal that called for all Arab countries to normalize relations with Israel in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from territories it has occupied since 1967, the creation of a Palestinian state, and a fair solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. But Israel reacted coolly to the idea at the time, and with Washington showing no greater enthusiasm for pressing the issue, little more was heard of it. But following the collapse of the Hamas-Fatah Palestinian unity government, and with a greater sense of urgency over the need to rally Arab moderates against Iran and its allies, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has begun expressing interest in the Arab peace initiative, and in restarting dialogue with the Palestinians.

But Arab countries are concerned that Olmert is more interested in the symbolic value of a peace process rather than in the substance of concluding it. Burdened by rock-bottom popularity thanks to his mishandling of last summer's war in Lebanon, Olmert is hoping that the Israeli public will be wary of tossing out a leader engaged in peace negotiations. And even if he were serious about concluding a deal, his domestic political weakness would make it difficult for him to lead the country through the wrenching changes that peace would require. Thus Olmert's announcement Wednesday that he intends to reach an agreement with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas over the principles for resolving the easy issues — the characteristics of the Palestinian state, its economy, and the customs arrangement it will have with Israel — and postpone addressing the difficult issues such where to draw the border between Israel and Palestine, the status of Jerusalem, and the fate of the refugees. Olmert's plan, in fact, is the reverse of the Arab initiative, which attempts to jump straight to the heart of the matter.

The problem with Olmert's approach is that the Arab world has run out of patience. It is well aware that the Oslo process floundered, at the end, not over customs arrangements and the Palestinian economy, but over borders, Jerusalem and refugees, and those issues are the ones that must be resolved if the process is to be about anything more than marking time. And the Arab League regimes don't have much time to lose: Between the radicalizing impact on their own populations of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict and also the war in Iraq; the rising power of Iran; and growing tension between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, the Middle East is ready to explode. Countries that were once ready to bury the hatchet with Israel are now looking over their shoulders at their angry citizens, increasing numbers of whom see more to be gained by standing up to America and Israel than by trying to revive the peace process. Saudi Arabia, for example, which drafted the Arab initiative, is now warning that peace between Israel and the Palestinians is impossible unless Israel also negotiates with Hamas.

The Saudi warning is a sign that those in Fatah such as President Mahmoud Abbas who are closest to the U.S. and Israel have lost support not only among Palestinians, but among Arab countries as well. Not coincidentally, Saudi Arabia is also the country with perhaps the biggest jihadi problem in the region — a significant proportion of suicide bombers in Iraq are reported to be Saudi citizens.

Likewise, time may have run out for peace between Israel and Syria. Since the end of last year, Syria has been repeatedly calling for a resumption of the peace talks of the late 1990s premised on Israel returning the Syrian Golan Heights, captured in 1967. But while Olmert has largely evaded the overtures — questioning their sincerity, quibbling about who if anyone should mediate — Syria may have given up. Last week, the Israeli press was filled with rumors that Iran gave Syria $1 billion to purchase weapons in return for abandoning peace overtures towards Israel.

The Arab League country most eager to get the peace process back on track is Jordan. Even as its foreign minister talked peace in Jerusalem on Wednesday, its head of state, King Abdullah II, was visiting Washington to seek U.S. support for the Arab initiative. Jordan certainly has more to lose than any of its Arab League partners if peace fails. The pro-U.S. Hashemite Kingdom may have a peace treaty with Israel, but the majority of its population is Palestinian, and it is quickly filling with Iraqi refugees growing angrier by the day. Jordan's enthusiasm for peace, then, may be less a sign of hope, as much as a sign of desperation.

Zionism has meant many things to many people over the past century. To Theodor Herzl and the founders of the Zionist movement, it meant creating a national home to gather in the Jewish people — to some minds, as a refuge from antisemitism; for others, as a fulfillment of an ancient promise. To Herzl’s great critic, the essayist Asher Ginsberg, better known as Ahad Ha’am, Zionism meant building a cultural and spiritual center in Israel to enrich the lives of Jews wherever they live.

To David Ben-Gurion and generations of Israelis after him, it meant the act of settling in Israel and building it, brick by brick. To millions of Jews around the world, it meant providing material and moral backing for that effort. To Palestinians and other Arabs, it meant assault and dispossession. To much of the outside world, it has come to mean the seed of seemingly endless conflict.

To Avraham Burg, former Knesset speaker, former chairman of the World Zionist Organization and son of one of Israel’s founding fathers, it is all of those things and more. In a new book, “Defeating Hitler,” and in a much-discussed interview in Ha’aretz last week, Burg argues that the time for Herzl’s Zionism is past. Now it is time for Ahad Ha’am’s Zionism, for Israel as a spiritual beacon.

Israel has lived long enough in the shadow of trauma and fear, he argues. Now is the time for trust — trust in Israel’s place in the world, in the possibility of coexistence, in the moral legacy of Judaism.

That, at least, is how Burg describes his message. You’d hardly know it, though, from the Ha’aretz interview and the response it’s gotten in Israel and the broader Jewish world. The interviewer, Ari Shavit, read the book and admits he detested it.

As Shavit reads it, Burg’s book rejects the very notion of a Jewish state, claims that Israel has no moral core and has become a brutal Sparta fast sliding toward Nazism. In the interview, Burg tries gamely to answer Shavit’s objections, to explain what he meant, but Shavit won’t have it. Burg is talking spiritual philosophy, and Shavit is tasting red meat.

They go at each other for 4,500 words (2,800 in the abridged English translation), but the casual reader needn’t wade through it all. Shavit and his editors sum up the main points — abandoning Zionism, rejecting Israel — in the headlines and bold print.

“He did something I’ve never experienced before in journalism,” Burg told the Forward in a telephone interview this week. “He read my book and got angry, and then sat with me for what was supposed to be an interview and argued with me.”

Reading the interview, after hearing it discussed endlessly online and in synagogues over the weekend, is an almost psychedelic experience. Shavit starts out by telling Burg that he saw the book as a “farewell to Zionism” and asks, “Are you still a Zionist?” Burg explains his belief that it’s time to move from Herzl to Ahad Ha’am.

Shavit promptly informs Burg that Zionism “means belief in a Jewish national state,” and that he, Burg, no longer believes in that.

Burg: “Not in its current definition. A state in my eyes is a tool,” not a spiritual or religious value. “To define Israel as a Jewish state and then to add the words ‘the first dawning of our redemption’” — a quote from the chief rabbis’ Prayer for the State of Israel, and the core principle of settler messianism — “is explosive. And to add to that the attempt to embrace democracy, it’s just impossible.”

Shavit: “Then you no longer accept the notion of a Jewish state?” Burg: “It can’t work.” (The English version, by the way, skips over Burg’s warning about messianism and the state as a tool, and cuts straight to “explosive” and “can’t work.”)

I phoned Burg because the interview looked fishy to me. I hadn’t read his new book, but I know Burg.

Is it true, I asked, that he believes Israel can no longer be a Jewish state?

“I think Israel should be defined not as a Jewish state, but as a state of the Jewish people,” Burg said. “What I mean is that the significance of the state’s content, its culture and ethos and so on, should be placed on the shoulders of every one of us. We shouldn’t be on automatic pilot.” “I see Israel as a state that was created by the Jewish people, as the expression of thousands of years of yearning,” he said. “Its governing structures should be democratic. Its content should be created by its people. When you create something called a Jewish state and then leave it on automatic pilot, the individual bears no responsibility for its content and character.”

Burg has harsh words for Israel’s current character. He believes that years of confrontation and fear have spawned a militaristic spirit and a widespread contempt for universal norms like human rights. In one of his most controversial assertions, he compares Israel today to Germany in the years before the Nazi takeover. Shavit hammers him on that one.

Is Shavit exaggerating the point? “Yes and no,” Burg said. “Not every comparison to Germany means gas chambers. There is a long history to the rise of German nationalism, beginning with Bismarck.”

It’s also true, Burg said, that important elements of Israeli society and culture are drawn from German culture. “From the beginning, Max Nordau and Theodor Herzl were deeply influenced by the awakening of German nationalism.”

Still, he said, “It’s important to recognize that there are some difficult processes underway in Israel. What I’m saying is that we’re living in a society that is becoming more militaristic, and it’s important to pay attention to the process. That means looking at similarities elsewhere.”

Burg, 52, is used to raising eyebrows and stirring outrage, and he seems to get a kick out of it. The son of Yosef Burg, the longtime leader of Israel’s National Religious Party, he gained almost instant notoriety in 1982, when he helped lead a soldiers’ protest against the first Lebanon War. He quickly entered politics, serving as an aide to Labor Party leader Shimon Peres, while also hosting an improbably popular weekly biblical-portion show on television.

Elected to the Knesset in 1988, he resigned in 1995 to run for chairman of the World Zionist Organization and Jewish Agency for Israel, a post traditionally reserved for washed-up ex-politicians. In 1999, he returned to politics. Riding that year’s Labor Party election victory, he became speaker of the Knesset.

In the fall of 2003, a few months after leaving the speaker’s post, Burg gained international notoriety for an article that was published in Yediot Aharonot, translated by the Forward and then reprinted worldwide, in which he claimed that Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was undermining the moral foundations of Zionism. That was taken, by Israel’s friends and enemies alike, to mean that Zionism had lost all moral justification — something he never said. Soon afterward, he left politics entirely and entered business.

His latest outing in Ha’aretz seems like a rerun of his 2003 misadventure — especially the part where his provocative thesis is circulated in a slightly garbled version and makes him a bete noire. He claims to be annoyed, but he seems at least a bit amused at the same time.

During the interview with Shavit, he recalled with a chuckle, “I got him angry when I said, ‘You have abandoned Judaism. You have an Israeli identity without Jewish content. You identify Judaism with narrow particularism and settlements. I suggest you go to see places where Judaism is a universalistic ideal. Go and learn the meaning of Reform and Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism.’”

“What I want to do is to expand the borders of Israel beyond land and location to include universalism and spiritual search,” Burg told me. “We were raised on the Zionism of Ben-Gurion, that there is only one place for Jews and that’s Israel. I say no, there have always been multiple centers of Jewish life.”

And what about Shavit’s claim — repeated in a headline — that Burg favors abolishing Israel’s Law of Return?

“I never said ‘abolish’,” Burg replied. “I said ‘rethink.’ Look, in the parliamentary mythology of Israel, the Law of Return is an answer to the Nuremberg Laws. That’s not its actual origin, but that’s how it has come to be seen. Whomever Hitler would have killed, we will accept as a Jew. And I say Hitler will not define me and who I am.” Hence the book’s title, “Defeating Hitler.”

“If a state is Jewish,” Burg said, “it is founded on a certain measure of holiness. Moses himself defined holiness as an ongoing process of actions, of behavior toward others and toward God. I am very afraid of automatic holiness. It can lead to chauvinism, to exclusivism, to all kinds of negative ramifications in relations between individuals and between nations. The Jewish people after 60 years of statehood cannot allow itself to take its holiness for granted. It has to question itself every day.”

The brouhaha over the dark power of the “Israel Lobby” has flared into a full-scale intellectual prairie war in the past few weeks. And boy, the fireworks couldn’t be more riveting.

The debate, long simmering in dank corners of Paris and London, entered the American mainstream last March with the publication of a paper by two professors from Harvard and the University of Chicago. The professors’ thesis, alert readers recall, is that a sprawling “lobby” of like-minded groups and individuals has distorted America’s Middle East policy, dragged us into war with Iraq and thwarted open, honest debate of our nation’s policies and interests. So powerful is this lobby, the authors wrote, that their own paper couldn’t be published in this country and had to appear in a British journal.

Since then it’s been quoted and defended everywhere from Mother Jones to The New York Times, debated before a packed audience at New York’s revered Cooper Union and lately republished in the respected quarterly Middle East Policy. It’s also landed a prestigious book contract for the professors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. What better proof of the Lobby’s power to quash dissent?

Pro-Israel activists have given back as good as they’ve got. Stung by the antisemitic undertones in the claim that they stifle debate, they’ve been working overtime to keep those who hold such views from speaking in public. In the past two weeks alone, Jewish protests have helped to cancel appearances in New York by an Australian author at the French mission and by a New York University historian at the Polish consulate and at a Catholic college in the Bronx. (See news story, Page 4.) That ought to stop those rumors about Jews stifling debate.

The NYU historian, Tony Judt, is now a cause celebre in his own right. One of two panelists to take Mearsheimer’s side at Cooper Union last month, his name was already mud in pro-Israel circles, mostly because of his 2003 essay in the New York Review of Books arguing that Israel was an “anachronism” and would probably end up a binational Jewish-Arab state. A quick Web search for his name turns up entries like “Tony Judt’s Jihad Against Israel.” Lately he’s become a dinner-table name, attacked as an enemy by the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and a host of others. “I find the whole thing, in the end, depressing,” Judt told the Forward this week. “Antisemitism is a real thing, and it’s a serious thing. I’ve written about it and I care about it. So to find myself attacking the ADL for implicitly accusing people of antisemitism — it seems, well, upside down.” His complaint about the ADL stems from the Polish consulate affair. Press accounts suggest that the ADL and AJC had a hand in the cancellation of his speech. Judt says the ADL was doing precisely what Mearsheimer and Walt claim it does, muzzling dissent.

The ADL replies on its Web site that Judt’s complaint is simply “part and parcel of Judt’s conspiratorial ideas about pro-Israel groups and ‘Jewish control’ of U.S. foreign policy.” For the record, they’re both wrong. The ADL’s role in the consulate flap was little more than to call and ask what the event was about, according to both ADL and the consulate. Told that a room had been loaned to an outside group, the league said thanks and backed off. The consul-general then Googled Judt to find out what the fuss was about and concluded that the controversial historian was not someone Poland’s New York consulate needed to be associated with, given Poland’s sensitivities about Jewish sensitivities.

On the other hand, ADL indignation over Judt’s “conspiratorial ideas” is wildly misplaced. The only time he has publicly discussed conspiracies or “Jewish control” of American policy was in a 2005 essay in The Nation, in which he flatly condemned such notions as “anti-Semitism.”

His reputation as an Israel-basher rests almost entirely on that one essay in 2003, “Israel: The Alternative.” In it he wrote that the scope of Israel’s West Bank settlements had made the old partition idea of separate Jewish and Arab states in Palestine nearly impossible. Dismantling settlements and separating the two peoples was no longer conceivable. The only alternatives left were mass expulsion of the Palestinians or a single state in all of the land of Israel, which would inevitably be binational. He was not advocating a binational state, he says. It was an observation.

Would he have written the same essay now, after seeing Israel withdraw from Gaza? “I might have written some things differently,” he said. “A lot of my friends still believe that a two-state solution is possible. I’m more pessimistic, I guess.” He wouldn’t have changed the word “anachronism,” though. “As a historian, I do believe that nation-states based on ethnicity are an anachronism.” But, he added quickly, “you can be an anachronism and still have a perfect right to exist.” Does he think Israel’s existence is morally wrong? “Good God, no,” he said. “Of course I don’t believe that.” Judt is a complicated figure. Born in London in 1948, he served as national secretary of the Labor Zionist youth group Dror and spent much of his teens on a kibbutz. He has written extensively about European antisemitism. He served for a time as a judge on the Koret Jewish book awards. Over the years, though, he has become deeply disenchanted with what he calls “Israeli misbehavior” in the West Bank and Gaza. He says he no longer feels close to Israel, as he once did.

Up to a point, that is. “I can’t pretend that it’s not connected to me,” he said of Israel. “I have relatives there. I used to know it well. I feel almost as I would if it were my own country that were misbehaving. I care about it more than I do about other countries.” What, then, was he doing on the stage at Cooper Union, defending Mearsheimer? Here Judt starts to sound uncomfortable and to pick his words carefully. “I didn’t see myself as defending him,” he said.

Mearsheimer’s critics observe that he has a way of conflating pro-Israel lobbying groups with institutions like The New York Times that happen to accept Israel’s right to exist and happen to look Jewish. Judt doesn’t argue the point. “I saw it as crucial to put some space between myself and his paper,” he said. “The one crucial thing is that this is about forcing open the conversation.” Judt argues that antisemitism should not be the first objection raised in a debate like this, but the last. “Once you raise the issue of antisemitism, further discussion is silenced. Antisemitism becomes the only question addressed,” he said. “I’m not worried about the fate of Jews in this country. This is not Germany in 1938. What I worry about is the state of conversation in this country.” The conversation Judt wants brought into the open — the one point that Mearsheimer and Walt may have gotten right — is about America’s proper role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel is one of the important irritants in our relationship with the Muslim world. It’s not the whole problem, but it’s a big part of it. Lowering the heat in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would go a long way toward reducing the growing international conflict between the West and the Muslim world. America could make a big difference, if it would nudge Israel harder toward those “painful concessions” that are the key to a solution. Israel and its advocates, naturally, want Jerusalem left free to make its own decisions.

Which brings Judt to the Lobby. “In the end,” he said, “there are lots of lobbies that use all sorts of tactics to influence policy — the oil lobby, the chemical lobby. The one thing that’s distinctive about the Israel lobby is that part of its agenda is to silence criticism of itself.” And that is where Tony Judt, for all his protestations, comes closest to conspiracy theory. Like many critics of Israel, he’s been stunned and infuriated by the tsunami of hate mail and formal protest he’s encountered since his infamous 2003 essay. He can’t believe it’s a spontaneous outpouring of rage from angry fellow Jews. Instead, he’s convinced himself it’s orchestrated by big Jewish organizations.

But it isn’t. It’s the grass roots screaming at him. The anti-Judt postings on the Internet aren’t from the ADL but from bloggers and militants. American Jews by the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, live in daily fear for the fate of Israel and of the Jewish people. When they see a threat, or the shadow of a threat, they shout.

Judt used to know that; he wrote about it, with some sympathy, in his 2003 New York Review essay. But, like so many others who’ve run afoul of Jewish militants, he seems bruised these days, too weary to draw distinctions.

There is an important, even urgent conversation to be had about Israel, America and the scary new Middle East. It’s not an easy conversation to begin. It’s not clear that Judt and the bedfellows he’s chosen are making the discussion any easier.

Another long silence on the phone. “Maybe not,” Judt said quietly.