The conditions of the US-Israel alliance have changed, but have there been any structural changes?

There haven't been any significant structural changes. It's just that the capacity of Israel to serve US interests, at least in the short term, has probably increased.

The Clinton administration has made it very clear that it intends to persist in the extreme pro-Israeli bias of the Bush administration. They've appointed Martin Indyk, whose background is in AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a lobbying group], to the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.

He's headed a fraudulent research institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Studies. It's mainly there so that journalists who want to publish Israeli propaganda, but want to do it "objectively," can quote somebody who'll express what they want said.

The United States has always had one major hope from the so-called peace negotiations -- that the traditional tacit alliance between Israel and the family dictatorships ruling the Gulf states will somehow become a little more overt or solidified. And it's conceivable.

There's a big problem, however. Israel's plans to take over and integrate what they want of the occupied territories -- plans which have never changed -- are running into some objective problems. Israel has always hoped that in the long run they would be able to expel much of the Palestinian population.

Many moves were made to accelerate that. One of the reasons they instituted an educational system on the West Bank was in hopes that more educated people would want to get out because there weren't any job opportunities.

For a long time it worked -- they were able to get a lot of people to leave -- but they now may well be stuck with the population. This is going to cause some real problems, because Israel intends to take the water and the usable land. That may not be so pretty or so easy.

What's Israel's record of compliance with the more than twenty Security Council resolutions condemning its policies?

It's in a class by itself.

No sanctions, no enforcement?

None. Just to pick one at random -- Security Council Resolution 425, March 1978. It called on Israel to withdraw immediately and unconditionally from Lebanon. Israel is still there, even though the request was renewed by the government of Lebanon in February 1991, when everyone was going at Iraq.

The United States will block any attempt to change things. Many of the large number of Security Council resolutions vetoed by the US have to do with Israeli aggression or atrocities.

For example, take the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. At first the United States went along with the Security Council condemnations. But within a few days the US had vetoed the major Security Council resolution that called on everyone to withdraw and stop fighting, and later vetoed another, similar one.

The US has gone along with the last few UN resolutions or deportations.

The US has gone along, but has refused to allow them to have any teeth. The crucial question is: Does the US do anything about it? For example, the United States went along with the Security Council resolution condemning the annexation of the Golan Heights. But when the time came to do something about it, they refused.

International law transcends state law, but Israel says these resolutions are not applicable. How are they not applicable?

Just as international law isn't applicable to the United States, which has even been condemned by the World Court. States do what they feel like -- though of course small states have to obey.

Israel's not a small state. It's an appendage to the world superpower, so it does what the United States allows. The United States tells it: You don't have to obey any of these resolutions, therefore they're null and void -- just as they are when the US gets condemned.

The US never gets condemned by a Security Council resolution, because it vetoes them. Take the invasion of Panama. There were two resolutions in the Security Council condemning the United States for that invasion. We vetoed them both.

You can find repeated Security Council resolutions that never passed that condemn the US, ones which would have passed if they were about a defenseless country. And the General Assembly passes resolutions all the time, but they have no standing -- they're just recommendations.

I remember talking to Mona Rishmawi, a lawyer for the human rights organization Al Haq in Ramallah on the West Bank. She told me that when she would go to court, she wouldn't know whether the Israeli prosecutor would prosecute her clients under British mandate emergency law, Jordanian law, Israeli law or Ottoman law.

Or their own laws. There are administrative regulations, some of which are never published. As any Palestinian lawyer will tell you, the legal system in the territories is a joke. There's no law -- just pure authority.

Most of the convictions are based on confessions, and everybody knows what it means when people confess. Finally, after about sixteen years, a Druze Israeli army veteran who'd confessed and was sentenced was later proven to be innocent. Then it became a scandal.

There was an investigation, and the Supreme Court stated that for sixteen years the secret services had been lying to them. The secret services had been torturing people -- as everybody knew -- but telling the Court they weren't.

There was a big fuss about the fact that they'd been lying to the Supreme Court. How could you have a democracy when they lie to the Supreme Court? But the torture wasn't a big issue -- everyone knew about it all along.

Amnesty International interviewed Supreme Court Justice Moshe Etzioni in London in 1977. They asked him to explain why such an extremely high percentage of Arabs confessed. He said, "It's part of their nature."

That's the Israeli legal system in the territories.

Explain these Orwellisms of "security zone" and "buffer zone."

In southern Lebanon? That's what Israel calls it, and that's how it's referred to in the media.

Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978. It was all in the context of the Camp David agreements. It was pretty obvious that those agreements would have the consequence they did -- namely, freeing up Israel to attack Lebanon and integrate the occupied territories, now that Egypt was eliminated as a deterrent.

Israel invaded southern Lebanon and held onto it through clients -- at the time it was Major Sa'ad Haddad's militia, basically an Israeli mercenary force. That's when Security Council Resolution 425 [described on page 41] was passed.

When Israel invaded in 1982, there'd been a lot of recent violence across the border, all from Israel north. There had been an American-brokered cease-fire which the PLO [the Palestine Liberation Organization] had held to scrupulously, initiating no cross-border actions. But Israel carried out thousands of provocative actions, including bombing of civilian targets -- all to try to get the PLO to do something, thus giving Israel an excuse to invade.

It's interesting the way that period has been reconstructed in American journalism. All that remains is tales of the PLO's bombardment of Israeli settlements, a fraction of the true story (and in the year leading up to the 1982 Israeli invasion, not even that).

The truth was that Israel was bombing and invading north of the border, and the PLO wasn't responding. In fact, they were trying to move towards a negotiated settlement. (The truth about earlier years also has only a limited resemblance to the standard picture, as I've documented several times -- uselessly, of course.)

We know what happened after Israel invaded Lebanon. They were driven out by what they call "terrorism" -- meaning resistance by people who weren't going to be cowed. Israel succeeded in awakening a fundamentalist resistance, which it couldn't control. They were forced out.

They held on to the southern sector, which they call a "security zone" -- although there's no reason to believe that it has the slightest thing to do with security. It's Israel's foothold in Lebanon. It's now run by a mercenary army, the South Lebanon Army, which is backed up by Israeli troops. They're very brutal. There are horrible torture chambers.

We don't know the full details, because they refuse to allow inspections by the Red Cross or anyone else. But there have been investigations by human rights groups, journalists and others. Independent sources -- people who got out, plus some Israeli sources -- overwhelmingly attest to the brutality. There was even an Israeli soldier who committed suicide because he couldn't stand what was going on. Some others have written about it in the Hebrew press.

Ansar is the main camp. They very nicely put it in the town of Khiyam. There was a massacre there by the Haddad militia under Israeli eyes in 1978, after years of Israeli bombing, that drove out most of the population. That's mainly for Lebanese who refuse to cooperate with the South Lebanon Army.

So that's the "security zone."

Israel dumped scores of deportees in Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s. Why has that changed now? Why has Lebanon refused?

It's not so much that it has refused. If Israel dropped some deportees by helicopter into the outskirts of Sidon, Lebanon couldn't refuse. But this time I think Israel made a tactical error. The deportation of 415 Palestinians [in December 1992] is going to be very hard for them to deal with.

According to the Israeli press, this mass deportation was fairly random, a brutal form of collective punishment. I read in Ha'aretz [the leading Israeli newspaper] that the Shabak [the Israeli secret police] leaked the information that they had only given six names of security risks, adding a seventh when the Rabin Labor government wanted a larger number. The other four hundred or so were added by Rabin's government, without intelligence information.

So there's no reason to believe that those who were deported were Hamas [Islamic fundamentalist] activists. In fact, Israel deported virtually the whole faculty of one Islamic university. They essentially deported the intellectuals, people involved in welfare programs and so on.

But to take this big class of people and put them in the mountains of southern Lebanon, where it's freezing now and boiling hot in the summer -- that's not going to look pretty in front of the TV cameras. And that's the only thing that matters. So there may be some problems, because Israel's not going to let them back in without plenty of pressure.

I heard Steven Solarz [former Democratic congressman from Brooklyn] on the BBC. He said the world has a double standard: 700,000 Yemenis were expelled from Saudi Arabia and no one said a word (which is true); 415 Palestinians get expelled from Gaza and the West Bank and everybody's screaming.

Every Stalinist said the same thing: "We sent Sakharov into exile and everyone was screaming. What about this or that other atrocity -- which is worse?" There is always somebody who has committed a worse atrocity. For a Stalinist mimic like Solarz, why not use the same line?

Incidentally, there is a difference -- the Yemenis were deported to their country, the Palestinians from their country. Would Solarz claim that we all should be silent if he and his family were dumped into a desert in Mexico?

Israel's record and its attitude toward Hamas have evolved over the years. Didn't Israel once favor it?

They not only favored it, they tried to organize and stimulate it. Israel was sponsoring Islamic fundamentalists in the early days of the intifada [the uprising of Palestinians within Israel against the Israeli government]. If there was a strike of students at some West Bank university, the Israeli army would sometimes bus in Islamic fundamentalists to break up the strike.

Sheikh Yaseen, an anti-Semitic maniac in Gaza and the leader of the Islamic fundamentalists, was protected for a long time. They liked him. He was saying, "Let's kill all the Jews." It's a standard thing, way back in history. Seventy years ago Chaim Weizmann was saying: Our danger is Arab moderates, not the Arab extremists.

The invasion of Lebanon was the same thing. Israel wanted to destroy the PLO because it was secular and nationalist, and was calling for negotiations and a diplomatic settlement. That was the threat, not the terrorists. Israeli commentators have been quite frank about that from the start.

Israel keeps making the same mistake, with the same predictable results. In Lebanon, they went in to destroy the threat of moderation and ended up with Hezbollah [Iranian-backed fundamentalists] on their hands. In the West Bank, they also wanted to destroy the threat of moderation -- people who wanted to make a political settlement. There Israel's ending up with Hamas, which organizes effective guerrilla attacks on Israeli security forces.

It's important to recognize how utterly incompetent secret services are when it comes to dealing with people and politics. Intelligence agencies make the most astonishing mistakes -- just as academics do.

In a situation of occupation or domination, the occupier, the dominant power, has to justify what it's doing. There is only one way to do it -- become a racist. You have to blame the victim. Once you become a raving racist in self-defense, you've lost your capacity to understand what's happening.

The US in Indochina was the same. They never could understand -- there are some amazing examples in the internal record. The FBI right here is the same -- they make the most astonishing mistakes, for similar reasons.

In a letter to the New York Times, Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman wrote that the Rabin government has "unambiguously demonstrated its commitment to the peace process" since assuming leadership. "Israel is the last party that has to prove its desire to make peace." What's been the record of Rabin's Labor government?

It's perfectly true that Israel wants peace. So did Hitler. Everybody wants peace. The question is, on what terms?

The Rabin government, exactly as was predicted, harshened the repression in the territories. Just this afternoon I was speaking to a woman who's spent the last couple of years in Gaza doing human rights work. She reported what everyone reports, and what everybody with a brain knows -- as soon as Rabin came, it got tougher. He's the iron-fist man -- that's his record.

Likud actually had a better record in the territories than Labor did. Torture and collective punishment stopped under Begin. There was one bad period when Sharon was in charge, but under Begin it was generally better. When the Labor party came back into the government in 1984, torture and collective punishment started again, and later the intifada came.

In February 1989, Rabin told a group of Peace Now leaders that the negotiations with the PLO didn't mean anything -- they were going to give him time to crush the Palestinians by force. And they will be crushed, he said, they will be broken.

It hasn't happened.

It happened. The intifada was pretty much dead, and Rabin awakened it again with his own violence. He has also continued settlement in the occupied territories, exactly as everyone with their eyes open predicted. Although there was a very highly publicized settlement cutoff, it was clear right away that it was a fraud. Foxman knows that. He reads the Israeli press, I'm sure.

What Rabin stopped was some of the more extreme and crazy Sharon plans. Sharon was building houses all over the place, in places where nobody was ever going to go, and the country couldn't finance it. So Rabin eased back to a more rational settlement program. I think the current number is 11,000 new homes going up.

Labor tends to have a more rational policy than Likud -- that's one of the reasons the US has always preferred Labor. They do pretty much the same things as Likud, but more quietly, less brazenly. They tend to be more modern in their orientation, better attuned to the norms of Western hypocrisy. Also, they're more realistic. Instead of trying to make seven big areas of settlement, they're down to four.

But the goal is pretty much the same -- to arrange the settlements so that they separate the Palestinian areas. Big highway networks will connect Jewish settlements and surround some little Arab village way up in the hills. That's to make certain that any local autonomy will never turn into a form of meaningful self-government. All of this is continuing and the US is, of course, funding it.

Critics of the Palestinian movement point to what they call the "intrafada," the fact that Palestinians are killing other Palestinians -- as if this justifies Israeli rule and delegitimizes Palestinian aspirations.

You might look back at the Zionist movement -- there were plenty of Jews killed by other Jews. They killed collaborators, traitors and people they thought were traitors. And they weren't under anything like the harsh conditions of the Palestinian occupation. As plenty of Israelis have pointed out, the British weren't nice, but they were gentlemen compared with us.

The Labor-based defense force Haganah had torture chambers and assassins. I once looked up their first recorded assassination in the official Haganah history. It's described there straight.

It was in 1921. A Dutch Jew named Jacob de Haan had to be killed, because he was trying to approach local Palestinians to see if things could be worked out between them and the new Jewish settlers. His murderer was assumed to be the woman who later became the wife of the first president of Israel. They said that another reason for assassinating him was that he was a homosexual.

Yitzhak Shamir became head of the Stern gang by killing the guy who was designated to be the head. He didn't like him for some reason. Shamir was supposed to take a walk with him on a beach. He never came back. Everyone knows Shamir killed him.

As the intifada began to self-destruct under tremendous repression, the killing got completely out of hand. It began to be a matter of settling old scores and gangsters killing anybody they saw. Originally the intifada was pretty disciplined, but it ended up with a lot of random killing, which Israel loves. Then they can point out how rotten the Arabs are.

It's a dangerous neighborhood.

Yes, it is. They help make it dangerous.