Professor Avi Shlaim published an article called "IS ZIONISM TODAY THE REAL ENEMY OF THE JEWS? YES." in the International Herald Tribune for Friday, February 4, 2005, datelined Oxford, England. DavidFarer.com shall now proceed to demolish Shlaim's article.

Me: "In your title, Professor Shlaim, you use the word 'Zionism', which is the general term for the Jewish national movement, but your article will presently use this term in a much more specific sense: to refer to the settler movement, which you seem to despise. You thus conflate ordinary Zionism with a highly specific variation of it that is frequently - and unfairly - demonized.

Shlaim: "Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people and the state of Israel is its political expression."

Me: "Yes and no, Shlaim. Various movements loosely called 'Zionist' worked for a Jewish state between the end of the nineteenth century and the first Israeli Independence Day in May of 1948. Thereafter, the actions of Israel have been those of a sovereign state managing its own interests and defending itself. To call everything Israel does 'Zionist' is like saying that everything the United States does is a continuation of what the patriots did when they signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In some sense it is, I suppose. But when a leftist like you, Shlaim, uses the word 'Zionist', it has a delegitmizing ring to it, as if Israel were merely a movement or an idea, rather than a legitimate, sovereign state. Leftist and Arab propaganda is full of references to 'The Zionist Entity', a circumlocution they use to avoid breaking their poor little left-leaning teeth on the hated name of Israel."

Shlaim: "Israel used to be a symbol of freedom and a source of pride for the Jews of the Diaspora."

Me: "The existence of a Jewish state, Shlaim, was intended by people like Theodor Herzl and other early Zionists to be, among other things, a kind of alternative identity for Jews remaining in the diaspora. The sight of Jews tilling the land and living in a normal Jewish country was supposed to boost the self-respect of Jews living elsewhere. This has in fact occurred. Some Jews living outside Israel feel this more than others, but the existence of a Jewish state has been and remains good therapy for many non-Israeli Jews. The good feelings those non-Israeli Jews get from contemplating a Jewish state are of course nothing compared to the numerous Jews whose lives have been saved or drastically improved by moving to that state, or compared to Jews who lost their lives a few years before Israeli independence because they had no Jewish state to escape to."

Shaim: "Israel's mistreatment of the Palestinians, however, has turned it into a liability and a moral burden for the liberal segment of the Jewish community."

Me: "No, Shlaim. The Jews living outside Israel have no business feeling morally burdened by the actions of their cousins living in it. The 'liberal segment', Shlaim? You mean 'the deceived segment'. Why is Israel obligated to please non- or anti-Zionist Jews of leftist views who do not choose to move there?

Shlaim: "Some Jews, especially on the left, would go even further by linking Israel's behavior to the upsurge of the new anti-Semitism throughout the world."

Me: "Not Israel's behavior, Shlaim, but rather its grotesquely and deliberately distorted image is what has damaged Israel's reputation in recent years. I notice no specific deed in your accusation you can point out here on the part of Israel, but only this general one of 'behavior'.
"Leftiist intellectuals, Shlaim, both Jewish and not, frequently fall for this distortion. Many assimilated Jews living outside of Israel and having slight Jewish identity, apart from the neurosis of being Jewish and not Jewish at the same time, might react to newspaper articles critical of Israel with the same self-hate Phillip Roth's Portnoy felt for his big nose."

Shlaim: "Israel's illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967 is the underlying problem."

Me: "Illegal, Shlaim? You forget how Israel happened to occupy those areas in 1967. The 'underlying problem' is that the Arabs consistently rejected the existence of Israel and attacked Israel several times. The 'occupation' by Israel of the West Bank and Gaza happened because of a war that the Arabs forced on Israel in 1967, when Israel defeated those Arab armies and pushed them back from the ceasefire lines, loosely called borders, that had been where the armies were when the previous war of 1948-49 ended - the first time the Arabs tried to destroy Israel. The new cease-fire lines after the Six Day War of 1967 included Jordanian, Egyptian, and Syrian territory that Israeli armed forces captured in the process of preventing the Arabs from seizing Tel Aviv and the whole of Israel, as they intended to do.

"Israel occupied no Palestinian territory, but rather Jordanian; 'Palestine' had not been invented yet.

"This Israeli military success was NOT 'illegal'. Countries have the legal right of self-defence. While Kofi Annan has falsely applied the term 'illegal' to Israel's presence in those areas, international law is clear that occupying the territory of a foreign country during the course of a war with that country, especially if that country started the war, is not inherently against international law. The UN resolution 242 does not refer to the return of all 'lillgally' occupied Arab land, but rather calls for the sides to negotiate a compromise peace, by whose terms Israel will give back SOME territory, but not necessarily all, and the Arabs will recognize Israel and make peace with her. Israel has neither legal nor moral obligation to evacuate the territories occupied in 1967 except in the context of peace treaties with the countries Israel defeated at that time. Israel did give back Sinai as part of a peace-agreement with Egypt.

"If the word 'illegal' can properly be applied to violating a UN resolution, then it is the Arabs who acted illegally, because they rejected resolusion 242 for so many years, even as they earlier refused to accept the UN resolution that was the basis in international law for a Jewish state. Because the UN has been so negative toward Israel during the last generation, we sometimes forget the fact that Israel has worked within these two major UN resolutions, but the Arabs have repeatedly violated them by assaulting Israel. I think Israel should point this out more often and more forcefully than she does.

"Having found so many errors in one sentence, I would be less than generous if I omitted your major truth: the 1967 war did indeed take place in 1967. No shit, Shlaim! You got one right."

Shlaim: "Occupation transformed the Zionist movement from a legitimate national liberation movement for the Jews into a colonial power and an oppressor of the Palestinians."

Me: "No, Shlaim. 'Occupation' - also called 'winning the war' - prevented the Arabs from transforming all Israelis into corpses. Ahmad Shukairy, Arafat's predecessor as head of the PLO, and others stated that their aim was genocide during the weeks leading up to the Six Day War. The Six Day War was an anti-genocidal war.

"In the most general sense, I suppose one can speak of that war as an act of the Zionist Movement, but only if one thinks of America's response to Pearl Harbor as an act of the American movement for independence from England. Israel, by then an established country, fought a war, as countries do when they are in danger. The 1967 war was an act of the armed forces of the State of Israel, and not of the Zionist movement.

"Your choice of the phrase 'national liberation movement' for Zionism shows a certain leftist bias on your part - hasn't that term been used mainly by countries like Viet Nam and Algeria? When you are having a 'national liberation movement', you are good, in Shlaimspeak, and the opposite of a 'natiional liberation movement' is colonialism - Franz Fanon would recognize this dichotomy.

"However, calling Israel a "colonial power" because she pushed back Arab armies is an abuse of that phrase. The allied occupation of Germany in 1945 was not colonialist. Britain, France, Italy and other countries once owned territories across the seas, known as colonies. Colonies were specific legal entities, and not in the category of militarily occupied territory. Acquisition of colonies was largely, though not entirely, motivated by economics, and especially by the need for commodities like oil. The West Bank and Gaza have no such resources. They are a substantial burden on the Israeli economy. Leftist people today use the word 'colonialism' loosely to refer to anything they don't like. Some of them call MacDonalds in India or screening 'Jaws' in Brazil forms of colonialism. Colonialism is just a swear-word today, as is Fascist."

Shlaim: "By Zionism today I mean the ideological, ultra-nationalist settlers and their supporters in the Likud-led government."

Me: "It's daffy definition-time in Shlaimspeak, Shlaim! You simply announce what you mean by Zionism; you give no justification for rewriting the dictionary. Israeli leftists and moderates are just as Zionist as the wildest of the wild-eyed hill-top youth who build free-lance settlements in the West Bank. Anybody who believes, or even passively accepts, the idea that a Jewish state should exist can be called a Zionist. Zionism specified that a Jewish state should exist. It says nothing about which party its inhabitants should join after such a state is born, nor did Herzl and the other early Zionists specify which borders they had in mind for such a state. Zionists can be far left or far right, and anywhere between. I have interviewed major war heroes from the War for Independence who had considered themselves Stalinists when they fought for Israel in 1948. Who are you, Shlaim, to throw most Israelis out of the Zionist movement? Now that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wishes to uproot settlements and create a Palestinian state, has he become an anti-Zionist?"

Shlaim: "These settlers are a tiny minority but they maintain a stranglehold over the Israeli political system."

Me: "You flatter them, Shlaim. They wish you were right. The settler movement today is struggling to survive. For good or ill, it will probably lose this struggle. During periods when the Arabs offered no chance of peace - peace meaning recognition of Israel in return for some or most of the area Israel captured during the defensive Six Day War - the settlers went to work building villages on barren hilltops in the West Bank and Gaza. The Arabs rejected a peaceful settlement during most of the years between 1967 and today, thus giving the settlers much time to build things. Successive Israeli governments have demonstrated their willingness to remove the settlements and evict these people from their homes at the first faint hint of possible peace. The settlers feel abandoned by their one-time mentor, Ariel Sharon; they have no stranglehold on him or on the Israeli government. Sharon is strangling them, and not the opposite.

"Moreover, the settlers are a product of Arab intransigence. Had the Arabs not refused to make peace with Israel for so many years, and had the Arabs not started the Six Day War, or had they made peace immediately after their defeat, there would be no settlements today. There was not one settlement or one Jew living in what became the occupied areas before the Six Day War. The Arabs began that war in hope of destroying Israel within the old borders, and not because of the non-existent settlements."

Shlaim: "They (the settlers) represent the unacceptable face of Zionism. Zionism does not equal racism, but many of these hard-line settlers and their leaders are blatant racists."

Me: "A minuscule fraction of Jews living in the West Bank and Gaza are very hostile to Arabs as such. Baruch Goldstein even killed Arabs in cold blood. However, settlers who think that way are so few that most Israelis, and even most settlers, have never met one. The few extremists among the Israeliis living in the West Bank can hardly be said to be leading or even fighting the recent war. Arab extremists, with broad popular support from their people, have been blowing up cafes and buses. The Baruch Goldstein-equivalents are a tiny lunatic fringe among Israelis, but they are mainstream in the Moslem world.

"Calling the extremists "racists" is another leftist vocabulary choice. Racism means viewing another race as genetically inferior. Arabs are not a race. The most extreme Israeli rightist never refers to the Arabs as a race, either superior or inferior. 'Racist', like 'Fascist' and 'Colonialist', has become a kind of verbal finger to give to whomever a leftist dislikes. It is shloppy thinking, Shlaim, to describe the dislike of any particular group as racism, unless that group is a race, and unless the hostility expressed towards it is based on that racial principle.

"You also state, Shlaim, correctly, that Zionism does not equal racism, but if what you mean by Zionism is the most extreme Israeli right, whom you then mislabel racist, does Shlaimspeak not imply that Zionism IS racism?

"If the few extremists represent 'the unaccepatle face of Zionsim', is there such a thing as 'the unacceptable face of anti-Zionism?' Your article contains not one word of criticism or even hint at the existence of the insane, violent, religious fanaticism common among Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza. I also notice no condemnation of the kind of anti-Zionism common all over the Arab world, the kind that bases itself on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - how we are conquering the planet."

Shlaim: "Their (the settlers) extremism and their excesses have led some people to start questioning not just the Zionist colonial project beyond the 1967 borders but also the legitimacy of the state of Israel within those borders."

Me: "No, Shlaim. The EXISTENCE, and only occasionally the actions, of some Israelis residing in the West Bank-Gaza appear on the list of sins of which Arabs and leftists accuse Israel. Anti-Israel propaganda bases itself much more on a grossly distorted image of the war Israel has been compelled to wage against Arab terrorism. It is the Israeli army that is accused of excesses, and not the settlers. What excesses have the settlers committed, anyway? Most of them live pretty peacefully with the surrounding Arabs. If you think they should not exist AT ALL, then that is another issue, but the fighting in recent years has been the Israeli army versus the terrorists. The settlements themselves have not been battlefields.

"The degree to which the world has been hoodwinked by major publications in Europe and to a lesser extent in America is an outrage. One-sided, biased reporting and even outright fraud have been documented time and again, especially by HonestReporting.com. The most famous image of the war, that of an Arab trying to shield his son's body in a crossfire, has been demonstrated to have been a fake; the second best known photo, that of an individual with a bloody head lying near an Israeli soldier, turns out to have been a picture of a Jew injured by Arabs, rather than of an Arab injured by those soldiers.

"Another fact that Israel should point out more loudly and more often than she does is that most of the anti-Israel hysteria, especially from European governments, came up during and because of the oil embargo accompanying the1973 war. Obsessive anti-Zionism did not attain major proportions after the Six Day War of 1967. European governments took the side of the Arabs after 1973 for reasons of naked, economic self-interest. Their journalists followed suit. For them, the topic was and remains oil, and not Arab suffering."

Shlaim: "And it is these settlers who also endanger the safety and well-being of Jews everywhere."

Me: "No, Shlaim. Most non-Israeli Jews live in the United States. The American people and government have been generally supportive of Israel during the recent terrorist war. Leftwing professors - like you - have led many of the attacks that have occurred. If you think that Israeli decisions on when and how to defend itself should be based on how it effects our image in countries where non-Israeli Jews live, then we should be tougher than we are now, because much of the American Christian pro-Israel right views giving the West Bank to the Arabs as a sin.

"European cities have seen physical attacks on local Jews. These attacks come mostly from two groups: neo-Nazi skinheads and Moslem street thugs. The skinheads are hardly motivated by righteous indignation at the settlers; they are if anything more hostile to blacks and to Arabs than they are to Jews. Antisemitism among the Arabic-speaking underclass in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany is one aspect of a growing and violent radicalism among European Moslems. Al-Jezeera does its best to whip them up against Israel, but Moslem fundamentalism is a European social problem that would not be solved if Israel disappeared. When a Moslem preacher screams in Rotterdam that homosexuals should be burned alive, he is not against homosexuals because they are settling in the West Bank. Those sermons quote the Koran, and not Ariel Sharon.

"General public opinion in Europe has indeed unfairly but generally turned against Israel, but the major topic of its complaints is the misrepresented actions of the Israeli army - not Zionism, and not that much about the settlers. Most Europeans, while misinformed and hostile to Israel, cannot be called Antisemites, nor are most of them as violent as are European Arabs and skinheads.

"More basically, you imply, Shlaim, that the position of Jews outside of Israel is tenuous. It is a grave injustice to insult or assault an ethnic group living in one country because of the actions their cousins perform back in the home-country. The American people, government, and specifically President Bush went to great lengths to avoid accusing American Moslems or Arabs of inherent complicity in the 9/11 atrocity. What right do people have to accuse Belgian or British Jews of complicity in Israeli 'crimes', even if they did exist? You imply, Shlaim, that Europeans are eager to jump on the local Jews at the first hint of bad publicity from Israel. The kind of injustice you describe is something against which we must fight, and not something we should accomodate. If American Moslems do not inherently deserve to suffer for crimes their co-religionists commit, then why should American Jews suffer for crimes Israeli Jews allegedly commit? You imply that Antisemitism is so hopelessly endemic to western society that all diaspora Jews should pack up and move to Israel in order to protect themselves."

Shlaim: "Prime Minister Ariel Sharon personifies this xenophobic, exclusive, aggressive and expansionist brand of Zionism. One of the greatest accolades in Judaism is to be a rodeph shalom, a seeker of peace. Sharon is not that by any stretch of the imagination. He is a man of war and the champion of violent solutions."

Me: "Wrong again, Shlaim. Ariel Sharon spent much of his life serving Israel as a professional soldier. Having defeated the recent intifada, he is now attempting to make peace. "Rodef Shalom" means more literally "chasing peace". Sharon is indeed chasing peace - if anything, naively so. In recent weeks, he has overlooked acts of war on the part of the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza in order to strengthen the political position of Arab leader Abu Mazen. Sharon has split his own party, thus endangering his position as prime minister, if not his life, because some of those settlers hate him for trying to make peace even more than you do for winning the Israeli military victory over Arab terror that might yet make peace possible.

"Demonizing Ariel Sharon personally is one of the tricks the anti-Israel left plays. The truth is that the Israeli electorate - not the settlers and not the Zionist movement - turned rightwards after the Oslo peace process failed. It failed because the Arabs consciously rejected a settlement offered them by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak and President Clinton. The Arabs chose terrorist war over peace. The Israeli people chose Sharon to defend the country against this offensive. Under Sharon's extremely effective leadership, the Israeli armed forces did so.

"Another rhetorical trick leftist anti-Zionists like to pull, Shlaim, is to throw in a reference - 'rodef shalom' here - to the Jewish religion, and to contrast its peaceful nature with whatever aspect of Israeli policy they are attacking that day. They thus gain browny points for liking Judaism but disliking Zionism. This kind of thing is at best condescending. It is not as much of a fraud as claiming that Islamo-Fascism has no historical roots in 'the real Islam", though."

Shlaim: "Sharon's purpose is politicide: to deny the Palestinians any independent political existence in Palestine."

Me: "No, Shlaim. 'Politicide' is a clever and intellectual-sounding neologism whose roots mean 'the murder of a state'. Sharon cannot be said to be destroying a Palestinian state, because there is none to destroy and never has been. Creating a Palestinian state is one of several possible solutions for what to do with the Arab population left over from the old Palestine Mandate that ended in 1948. The Mandate was supposed to have been partitioned into two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Arabs rejected that partition. They rejected a two-state compromise. The Arab Palestinian state therefore did not come to be alongside the Jewish Palestinian state, also called Israel. The world has, for good or ill, evidently picked a variation on the old partition plan as a solution for what to do with the West Bank and Gaza and how to solve the Arab refugee problem. Sharon is taking measures to go along with that choice. Ariel Sharon has agreed to the two-state solution, and he is actively working for it, at the risk of his political life and the lives of Israeli citizens. Sharon is committed to CREATING a Palestinian state, many or most of whose inhabitants would like to commit politicide against Israel.

"If the Arabs living in the West Bank and Gaza want to create a state called Palestine, they will have to earn it. Earning it means recognizing Israel, accepting that the descendants of the 1948 refugees will live in that new Arab state, and making no further war on Israel. They must want that, and they must choose that. If they vote heavily for Islamo-Fascism in the form of Hamas, which they have done in recent municipal elections, then they are choosing terrorism. If they want a state, they will have to build it the way the old Zionist movement built Israel; brick by brick. Building Palestine means building an economy, a legal system, and modern, constructive, democratic life. If they democratically choose Hamas terrorism, then Israel is neither morally nor legally obligated to give them that state."

Shlaim: "His {Sharon's} plan for withdrawal from Gaza is called 'the unilateral disengagement plan.' It is not a peace plan but a prelude to the annexation of large chunks of the West Bank to Israel. Sharon, the unilateralist par excellence, is a Jewish Rambo - the antithesis of the traditional Jewish values of truth, justice and tolerance."

Me: "In which yeshiva did you become such an expert on traditional Jewish values, Shlaim? I know plenty of very traditional Jews who accuse Sharon of violating traditional Jewish values by giving back historically Jewish territory. First you kick everybody out of the Zionist movement who is not the most radical kind of settler, and now you tell everybody who disagrees that his peios are not long enough for you. You exclude most Jews and most Israelis from your bizarre little Jewish kingdom, but you present yourself as the protector of the Jews from Zionism - 'the enemy of the Jewish people today'.

"Unilateral disengagement - what is it? A year ago, when Arafat was still living, and it seemed that there was no possibility for negotiations, Sharon had the bright idea of withdrawing from Arab-populated areas in the West Bank and Gaza. 'Unilateral' here means 'not negotiated' with the enemy; by calling Sharon a unilateralist, you conflate Sharon with Bush, to whom the left applies that word. But they accuse Bush of going to war unilaterally, without consulting American allies, while Sharon's unilateral withdrawal is making peace unilaterally - without getting a peace agreement from the Arabs in return for that withdrawal. Shlaimspeak likes playing with words that way, and conflating meanings that do not belong together, even as you did with Zionism.

"I have neve seen a Rambo movie, but the image I have of that figure is of a rather simple soldier who fights against Communist bad guys and for truth, justice, and tolerance. If my impression is factually accurate, I do not view it as insulting to call somebody 'a Jewish Rambo'. I see 'Rambo' thrown around a lot, but I do not notice it is thrown at Moslem terrorists. Are there no Moslem Rambos?

"Unilateral withdrawal from some of the occupied areas, but not from others, might or might not indicate where the final border will be. So what?"

Shlaim: "Sharon's government is waging a savage war against the Palestinian people. Its policies include the confiscation of land; the demolition of houses; the uprooting of trees; curfews, roadblocks and 736 checkpoints that inflict horrendous hardships; the systematic abuse of Palestinian human rights; and the building of the illegal wall on the West Bank, a wall that is as much about land-grabbing as it is about security."

Me: "Always trying to be positive, Shlaim, I shall point out that you did not even accuse Israel of using Nazi methods. I hope I have not ruined your reputation among your friends with this compliment.

"Now, get serious, Shlaim. Israel has waged an effective war against Palestinian terror. Israel's armed forces have proved those people wrong who claimed there was no military response to terrorist warfare. That we did so while damaging the Arabs as little as we did is one of the major military achievements anywhere in the world during recent decades.

"Don't break my heart with those 'horrendous hardships' inflicted by roadblocks and the anti-terror fence. They prevent suicide-bombers from attacking Israeli civilians, and they were a major element in the Israeli victory, along with killing Moslem terrorists leaders like Rantisi and the offensive in Jenin and elsewhere that broke much of the terrorist infrastructure.

"These military methods damaged the Arab economy and caused inconvenience to Arab civilians. So what? Most of those civilians supported terror against Israel. If they don't like waiting on line at checkpoints, then they could have killed terrorist leaders like Rantisi themselves. Waiting on long lines is an unpleasant experience, but hundreds of Israeli men, women, and children would have preferred it to being blown up by suicide bombers. Most German civilians supported the Second World War. They paid for that by seeing their cities destroyed. Israel would have been morally and politically justified in using much rougher methods against the Arabs than she actually did, if they were required to defeat terror.

"The number of Arabs Israel killed during the recent war is about two thousand six hundred. Of these, about four percent were women, some of whom were suicide-bombers. Of the eight hundred and eighty Israelis whom Arab terrorists killed, about thirty-one percent were women, few, if not none, of whom were combatants. The reason for the difference between these percentages is that the Arabs intentionally target Israeli civilians in supermarkets and cafes, where women are as likely to be killed as men. Israel, in contrast, went after terrorists, but unintentionally sometimes hit civilians as well.

"Israel has no reason to be ashamed of its conduct of the war. The Arabs, in contrast, if they ever manage to get a Palestinian state, will print postage stamps with images of suicide-bombers on them - vicious terrorists are their founding fathers."

Shlaim: "It is this brand of cruel Zionism that is the real enemy of what remains of liberal Israel and of the Jews outside Israel. It is the enemy because it fuels the flames of virulent and sometimes violent anti-Semitism. Israel's policies are the cause; hatred of Israel and anti-Semitism are the consequences."

Me: "It is your brand of cruel anti-Zionism, Shlaim, that is the real enemy of what remains of common sense and intellectual integrity regarding Israel. You and your kind fuel the flames of anti-Zionism and excuse Antisemitism. Misrepresenting Israel's policies is the cause; hatred of Israel and Antisemitism are the consequences."

Shlaim: "There has been much talk in recent years about "the new anti-Semitism." The argument, in a nutshell, is that the resurgence of anti-Semitism has little or nothing to do with Israel's behavior. Anti-Zionism is merely a surrogate, so the argument runs, for bad, old-fashioned anti-Semitism."

Me: "The resurgence of Antisemitism is a kind of dusting off old ideas that are permenently present in the attic of Western and Moslem culture. Antisemitism never went away, or at least not very far away. Criticizing specific Israeli policies is one thing; using classic Antisemitic motifs to do so is quite another - the cartoon in La Stampa showing Jesus being crucified, and comparing it to Israel's military counter-offensive against Arab terror is a classic example. There are many, many more."

Shlaim: "These arguments need to be addressed. First: What is anti-Semitism? Isaiah Berlin defined an anti-Semite as "someone who hates Jews more than is strictly necessary!" This mischievous definition has the merit of applying to all anti-Semitism, old as well as new."

Me: "Do you mean, Shlaim, that hating Jews somewhat IS 'strictly necessary'? Do you mean that hating Jews for defeating Arab terror is reasonable, but that hating Jews for, say, trying to take over the world or killing Jesus is not? Lord Isaiah Berlin's understood his humorous definition of Antisemitism as a joke. Do you?"

Shlaim: "But we need to look beyond the labels. Is there a lot of classic anti-Semitism about? Yes. Is anti-Semitism spreading in Europe? Yes, at an alarming rate. Do some people use anti-Zionism as a respectable cover for their despicable Judeophobia? Alas, yes again. What is the relative weight of hatred of Israel on the one hand and Judeophobia on the other in the making of the new anti-Semitism? I don't know."

Me: "Isn't your middle name Sherlock, Shlaim? Your whole article is based on the premise that you DO know."

Shlaim: "What I do know is that a lot of decent people, without any anti-Semitic baggage, are furious with Israel because of its oppression of the Palestinians. There is simply no getting away from the fact that attitudes toward Israel are changing as a result of its own shift towards the Zionism of the extreme right and of the radical rabbis. During the years of the Oslo peace process, Israel was in fact the favorite of the West because it was willing to withdraw from the occupied territories."

Me: "A lot of decent people have had a lot of Antisemitic baggage forced onto them by being constantly bombarded by articles like yours, in which you not only distort Israel's actions, but excuse Antisemitism as a result of those actions."

Shlaim: "Israel's image today is negative not because it is a Jewish state but because it habitually transgresses the norms of acceptable international behavior. Indeed, Israel is increasingly perceived as a rogue state, as an international pariah, and as a threat to world peace."

Me: "Congratulaions, Shlaim! You and others like you have succeeded in deceiving large numbers of innocent people who lack the intellectual background to see through your distortions."

Shlaim: "This perception of Israel is a major factor in the recent resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe and in the rest of the world. In this sense, Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews. It is a tragedy that a state that was built as a haven for the Jewish people after the Holocaust is now one of the least safe places on earth for Jews to live in. Israel ought to withdraw from the occupied territories not as a favor to the Palestinians but as a favor to itself and to world Jewry for, as Karl Marx noted, a people that oppresses another cannot itself remain free."

Me: "Karl WHOOOOOO, Shlaim? How can you wax so paranoid about the effect Zionism has on the image of diaspora Jews, but then quote with approval a Jew in whose name dozens of millions died in the Soviet Union, China, and elsewhere? That Marx was a Jew produced more unreasoning Antisemitism than anything Israel ever did.

"Quoting that tedious old has-been as a kind of moral thinker, instead of the rigorous Marxist Marx actually was, is another example of the decadence of the left in our day. Genuine Marxism used to be something solid and meaty - something you could accept or reject. In spite of the fact that absolutely nothing has turned out as Marx predicted, sentimental leftists refuse him his place in the garbage-can of history. You once again betray your own leftist bias, Shlaim, but in a thoroughly contemporary manner - by quoting Marx as a moralist, rather than as a (perfectly discredited) prophet of historical inevitability.

"By the way, surely it would have been more effective to call your article 'Is Zionism an enemy of the Jews today?', rather than 'Is Zionism today the real enemy of the Jews?', thus emphasizing the reversal you claim has occurred by placing 'today' at the end of the title. You could also lose the 'real' and change the 'the' to 'a'. Not even you would claim, I hope, that Zionism is the ONLY enemy Jews have by implying that all the other enemies are figments of our febrile Jewish imaginations.

"Shloppy thinking leads to shloppy writing, Shlaim."

.(Avi Shlaim is a British Academy Research Professor at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and author of "The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World".