Blood and Religion - The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Paperback)

What is Israel hoping to achieve with its recent pull-out from Gaza? Journalist Jonathan Cook, who spent five years reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, presents a lucid account of the motivations and implications behind the Gaza withdrawal and the building of Israel's 700km fence-cum-wall around the West Bank. At the heart of the issue, he argues, is demography. The wars of 1948 and 1967 brought hundreds of thousands of Palestinians under Israeli rule. The biggest obstacle to a two-state solution comes not from Palestinians living under occupation, but from Israel's own Palestinian citizens - one in five of the population. Since the outbreak of the Second Intifada, they have been campaigning for democratic reforms to transform Israel from a Jewish state into a state of all its citizens. predicament over the course of the Intifada: its lethal military repression of Palestinian dissent on both sides; its claims that Palestinian citizens and the Palestinian Authority have been secretly conspiring to subvert the Jewish state from within; its banning of marriages between Palestinian citizens and Palestinians living under occupation to prevent a right of return through the back door; its plans to redraw the Green Line to exclude the heartlands of its Palestinian citizens from Israel; and the nascent alliance between Israel's secular leadership and its zealous settlers against the country's Palestinian minority. The path of unilateral separation will lead to more and greater abuses of the rights of Israel's Palestinian citizens. And ultimately, argues the author, it will lead to a third, far deadlier Intifada.