Yes, it was in 1977. I was wearing muttonchops. That’s a link to a Library of Congress record titled “The Colonization of the West Bank Territories by Israel,” a Senate hearing on “The Question of West Bank Settlements and the Treatment of Arabs in the Israeli-Occupied Territories” dated October 17 and 18, 1977. Fouzi El-Asmar, the Palestinian poet and author of the amazing book To Be an Arab In Israel, testified. El-Asmar lived behind barbed wire for a while, near Lyd. Also testimony from the great Dr. Israel Shahak, Professor of Chemistry, Hebrew University, where he describes how settlements are first referred to by their Arabic names, and then later biblical names.
There is one pro-Israel witness, Yehuda Zvi Blum, a professor of international law at Hebrew U. Today it would be all Blums. You can see where Sen. Jim Abourezk asks him:
I personally know of the former president or existing
president of Birzeit University who told me that he was taken summarily
with a bag over his head and dumped across the Lebanese
border in the middle of the night with no trial and no hearing and
no charges. Let’s take that one example. Do you approve of that
OK: What’s happened to my country, the U.S., that we can’t call colonization colonization and have the likes of Saree Makdisi and Mazim Qumsiyeh and Jeff Halper testify before the Senate? I believe the reason is the rise of the meritocracy, the new order of Jews inside the establishment, the Israel lobby as a fact of our elite culture. In ’77 the WASPs were still au saddle. As I hasten to add every time I make this point, it’s a great thing, generally, for everybody that the bluebloods were deposed, them too. But when it comes to Middle East policy it means that there’s no debate.
Listen to the great Shahak:
First of all, I would like to point out that the creation of the settlements in a territory, whose inhabitants then cannot settle in the state which settles this territory violates, in my opinion, the right of equal justice, the right which says that the people should be treated under equal law. I oppose both inside the State of Israel and in every place and in every forum of the world the statement of my Prime Minister, Mr. Begin, that Jews have the right to settle in the land of Israel because rights should be given irrespective of religion, race, and nationality. As I said in my own country, I say here that if the Jews of Tel Aviv have the right to settle on the West Bank, then they have it only under conditions that a mutual and equal right should be given to all the people, let us say, people of the West Bank to settle in Tel Aviv. Every other situation violates the conditions of freedom as known in modern states and violates the very principles established by the American Revolution and of the French Revolution and the most fundamental rules of a modern democracy. It returns us to the principles which were employed by anti-Semites against Jews. I say this especially as a Jew.
And listen to this:
I believe that especially now the Israeli Government is creating a class of quislings which should not be confused by any means with the previous notables
of King Hussein. These last, are newly made men. Tn many cases they are criminals, as I have said, and it is the aim, like in many other atrocious colonial regimes, to make of those people leaders.
