Rights and wrongs in the Arab-Israeli conflict : to the anatomy of the forces of progress and reaction in the Middle East / by M. S. Arnoni ; Introduction by D. F. Fleming.

An expanded version of the author's essay that first appeared as a special, Sept. 1967, issue of the Minority of one.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- I. TRUTH BY ALLIANCE -- Reincarnations of Sheiks and Monarchs -- How to Become an Imperialist Without Really Trying -- Between Oil Interests and Israel -- Soviet "Zionism" -- On Trading Countries -- Ideological Consistency and Facts --II. FROM THE HISTORY OF ARAB NATIONALISM -- The Greatest Arab Hero -- Nasser and the Axis -- The Mufti and His Friends -- Where Nazism Remains Uncompromised -- Expertise on Jews -- Expertise on Judaism -- Arab Portraits and Self-portraits -- III. JEWISH NATIONALISM -- Between Moses and Marx -- Legitimized Anti-Semitism -- Perpetuity of Rights -- IV. RELATIONS BETWEEN NEIGHBORS -- Application for Genocide -- Rejected Alternatives -- Between Dialogue and Monologue -- IV. RELATIONS BETWEEN NEIGHBORS -- Relative Viability -- Suspensibility of Rights -- Arab Confessions -- Soviet Denials -- V. THE POLITICS OF HUMANITARIANISM -- Standards of Judgment -- Dayan The Terrible – Napalm -- Prisoners of War -- The Other Refugees -- A U.N. Report -- VI. ELEMENTS OF A SOLUTION -- Author's Postscript -- Books Cited -- Index

This book will be a surprise to many who are acquainted with the author's previous writings and with The Minority of One, of which he is founder and editor. M. S. Arnoni has for years been battling on political fronts, aligning himself with the Third World, the socialist countries, and revolutionary forces in Latin America, Africa and Asia. He has been a friend of revolutionary Cuba ever since the publication of the first issue of his monthly, in 1959. He has denounced U.S. interventions in Latin America. He has argued for years that U.S. foreign policy is in fact motivated by the aggressive and advantage-seeking intentions which its spokesmen have for so long imputed to the USSR and which they now impute to the People's Republic of China. His was perhaps the first voice in America consistently and radically denouncing the U.S. war in Vietnam as genocidal. There was never a question as to where Arnoni stood in the world alignment of political forces. By the logic of those alignments, Arnoni should now be among those who loudly denounce Israel and praise the Arab governments. He does the virtual opposite. But in doing the opposite, Arnoni is least of all in-consistent. His consistency, however, is not one of ideological structures nor one of political alignments; it is a consistency of human values. Neither his praise nor his denunciation emanate from a rigid political loyalty that may serve as a short-cut guide to the rights and wrongs of any situation. What is important to him, and what guides his attitude is an insistence that the individual must always exercise his own judgment and keep his con-science alert and well fed with skepticism. Any default on this, Arnoni views as related to the infamous Eichmann attitude of "I only obeyed orders." Arnoni has a special reason for this emphasis. He spent nearly six years in Nazi ghettos and concentration camps. In Auschwitz, he lost his parents and sister. This is the lesson he derived from his tragic experiences: "Having seen men like you and me committing the most heinous bestialities, I asked myself what accounted for such de basement. I concluded that it was a lack of moral self-reliance that caused them blindly to trust the state and its leaders. Mob psychology replaced a personal conscience." Because Arnoni rejects any mob psychology, including that of the Left, in favor of personal conscience, he could not accept the progressive bona fides of Arab nationalism any more than he could remain indifferent to Israel's desperate struggle for survival. "Ideological consistency is least of all achieve when we close our eyes and say that thing are as they are not," says the author. Because he is primarily concerned with the fate of h man beings, not of ideological diagrams, the Arab-Israeli issue, he parted company with most of his comrades. The real difference probably that while to many on the Left ideology is supreme, to Arnoni it is merely "a grammar of humanism."