ABSTRACT
Pride of place in Noam Chomsky's list of Israeli truth-tellers who dare to expose the evils of Zionism goes to the late Israel Shahak, applauded for "commitment to human rights that few people anywhere can equal". Thus Shahak, if only for an instant, was able to grant the possibility that the appropriate analogue for the Jewish state was Imperial Germany or Fascist Japan. The predictable nadir of Shahak's political activities was the publication of his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. The implications were clear: if East Europeans were justified in annihilating the Jewish communities in their midst, the peoples of the world are now entitled to inflict the same fate on the population of Israel. Since 1967, according to Tanya Reinhart, Israel has deliberately manufactured a religious mystique about the Western Wall with the aim of forestalling demands to demolish the Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Temple.
