That year, during Black September, I held a press conference in Washington DC, under the auspices of the Quakers.⁷⁷ It seemed to be a huge success. The journalists came straight from a press conference with Prime Minister Golda Meir, and showered me with questions. Almost all the important media were represented-TV networks, radio, the major newspapers. After the planned hour was up, they would not let me go and kept me talking for another hour and a half. But the next day, not a single word appeared in any of the media. Thirty-one years later, in October 2001 I held a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, and exactly the same thing happened: many of the media were there, they held me for another hour-and not a word, not a single word, was published.

In 1968, a very respected American publishing house (Macmillan) brought out a book of mine, Israel Without Zionists, which was later translated into eight other languages. The book described the Israeli-Arab conflict in a very different way, and proposed the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel-a revolutionary idea at the time. It dealt with the "two states for two peoples" solution long before it became a worldwide consensus, and with my proposal for Israel's integration in "the Semitic region." Not a single review appeared in the American media. I checked in one of the most important bookstores in New York and did not find the book. When I asked a salesman, he found it buried under a heap of volumes and put it on top. Half an hour later it was hidden again.

True, I am an Israeli patriot and was elected to the Knesset by Israeli voters. But I criticized the Israeli government-and that was enough.

The book by the two professors, who criticize the Israeli government from a different angle, cannot be buried any more. This fact, by itself, speaks volumes.

The book is based on an essay by the two that appeared last year in a British journal, after no American publication dared to touch it. Now a respected American publishing house has released it-an indication that something is moving. The situation has not changed, but it seems that it is now possible at least to talk about it.

Everything depends on timing-and apparently the time is now ripe for such a book, which will shock many good people in America. It is now causing an uproar.

The two professors are, of course, accused of anti-Semitism, racism, and hatred of Israel. What Israel? It is the lobby itself that hates a large part of Israel. In recent years it has shifted even more to the right. Some of its constituent groups-such as the neo-cons who pushed the United

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