India, July 5 -- 1You have been quite vocal in your criticism of the state of Israel. What gives you the courage to do this? I grew up in Israel. Like many others, I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and was subjected to Zionist indoctrination. I was a patriotic Israeli but the turning point was the June 1967 War, when Israel tripled its territory by capturing Golan Heights, the West Bank and the Sinai Peninsula, and became a colonial power. My real change of heart about Israel happened when I became a scholar of the Arab-Israeli conflict, went to the Israel State Archives and read the official documents. I found out that the official documents did not support the Zionist version of the conflict. They made it clear that Israel was much more responsible, much more aggressive and expansionist than the official propaganda would have us believe, and that was the foundation of my becoming a so-called "new historian". I am part of a small group of Israeli scholars; the other two being Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe. We are known collectively as the "new historians" or revisionist Israeli historians. We got together to mount a frontal attack on the foundational myths that have come to surround the birth of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. The core values of Judaism are altruism, truth, justice and peace. I, as a Jew, completely distance myself from Israel for what it is doing. The essence of Judaism is non-violence but the present Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu not only suppresses dissent but violates the human rights of the Palestinians on a daily basis. 2You identify as an Arab-Jew. How do people in Israel respond to this coming together of two identities? The term "Arab-Jew" is very controversial in Israel. Many Israelis deny that there is such a thing. According to them, if you are a Jew, you cannot be an Arab. I completely reject this argument, and I define myself as an Arab Jew because I am a Jew who lived in an Arab country. For me the hyphen in Arab-Jew does not divide; it unites. It is like a bridge between Arabs and Jews. This view is based on my own experience as a boy. For the first five years of my life, we lived in Baghdad. We were Iraqis whose religion happened to be Judaism, and it is not for my Zionist critics to tell me what my identity is. My family and I were very lucky because for us Muslim-Jewish coexistence was not an abstract idea. It was our everyday reality, and this reality was shattered by the establishment of Israel in 1948. My family and I were very happy in Iraq. We left Baghdad because of circumstances beyond our control. Israeli inculcated in me a new identity. It was only after I left Israel years later that I was able to re-examine my identity. I reinvented myself as an Arab-Jew partly as a way of distancing myself from Zionism and from the state of Israel....