"Any critique of israel should never neglect to specify the oppressive state of affairs endured by the citizens of syria (religious persecution), iran (persecution of homosexuals), egypt (persecution of homosexuals), lebanon (manipulation by minority) and saudi arabia (repression of women); otherwise, one risks the accusation of anti-jewish bias."

- Jude Folly

Jude,

While I am very critical of these Arab countries, and of Iran, I think all your suggestion would do is dilute any attempt to change the heinous policies of Israel. Just think about it: Had all criticism of the apartheid government of South Africa been preconditioned on being voiced only in the context of criticizing the human rights violations prevalent in many African countries, apartheid would still be with us today.

As a Palestinian, I can tell you that the evil the Zionist movement has unleashed on my people since the start of the twentieth century has been nothing short of incredible. Europe (and America) stood by, or assisted Israel, out of guilt or as a result of the power of the Israel Lobby.

While the world looked the other way, my people have been ethnically cleansed to create a pure Jewish state in a country where Jews were less than 3% of the population in 1917. Today Israeli leaders speak openly of Palestinians as a "demographic threat" (imagine being born a "demographic threat" in your own country). The Zionist movement continues to take over Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, cynically manipulating the peace "process" and further reducing any future Palestinian state to disjointed bantustans. The collective punishment of Gaza, where 1.5 million people are kept in the world's largest open door prison and murdered at will by the Israeli army is an absolute disgrace to all humanity in the 21st century.

The persecution the Jews endured is not an excuse for all these atrocities. In fact, "never again" should apply to today's victims as opposed to serving as an excuse to protect the perpetrators.

We have the neocons to thank for this!

The neocons - who are ideologically part of the fascist Likud party in Israel - subscribe to a policy of fear mongering and paranoia. Unfortunately, they were successful in driving through these policies that make little sense from a security standpoint, not to mention the disastrous consequences in economic and human relations terms.

As a die-hard supporter of Israel's fascist right wing, I suspect you feel quite at home in this atmosphere of self-perpetuating fear mongering.

First and foremost,Israel is about ethnic cleansing: The ethnic cleansing that took place in the past (and remains a taboo subject in American MSM), the slow motion ethnic cleansing taking place in the present time and the future ethnic cleansing that will take place when the circumstances allow it.

Israeli historian Benny Morris puts it in perspective in this interview where he justifies the ethnic cleansing of 1948 and sets the stage for future acts of ethnic cleansing (http://www.counterpunch.org/shavit01162004.html)

According to your findings, how many acts of Israeli massacre were perpetrated in 1948?

"Twenty-four. In some cases four or five people were executed, in others the numbers were 70, 80, 100. There was also a great deal of arbitrary killing. Two old men are spotted walking in a field - they are shot. A woman is found in an abandoned village - she is shot. There are cases such as the village of Dawayima [in the Hebron region], in which a column entered the village with all guns blazing and killed anything that moved.

"The worst cases were Saliha (70-80 killed), Deir Yassin (100-110), Lod (250), Dawayima (hundreds) and perhaps Abu Shusha (70). There is no unequivocal proof of a large-scale massacre at Tantura, but war crimes were perpetrated there. At Jaffa there was a massacre about which nothing had been known until now. The same at Arab al Muwassi, in the north. About half of the acts of massacre were part of Operation Hiram [in the north, in October 1948]: at Safsaf, Saliha, Jish, Eilaboun, Arab al Muwasi, Deir al Asad, Majdal Krum, Sasa. In Operation Hiram there was a unusually high concentration of executions of people against a wall or next to a well in an orderly fashion.

"That can't be chance. It's a pattern. Apparently, various officers who took part in the operation understood that the expulsion order they received permitted them to do these deeds in order to encourage the population to take to the roads. The fact is that no one was punished for these acts of murder. Ben-Gurion silenced the matter. He covered up for the officers who did the massacres."