Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was widely criticized for his handling of that operation while heading caretaker government. Olmert told his Cabinet at its first meeting on Sunday that he would tolerate no illegal West Bank settlement outposts.

Police sawed through a barricaded metal door in the occupied building. Inside, they appealed to the settlers - some with toddlers and babies - to leave peacefully, and some agreed. But others had to be dragged out, including a woman whose bawling infant was carried out by officers.

Jewish settlers outside the building tried to force their way in after police sawed off the door. But police dragged the struggling protesters away, sometimes slapping them to stop their thrashing.

Three squatter families and 27 young sympathizers from the Hebron area were removed from the building, police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld said.

Hours before police stormed in, settlers hurled firebombs, stones and bottles at security forces. Nineteen security forces were injured, and 17 settlers were arrested, Rosenfeld said. Neither he nor rescue services could say how many settlers were wounded, but Israel's Army Radio said seven were slightly injured.

Hebron, a city holy to Jews and Muslims, is home to about 160,000 Palestinians and some 500 ultranationalist Jewish settlers who live in heavily fortified enclaves.

Three settler couples and their eight children moved into the abandoned home near the settler enclave of Avraham Avinu about a month ago, presenting documents allegedly showing they had rented the property from its Palestinian owner. Israeli authorities later determined the documents were forged, and the Supreme Court ordered the squatters removed.

"It is our house, bought with our money, and the court wronged us," Rabbi Israel Shlussel told Israel Radio before police stormed in. "Justice was not done."

About 700 police, reinforced by 1,000 soldiers, were mobilized for the operation. Rosenfeld said border police would increase the number of patrols in the Hebron area over the next few days to maintain public order.

In the first meeting of his Cabinet on Sunday, Olmert took a hard line against unauthorized settler activity.

"In every case where the law is violated, we will respond without compromise, and we won't reconcile ourselves to illegal facts on the ground," his office quoted him as saying.

A government-commissioned report issued last year says settlers have established 105 unauthorized outposts in the past decade. The outposts are designed to break up Palestinian areas and try to prevent establishment of a Palestinian state.

Israel promised the U.S. it would dismantle about two dozen outposts set up since 2001, but little action has been taken.

Olmert ordered the evacuation of unauthorized buildings in the West Bank outpost of Amona in February, an operation that critics said used excessive force.

But Olmert plans go further, hoping to pull settlers out of much of the West Bank by 2010 while fortifying Israel's three major settlement blocs. He contends the plan is necessary to improve Israel's security and guarantee its future as a democracy with a Jewish majority.

But many West Bank settlers are observant Jews and believe that God promised the land, which the Palestinians claim as part of a future state, to the Jewish people. They have promised fiercer resistance than Gaza settlers showed when they were uprooted over the summer.

In other violence, Palestinian hospital officials said a 55-year-old Palestinian civilian was killed Sunday in Israeli shelling of northern Gaza. But the Israeli army denied firing at Beit Lahia, the area where the man was killed.

Israel has been shelling the area in recent weeks to try to curb Palestinian rocket attacks on southern Israel. The artillery fire has killed civilians in the past, including a 60-year-old farmer on Saturday.

In March, the World Bank had predicted that by the end of 2006, average personal income would sink by 30 per cent, unemployment would jump from a pre-election level of 23 per cent to about 40 per cent, and the proportion of people living in poverty would climb from 44 per cent in 2005 to 67 per cent.

In a report released ahead of a meeting of Mideast negotiators and major donors on Tuesday, the bank concluded that "these projections now appear too rosy." Revised projections will be issued next month, it said.

Donor assistance has dropped more sharply than anticipated, and Israeli restrictions on the movement of Palestinian people and goods have been tightened, the World Bank said. Further pressure has come from banks that have withheld services to the Palestinian government, including The Arab Bank, which has informed the Palestinian Authority that it will no longer host its Central Treasury Account, the report said.

In light of evolving developments, 2006 is shaping up to be "the worst year in the West Bank and Gaza's dismal recent economic history," it added.

The interrupted cash flows have implications for the economy, security and governance, the World Bank said.

The Palestinian Authority has been unable for the past two months to pay government employees who provide for nearly one-third of the Palestinian population. Should this situation persist, a humanitarian crisis is liable to erupt, violence is liable to grow as discipline among unpaid security personnel breaks down, and the government could cease to function, the World Bank cautioned.

In a letter to donors ahead of the meeting on Tuesday, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned of an impending humanitarian crisis, a Palestinian official said.

"The recent international decision to withhold from the Palestinian Authority may frustrate, rather than accelerate, the peace process," the official quoted the letter as saying. "Without the injection of much-needed funds into the Palestinian economy, a serious humanitarian catastrophe is imminent."

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the contents of the letter with the media.

European donors have been exploring payment mechanisms that would bypass the Hamas-led government, and sustain people's incomes and basic public services.

The World Bank argued against setting up a new mechanism to handle salary payments, saying that could take too much time, and proposed operating through its existing emergency program.

But other voices have emerged, on the airwaves and in print, to bypass the facile attacks and address crucial issues. If this keeps up, the uproar over what Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt had to say could invigorate public discourse about Washington's policies toward a country that consistently has received a bigger U.S. aid package for a longer period than any other nation.

In April, syndicated columnist Molly Ivins put her astute finger on a vital point. "In the United States, we do not have full-throated, full-throttle debate about Israel," she wrote. "In Israel, they have it as a matter of course, but the truth is that the accusation of anti-Semitism is far too often raised in this country against anyone who criticizes the government of Israel. ... I don't know that I've ever felt intimidated by the knee-jerk 'you're anti-Semitic' charge leveled at anyone who criticizes Israel, but I do know I have certainly heard it often enough to become tired of it. And I wonder if that doesn't produce the same result: giving up on the discussion."

The point rings true, and it's one of the central themes emphasized by Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt.

If the barriers to democratic discourse can be overcome, the paper's authors say, the results could be highly beneficial: "Open debate will expose the limits of the strategic and moral case for one-sided U.S. support and could move the U.S. to a position more consistent with its own national interest, with the interests of the other states in the region, and with Israel's long-term interests as well."

Outsized support for Israel has been "the centerpiece of U.S. Middle Eastern policy," the professors contend - and the Israel lobby makes that support possible. "Other special-interest groups have managed to skew America's foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest," the paper says. One of the consequences is that "the United States has become the de facto enabler of Israeli expansion in the occupied territories, making it complicit in the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinians."

In the United States, "the lobby's campaign to quash debate about Israel is unhealthy for democracy," Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt assert. They point to grave effects on the body politic: "The inability of Congress to conduct a genuine debate on these important issues paralyzes the entire process of democratic deliberation."

While their paper overstates the extent to which pro-Israel pressures determine U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, a very powerful lobby for Israel clearly has enormous leverage in Washington. And the professors make a convincing case that the U.S. government has been much too closely aligned with Israel - to the detriment of human rights, democracy and other principles that are supposed to constitute American values.

The failure to make a distinction between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel routinely stifles public debate. When convenient, pro-Israel groups in the United States will concede that it's possible to oppose Israeli policies without being anti-Semitic. Yet many of Israel's boosters reflexively pull out the heavy artillery of charging anti-Semitism when their position is challenged.

Numerous American Jewish groups dedicated to supporting Israel are eager to equate Israel with Judaism. Sometimes they have the arrogance to depict the country and the religion as inseparable. For example, in April 2000, a full-page United Jewish Appeal ad in The New York Times proclaimed: "The seeds of Jewish life and Jewish communities everywhere begin in Israel."

Like many other American Jews who grew up in the 1950s and '60s, I went door to door with blue-and-white UJA cans to raise money for planting trees in Israel. I heard about relatives who had died in concentration camps during the Holocaust two decades earlier and about relatives who had survived and went to Israel. In 1959, my family visited some of them, on a kibbutz and in Tel Aviv.

The 1960 blockbuster movie Exodus dramatized the birth of Israel a dozen years earlier. As I remember, Arabs were portrayed in the picture as cold-blooded killers while the Jews who killed Arabs were presented as heroic fighters engaged in self-defense.

The film was in sync with frequent media messages that lauded Jews for risking the perilous journey to Palestine and making the desert bloom, as though no one of consequence had been living there before.

The Six-Day War in June 1967 enabled Israel to expand the territory it controlled several times over, in the process suppressing huge numbers of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Their plights and legitimate grievances got little space in the U.S. media.

In 1969, the independent American journalist I. F. Stone expressed hope for "a reconstructed Palestine of Jewish and Arab states in peaceful coexistence." He contended that "to bring it about, Israel and the Jewish communities of the world must be willing to look some unpleasant truths squarely in the face. ... One is to recognize that the Arab guerrillas are doing to us what our terrorists and saboteurs of the Irgun, Stern and Haganah did to the British. Another is to be willing to admit that their motives are as honorable as were ours. As a Jew, even as I felt revulsion against the terrorism, I felt it justified by the homelessness of the surviving Jews from the Nazi camps and the bitter scenes when refugee ships sank, or sank themselves, when refused admission to Palestine.

"The best of Arab youth feels the same way; they cannot forget the atrocities committed by us against villages like Deir Yassin, nor the uprooting of the Palestinian Arabs from their ancient homeland, for which they feel the same deep ties of sentiment as do so many Jews, however assimilated elsewhere."

When I crossed the Allenby Bridge from Jordan into the West Bank 15 years ago, I spoke with a 19-year-old border guard who was carrying a machine gun. He told me that he'd emigrated from Brooklyn, N.Y., a few months earlier. He said the Palestinians should get out of his country.

In East Jerusalem, I saw Israeli soldiers brandishing rifle butts at elderly women in a queue. Some in the line reminded me of my grandmothers, only these women were Arab.

Today, visitors to the Web site of the Israeli human-rights group B'Tselem can find profuse documentation about systematic denial of Palestinian rights and ongoing violence in all directions. Since autumn 2000, in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, according to the latest figures posted, the number of Israelis killed by Palestinians has totaled 998 and the number of Palestinians killed by Israelis has totaled 3,466.

Overall, in the American news media, the horrible killings of Israelis by Palestinian suicide bombers get front-page and prime-time coverage while the horrible killings of Palestinians by Israelis get relatively scant and dispassionate coverage.

If the U.S. news media were to become committed to a single standard of human rights, the shift would transform public discourse about basic Israeli policies - and jeopardize the U.S. government's support for them. It is against just such a single standard that the epithet of "anti-Semitism" is commonly wielded. From the viewpoint of Israel and its supporters, the ongoing threat of using the label helps to prevent U.S. media coverage from getting out of hand. Journalists understand critical words about Israel to be hazardous to their careers.

In the real world, bigotry toward Jews and support for Israel have long been independent variables. For instance, as Oval Office tapes attest, President Richard M. Nixon was anti-Semitic and did not restrain himself from expressing that virulent prejudice in private. Yet he was a big admirer of the Israeli military and a consistent backer of Israel's government.

Now, the neoconservative agenda for the Middle East maintains the U.S. embrace of Israel with great enthusiasm. And defenders of that agenda often resort to timeworn tactics for squelching debate.

Last fall, when I met with editors at a newspaper in the Pacific Northwest, a member of the editorial board responded to my reference to neocons by declaring flatly that "neocon" is an "anti-Semitic" term. The absurd claim would probably amuse the most powerful neocons in the U.S. government's executive branch today, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, neither of whom is Jewish.

Over the past couple of decades, a growing number of American Jews have seen their way clear to oppose Israeli actions. Yet their voices continue to be nearly drowned out in major U.S. media outlets by Israel-right-or-wrong outfits such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.

As with all forms of bigotry, anti-Semitism should be condemned. At the same time, these days, America's biggest anti-Semitism problem has to do with the misuse of the label as a manipulative tactic to short-circuit debate about Washington's alliance with Israel.

Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and the author of "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." E-mail to: mediabeat@igc.org.

Last year, in a long overdue observance, the General Assembly held a special session to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps.

And this year, on 27 January, we marked the first of what will now be an annual international day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust.

The United Nations is, I hope and believe, what it always should be -- a place where Jews can feel at home.

It is also an Organization within which, more and more, the State of Israel enjoys the same rights and responsibilities as every other member. My good friend Danny Gillerman is now serving as one of the General Assembly's vice-presidents. And for some years Israel has been participating in one of the Assembly's regional groups -- the West European and Others Group -- in New York. I hope the same group will soon find ways to include Israel in its deliberations in Geneva and Vienna, too.

We should all be pleased about these developments, because our world faces immense challenges. We need the Jewish people -- and especially the American Jewish Committee -- to make its full contribution, on every item on the global agenda.

Next Tuesday, the General Assembly will elect the first members of the UN's new Human Rights Council. As you know, this Council will replace the old Commission on Human Rights, which in recent times discredited itself by focusing selectively on violations in a few States, while ignoring those in others.

By contrast, the new Council is meant to eliminate double standards, in part by regularly reviewing the human rights record of all countries, starting with its own members. Moreover, those members must uphold the highest principles of human rights, and be elected directly and individually by an absolute majority of the General Assembly. And any members that commit gross and systematic human rights violations can have their membership suspended.

As you know, the United States decided not to present its own candidature this first time. But it has pledged to support and cooperate with the Council with a view to running for a seat in the near future. I trust that the Administration, and also civil society groups like yours, will use their influence to help ensure that other States with a strong and genuine commitment to human rights are elected, and that they give the Council a fresh start, without the baggage that accompanied the Commission.

What we are really celebrating today is the fact that no one asks you to choose between your Jewish identity and your American identity. On the contrary, everyone understands that America is enriched by the distinctive contribution that you can make as Jews. That was not always true in the past. That it is true today is due in part to the tireless work of the AJC, and it is a wonderful example to all other countries where communities of different faith or tradition live side by side. I hope all countries can learn from, and be inspired by, your experience.

Indeed, I hope that within my lifetime, just as in this country, where Jews are accepted without question as full citizens, by all their fellow citizens, so Israel will be accepted without question as a member by the whole family of nations.

We all know what that means: a peaceful Middle East, at the heart of which will be two States, Israel and Palestine, living side by side, within secure borders, in peace and with mutual respect.

I welcome the passion with which Prime Minister Olmert spoke, on the night of Israel's recent general election, about the need to create the conditions in which both peoples will be able to fulfil their dreams of prosperity and peace.

We are all painfully aware that he and President Abbas must overcome enormous obstacles in order to achieve true security for Israelis and statehood for Palestinians. Some of those obstacles seem to have become even more insurmountable in recent weeks and months.

But I refuse to despair. There is still abundant evidence that peace is what the majority of both Israelis and Palestinians want, even if each is reluctant to believe that the other wants it, too. And it is still the case that, while interim measures might bring interim relief, a true and lasting peace can be achieved only through a genuine agreement.

I know that it is easy to speak of this dream, and much harder to turn it into reality. But I pledge that the United Nations, with its partners in the Quartet, will be there to help, working with any who truly seek peace until that goal is achieved.

As we mark this milestone in your history, I hope we will also recognize the deep, productive ties between our organizations. Our common objectives of preventing genocide and protecting human rights bind us together in a global mission. Suffering, wherever it exists, justice, wherever it is needed -- these are the main claims on our energies. With this thread that connects our organizations, I hope we can weave a strong and lasting fabric of peace.

Congratulations again on a century of action and achievement.

Thank you very much.

WASHINGTON-Editors of the London Review of Books are standing by their decision to publish a paper by Harvard academic dean Stephen Walt and University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer, entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. The paper promotes the false and reactionary theory that U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is manipulated by a Jewish lobby with support from a network of "neoconservative gentiles."

A March 30 article by James Petras, a professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton, tries to provide an "analysis" of why this is the case, by claiming that Jews are disproportionately represented among finance capitalists resulting in an equally disproportionate Jewish influence over U.S. foreign policy. The article is posted on the antiwar website AxisofLogic.com. Petras is looked to by many on the left in the United States and Latin America as a socialist.

Others on the left have endorsed these views. In a column in the April 24 Nation, Perry Anderson, editor of the New Left Review and history professor at University of California, Los Angeles, praised the Walt/Mearsheimer paper. He called it a "genuinely critical reflection on American foreign policy, from thinkers who have earned the title 'realist.'"

The conspiracy theories peddled in Petras's article and the Harvard paper, and backed by others on the left, leave the U.S. capitalist class and the profit system off the hook as the root cause of the devastating conditions imposed on working people worldwide. At the same time these "theories" fan the flames of Jew-hatred and American nationalism. So far the U.S. left-from the Communist Party USA to the Workers World Party-has been silent on this issue.

The 83-page paper by Walt and Mearsheimer argues that the unmatched power of the "Israel Lobby" leads the U.S. government to subordinate "American national interests" to those of Israel. According to the document, this lobby has the backing of pro-Israel neoconservative politicians like former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle. Walt and Mearsheimer claim that the Israel Lobby also controls the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, and holds the leading position in several foreign policy research institutes, among them the Brookings Institution. The Militant already analyzed the implications of this tract in the article, "The myth of the 'neoconservative' and 'Israel Lobby' conspiracy: How U.S. foreign policy shifted after Cold War," in its May 1 issue.

'London Review of Books'
An edited version of the Harvard paper appeared in the March 23 London Review of Books. Despite receiving what they describe as "a great many letters" criticizing its publication, some of which they reproduced, the editors of the literary journal said in the April 20 issue they stand by their decision to publish it. They also announced they will run a reply by Walt and Mearsheimer to the letters in the magazine's next issue.

The magazine's editors also noted that some of the letters congratulating the authors of the paper are of an "anti-Semitic nature." One of them applauded Walt and Mearsheimer for having exposed a "secret Jewish conspiracy," and its author felt the need to spell it "JEWISH conspiracy." Nonetheless they asserted that what the letters supporting and opposing the article have in common is that they "come from people who appear not to have read the piece, and who seem incapable of distinguishing between criticism of Israeli or U.S. government policy and anti-Semitism."

One of the letters was from Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz. Among other points, he took exception to two of the paper's central arguments-the United States has become a target of "terrorism" because of its support for Israel and that Washington and Tel Aviv have different, if not conflicting, interests in the Middle East.

"In fact bin Laden was primarily motivated by the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia," Dershowitz writes. He is referring to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden who along with the leader of other Islamic jihadist movements say their goal is to overthrow "apostate" regimes and establish Islamic states in majority Arab countries. For bin Laden and these groups, the rulers of Saudi Arabia are "infidels" controlling and profaning the holy sites of Islam.

Another letter came from Robert Pfaltzgraff of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis. The institution was one of many "think tanks" at which Walt and Mearsheimer claim the Israel Lobby has a "commanding presence." Pfaltzgraff wrote that "to the extent that such studies support Israel or any other states in the region, this is the result of an independent analysis of US needs and interests."

'Jewish bankers'
In his article Petras comes to the defense of Walt and Mearsheimer. He denounces the "virulent" campaign against the professors' "well documented" paper as another example of the "growing tyranny of the pro-Israel minority over our civil liberties."

He then goes on to assert that a "a significant affluent minority of prominent Jewish banking and real estate millionaires are active in financing and promoting Israeli policy either directly or through pro-Israel lobbies."

Petras even infers a connection between alleged Jewish prominence in the garment industry-as owners and union "bosses"-and the decline in wages and union membership for garment workers. "No doubt the ethnic-class differences between the six-figure salaried Jewish labor bosses and the low paid Asian and Latino workers and the common class-ethnic positions of the labor bosses and the manufacturers facilitated these failed policies," he says.

No blood for Jews?
"The Jewish and Gentile critics of the war deliberately exclude the role of the minority of wealthy Jews and their political lobbies in shaping U.S. policy in the Middle East by focusing on the U.S. and overseas oil companies ('No blood for oil!')," Petras writes. "Jewish lobbies," he adds, "were far more pro-war than the oil industry."

The dangerous logic of such arguments peddling Jew hatred (to say "anti-Semitism" would be putting it mildly) should not be lost on working people. Such conspiracy theories have been the stock-in-trade of ultrarightists and fascists-mortal enemies of the working class and its allies. Petras's arguments also point to the political evolution of many middle-class "socialists" like him. The banner of opponents of the imperialist war against Iraq in 1990-91 was "No blood for oil!" Now, Petras says, it should be changed to "No blood for Israel!" or, by implication, to "No blood for Jews."