"We have to make sure that no Palestinian individual remains under our occupation. If they (Palestinians) escape then it is good; but if anyone of them remains, then he should be exterminated", the fanatic rabbi added in his article.

Falay is not the first to have called for such extreme measures. Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the Kach movement, called for "the transfer of Israel's Arab population to Arab (or other) lands." (As it states on the group's website). Followers of Kahane have been connected to a number of murders of Palestinians, particularly in the Hebron area in the southern West Bank. In the most well-known of such attacks, 29 Palestinians praying in the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron were gunned down by Baruch Goldstein, a follower of Kahane, in 1994, with Israeli soldiers looking on and allowing the gunman to reload his automatic machine gun and continue killing innocent civilians. In response to that massacre, the Israeli authorities punished the Palestinian victims by taking over the Ibrahimi mosque and turning half of it into a synagogue, where Israeli settlers go to pray each week. And each year, on the anniversary of the massacre, Israeli settlers in Hebron dress up like Baruch Goldstein and parade through the streets of Hebron, firing guns in the air.

The Kach movement recognizes the 'transfer' of 750,000 Palestinians that took place in 1948 in order for the state of Israel to be created on their land, but argues on their website that this 'transfer' was incomplete, and that all Palestinians must be sent away, or killed, in order for Israel to remain a 'Jewish state'. Their platform reads, "In a genuinely 'JEWISH State', how can an Arab be an equal when that State has an Independence Day celebrating his defeat. Its flag isn't that of its people. He isn't trusted to serve in the army. His cousin born in Haifa [sic] and fled during the 1948 War of Independence cannot return... yet any Jew who never lived there before is welcomed with open arms. In short, Israel is his enemy's country, not his. So how can an Arab truly be a loyal citizen in a Jewish State? Simply, they cannot, and they must go!"

The idea of extermination of Palestinians, or their 'transfer' into other countries, is not only a view held by extremists on the fringes of society. Prominent Israeli politicians have also made calls for a 'transfer', or ethnic cleansing, based on race. Just last week, on September 11, 2006, an Israeli member of Parliament called explicitly for the transfer of Palestinians (whow he referred to as 'Arabs') from the West Bank (which he referred to as 'Judea and Samaria', the biblical name for the region where the majority of Palestinians now live).

"We have to expel most Arabs from Judea and Samaria," Eitam said at a memorial service for Lt. Amihai Merhavia, a soldier who was killed in South Lebanon in July. "We can't deal with all these Arabs, and we can't give up the territory, because we've already seen what they do there. Some of them might have to stay under certain conditions, but most of them will have to go." Despite a law that would strip Israeli parliament members of their immunity to prosecution if they are found make explicitly racist statements, no investigation of Eitam has occurred on this matter, and there was no condemnation of his statement by the Israeli government.

Mr Howells, who visited the region in July to oversee the evacuation of UK nationals, was cross-questioned by MPs of the UK Parliament's influential Foreign Affairs Committee.

The minister alleged that Hezbollah had hidden caches of arms in schools and mosques, and rockets in apartment blocks in southern Lebanon.

"What I saw out there begs many questions about the way we try to define what constitutes a war crime in the future. I think we have to do a huge amount of reassessment in the future about how we define this kind of warfare," he said.

"Every time the Israelis responded... and smashed a building down, every picture of a burnt child and every picture of a building that had housed people [where] there was now pancake on the ground was propaganda for Hezbollah.

"And if an organisation like Hezbollah is ruthless enough to exploit those tactics, then one wonder how it can ever be possible in the future to, if you like, win the justice on your side against such an enemy."

Israeli tactics

Kim Howells has a reputation for plain speaking, says BBC correspondent Rob Broomby.

In front of the parliamentary committee, Mr Howells defended his government's handling of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and its initial reluctance to call for a ceasefire.

He said they had wanted one that would last and he claimed they had now been "vindicated", although their position had generated hostility in Arab countries.

He called it a "horrific and terrible conflict", but he rejected suggestions the UK and US governments had stood back to allow the Israelis time to destroy Hezbollah.

On the question of the effectiveness of Israeli tactics against Hezbollah, he said:

"They assumed that an airborne assault would probably draw down upon them less international criticism than if they tried to reorganise that territory and that's obviously my assessment of what was going on.

"I thought it was the wrong tactics - not because of some notion of disproportionality, which I find a very difficult concept, but because I think it was not effective in reducing the ability of Hezbollah to survive.

"And in the end of course... Hezbollah emerged stronger for it."

During a trip to Lebanon during the 34-day conflict Mr Howells appeared to criticise Israel's military tactics, saying they were "very difficult, I think, to understand".

"The destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so many children and so many people... You know, if they're chasing Hezbollah, then go for Hezbollah. You don't go for the entire Lebanese nation," he said.

His remarks came a day after Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh from the Islamic militant Hamas group declared that he would not lead a coalition that recognised Israel.

The Palestinian President's Fatah Party and Hamas had agreed earlier this month in principle to form a national unity government, having made a deal that said the government would seek to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel, which implies recognition.

Last Thursday Abbas addressed the United Nations saying that a national unity government would recognise the Jewish state.

Jewish organisations cross every red line

Like many innocent persons I've thought that as I have left Jerusalem for Tel Aviv, I'll be able to live without Jewish interference, and will never have to use the Jewish services. I'll be able to fuck during my periods, and with great pleasure, I've thought. And I erred twice.

At first, let me tell you of my neighbour Etti. She was born and brought up in Jerusalem, in Bukhara neighbourhood, a free one in those days. When the neighbourhood was Jewified, Etti moved to Ramoth, and Ramoth became Jewified, so her mother moved to Ramath Eshkol. Believe it or not, now Etti's mother is the only non-Jewish person in the building. Etti ran away to Tel Aviv, to light, and she lives for 20 years in Arnon st, as non-Jewish as it can be. The tenants are middle-aged bourgeois non-Jews, but now there is an invasion of Moroccan Jews in noticeable amounts!

"On a corner of my street, there was a small prayer-house, usually visited by nice respectful Germans during feasts. - told me Etti. During last two-three years, the Moroccan Jews took over the prayer house, and they changed everything. Now it looks like Bukhara neighbourhood that I escaped so many years ago. People come there even on the weekdays. Now we see women in shabis and bearded men who pray loudly. An opera singer in our house decided to act against them, and he turned on his stereo system from his balcony. Now they play music softer, but there are so many Jews hanging around, that surely in short time they will rent flats around here. It's not that I hate Jews, but can't they go elsewhere? After all, I can't move into a house they live in. Why they are permitted to intrude into our goyish life?

If it is not enough, in 200 meters away, they build up a Center for Spirituality, and there they bring in - Russians, and turn them into Jews, for God's sake! Only that we were short of!

P.S. For Jews - read religious Jews; but anyway these are the only Jews the Germans and Russians, Spaniards and Poles had to deal with for centuries, until they came to the conclusion of Ms Livneh: one can't live with them!

Mishandled, the July 12th Hezbollah raid that seized two Israeli soldiers could certainly have brought down the government. But the incident was no unprecedented failure of Israeli deterrence. Hezbollah had been trying to capture Israeli soldiers in cross-border raids all year. Israel's government had a choice in how they responded this time.

Why the choice for war?

Some say it was responding to a message from its sponsor. Charles Krauthammer, the doyen of U.S. neo-cons wrote in the Washington Post of Israel's rare opportunity to demonstrate what it can do for its great American patron'. Washington's green light for Israel was no favour, he said. America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat'.

But why pursue this objective by force of arms, at the cost of hundreds of lives, before even considering the diplomatic option that was available from day one?

Partly because Israeli society holds a longstanding inclination towards overwhelming force preferably involving collective punishment whenever an Arab force militarily defies it. But where does this prejudice come from, and why has it proved so pernicious?

A hint of the answer came on June 26th, a day after the Shin Bet brutally squashed a religious peace initiative aimed at resolving Israel's other 'existential' crisis in Gaza (see

Then, Amir Peretz, Israel's Defense Minister, explained why a military response to the seizure of Corporal Gilad Shalit in Kerem Shalom was needed. 'I will not permit the blood of our citizens to be shed,' he growled. 'Our hand is open for peace, but closed into a fist in the face of terror.'

Peretz' use of the 'clenched fist' metaphor was telling. In Jewish lore, it traces back to a song the Jewish Partisans sang as they marched through the forests towards Warsaw:

'We strike like the wolf strikes,
We come like the wind and are gone,
And the fascist feels our clenched fist,
Our clenched fist, our clenched fist...'

The clenched fist allegory evokes two defining characteristics of Israeli Jewish identity, eternal victimhood and its Zionist riposte, the 'new Jew'. Early Zionist leaders such as David Ben Gurion, Ze'ev Jabotinsky and Arthur Ruppin were anxious to construct Israeli national identity around this unyielding and aggressive prototype. Nordau called it 'muscular Judaism'.

Revulsion at the victimhood of the 'trembling ghetto Jew', weak, stooped and debased by two millennia in exile, fed its modish alter-ego: a robust and virile Israeli, implacable, resolute, and tied to the soil by blood.

Zionist groups had not been distinguished in their physical resistance to anti-Semites in Europe but they were gladiatorial in their assaults on Palestinian communities. Moshe Dayan was frank about it: 'We are a generation of settlers and without the steel helmet and gun barrel, we shall not be able to plant a tree or build a house."

The settlers' houses and allotments mushroomed - at the expense of a people without a land who, forced from their homes and denied civic rights, were to be holed up behind ghetto walls or else exiled into an Arab Diaspora, there, perhaps, to live as rootless cosmopolitans.

Those who resisted learned how Moshe Dayan's steel helmets and gun barrels provided their housing insurance. 'If we try to search for the Arab it has no value, but if we harass the nearby village,' Dayan said, 'then the population there comes out against the [infiltrators]. The method of collective punishment so far has proved effective.'

Today, it is a common sense notion for most of the world that collectively punishing civilians is more of a provocation than a deterrent. But historically, the practice was effective in bowing the heads of one ethnic group: the Jews of old.

During the 1648 Chmielnitzki pogroms, which claimed around 250,000 Jewish lives, for instance, the Jews of Tulczyn refused to even attack the Polish nobles who had betrayed them to the Cossacks. Their community elders had told them: 'We are in exile among the nations. If you lay hands upon the nobles, then all kings of Christianity will hear of it and take revenge on all our brethren in the exile.'

Eventually, the Zionist movement placed the blame for such catastrophes on the lack of any European territory from which to organise self-defence. But no Arab can get with their liberation programme in Palestine because the only roles it offers them are stand-in victims in someone else's psychodrama. The programme's mitigating plea, the narrative of a Phoenix state rising from six million ashes, came at a heavy price - for Jews too.

As successive waves of migrants arrived in the holy land, the "new Jew trope required them to prove their worth as Israelis. Holocaust survivors became the most merciless warriors of 1948; Arab Jews, the most fearful anti-Arab racists. The meek Orthodox establishment won their spurs as gun-toting hilltop bigots, while Russians today flock to Avigdor Liebermann's Yisrael Beitenu party of ethnic cleansing. They marched there all with fingernails piercing their palms.

Soon, the memory of anti-Semitic persecutions will dim. In Israel they have already merged with 1948, 1967 and the country's subsequent wars as battles for the survival of the Jewish people. Together they now form a powerful assumed collective memory, with its own tabloid shorthand that can be invoked at will.

On July 12th, for example, the mass-circulation Israeli newspaper Maariv compared Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah to Hitler, saying that it left Israel with 'one choice: To respond with might, in one fell swoop, unless it does not wish to live!' The resonance with Menachem Begin's justification for carpet bombing Beirut in 1982 was unavoidable. Then, Begin had compared Yasser Arafat to Hitler, hiding in a bunker surrounded by civilians.

For most of the 34 days of war, Israel's political leadership was sophisticated enough to speak the lingo of US soundbites. As torn bodies were pulled from the Lebanese wreckage, Ehud Olmert talked of a national moment 'of transcendence, of purification' while the chief of the Northern Command, Major General Udi Adam, suggested not counting the dead.

But on the bus stops of Tel Aviv, the posters bellowed a simpler message: 'Together we will win'. The catch is that even victory would not staunch the pain of the new Jew, whose raison d'etre is a misplaced fight against terrifying ghosts that remind him from whence he has come.

Safer to say the phoenix will prevail, and each time more barbaric. For the poisoned bird of prey feeds on the hatred it creates as it hovers above the ruins, unable to fly, its talons clenched and bloody, its screech of 'a nation's right to self-defence' an agonised cry for help that might better translate as 'Stop me before I kill again'.

Washington listens, and sends more bombs.

Arthur Neslen is a journalist working in Tel Aviv. The first Jewish employee of Aljazeera.net and a four-year veteran of the BBC, Neslen has contributed to numerous periodicals over the years, including The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent and Red Pepper. His first book, Occupied Minds: A journey through the Israeli psyche, was recently published by Pluto Press.

This piece originally appeared in Tikkun.

The suggestion was rejected immediately by Israel which insisted that any Palestinian government recognise Israel, renounce violence and abide by past agreements signed by the Palestinian Authority.

"The national unity government does not recognise Israel in its political programme. The government and the Hamas movement will be against recognising Israel," Ahmed Yussef, Haniya's political adviser, told AFP.

"Our position to solve the crisis is a 10-year truce which will be good for stability and prosperity," he added, calling on the Israelis to withdraw from Palestinian territory occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.

Yussef said a "third party" should be responsible for mediating the truce without specifying who he thought should be involved in possible negotiations.

Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas told the UN General Assembly on Thursday that any new Palestinian government will recognise Israel.

"I would like to reaffirm that any future Palestinian government will commit to all the agreements that the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority have committed to," he said in a speech.

Hamas, which won landmark parliamentary elections in January, and Fatah, the party led by Abbas, have agreed to set up a unity government, based on a national reconciliation document drawn up in June which implicitly recognises Israel.

Hamas leaders say, however, the accord does not include recognition of Israel and Abbas froze negotiations before leaving for New York.

Yussef said a new Palestinian government "will respect the agreements (signed with Israel) if they do not contradict Palestinian rights and principles".

Haniya's adviser told AFP that Abbas could arrive in Gaza as early as Saturday to meet Haniya to finalize the national unity government, although no confirmation was immediately available from Abbas's office.