EIN VOLK, EIN FUEHRER, EIN ISRAEL…

Although I am sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, and hardly a friend of Israel, I must admit to being shocked at the analogy – made by many in the anti-Israel camp – between the Jewish state and the Thousand Year Reich. I remember seeing photos of a pro-Palestinian demonstration in the US that had swastikas scrawled all over the picket signs and slogans equating Sharon with Hitler. It seemed, at the time, a little over-the-top, and even offensive: after all, there is something distinctly … icky about likening the victims of the Holocaust to the perpetrators. Now that the Israeli government is not only seizing Palestinian land but building public sector "Jews only" housing on it, however, the analogy between Zionism and Nazism is obscenely undeniable.

The Nazi-Zionist equation is still overblown, of course, since Ariel Sharon has a looong way to go before the number of his victims even distantly approaches the six-million mark. But an important principle has been established, that of exclusivism as an official Israeli policy. Just as the Nazis declared that Europe would one day be "Judenrein" (without Jews), so the leaders of the Jewish state are now announcing their intent to create a Palestinian-free nation. Unless they are stopped, the radical Zionists will be forced to utilize the same methods as Hitler's stormtrooopers: massacre, deportation, and genocide.

In America, the ceaseless refrain of Israel's amen corner boils down to one essential argument: that Israel is a "democracy," a member in good standing of the West, and even (incredibly) a "free market" economy – compared to the "closed" economies of the Arab world. It was my old friend, the pseudonymous "Emmanuel Goldstein," formerly our British correspondent and now writing his own excellent blog, Airstrip One, who first raised the interesting question as to whether Israeli political culture is, in reality, a Western phenomenon. Goldstein asserts that the waves of immigration to Israel from Arab countries, coupled with the growing Russian influence, consitutute a radically de-Westernizing influence:

"So what are the cultural implications of this? Well it is orientalising Israel. Whereas the predominantly Ashkenasi Zionist movement was heavily influenced by the ideas sweeping around Western Europe because of the years spent in or near Western Europe – what is the likely outcome of a longer immersion in Arab culture for the Sephardic Jews?"