Over the past few weeks, we have once again, witnessed the bombing of innocent civilians in Southern Lebanon leading to the death of a mother and six children. More Lebanese and Palestinian houses were also demolished to pave the way for new Jewish settlements. While facing the retaliation from the freedom fighting Hizbullah in Lebanon, the Israeli officials went on the attack, threatening to launch a wide scale attack on Lebanon in case of Hizbullah retaliation.

Looking back at Israel's history, this is not very unfamiliar, since racism against the local occupants in Palestine, has been exercised as early as 1890. From this time, people referred to the local population in disparaging terms such as donkeys and so forth. The very project of the Zionist movement explicitly involved the displacement of the local Arab population from their lands and thus contained at least implicitly, a racist denial of their rights and common humanity.

The early Zionist poet, Ben Yehuda, wrote How beautiful is Israel without Arabs! The racism was also practiced against Oriental local Jews who were referred to as rabble (asafsuf), hooligans (biroynim), masses (amkha), cave dwellers (shluhim), pagans ( ovdai elilim). Mordechai Gur , a Labor candidate and former Israeli Chief of Staff, warned a heckling group of Oriental Jews , Likud supporters, "We'll screw you like we screwed the Arabs, in the Six Day War. The more specific anti-Arab/Muslim hostility was to develop after 1967.

With the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, there emerged a stronger current of militant atmosphere. It was in this context that orthodox rabbis began providing a religious justification - deploying elements available in the Judaic tradition - for occupation of the West Bank , and the violent displacement of Arabs. In 1968 Samuel Derlich, head chaplain for the Israeli army, wrote to soldiers that it was a mitzvah (religious duty), recorded in the Bible, ` to destroy Amalek'. When some army officers protested, forty other rabbis wrote to defend Derlich and to certify that this statement was consistent with hakalah, Jewish tradition.

At the same time, particularly from the mid-1970s onwards, the parties of the religious right, the haredim, were to play an important role in Israeli politics. This internal shift in Israeli politics was compounded by external eventsthe triumph of Iranian revolution in 1979 and the emergence of the freedom fighting Shiite Hizbullah in Lebanon. The most extreme anti-Arab trend was, however, represented by the movement of Rabbi Meir Kahane and his Kach movement, which occupied a militant, violent place in Israeli politics from the early 1970s until his assassination in 1990.

`Kahane professed a militant reading of the Talmud and the halakhah , according to which Jews were enjoined to fight non-Jews, and indeed those corrupted gentilized and Hellenized. Central to his message was for the call for all Arabs to be forcibly deported from Israel. Kahane wanted a law to be introduced not to allow non-Jews to be granted citizenship in Israel. His supporters were reported to have chanted slogans like death to the Arabs. Kahane's rhetoric was clear, Hateful and threatening.

The Arabs are cancer, cancer, cancer, in the midst of us. But there is not a single man who is willing to stand up and say it . I am telling you what each of you thinks deep in his heart: There is only one solution, no other, no partial solution: The Arabs out! Out! . Do not ask me how .

Let me become defense minister for two months and you will not have a single cockroach around here ! I promise you a clean Eretz Israel! Give me the power to take care of them! Of cases of Zionist Justifications for murder , I should like to examine the case of little seven year old Palestinian girl, called Intisar al-Atar , who was shot and killed in a schoolyard in 1989 by a Zionist settler, who was arrested a few months later.

He was later acquitted of the charges because the Israeli courts decided that. The offence is not severe enough. The judge concluded that the murderer only intended to shock the girl (by shooting a gun at her head!). So this was not a case of a criminal person who has to be punished. As the murderer was only given a suspended sentence, the settlers in the streets, fired their Uzis in the air, in celebration, as they were now sure they would not be punished for killing Palestinians. As a senior Israeli police officer explained, the only way to save the Israeli settlers who shot at Palestinians was for him ( the officer) to stand in front of the Palestinians, as he was not allowed to shoot at the settlers ( since Jews are not allowed to shed Jewish blood), and this way , he would save the settlers from being punished for shooting innocent civilians .

One of the prayers frequently cited by many West Bank settlers, includes the lines Let the praises of the Lord be in their mouth and a two edged sword in their hand. To execute vengeance against the Gentiles and punishment against the nations. Expressions such as Death to Arabs, to make mine meat of the Arabs, are frequently used by the settlers.

In Baruch Goldstein's (murderer of 38 innocent Muslims) words One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail. In July 1993, the head of the Public Committee for the Defense of Human Dignity, called on the government to allow the organs of the Arabs killed during the Intifada to be used for transplants, in order to dispense with the need to extract such organs from the bodies of the Jews, since such extractions are deemed to forbidden under Orthodox Jewish law.

In effect Zionism is a sworn enemy of the concept of the open society . A state based on the principles of Zionism based on its present ideology, cannot ever contain an open society. It can become a fully closed and war-like ghetto, a Sparta supported by the labor of Arab helots, kept in existence by its influence on the U.S. political establishment and by threats to use its nuclear power, or it can try to be an open society.

The second choice is dependent on an honest examination of its past, and on the admission that chauvinism and exclusivism exist, and is an honest examination of the attitudes of Zionism towards the non-Jews