I guess Mr. Kenny also never read Koestler’s “The Thirteenth Tribe” or Douglas Reed’s “Controversy of Zion” where many of these same issues were articulated long ago, in opposition to the Zionist myth. Nor has he read Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” which gives an interesting history of the Jews in Europe though Arendt was abysmally ignorant of Jewish religion and religious history.

Mr. Kenny writes: “Basically, Dr Sand’s theory is just a re-cycled version of the argument that modern Israel was empty land in 1948 and the Palestinians are just camel-riding nomads who drifted in since then. The discourse is still “this land is mine”. They’re just looking at a different piece of land!”

Hmmm… did he read the article at all? Did he not notice that it is clearly stated that the Palestinians, if anyone, were the original Jews who never left, but merely converted to Islam and/or Christianity?

Finally: Is there a “deepening panic” among Israelis? Perhaps among some of them, in the same way there is a deepening panic among some Americans who are beginning to realize – vaguely – that pathological deviants have been in leadership positions for a long time, and pathology never maps a reasonable political agenda for anyone. Based on what I hear from Israel, most Israelis are as ignorant about what is going on and what the potential outcomes are as are most Americans regarding the collapse of the US.

And, over it all preside the psychopaths – the lunatics who have taken over the asylum.

Exactly. Good intentions or no, anyone with any awareness of history should have known that a Jewish state would be no different in principle from an Aryan state (with all the self-important arrogance that came with it in both cases). Racism is racism no matter who’s on which side. Sooner or later Israel, like Germany and Britain and Rome in the past and America in the future, will have to accept that they’re not special or exceptional, and (maybe) eventually learn to play well with others. It won’t be easy – and it won’t be the kind of birth pangs Condi and the zealots had in mind – but history has shown what the only alternative is.

“It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel’s first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area’s original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam.”

Which is a shocking, wonderful revelation to overturn zionist zeal and hopefully create a new, one-state solution.

That necessarily involves re-writing the Zionist discourse, in which the Jews, unwelcome in Europe, were to return to the land of their ancestors and there establish a Jewish state. In that logic, the Jews would not be welcome if they returned to Europe as an alien, non-European people. Hence, the Jews have to be “de-peopleised” and turned into a mere religion, to which millions of ethnic Europeans converted at some point. The modern Jews are thus the descendants of those people and not of immigrants into Europe from Palestine. That is essentially the new discourse which Dr Sand is articulating and which was also articulated by Uri Avnery in a recent article.

Basically, Dr Sand’s theory is just a re-cycled version of the argument that modern Israel was empty land in 1948 and the Palestinians are just camel-riding nomads who drifted in since then. The discourse is still “this land is mine”. They’re just looking at a different piece of land!

What all this reflects is the deepening panic in Israel, as people come to grips with the end of US hegemony and what it means for them. Like the South African whites, or the Pied-Noirs in Algeria, the Israelis are understandably worried about what will happen to them when the people they have persecuted for 60 years get the upper hand. And with the US economy in the toliet, the unspoken belief that if the worst came to the worst, they could always go to the US also seems increasingly increasingly unrealistic.