Forgive me if I expressed my point inartfully. The point I wanted to make was that regardless of how Israel got its start, it has over the past decades arrived at a place where the "Nazi" and "Fascist" aspects of Israeli society that Einstein and Arendt warned about in their 1948 letter to the3 NYT.

There is no doubt that, whether due to an intrinsic racism or decades of indoctrination - or both - the Israeli settlers and the Likud leadership do see the Palestinians as "subhuman" and they have lost all respect for the lives of the Palestinians and are now mounting a determined effort at ethnic cleansing and/or extermination of the Palestinian population.

I am willing to concede that the Jews and Arabs attacked each other and the British wirth regularity leading up to the formation of the Jewish State. I am also willing to concede that Israel was surrounded by enemies up until recently.

But I do maintain that those Arab states that threatened Israel were not a reason to reject UN 242 and subject the Palestinian populations to decades of the most degrading and debilitating occupation. An occupation that has led us to the current state of affairs, with the apparent denouement that Likud has always wanted: the final elimination of the Palestinian population.