PALESTINIANS are commemorating this the week the 65th anniversary of Nakba. On May 15, 1948, Israeli was declared a nation on the ruins of more than 500 townships and 800,000 expelled Palestinians.

In December 1948 the international community adopted UN resolution 194 calling on Israel to allow for the return of Palestinian refugees “… at the earliest practicable date.” This became one of more than three dozen resolutions ignored by Israel.

To preempt this and similar UN resolutions, Israel is demanding recognition as a nation for the Jewish people.  Hence, reducing the presence of non-Jewish natives to interlopers and elevating the status of Ashkenazi European converts to original inhabitants.

It is worth noting that the vision of Jewish exclusivity started to take shape at the end of the 19^th century.  Theodor Herzl, founder of modern political Zionism articulated these objectives in his 1895 diary “When we occupy the land…. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border … while denying it any employment in our country.”  

Following UN vote to divide Palestine in November 1947, David Ben-Gurion the founder of Israel reiterated the same goals when he voiced concerns that the partition plan would result in a Jewish state of only 60 per cent majority, declaring that “Such a composition does not provide a stable basis for a Jewish State.”

After six months terror campaign, the Zionists succeeded in reducing the “vexing” population by more than 90 per cent.

Institutional racism targeting the remaining natives- representing today 20% of the total population- was complemented by a rabbinic edict signed by several Israeli religious Jewish scholars, among them the late Rabbi Yaakov Yosef forbidding “Jews to employ Arab or rent them apartments.”

Yosef also endorsed Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira’s book “The King’s Torah”- a rabbinical manual permitting the killing of non-Jew s.  It rationalizes the slaughter of "… babies… because of the future danger they may present, since it is assumed that they will grow up to be evil like their parents."

Last month Israeli Prime Minister anointed Yosef as a “Torah giant, teacher and arbiter of Jewish law”.

Following on the footsteps of his father, the once Chief Israeli Rabbi Ovadia Yosef who pontificated in a 2010 sermon that God created Gentiles “to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel.”

The older Yosef must have reflected on the role of US Congress and the White House when he spoke.

Apartheid South Africa would have been shamed to exalt advocates of “baby killers,” but in Benjamin Netanyahu’s “Jewish State,” rabbinical deviants are lauded as “Torah giant” and halakhic arbiters.

Israeli ethnocentric racial abomination towards Gentiles is not limited to Palestinians. A survey conducted last summer by Tel Aviv University statistician Camil Fuchs found that nearly 60 per cent of 12^th grade Jewish students believed that black African refugees should be expelled. 

Following a visit to Israel, Nobel peace laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu who experienced firsthand South African apartheid lamented that he was reminded “so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa".

Ethnocentric programs have always ended up with disaster for members of the in-groups and the out-groups. After 65 years of Palestinian Nakba, Zionism is constructing the synthesis for another tragic human experiment. 

Israel is the only nation where religious ethnicity is an automatic qualifier for citizenship and where national rights of the indigenous are denied for “deficient” maternal genetics.

In fact, it is the only country in modern history demanding recognition not as a country, but as a nation of a single creed, for a people of one kind.

*Jamal Kanj writes weekly Newspaper column and publishes on several websites on Arab World issues. He is the author of “Children of Catastrophe, Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America”, Garnet Publishing, UK. Jamal’s articles can be read at www.jamalkanj.com, his email address is jkanj@yahoo.com

ISRAELI leaders are masters at muddling the international community with trivial issues while turning the peace negotiations into a temporizing process “to end all peace.” 

Assured by US subservient backing, and for more than 15 years prior to current Sisyphean process, Israel rejected Palestinian’s peace overtures insisting on impossible chameleon terms to be fulfilled even before agreeing to talk with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). 

The first- which became later a US law, was to renounce “terrorism” and recognize Israel without reciprocity. The PLO submitted to the American demand to start the current peace marathon in 1988.

After the signing of the Oslo Accord between the PLO and the Labor party government of Isaac Rabin, the successive rightwing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected the Palestinian recognition as incomplete insisting on the PLO to annul its charter, specifically sections calling for establishing a bi-national nonsectarian democratic state on all of historical Palestine.

Again the PLO acquiesced and invited then President Bill Clinton in December 1998 to christen a meeting of the Palestine National Council annulling the provisions demanded by the new Israeli government.

There have been at least five internationally supervised peace milestones and countless schemes negotiated directly between the two parties in the last 20 years. Sequentially they were: Oslo accord, Wye River agreement, Road Map, Annapolis conference, Quartet Peace Plan… etc.

All were initiated at the behest of various American administrations to allay succeeding Israeli governments’ “conditional approval” of the preceding understanding. In fact, US Secretary of State John Kerry is leading fresh efforts to customize the 2002 Arab Peace initiative to suit Israel’s reservations.

Out of their magic tricks to throw off the international community, the current Israeli Prime Minister conjured a new condition demanding Palestinians to recognize Israel as an ethnocentric Jewish state.

Keeping in mind, Israel does not have a constitution defining its character or even an official demarcated national borders.

To ascribe national identity for a country is an internal matter. But to mandate on Palestinians to recognize an ethnocentric character for Israel is akin of asking the Pan African Congress to recognize South Africa as a white nation during apartheid

Ethnocentrism was defined by William Graham Summer, American professor of Sociology at Yale University in 1906 “as having a view of things in which one’s own group is the center of everything and the feeling that one’s own culture is better than all others.”

Building on Summer’s earlier studies, Psychologist Donald Campbell and his associates described ethnocentrism in the late 60s and mid 70s ”as a psychological construct,” whereby the individual propensity is “to identify strongly with her own in-group and culture, the tendency to reject out-groups or the tendency to view any economic, political, or social event only from the point of the in-group.”

Ethnocentrism is typified by the in-group proclivity to uphold its own values as being superior and the values of other cultures as inferior. This develops into a groupthink collective behavior by members of the in-group rationalizing the demonization and rejection of the out-groups.

Israel is a classic ethnocentric example of the in-group vs. the out-groups. In a 2012 survey commissioned by the Yisraela Goldblum Fund and carried out by Dialog found that 59 per cent of the Jewish in-group believed that Jews should be given preference over non-Jewish natives in admission to jobs in government ministries, and 49 per cent wanted the state to treat Jews better than Palestinians.

Unlike Machiavellian Israeli leaders, the late Knesset member Rabbi Meir Kahane was more candid in articulating the ethnocentric state’s vision in his 1981 book They Must Go. Where he wrote that in a “Jewish state”- benefitting Jews- Arabs will suffer from discrimination. In such case they will become alienated and antagonistic; therefore the only sensible solution is to “get rid of them.”