Much has been said and written about the remarkable coincidence that this year Holocaust Day fell on April 9, the day of the Deir Yassin massacre in 1948.

From eyewitness accounts of foreign journalists and peace activists, the carnage, murder and executions in the West Bank towns in the days leading up to April 9 eerily resonated of Deir Yassin.

The worlds mood and the repeated simplistic mantra of war on terrorism have been crudely exploited by the man who was held responsible by the Israeli Parliament some 20 years ago for the massacre of Palestinian women and children in refugee camps in southern Lebanon, and, who until recently risked arrest and charges of crimes against humanity should he set foot on Belgian soil.

The state that was born out of the Holocaust tragedy has embarked on an all-out colonial war using fighter jets, attack helicopters and battle tanks to unleash terror on a largely unarmed civilian population to annihilate and drive them off their land.

It is as though Yasser Arafat alone has control on the will of his desperate and despairing young men and women, who see no end to a life of misery, indignity, hopelessness and subjugation to stop the suicide bombings. If the overused and abused war on terror has been an excuse for autocrats to suppress political opposition, for Ariel Sharon, this is the pretext to finally kill off the Peace Process and blaming it on the Palestinians.

For sceptics, this can only be the logical conclusion to the negotiations at Oslo signed in Sept 1993 on the White House lawn, the so-called Peace Process. It was not meant to work and never intended to.

The peace process was the outcome of American ascendancy in the middle-east after the Gulf war, where Arafat, in his short-sightedness, aligned himself with Saddam Hussein.

A weakened and discredited Arafat was the perfect peace-partner for Israel to force his people to end the Intifada (uprising) and accept his peoples subjugation.

Sheer imbalance

The sheer imbalance of power between the US and Israel, on the one hand (and the US is not a neutral party), and on the other, the weak and ill-prepared Palestinians at the negotiations, was not meant to achieve land for peace, i.e., reconciliation, true co-existence, real peace, justice and equality.

For Palestinians in the occupied territories, the Peace Process did not deliver a state of real sovereignty, self determination and economic self-sufficiency but a life of subjugation and dependency in non-contiguous Bantustans, with Israel controlling water resources and security from without and Arafats Palestinian Authority acting as Israels policeman and sub-contractor within, using the very same instruments of arrests and torture on its own people who dared to dissent.

With all the restrictions and the Palestinian Authoritys corrupt, cruel and incompetent administration, unemployment since Oslo rose dramatically and standards of living drastically reduced, while businessmen and hangers-on around Arafat prospered.

On the other hand, the destructiveness of the Netanyahu years, the continuing construction of illegal settlement on Palestinian land, Sharons provocation that led to the second Intifada , and today the deployment of Israel's military might on the pretext of fighting terrorism ensured the death of peace process, revealing Israels intransigence and her real objective, that of an all out colonisation of the historical land of Palestine, the Zionist vision of Greater Israel.

The Peace Process is, in the words of renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky, an ideological victory for the Zionists in that it takes at its starting point the borders of Israel before the June 1967 war.

Even if a truly sovereign Palestinian state materialises, it would have legitimated the violent conquest, genocide, expulsions of Palestinians from their towns and villages, and the destruction of Palestinian society. In short, the violent, dark history of Israels birth.

But the continued expansion of illegal settlements and the cycles of provocations and violence that reach its climax today showed that Israel is not content with that victory. The principle of the Oslo land for peace negotiations is based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 of 1967 and 338 of 1973, i.e., withdrawal of Israel to its frontiers before the June 1967 war in exchange for peace.

Subsequent attempts to shore up the crumbling peace process have all been based on that principle  the Camp David negotiations of July 2000 just before the second Intifada erupted, the last chance Taba negotiations of Jan 2001, and finally the Saudi Crown Prince Abdullahs initiative of Feb 2002, before the current full scale aggression.

The principle seemed to be driven by a conscious, determined effort to erase the history of Israel-Palestine conflict before 1967. But peace and reconciliation between Palestinians and Israelis is an unachievable dream as long as the fundamental reality of the conflict continues to be ignored.

Original sin

Benjamin Beit Hallahmi, a psychologist and historian at Haifa University called this fundamental reality Israels Original Sin, its treatment of the Palestinians from the Zionists movement very inception in the late 19th century through 1948 and 1967.

The biggest of these sins which Israel would want the world to erase from its memory has to be the well documented and witnessed Deir Yassin massacre.

Many more people today would know of the massacre for the first time partly because of that great co-incidence with Holocaust Day and partly because of what is happening in Palestine at present carries faint reminders of what happened on April 9, 1948 at Deir Yassin  250 men, women and children ruthlessly murdered in cold blood by members of the Irgun and Stern militias.

A hundred of them were paraded through the streets of Jerusalem before they were shot. The massacre was not a random terrorist incident, it was abetted and participated by the Haganah (precursor of todays Israeli Defence Force). It was part of an overall Zionist plan to systematically empty Palestine of its Arab population.

The sheer terror of Deir Yassin triggered the flight of 800,000 Palestinians from their villages, to be occupied by holocaust victims from Europe and Jewish immigrants from America and Russia, and thus the state of Israel was born.

Menachem Begin, leader of Irgun congratulated the killers and commending them as creators of Israels history, and said that Deir Yassin was not only necessary but without it the state of Israel would not have emerged.

Israel Shamir, who was here recently on a speaking tour wrote in his well known essay April is the cruellest month that the Deir Yassin massacre demonstrated the full scope of Zionist tactics, including initially blaming the mass murder on Arab rogue gangs.

Just three days after the murder, the gangs were incorporated into the emerging Israeli army, the commanders received high positions (Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir eventually became Prime Ministers) and a general amnesty forgave their crimes. The same policy of trying to get rid of the Palestinians by actual transfer, by massacre or by forcing submission on them as a whole continued well after 1948.

The state of Israel came largely by conquest and by driving out as many Palestinians as possible as the Zionist only succeeded in buying six percent of Palestines land area by 1948.

Part II

DR MAZENI ALWI is a medical practitioner who takes care of sick children