At the risk of appearing to echo the Malaysian government's sectarian sentiments on the subject, the current Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Gaza are an absolute outrage. Israel, of all nations, should be aware of the evils of submitting innocent civilians to the kind of blitzkrieg it's indulging in.

Firstly, as the UN and many of its members insist, it's collective punishment, specifically ruled out by international law. Secondly, such indiscriminate killing and destruction will only generate more hatred and resentment of Israel in the Arab world than ever and, perhaps worst of all for Israel's future, it is appalling public relations.

Everybody on earth has been aware since soon after the creation of Israel that it's a client state of the US. Witness the old American witticism that 'a Zionist is a Jew who pays another Jew to live in Israel'.

But as dependent on US aid and diplomatic support as it has been, and as it is richly entitled to be, in my opinion, considering how shabbily the US and other allies dealt with the plight of the Jews during World War II, it should be pointed out that Israel has previously fought its own battles, in its own fashion.

It easily won all-out wars with Arab nations whenever they got together to gang-up on this tiny, industrious democracy amid the swamp of oil-fueled indolence, ignorance, incompetence and fanaticism that comprises so much of the Middle-East.

And it has always dealt with every lesser insult and assault from the Entebbe hijackers to the sponsors of suicide bombings and rocket-firing in its own highly-efficient fashion, with extremely efficient commando operations, highly-selective (and richly-deserved) assassinations, and more recently, a security fence.

But this time Israel has gone totally overboard using not just its arsenal of US armaments but also US methods. The kind of bully boy, blast-em-back-to-the-Stone-Age heavy bombardment that murders, maims and terrorises a great many more civilians than combatants has proven such a criminal fiasco and failure everywhere it's been practiced, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan.

A full circle

So now, for once and for all, Israel has emerged not just as a US dependant and ally, but some new kind of entity that looks very much like a mini US itself.

Which seems a shame to me, because I've always admired both the concept and the reality of Israel, as well as the spirit with which it has - albeit with US help - fought, prevailed and prospered as a David among hostile neighbouring Goliaths.

But now that it has allowed itself to be conscripted as a fully-fledged member of the so-called 'coalition' in the Bush regime's ill-conceived, ill-executed and ill-fated War on Terror, Israel has lost the plot.

It also seems to have lost its memory, to have forgotten the fact, apparently, that the state we know today as Israel was forged 50-odd years ago out of what was previously known as British Palestine over the dead bodies of British occupiers.

And the people who did the killing back then were the Stern Gang and other groups of what were in those days considered Jewish terrorists. The determination of these terrorists sprang from their desperation for a Jewish homeland; a safe haven from the horrors of Hitler's gas chambers and later, the refugee camps in which so many of the survivors were dumped after the Nazis were defeated.

Now, however, the wheel of history has come full circle. Now the terrorists are not Jews desperate for a homeland, but Arabs displaced from theirs, and living, in the Gaza strip and elsewhere, as permanent refugees from the Israelis.

And now the Israelis are attacking both the Gaza refugee camps and the people of Southern Lebanon with a ferocity and inhumanity that's eerily reminiscent of anti-Jewish atrocities like the notorious Warsaw Ghetto. Not quite so malicious or massive in scale yet, admittedly, but getting there.

Too fixated

And yet this is the nation whose whole reason for existence is founded on declaring 'never again' to the holocaust. In the almost sixty years since European Jews (not to mention gypsies and other largely overlooked and unlamented groups) were slaughtered in their millions, there have been countless other holocausts, of course, none of which appeared to bother Israel too badly, as they happened to non-Jews.

Like the ethnic Chinese following the Suharto-led coup in Indonesia; the Karen and other Christian tribes in Burma; the Ibo in Nigeria; first the 'intellectuals' then all city-dwellers and finally anyone who laughed, sang or wore colours in Cambodia; the Kurds in Iraq and Turkey; the Albanians in Serbia; the Serbs in Kosovo; every species of 'dissident' from Tibet; the Falun Gong in China and both the Hutus and Tutsis in their turn in Rwanda.

And so the grisly list goes on. Liberal Jews around the world, notably including those who own and run The New York Times, have protested against these events. But Israel, as a nation, seems to have been too fixated on its own problems to be bothered about those of other peoples, including the Arabs it has been responsible for displacing and dispossessing.

And now, its attitude of indifference to the plight of others appears to be turning into outright aggression. Israel's war on the god-forsaken inmates of the Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and the mostly innocent men, women and children of Lebanon won't amount to a full-scale holocaust, of course.

Even if they wanted it to, Bush, Blair and Nato wouldn't stand for it. But their victory certainly will be a hollow one, and it'll come at a terrible cost. Not just to the victims, but to Israel itself - its image, reputation, credibility, and, most damaging of all, its future security in the face of the whole new levels of hatred that this 'Operation Overkill' is engendering among its enemies.

DEAN JOHNS is an Australian freelance journalist now living in Kuala Lumpur and a former occasional columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.