In the Independent on Monday, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown posed the question 'how the Israelis can do what they do'. Her answer: 'it is racism'. Money quote (subscription required, but see here):
[T]he politicians, generals and soldiers on this mission, and their supporters, are consumed with burning revulsion for all their non-Jewish Semite neighbours. Serbian killers who turned on Muslims in Bosnia were similarly hate-filled, as were the Hutus who massacred Tutsis in Rwanda, and the murderous Muslims who want to destroy every Jew on the planet. In 1935, Goebbels said: "Many intellectuals are trying to help the Jews with the ancient phrase, 'The Jew is also a man.' Yes, he is a man, but what sort of man? The flea is also an animal." Today, Semites treat the Arab brother as the flea, or the "other".You see, not merely 'burning revulsion', not even merely racism - but genocidal racism as in Rwanda and Nazi Germany. Alibhai-Brown tries to reinforce herself somewhat by linking her own view to the words, first, of a Jewish mentor and those, second, of a Jewish friend. But that these two were and are Jewish doesn't render the above paragraph any less poisonous, or any more valid. She gives no serious evidence for what she says there. Of course, Alibhai-Brown isn't among the brightest of the daughters of the morning. So perhaps one should just laugh it off (I'd rather be an 'other' than a flea, etc). But this appears in a major national newspaper, where presumably some editorial control operates. The discourse of Israel as a genocidal state takes another step towards the centre of acceptable left-liberal discourse.