Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
Samuel 15:3

BEN-GURION, the architect of the Israeli state, once mentioned in a letter to his family: "A Jewish state is not the end but the beginning … we shall organise a sophisticated defence force -- an elite army. I have no doubt that our army will be one of the best in the world. And then I am sure that we will not be prevented from settling in other parts of the country, either through mutual understanding and agreement with our neighbours, or by other means."

This is a part of the philosophical vision of Zionism. The vision of Zionism held little room for Arab aspirations right from the birth of Zionism at the end of the nineteenth century. The specific "Arab ideologies" developed by the Zionist parties to deal with those Palestinians ranged from almost total oblivion to political program for cooperation and coexistence. This vision was added to the general belief that the opposition and hostility of the Arabs to Zionism was irreversible, and that coexistence between Jews and Arabs was totally impossible.

During the early years of the state, Ben-Gurion stated that "the Arabs cannot accept the existence of Israel. Those who accept it are not normal. The best solution for the Arabs in Israel is to go and live in the Arab states -- in the framework of a peace treaty or transfer."

The Israel-Arab problem goes back to the beginning of Zionist colonization. It is not true that the Zionist came into Palestine as "agents of British imperialism" with the creation of the Mandate after the First World War. What is true is that they came as conscious junior partners of British Imperialism: they would ensure continued British domination of the country, they proposed, if they were in turn given a free hand to take it over from the indigenous Arabs. Chaim Weizmann, who became Zionism's world leader and later first president of Israel as the shrewd architect of this symbiotic relationship, is quite candid about this in his autobiography. No wonder Weizmann blurted out in 1919 that Zionism aimed to make Palestine "as Jewish as England is English."

Keeping these two paragraphs in mind let us see the hypocrisy and double standards played by the Israeli ruling class in escalating the war in Lebanon. In an article in Marxist.com website it clearly revealed that back in March 2004, the Israeli newspaper Maariv pointed out that there were ties between Ariel Sharon and the family of a certain Elhanan Tennenbaum.

Tennenbaum had been kidnapped by Hizballah back in 2001 and kept captive for more than three years. Tennenbaum, who was a reserve army colonel, was also a self-confessed drug dealer. To get him freed, Sharon ordered the release of more than 400 Palestinian prisoners, in spite of opposition from members of his own government who held the position that to go ahead with such a deal would encourage more kidnappings. Sharon denied that he struck the deal because of his links to Tennenbaum's family.

Rabin faced a similar situation in 1994 when a 19-year-old Israeli soldier, Nachson Waxman, was kidnapped. Rabin considered negotiating but then rejected the idea and the young soldier was killed with the three Palestinians that were keeping him captive when the house he was being held in was stormed by an Israeli commando group.

The Israeli ruling class plays double standards; when it is one of their own they are prepared to make any concession necessary, when it is just an ordinary soldier they come out with the hard line position that concessions only encourage more attacks.

The case of Tennenbaum's release clearly shows that if the Israeli government had wanted to, they could have avoided sending the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) into the Gaza Strip over the past few weeks. They could have negotiated and then released a number of Palestinian prisoners. No Palestinians would have been killed, no power stations would have been bombed, no houses, roads and bridges would have been destroyed, and the young Gilad Shalit would be free. Instead they seem to prefer risking that Gilad ends up like his predecessor Nachson Waxman.

It is also revealed by Yoshi Swartz of Marxist.com that on June 25 when Palestinian armed groups launched a guerrilla attack on an army tank posted on the Israel-Gaza border; they killed two soldiers and took Corporal Shalit prisoner. This happened in spite of the fact that the army had been informed by the Shin Beth, the Israeli security services, that such an action was about to take place.

This "willful blindness" more than likely indicates that the generals were looking for an excuse to attack Gaza, and thus sacrificed the tank team. The soldiers were ordered not to return fire but to try to escape. The two soldiers were killed and Shalit was captured during this "escape." One thing however must be said about the generals: they most likely did not plan that Shalit should be captured. From their cold-blooded class point of view it would have been better if all three soldiers had been killed in the attack. This would have given them the excuse to attack the Palestinians without having to deal with the awkward question of whether to negotiate to get the soldier released.

In any case, they then proceeded to escalate the whole situation. Yoshi Swartz reports that the reason for the Israeli government to refuse to negotiate to save the life of Shalit has nothing to do with the protection of Israeli people. It has every thing to do with its plan to topple the Hamas government and punish the Palestinians for having elected Hamas instead of Israel's choice, the corrupted pro-US group of Abu Mazen, who has shown time and again his readiness to collaborate with the rulers of Israel against his own people.

In the recent intensification of bombing in Lebanon it seems, according to different sources in Israel, that the Israeli military carried out some acts of provocation. Al-Manur, the Hizballah TV station, claims that Israeli jeeps actually entered Lebanese territory just before the kidnappings. Al-Manur has been quite reliable in its news reporting and so there may be some truth in this claim. It would indicate that the Israeli army chiefs were looking for an attack that would give them the justification for counter-attacking.

All these attacks, counter-attacks and military fear by Zionist Israel help strengthen the age-old Zionist thesis that the Palestinians were not a people with national aspirations and rights but simply Arabs who could live anywhere in vast expanses of the Arab world. Ben-Gurion in 1948 wrote that "history has proved who is really attached to this country and for whom it is a luxury which can be given up. Until now not a single [Jewish] settlement, not even the most distant, weak, or isolated, has been abandoned, whereas after the first defeat the Arabs left whole towns like Haifa and Tiberias in spite of the fact that they did not face any danger of destruction or massacre."

It is mostly ignored that the large majority of the Palestinians who fled their homes did not leave the country. Like many Jews caught in the same circumstances, they evacuated battle areas and moved to safer places. It was near impossible for the Palestinians to return to their homes in Palestine as they were taken by the term "infiltration" by the Zionist leadership.

It was the refugee problem that bedeviled relations between Israel and the Arab states. Far from stabilizing Israel, as was so ardently hoped by the Zionist leadership, the expulsion and the creation of a refugee nation were to contribute to continually escalating frictions. For many years the Israeli leadership ignored the fact that the politically deprived, homeless Palestinians living in impossible conditions in refugee camps were evolving a radical nationalist movement. This movement, characterized by desperation and terrorism, has become a detonator for internal Arab conflict and a major cause for the Arab-Israel tension.

In the early 1960s, Golda Meir, then Israel's fourth prime minister, claimed that repatriation of the Palestinian refugees would mean the placing of a time bomb inside Israel. She ignored the danger that the time bomb, if not defused, would explode at Israel's doorstep, which it did in 1967. By a strange twist of fate, it was again Golda Meir who, after 1967, justified Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza -- including the time bomb of a half-million Palestinian refugees -- with the argument of "security."

Now a state has been set up and is a reality. Thanks to the Zionist capitalists with the blessing of the imperialist, Britain and USA. A people have declared that they want to live under their own national destiny. They have taken a blank check made out to the right of self determination and have signed their name on it: Israel. Invading their defenses and threatening their independence came the reactionary onslaught of some of the most backward and reactionary kingships and dynasties of the world, the semi-feudal oppressors of the Arab people.

We, as socialists, advocate a different course, a socialist plan to achieve a viable life for the peoples of Palestine, Jewish and Arab, and which could but meet with the opposition of the rulers of both peoples, the Zionist capitalist and the Arab dictators. We advocate that the workers, land workers and peasants of both communities, joining their strength from below in common struggle, launch a united struggle for independence from their common master, the US and British imperialism; and that they fight for the creation of a free, democratic Palestine based on universal suffrage and a fully democratic constituent assembly.

It is unfortunate that in the present crisis, Nasrallah, the Hizballah leader's only aim is to break the backbone of the Israeli people. He has no concept of class divisions in society. If instead of the reactionary that he is he were to have a Marxist approach, i.e. to appeal to the ordinary working people, to target the military but not the civilians and so on, he could actually have an impact. Were there a different leadership -- on both sides -- the situation would be a very different one.

First the Zionist leadership and then the Arab reactionary kingship opposed the partition of Palestine, because they too had an alternative. Their alternative was the complete conquest of Palestine and the subordination of the other people, by force of arms if necessary. This was their reactionary, chauvinistic alternative to partition -- one that is in opposite pole from our socialist plan.

The national antagonism between Jew and Arab does not stem from the interests of the exploited, but from the interests of the top rulers. In such a joint struggle for national liberation, the already strong tendencies toward Arab-Jewish cooperation from below could flower, the Arab workers could be torn away from the ties with Arab money masters, the Jewish workers could cut loose from the chauvinistic aims of the Zionist leadership, and a united democratic Palestine achieved, in which both peoples could live with full national rights assured.

Jamil Iqbal is a researcher at the Centre for Research on Nationalism, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (CRONEM), University of Surrey, UK.