This is an excellent post. It is sad, though, and frankly bewildering that these points need to be made. Even the Independent newspaper, some time ago, when producing a list of the world's best political constitutions, placed Israel near the top.

A couple of years ago I spent some time in Israel working on a peace-building programme that involved both Arab/Palestinians and Jewish Israelis. I learned during that time that non-Jews in Israel often find themselves at a severe disadvantage when compared with Jewish Israelis. Yet, the Israeli authorities make huge efforts to support the Arab minority. In practice this doesn't work as well as it should. Arabs still find themselves dicriminated against.

But the parallel, surely, is not with arpartheid South Africa (which, of course is the parallel that Israel-haters wish to draw) but with western European countries over the past half-century or so, and the way in which those countries have struggled to accommodate minority groups and quell racism and xenophobia, with partial success.

Israel has a lot to answer for, as do most western societies, and if Israel has more to answer for than western societies that is because Israel has things to contend with that most western societies are blissfully free of.

By all means hold Israel to account, but anyone who calls Israel an apartheid society is either ignorant or vicious.

"if Israel has more to answer for than western societies that is because Israel has things to contend with that most western societies are blissfully free of."

Those western societies you speak of actively and willingly collaborated in the murder of 1.5 million Jewish children (that's right, 1.5 million Jamie Bulgers). In Holland, for example, where there were actually very few Gestapo and SS at the time, having been betrayed by their neighbours Jews were rounded up on Dutch orders and taken to Dutch run concentration camps. From there they were shipped to Auschwitz on Dutch trains with Dutch drivers. Virtually none of the property ever stolen from the murdered Jews by Holland (the state and individuals) was ever retuned. Ditto such countries as Belgium, Norway and France. Lithuanian "partisans" with the encouragement of the church and the local population murdered countless thousands of Jews by taking them to pits (dug by the Jews) forcing them to strip naked and machine-gunning them. In Poland, virtually as one the Polish gentiles betrayed their Jewish neighbours, stole their property, engaged in many acts of mass-murder and actually cheered the Nazis on as they murdered Jews. The United States and United Kingdom effectively collaborated in the Holocaust through their twin policies of keeping out Jews from the West and deliberate inaction. After the war's end: nearly 2,000 Jews were murdered in pogroms by Poles, hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in camps with no nation willing to take them, breaking every promise it ever made a British Labour government and the military forces under their command engaged in acts of barbarity in Palestine against survivors that would have done credit to the SS. In the decades that followed the nations of Europe protected many thousands of the very worst criminals, returned virtually none of the property stolen from Jews, and embarked on a massive campaign of deligitimising Israel.

And I haven't even mentioned Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, crimes which put Britain and the U.S. in the same camp as the Nazis and their allies in terms of acts of deliberate murderous brutality.

Then we have all those other things. Herewith a partial list: the rape of Vietnam by the U.S. with massive British connivance; the support for virtually every vile dictator in the West by the U.S. in the name of fighting communism, once again with the support of Britain; Britain's brutal and bloody occupation of Nothern Ireland; the West's refusal to lift a finger to prevent genocide in Rwanda, mass-starvation in Zimbabwe, and mass-murder in Sudan; the illegal bombing of Serbia; the illegal war in Iraq; the inaction and insouciance as Iran's leader prepares another Holocaust; an EU Common Agricultural Policy which has condemned many millions to poverty and worse in the Third World; the recent tsunami of anti-Semitism in the very place responsible for the genocide of the Jews and two thousand years of persecution.

No, we Jews need no lessons in morality from you gentiles, especially of the European sort.

"I learned during that time that non-Jews in Israel often find themselves at a severe disadvantage when compared with Jewish Israelis."

Christian citizens of Israel (Israel is the only nation in the region where the Christian population is increasing) live longer than Jewish Israelis and have a higher standard of living.

And there are many good reasons why Muslims are at a disadvantage, none of which has to do with discrimination. Perhaps on another occasion when I have the time I'll list them.