I MUST say at once I'm not anti-Jewish. You always have to say that before you criticise Israel. I certainly don't think I'm any more anti-Jewish than the hundreds of Jewish people working and campaigning within Israel against the oppression of Arabs.

I won't be believed anyway, since apologists for Israel always accuse their opponents of anti-Semitism (not entirely accurately, since Semites are those who speak a Semitic language such as Hebrew or Arabic, which describes just about everybody in that seventh circle of hell known as the Middle East).

Like everybody else, I still feel sick with shock and grievously sorry for what Jews suffered under the Nazis. (Notice you cannot criticise Israel without apologising for the Third Reich. ) I feel just as sorry for the Jews . . . but not more sorry . . . as I do for the homosexuals, disabled people, Jehovah's witnesses, communists, Poles, Russian prisoners of war and gypsies who went through the same thing at the same time. They may not have been slaughtered in the same numbers, but is it about numbers? See, now I'm a holocaust denier.

Now that that's out of the way, and I'm officially a Jewhater (or at least "not antiJewish but. . .") we can move on, and I can insult you back:

Israel is a racist state. Zionism is still zionism, even when it's dressed up nice for Camp David. The very foundation of the state of Israel was an exercise in racism and its parliament, its military and its institutions have become almost a stereotype for chronic, institutionalised racism in the six decades since. (Two words for the doubters: Avigdor Lieberman, new deputy prime minister and advocate of ethnic cleansing for Palestinians. ) John Dugard, the UN's special 'rapporteur' on human rights in the Palestinian territories, spells it out clearly in his latest report. As a professor of international law born and raised in South Africa, Dugard knows his onions when it comes to organised persecution (and, curiously, doesn't feel the need to preface his strident criticisms of Israel by saying "I'm not anti-Jewish").

In his report (www.

ohchr. org/english/bodies/ hrcouncil/docs/4session/A.HRC.

4.17. pdf), Dugard likens Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories to apartheid. "The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid appears to be violated by many practices, particularly those denying freedom of movement to Palestinians."

He goes on: "The indiscriminate use of military power against civilians has resulted in serious war crimes." And he suggests, delicately but firmly, that Israel might have a case to answer in the International Court of Justice.

He says the Occupied Palestinian Territory "is the only instance of a developing country that is denied the right of self-determination and oppressed by a western-affiliated state". This, he says, is why Palestine has become "a test for the west, by which its commitment to human rights is to be judged".

And he says the west . . . and he includes the UN . . . "appears to be failing this test".

This isn't the first time Israel has been smacked by the UN.

(In fact there have been scores of . . . largely ignored . . . UN resolutions. ) But it may be the first time the UN has called a spade a spade, and a "separation fence" an instrument of "social engineering". Finally, Israel is becoming a moral pariah. Even we laissez-faire cheese-eaters in the EU are beginning to experience distaste. And of course the Arab world is positively livid, with all that implies. (After all, hatred of Jews has been a feature of one great war, but hatred of Muslims has been the war of choice for decades now. ) But seemingly America is still in the dark about Israel's antics, despite forking out $15m a day to subsidise them.

Former president Jimmy Carter, author of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, has written that it would be "almost political suicidal for members of Congress to. . . suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defence of justice or human rights for Palestinians".

It won't help that this latest reprimand has come from the UN, given how America feels about that organisation. Yet Israeli apartheid won't stop until America stops paying for it. I'm not anti-American.

But. . .

Richard Delevan is on leave