To speak of Israel practicing Holocaust denial may at first seem absurd. Across Israel's political spectrum, from the haredi Orthodox to the most committed secularists, there is agreement on one principle: Holocaust revisionism is not only repugnant, but a specially horrifying species of evil. This bedrock consensus is enough to prevent even Israel's most irresponsible historical revisionists, the enfant terribles who reverse the story of Israel's birth, making Israel Goliath and the armies of five Arab states their pitiful victim, from tampering with the historical reality of the Holocaust. Israel's government is sufficiently sensitive on this issue that despite its previous unwillingness to do so, it has released the memoirs Adolf Eichmann wrote in an Israeli prison, describing the deportation and mass killing of Jews, in order to help Professor Deborah Lipstadt, currently being sued for libel for calling "revisionist-historian" David Irving "a dangerous spokesman for Holocaust denial."

There is solid reason for this unanimous Jewish revulsion toward those who deny the Holocaust occurred. Hitler rejected the humanity of his Jewish victims; the Holocaust deniers deny their suffering, dispute their very existence. And if they were not murdered, their accused murderers are exonerated of the crime of genocide. The most evil of men are purified, indeed themselves become the victims of a giant Jewish hoax: the Holocaust. An event of great significance--the onslaught by a modern "civilized" society against an ancient people and religion, the wellspring of its own faith--is dismissed as of no signficance, a non-happening, a fabrication.

And yet Israel, abetted by Jewry worldwide, is currently engaged in a form of Holocaust denial, refusing to credit the Arabs' determination to eliminate Israel's Jewish population, this despite the openness with which the Arabs proclaim their intentions. In every possible way, the Arabs tell the Jews what they have in store for them. The PLO has its Covenant (not repealed to this day, Israel having finally abandoned the effort out of embarrassment at its futility), whose 33 clauses endlessly repeat the goal--to "liquidate the Zionist and imperialist presence" in Palestine. Arafat's own "moderate" Fatah organization, the PLO's chief component, has not even staged any pretense of making or planning changes in its own Constitution, which it proudly posts on its website. (As Nativ editor Arie Stav has pointed out, that Constitution is the ideological foundation of the Palestinian state which is to replace the Palestinian Authority.) Paragraph 12, defines the "goal:" "The complete liberation of Palestine and the economic, political, military and cultural elimination of Zionism." Paragraph 17 defines the "Method:" "A revolutionary military struggle as the sole method of liberating Palestine." Paragraph 22 announces "Opposition to any political solutions recommended as an alternative to the destruction of the Zionist occupation of Palestine." The equally concise remaining 24 paragraphs restate the above in a variety of ways. So intolerant is the Arafat-led organization of the mere notion of "peace" that its website has called for a boycott of the Peres Center for Peace (that's Shimon, prophet of the New Middle East) on the grounds that "it is waging war on us." And, of course, as has been frequently noted, under the Palestinian Authority educational materials in the schools preach undying hatred and contempt for Israel and Jews.

If this comes from Israel's current "partner in peace," other Arab neighbors make their intentions equally clear. According to Yigal Carmon, whose Middle East Media Research Institute monitors the Arab press, Egypt, Israel's oldest peace partner, is currently the world center of anti-Semitic literature. Mubarak recently went to Lebanon (the first visit by an Egyptian president since Lebanese independence in 1943) in order to issue a joint statement with Lebanon's president praising Hizbollah (which has vowed to continue its attacks on Israel until every inch of Palestine is restored to Arab

The Palestinian Authority's schools preach undying hatred and contempt for Israel and Jews.

As for Syria, Israel's proposed new peace partner, negotiations have not even temporarily ameliorated the outpouring of hatred. Holocaust denial is staple fare there. Tragi-comically, the hatred is so great that the government-controlled Syrian press veers between a straightforward "the Holocaust did not happen" and "the Israelis are guilty of much worse crimes." For example, in a February 2 article in Al-Thawra, Fayez Al-Sayegh, a member of the negotiating team at Shepherdstown and Director General of the Syrian News Agency, wrote: "Israel...was established on Arab land following the banishment of its original inhabitants, their expulsion, and their murder in a series of horrible massacres...What is the Holocaust in comparison with these massacres?" Syrian Foreign Minister Faruq al-Shara, Barak's bizarre opposite number at Shepherdstown (who would neither

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