Last Thursday and Friday - Oct. 7 and 8, 2004 - the Franco-German channel Arte, mostly paid for by the taxpayer, broadcast a very bad French-Egyptian movie by Yousri Nasrallah called "Les portes du soleil". The fact that it was very bad was actually a blessing, for the main purpose of the movie was to show the founders of the state of Israel as moral equivalent to the Nazis. The movie begins with a scene in a Palestinian school in 1943 where a teacher tells children about "our country, Palestine" and the "Jewish colonisation" going on. 1-9-4-3. Was nothing else happening at that time in Jewish history? Apparently not, according to Arte.

It goes on: the 1948 war, when Israel barely survived a coordinated attack on the day of her birth by Arab states openly calling for genocide, is described slightly differently. Jews in green-grey uniforms come with tanks and commit mass murders of innocent women and children, burn the villages, pile the clothes of the dead according to size in order to send them to Israel. The Palestinian hero tattoos the date of the slaughter on his own wrist. This is nauseating. This is unbelievable. Of course the 1948 Jews had neither tanks nor real uniforms - they almost didn't have two rifles of the similar kind, for God's sake! Arabs were brutalised, some were expelled in militarily important areas just as Jews were expelled from their homes in Arab countries - but indiscriminate slaughter by Tsahal? When, where? And what kind of person could dream up the Nazi analogies, apparent from the color of the uniform, the clothes piled on and the tattoo on the wrist? My God, which side actually had tattooed wrists in this war? This is nauseating. This is unbelievable. But this is where we are.