First, there was the openly racist anti-Arab campaign platform of Avigdor Lieberman, who called for stripping Palestinian Israelis of their citizenship and requiring them to take an oath of allegiance. The strong showing of Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home} in the recent Israeli election validated for many Israelis, Lieberman’s racist views and led some Israeli commentators to wistfully observe that racism was now an acceptable Jewish value in Israel.

Second, the preparatory work for the United Nations Conference on Racism, Durban II had produced a final communique, which had singled out Israel as an occupying state practising racism.

Now, although allegations of Israel's crimes against humanity and Israeli officers' liability before international justice are likely to be on the agenda, the final communique has been changed and, according to sources cited by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, it now speaks only of "concern about the negative stereo-typing of religions and does not single out Israel for criticism."

Third, the Israeli press reported in late March that the state-owned Israeli Railways had fired some 40 Arab citizens of Israel, who mostly worked as crossing guards, on the grounds that jobs at the Israeli Railways would be given to Israelis who served in the army. Since Arabs in Israel are exempt from military service, they are automatically excluded from jobs that require proof of military service.

This decision has been described by Haaretz, as a de facto discrimination against Palestinian Israelis. One commentator noted that despite existing anti-discrimination laws "only 5.2 per cent of civil servants are Arabs, while they make up almost 20 per cent of the overall population", and concluded that the sacking shows that "security concerns are used to camouflage double standards in favour of Jewish Israeli workers."

The Palestinian Israeli rights organisation Adalah protested in a letter sent to the Ministry of Transport and the Israeli Railway Company on March 23, 2009.

Adalah cited the case of Haifa University whose policy of giving priority for accommodation to students who served in the army was challenged in court. The court ruled that "the use of the military service criterion led to discrimination against Arab students on the ground that they are exempt from serving in the Israel army".

Adalah argued that The Israel Railway Company "is obliged to respect the existing legal and constitutional directives that prohibit discrimination on the basis of national belonging."

In fact, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was reported in the Israeli press last October to have admitted the existence in Israel of entrenched discrimination against Palestinian Israelis.

"There is no doubt," he said, "that for many years there has been discrimination against the Arab population that stemmed from various reasons".

In a speech in parliament, last December, Olmert again admitted that racial discrimination was rife: "It is terrible," he said, "that there is not even one Arab employee [out of 900] at the Bank of Israel.

"There is no arguing," he added, " that some government ministries did not hire Arabs for years."

The founding Zionist idea of Israel contained two fundamentally discriminatory practices judged necessary to build and protect its Jewish character.

First, the state of Israel is not the state of its citizens, but the state of the Jewish people wherever they may be. The Law of Return grants any Jew in the world unique political rights in Israel.

Secondly, the project of transforming Palestine into a Jewish state required the redemption and Judaisation of the land. The land was 'redeemed' largely through the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 and subsequent dispossession and confiscation of their lands.

In his seminal book, The Arabs in Israel, Sabri Jiyris showed how the Emergency Regulations enacted during the British mandate were used as an instrument to expropriate Arab land.

Palestinian land thus 'redeemed' became the property not of the state of Israel, but of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) for the benefit of the Jews. The JNF was specifically prohibited from leasing land to the Arabs.

Although it is unlikely that the Law of Return can seriously be challenged without threatening the very Zionist foundation of Israel, the discriminatory land practice of the JNF is being challenged.

Adalah challenged this discrimination in court and argued that this policy "will lead to the further creation of Jewish-only towns and neighbourhoods", and that "the resulting racially-segregated areas will resemble those established under the Apartheid regime in South Africa. "

Significantly, liberal Israelis are challenging this basic feature of Zionism.

Writing under the heading Who Needs the JNF, Haaretz recalled that "almost two million dunams out of 2.5 million dunams owned by the JNF were not purchased with contributions, but simply taken from Arabs who fled" or were expelled during the 1948 war.

It pointed out that the project of dispossession continues in the Occupied Territories through Himnuta, a JNF subsidiary.