Backing up the argument: There is no Israeli ideology, policy or plan to persecute, exterminate or expel the Palestinian population. Labeling Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as akin to the Holocaust, "ethnic cleansing" or "genocide" is an attempt to conjure up an emotional reaction through inflammatory rhetoric. No other nation faced with comparable external and internal threats has been more protective of enemy civilians, more willing to take risks for peace, and more committed to the rule of its law. Throughout the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, only one side has attempted genocide. The self-proclaimed Arab “War of Extermination” in 1948, the continuous rhetoric of genocide and the targeting of Israeli cities by Arab armies during the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars, and the continuous terrorist attacks that have killed thousands of Israeli civilians can be characterized as attempted genocide. The number of Palestinian casualties during the ongoing conflict with Israel has been infinitesimal in comparison with the number of Arabs killed by Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran in the recent past. The murder of 20 000 Muslim Brothers by Syrian President Assad in Hama in 1982 was never denounced by Arabs for what it was: state terrorism. Moreover, Palestinian civilian deaths have resulted primarily from terrorists hiding among their own civilians, as was the case in Lebanon, whereas the Israeli deaths have resulted from innocent civilians being specifically targeted. The entrance of the Israeli army to the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002 came following hundreds of suicide bombings, and after the camp became a bomb-making factory and terrorist center. Israel could have bombed the terrorists’ camp from the air, as the US did in Afghanistan, and Russia in Chechnya, with little risk to their own soldiers but much to civilians. However, in order to minimize civilian casualties, Israeli infantrymen entered the camp, going from house to house by foot in search of terrorists and bomb-making equipment. This cost the lives of 23 Israeli soldiers. Not only was Jenin not a “massacre” or an “unparalleled catastrophe”, but it is regarded by many as a model of how to conduct urban warfare against terrorists hiding among civilians. Israel has met that challenge better than any nation that has faced comparable dangers. Even the director of the anti-Israel film “Jenin, Jenin”, a propaganda film that so outraged Israeli soldiers involved in fighting that they sued the filmmaker for libel, admitted that there were several major inaccuracies in the movie. Israel has never dropped bombs indiscriminately on an enemy city in an effort to kill innocent civilians in retaliation for the deliberate bombing of its own civilians. Although Israeli soldiers make mistakes like soldiers in every army, at least there is an ethical code against which their actions can be judged. Palestinian terrorists have no similar constraints. The US also has a code, though it is far more general than that of Israel, emphasizing honor and tradition. The Supreme Court of Israel exercises control over military decisions that are challenged under the rule of law as creating undue risks to civilians. Since September 11, and especially during the war against Iraq, the US government has committed virtually all the wrongs for which Israel has been condemned by the US itself in the annual State Department reports on human rights. No comparison can be made between the complex Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews. The Nazis' "final solution" to the "Jewish problem" was the deliberate and systematic extermination of European Jewry. Hitler's final solution led to the calculated, pre-meditated murder of six million Jews and the destruction of many thriving Jewish communities across Europe. Israeli policies toward the Palestinians are dictated solely by its need to defend its population and combat threats to Israel's citizens, while promoting a negotiated resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Charges that Israel is committing genocide or ethnic cleansing totally contradict the fact that the Palestinian population has continued to increase more than 20% just from 1995 to 2000, according to statistics from the Palestinian Authority. Those who make the comparison between the Jewish state to the Nazis and Hitler are trying to associate the victims of the Nazis' crimes with the Nazi perpetrators, and to diminish the significance and uniqueness of the Holocaust. Such a comparison is such an act of blatant hostility toward Jews and Jewish history that it clearly indicates a deeper hatred. In fact, the Nazi genocide of the Jews was supported by Palestinian leaders of the time, including Haj-Amin Al-Husseini, the first leader of the nascent Palestinian national movement in the 1920s, who collaborated with Hitler and offered his strategic help for a Nazi invasion of British Palestine and the extermination of the Jews there. ( See background )