One day maybe Israel -- like South Africa and Chile before it -- will have some kind of "truth finding" commission to try to purge itself of the past.

That day can only come somewhere in the hazy future, for the truths and crimes that will be investigated and uncovered are still happening today. But when that day does come the Israeli "ethnic cleansing" that has taken place in the past, which is continuing in other forms today, and which may be being planned anew for the future, will be high on the list of truths to be uncovered and for which reparations will be rightly demanded. This interesting glimpse into Israel's present-day soul-searching comes from the far right-wing in response to attempts by the Labor Party establishment to distance itself from what it did as opposed to what it says.

[Ha'aretz - 20 February]: Far-right National Union party leader Rehavam Ze'evi, at the center of a dispute over the character of a future unity coalition, said Tuesday that Ehud Barak's Labor forebears not only invented, but implemented, the concept of "transfering" Arabs out of the confines of the biblical land of Israel.

Barak has ruled out Labor participation in a Likud-led coalition government including the National Union, which he has said "flies the banner of transfer, a very extreme party." But Ze'evi said that Labor had already agreed to participation of his National Union-Yisrael Beiteinu bloc in a prospective government.

Ze'evi said of the transfer concept, "I am proud of it - I learned it in the Labor movement. If transfer bothers Barak, then he is cutting off his ties from (Israel's founding prime minister David) Ben-Gurion, from (the late Labor ideologue) Berl Katznelson, from all of the Labor movement's leaders of past generations.

In an apparent reference to actions taken by the Israeli army in some Arab areas during the 1948 war, Ze'evi said: "They not only invented the concept, they carried it out. They ordered it, they commanded others to do it And this was not my (concept) of a humanitarian, willing transfer, but a transfer by force, an expulsion - and this was done by the Labor movement.

So if Barak is bothered by this, he has a problem with his own heritage." In an interview with Army Radio, Ze'evi said that in the course of nearly two weeks of coalition talks "after 11 days it was agreed, and this was clear to Labor representatives as well, that we are 'inside' and strongly so."

Ze'evi said that Barak raised the issue only to mask his difficulties in convincing party colleagues to agree to the defeated prime minister continuing as defense minister in a unity government.