With spectacular fanfare and a plethora of highlighted events, Israel is planning to celebrate its 60th birthday on 18 May 2008.

According to an Israeli government website called Israelfestival.com, the festival will include "non-stop entertainment, [a] fashion show, a variety of ethnic food for sale, Israeli folk dancing, arts and crafts, Israeli and Jewish cultural and heritage pavilions and art exhibits".

The centrepiece ceremony is expected to take place in West Jerusalem and be attended by Israel's political and military leaders as well as foreign dignitaries. Among those expected are US President George W Bush, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

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Last year, Richard Falk, a renowned American Jewish professor of international law and practice, wrote an article entitled "Slouching toward a Palestinian holocaust," in which he warned that Israel was moving towards the perpetration of a holocaust against the Palestinians. "Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not," said Falk.

Justifying the Israel-equals-Nazi analogy, Falk argued that developments in Gaza (the blockade against its estimated 1.5 million inhabitants), were especially disturbing because they expressed vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its backers to subject an entire human community to life- endangering conditions of maximal cruelty. "The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating into a collective tragedy," Falk wrote.

In sum, from the standpoint of fascism, Israel has much to celebrate in terms of political and military achievements.

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