1. Jews are giving up being Jewish because it is now associated with a State which ignores human rights, commits war crimes and which conducts one of the most vicious occupations and colonisations in modern history.

2. Jews no longer need to hold together because it is perfectly safe to be Jewish and live anywhere in the developed world. Just as it is safe to be Catholic or Anglican these days.

3. Israel has become such a pariah in the world that any person of conscience who can, will remove themselves from association. At least until it changes its behaviour.

4. Young people are more informed and less religious. Judaism is a religion. Its only raison d'etre is religious. My ancestors gave up their Jewishness shortly after arriving in Australia. Because they could. If you are not religious then why define yourself by a religion.

5. No modern democracy can be established on racist lines. Israel cannot remain a Jewish State if it is to be a member of the developed world. Ergo, Israel is increasingly meaningless to Jews who do not live there, simply because they do not believe they need a safe reguge to which they can run and because it is simply not safe.

6. Israel was established and has survived because of the holocaust industry. As the older generation dies out less and less people remember or care about that particular holocaust. One would hope that consciousness of all holocaust experiences are kept alive but one should not be more important than any other and it should most certainly not be justification for the dispossession and subjugation of others,ie the Palestinians. So the less 'real' the Jewish experience of holocaust becomes for people, the less relevant Israel becomes. That is not to say Israel will not survive but it will not survive as a Jewish State nor as an Occupier and coloniser.

Try telling it to the 1700 Palestinians recently made homeless in Beit Hanoun or the families of the children slaughtered in Beit Jbeil.

What about the 12 year old Bedouin girl shot in the head, or the 15 year old boy shot in the leg and left to die last month.

What about the wall, who protests the dreadful wall and who is not afraid to shout Ilan Pappes' revelations of the ethnic cleansing from the roof tops and scream out loud "forgive us, we know not what they do".

How about them apples then.

I finally read a book by a Palestinian after many months of reading books by Jews and he had an extraordinary story which I have had confirmed by an Iraqi who was 15 at the time and remembers being shocked to his core.

ON 5 June 1967, just before the "war" that has become the big myth, the Israeli's blew up all the planes belonging to the arab states, left them undefended and then attacked on the 6th pretending that they had been attacked,

Nothing really changes does it as they try to hang onto what is not theirs and steal more and more of it.