Obama's initiative in Cairo is more than a political gambit, it is a probably last chance to avoid another Holocaust. The question is whose Holocaust will it be.

The Right Wing extremist emergence as the power in the Israeli government had its genesis in the assassin's bullet which struck down Yitzhak Rabin, the last Israeli Prime Minister with stature to deliver a peace for land settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli deadlock.

The victors in the Rabin assassination were the extremists on both sides. That the Israel right wing "won" is obvious. It ought to be equally clear that the extremists who wish to push Israel into the sea also won. Moderate voices on both sides were muted.

Now, the most extreme Israeli position - that the Arabs must be expelled from all the land west of the Jordan - is holding Israeli politics captive.

The opposition to a Palestinian state means that the Palestinian population of the West Bank will be stateless. If there are any people on earth who should know what statelessness means it ought to be the Jewish population of Israel. The Nazi's decreed that Jews were stateless and thus had the protection of no sovereign. There were exceptions for Jews who claimed in citizenship in nations beyond the Nazi control.

In 2007, my wife Rene and I visited the Ann Frank Museum in Amsterdam. It was a profound experience. While those of us who remember the book and movie made from her diary as a affirmation of her life, the Museum also tells the story of her death and the last few agonizing months of her life.

One gut-wrenching moment was a filmed testament of a Jewish woman who had been a childhood friend of Anne. Her father had obtained citizenship for their family in a South American country and when they were interned, they were kept in a part of the concentration camp reserved for foreign nationals. They were separated from the stateless Jews by a barbed wire fence. On day she discovered her friend Anne on the other side of the fence. Anne was starving and begged for food.

That evening by prearrangement she met Anne by the fence and threw food over to her, but another woman took the food from Anne and left Anne howling in anguish. She never saw Anne again.

The zealots who would keep the Palestinians stateless are writing on the same page as the Nazi’s. It is their expressed intention to expel all Palestinians from the West Bank. The Israelis fear a second Holocaust but extremist remedy is to create a Palestinian one.

The problem for Israel is that it is an enclave of 6 million Jews in a sea of 1.5 billion Moslems. In 1099, a Crusader Army defeated the Moslems and seized control of Jerusalem. But they too were an enclave in a sea of Moslems. Their enclave lasted only 89 years. Israel is 61 years this year.

For Israel to survive, it must have a permanent t peace with the Moslem world. A peace secured by force of arms will only be a temporary peace. Expulsion of the Palestinians will offer no respite.