The Bush administration is being criticized for its decision not to send a top-level diplomatic delegation to the U.N. Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, because it objects to the anti-Semitic attacks on Israel being promoted there, including the old libel that Zionism is a form of racism.

The U.S. government should continue to insist that Zionism is not a form of racism, but rather a form of nationalism as legitimate as any other. However, while Zionism itself is not racism, some Israeli policies are unjustifiable and should be condemned even by Americans who support Israel's right to exist and defend itself.

Zionism -- the belief that the Jewish ethnic nation deserves its own homeland, like other ethnic nations -- is no more racist in itself than Polish nationalism or Norwegian nationalism. Today's Israeli Jews, most of who are descendants of 19th and 20th century immigrants, have as much a right to live in the internationally recognized State of Israel as do the descendants of European settlers and non-European immigrants in the Americas, Australia and New Zealand. The fact that a majority of the world's Jews now live in Israel makes the preservation of a Jewish nation-state all the more necessary, in light of the long history of anti-Semitism elsewhere that culminated in Hitler's attempt to exterminate Europe's Jews along with Europe's gypsies and gays.

If Zionism means support for the preservation of the State of Israel, then, it is not racist. Nor is Israel's Law of Return, which gives preference to Jewish immigrants, racist in itself. As a state founded to preserve Jewish ethnic culture, Israel can legitimately favor the immigration of ethnic Jews, including secular Jews, of different racial backgrounds -- black Jews from Africa, along with blond and blue-eyed Jews from Europe.

Nor is it racist for the Israeli government to support a minimal public culture based on Jewish tradition, including the Hebrew language and Jewish holidays, as long as the government respects the rights of religious and ethnic minorities.

All of these manifestations of Zionism are perfectly compatible with the values of tolerant, enlightened liberal democracies like the United States. However, though all Zionism is not racism, some versions of Zionism are racist.

Unlike liberal Zionism, which grew out of the 19th century ideal of self-determination on the part of peacefully coexisting secular nation-states, racist Zionism is based on chauvinistic tribalism and religious fundamentalism. Racist Zionists believe that millennia ago God gave the Jewish people a right to a mythical "Greater Israel," which includes not only the West Bank, which Israel detached from Jordan during the 1967 War, but also parts of other Arab countries.

Despite the protests of the United States and the other democratic nations, Israeli governments, under the influence of Israel's extreme Right, not only occupied the West Bank but colonized it. Today 200,000 Jewish settlers live in the occupied West Bank on land stolen by the Israeli government from the 2 million native Palestinian Arabs.

Zionism, then, like other kinds of nationalism, comes in both good and evil forms. Americans should support legitimate, liberal Zionism, while opposing the colonial policy toward the West Bank that has turned the noble dream of Jewish self-determination into an ugly nightmare of Israeli imperialism.

Israel's brutal 34-year occupation of the West Bank is as illegitimate as Indonesia's recently ended 24-year occupation of East Timor. Although suicide bombings by Palestinians are evil and cowardly, the Palestinian revolution is a legitimate war for national independence from foreign tyranny. Indeed, the Palestinian Arabs who have been expropriated, harassed, tortured and killed by the Israeli conquerors have a much greater claim to national independence today than the American colonists did in 1776 when they rebelled against British taxation.

Whether it becomes a democracy or a dictatorship following independence, Palestine should be ruled by Palestinians, not by a foreign army of occupation.

Without waiting for Israeli agreement, the United States and other democracies should immediately recognize the independence and statehood of Palestine. No assurances or concessions to the Israeli invaders by the Palestinians are necessary as a precondition of Palestinian independence -- any more than concessions by the Timorese to their Indonesian conquerors were necessary before Indonesia withdrew its army from East Timor.

Of course if the Palestinian state, after independence, attacks Israel, or sponsors terrorism, then Israel can legitimately defend itself -- but only by means short of occupation, colonization, torture, assassination and the theft of Arab land.

In addition to demanding that Israel immediately retreat behind its 1967 borders, the United States and its allies should insist that all Jewish colonists in the West Bank be returned at once to Israel. International peacekeeping forces should be deployed between the state of Israel and the new state of Palestine, to prevent further Israeli invasions of Palestine, as well as Palestinian attacks on Israel. The United States and the other democracies should also insist that the Israeli government set up a fund to pay monetary compensation to the Arabs in the West Bank whose lands were stolen by Jewish colonists and whose homes were destroyed by the Israeli military, beginning in 1967.

In return for these unilateral actions by the Israeli government, the United States and its allies should strongly oppose international prosecution of individual Israeli leaders for the many war crimes and human-rights abuses committed by Israel during its invasion and occupation of the West Bank. Finally, the United States and the other democratic nations should reject the claim that Palestinian Arabs have a right to return to Israel in its pre-1967 borders.

The Jewish ethnic nation has a right to live in peace in its own homeland. It does not have the right to conquer and tyrannize another ethnic nation in their homeland. Americans should continue to condemn U.N. statements equating Zionism with racism. But it is up to the Israelis themselves now to prove by their actions that the equation is false.