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Next June will mark the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War. For four decades we have been told that the cause of the anger, violence and terror against Israel is its occupation of the territories seized in that war. End the occupation and the ``cycle of violence'' ceases.

The problem with this claim was that before Israel came into possession of the West Bank and Gaza in the Six Day War, every Arab state had rejected Israel's right to exist and declared Israel's pre-1967 borders -- now deemed sacred -- to be nothing more than the armistice lines suspending, and not ending, the 1948-49 war to exterminate Israel.

But you don't have to be a historian to understand the intention of Israel's enemies. You only have to read today's newspapers.

Exhibit A: Gaza. Just last September, Israel evacuated Gaza completely. It declared the border between Israel and Gaza an international frontier, renouncing any claim to the territory. Gaza became the first independent Palestinian territory in history. Yet the Gazans continued the war. They turned Gaza into a base for launching rocket attacks against Israel and for digging tunnels under the border to conduct attacks like the one that killed two Israeli soldiers on June 25 and yielded a wounded hostage brought back to Gaza. Israeli tanks have now had to return to Gaza to try to rescue the hostage and suppress the rocket fire.

Exhibit B: South Lebanon. Two weeks later, on July 12, the Lebanese terror organization, Hezbollah, which has representation in the Lebanese parliament and in the Cabinet, launched an attack into Israel that killed eight soldiers and wounded two, who were brought back to Lebanon as hostages.

What's the grievance here? Israel withdrew from Lebanon completely in 2000. It was so scrupulous in making sure that not one square inch of Lebanon was left inadvertently occupied that it asked the U.N. to verify the exact frontier defining Lebanon's southern border and retreated behind it. This ``blue line'' was approved by the Security Council, which declared that Israel had fully complied with resolutions demanding its withdrawal from Lebanon.

Grievance satisfied. Yet what happens? Hezbollah has done to South Lebanon exactly what Hamas has done to Gaza: turn it into a military base and terrorist operations center from which to continue the war against Israel. South Lebanon bristles with Hezbollah's ten-thousand Katyusha rockets that put northern Israel under the gun. Fired in the first hours of fighting, just 85 of these killed two Israelis and wounded over 100 in Israel's northern towns.

It was Yasser Arafat's PLO that persuaded the world that the issue was occupation. Yet through all those years of pretense, Arafat's own group celebrated its annual Fatah Day on the anniversary of its first attack on Israel, the bombing of Israel's National Water Carrier -- on Jan. 1, 1965.

Note: 1965. Two years before the 1967 war. Two years before Gaza and the West Bank fell into Israeli hands. Two years before there were any ``occupied territories.''

But again, who needs history? As the Palestinian excuses for continuing their war disappear one by one, the rhetoric is becoming more bold and honest. Just last Tuesday, Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, writing in The Washington Post, referred to Israel as ``a supposedly 'legitimate' state.''

He made clear what he wants done with this bastard entity. ``Contrary to popular depictions of the crisis in the American media,'' he writes, ``the dispute is not only about Gaza and the West Bank.'' It is about ``a wider national conflict'' that requires the vindication of ``Palestinian national rights.''

That, of course, means the right to all of Palestine, with no Jewish state. In the end, the fighting is about ``the core 1948 issues, rather than the secondary ones from 1967.''

In 1967, Israel acquired the ``occupied territories.'' In 1948, Israel acquired life. The fighting raging now in 2006 -- between Israel and the ``genocidal Islamism'' (to quote the writer Yossi Klein Halevi) of Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran behind them -- is about whether that life should and will continue to exist.

Of the 175 United Nations Security Council resolutions passed before 1990, 97 were directed against Israel. Of the 690 General Assembly resolutions voted on before 1990, 429 were directed against Israel. The U.N. was silent while 58 Jerusalem synagogues were destroyed by the Jordanians. The U.N. was silent while the Jordanians destroyed 58 Jerusalem Synagogues and systematically desecrated the ancient Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives. The U.N. was silent while the Jordanians prevented Jews from visiting the Temple Mount and the Western Wall.

The horrific suicide bombings by Palestinian terrorists that killed and maimed dozens of innocent Israeli civilians last week is the latest, and most lethal, series of actions in their murderous war of terrorism against Israel. What may be less well known is that the Palestinian Authority, with support from numerous Arab and Muslim regimes, is waging a parallel campaign to isolate Israel and delegitimize its right to exist and to attack the Jewish people and their history. Incubated at the recent World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, this phenomenon has been maturing in the wake of the terrible terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

The concerted anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic campaign that has blossomed under United Nations auspices is seriously undermining its credibility. The Durban conference may have put this anti-Israel, anti-Semitic animus on full display, but it has been present for decades, as witness the passage of the despicable "Zionism is racism" resolution (since rescinded); the unwarranted obsession with Israel at the UN Commission on Human Rights; the singular institutional discrimination that blocked Israeli membership in a UN regional group; the annual UN General Assembly anti-Israel resolutions; and the bogus extraordinary emergency sessions that exclusively blame Israel for the conflict, while ignoring Palestinian violence and terrorism.