MIDDLE EAST: Swastikas have been scratched into the paint work of the car of left-wing Labour Party Knesset member Yuli Tamir.
Nazi graffiti have been daubed at public sites to deride the commemoration of the assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
And a Tel Aviv court yesterday indicted three Israelis for vandalising the memorial to Mr Rabin at the spot where he was gunned down in 1995 - two of the defendants allegedly spat on it, while the third scrawled "murderer".
As Israel yesterday marked the eighth anniversary of the assassination of Mr Rabin, the Anti-Defamation League, the US-based organisation more routinely involved in combating anti-Semitism worldwide, was forced to issue a statement of "dismay and outrage" at the new "rash of swastikas and Nazi imagery" in graffiti in the Jewish state.
One of the spitters was captured by TV cameras, prompting a well-known comedian who was being interviewed by the TV crew at the time to lament the degeneration of Israeli society.
But the rash of incidents also underlines the unhealed divisions between left and right over the price Israel should pay for making peace with the Palestinians, eight years after those divisions prompted Orthodox extremist Yigal Amir to kill Mr Rabin.
More than 100,000 Israelis gathered last Saturday at the central Tel Aviv square where Mr Rabin was assassinated to invoke his memory and re-endorse his peace efforts. But polls show that a large majority of Israelis regard the Rabin-led Oslo peace partnership with Mr Yasser Arafat to have been a mistake and the Palestinian leader to be an unreformed terrorist, and a minority are pressing for the architects of Oslo to be prosecuted for acting against the national interest.
However, while the overwhelming re-election of Mr Ariel Sharon as prime minister in January indicated that his hawkish mistrust of the Palestinian leadership reflected mainstream Israeli sensibilities, there appears to have been something of a public reassessment of late. Much-publicised comments by the army's chief-of-staff Gen Moshe Ya'alon last week, to the effect that Israel's ongoing restrictions on the Palestinians amounted to collective punishment and provided easy recruits for Hamas, were somewhat surprisingly echoed even by some of Mr Sharon's more right-wing ministers.
An opinion poll yesterday showed 62 per cent of Palestinians backing suicide bombings.
The Likud's junior partner in the governing coalition, the centrist Shinui Party, yesterday unveiled a peace plan it intends to try to impose on Mr Sharon, which includes a call for the evacuation of the isolated Netzarim settlement in the Gaza Strip - where three soldiers were killed 10 days ago - the honouring of a largely ignored Israeli government pledge to dismantle illegal settlements in the West Bank, and other steps designed to revive the diplomatic process.