Johann Hari

It was good for me; was it good for you? 2006 has been a bipolar year for global gay rights, with soaring highs punctuated by numbing lows. It was the year gay marriage got applauded at a Tory Party conference, finally stopped losing elections in America, and came even to the tip of Africa. But it was also the year the Grand Ayatollah of Iraq issued a fatwa calling for gays to be killed in “the worst, most severe way possible” – and the religions of the world united in that global font of superstition, Jerusalem, to stop gay people from throwing a party.

So let’s begin there, with our greatest achievement and saddest moment of 2006, all tied into one. We, the gays of the world, managed to pull off a trick all the Messiahs, peacemakers and Nobel prizes have been unable to confect for a thousand years: we united all the communities of the Middle East. This summer, the Jews, Muslims and Christians who spend most of the year trying to ethnically cleanse each other organised a joint press conference to declare – yes, we hate each other, but we hate the gays more.

The trigger was the announcement of a long-delayed Gay Pride rally in Jerusalem. Last time gays met in Jerusalem, three of them were stabbed by religious fanatics. This time, incredibly, the Israeli government – which has long boasted of being the only liberal democracy in the region – caved in to the fanatics and banned the march. It was confined in the end to a sealed-off stadium, a tiny pocket of gay freedom in a homo-cidal region.

But compared to the treatment of gay people elsewhere in the region, this was Paradise. In Iran – under the tightening Islamist regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – the hounding and slaughter of gay people intensified. While there were no stark photographs like the 2005 hangings of gay teenage boys in a public square, an investigation by gay rights group Outrage! found that the Iranian secret police have shifted to staging secret hanging in prison, where the rope is knotted carefully to ensure slow strangulation of gays.

Next door, in a collapsing Iraq, gay people are being increasingly hunted down by Talibanist death-squads committed to “morally purifying” their little patch of Mesopotamia. Outrage! again documented a few of the thousands of cases. Here’s one: “Nyaz is a 28-year old dentist who lives in Baghdad. She is terrified that her lesbian relationship will be discovered, and that both she and her partner will be killed. They have stopped seeing each other. It is too dangerous. To make matters worse, Nyaz is being forced by the fundamentalist Mahdi militia to marry an older, senior Mullah with close ties the Mahdi leader, Muqtada al-Sadr. If she does not agree to the marriage, or tries to run away, Nyaz and her family will be targeted for ‘honour killing' by Sadr's men.”

Or how about Karzan, a 23 year old arts student in Baghdad, whose father received a message saying that if he did not hand over his “depraved” gay son for execution, the family would be killed one by one? How about Wathiq, a 29-year old gay architect who was kidnapped, whose family stumped up an £11,000 ransom – and who was still found beheaded and mutilated a few days later?

Across the world, gay people were still the victims of this perverse determination to cling to the moral visions of pre-modern nomads who lived millennia ago, set out in “Holy Books”. Even in Britain, one of the most irreligious countries in the world where just 7 percent of the population attend a religious service every week, superstition was used to attack gays. The Gay Police Association (GPA) announced there has been a 75 percent increase in homophobic hate crimes by religious fanatics here since the September 11th massacres.

And yet the public faces of religion still dare to sanctimoniously claim that it is consensusal gay sex that is the real immorality. In the year in which it was revealed in even greater detail how Pope Benedict covered up the mass rape of children in his Church, he reiterated his view that homosexuality is an “intrinsic evil”. He has helped fuel a resurgent Catholic nationalism in some parts of Eastern Europe, not least in Poland where Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz has declared that if a homosexual "tries to infect others with their homosexuality, then the state must intervene in this violation of freedom."

Even the supposedly liberal Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, refused to condemn his Nigerian colleague, Archbishop Akinola, who acted as national cheerleader for a new set of savagely anti-gay laws. Thanks to him, gay sexual health education will now stop entirely in a country with epidemic AIDS.

But for every Dark Ages prohibition like this, there were shimmering points of light in other parts of the world. Gay marriage of some sort is now standard in Western Europe, and – surprise, surprise! – conservative predictions that it would cause the institution of marriage to crumble have proved to be preposterous. Indeed, most of the people getting married are lesbians, and the evidence suggests their relationships last longer than their heterosexual siblings’ – suggesting that gay marriage actually strengthens the institution.

Under David Cameron, even the British Tory Party – a generation on from the horrors of Section 28 – lauds gay marriage, and their crumbling conference audience applauds on cue. While there’s every reason to be suspicious of many of Cameron’s rebranding exercises, this shift seems genuine, with an attempt to recruit gay candidates across the board. Britain, along with the rest of Western Europe, seems to be entering an era of post-gay politics, when all parties agree to a plush package of gay rights.

And the argument is being won in the US faster than anybody could have imagined. Just two years ago, referenda to force a ban on gay marriage into individual states’ constitutions were being won with 65 percent majorities. This year, the margin of support was down to the low fifties, and for the first time one of these bans was actually rejected by the American people – and in the largely Republican state of Arizona too. With the Democrat victory in both houses of Congress, any-gay rhetoric ceased being the “wedge issue” that Karl Rove has salivated over for so long. Most states and Presidential candidates are now settling on a “civil partnership” compromise that is marriage in all but name. The homophobic fringe in American politics is demoralised; in August, Midge Decter, one of the leading intellectual enemies of gay rights, told me “we are losing this fight.”

But perhaps the most incredible advance for gay marriage has been in South Africa. This is a country next door to Zimbabwe, where Robert Mugabe denounces gays as “worse than dogs” and designates them for torture and semi-starvation. Yet the South African Supreme Court has declared gay marriage to be a legal right in the post-Apartheid constitution. Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula, the Home Affairs Minister, said, “Men and women of homosexual and lesbian orientation joined the ranks of the democratic forces in the struggle for liberation. Same -sex unions should be afforded similar space as heterosexual marriages in the sunshine of democracy.”

If we can win there – in a continent that has been slaying gays since the white colonialist first arrived – we have no right to be pessmisitic about any part of the world. We shall overcome, the anti-Apartheid protestors sang in Soweto. That tune should echo today, from the gay-bashings on Clapham Common to the darkest torture chamber in Teheran.

POSTSCRIPT: You can donate money to the underground gay rights movement in Iraq, to save gay lives from Islamist militias. Cheques should be made payable to “OutRage!” with a cover note marked “For Iraqi LGBT” to PO Box 17816, London SW14 8WT.

The best sound-track to the slow-motion murder of Alexander Litvinenko – leaving a corpse so radioactive there may never be a post-mortem – comes from the Beatles: “We’re back in the USSR/ Been away so long I hardly knew the place…”

To those who stopped following the news from Russia when the Cold War thawed out, the thought of a Russian Bond being despatched to London to take out a dissident in a Mayfair Hotel seems like an inexplicably retro moment. But for those who have cared to see, it has been clear for some time that under Vladimir Putin, Russia is marching back towards totalitarianism. The Russian journalist Anna Polikovskaya wrote three years ago, “The shroud of darkness from which we spent several Soviet decades trying to free ourselves is enveloping us again.” For talking this way, she was swiftly poisoned, and when that didn’t kill her, she was found last month with three bullets in her skull in a Moscow lift-shaft.

Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, Victor Yushenko – one poisoning of your enemies could be a misfortune, but three begins to look like carelessness. Or, rather, a deliberate strategy, and the list of victims goes on. But at first glance, this latest attack seems an extraordinarily inefficient way for the FSB – the successor to the KGB – to murder a dissident. They had to smuggle radioactive poison into Britain, and within 130 days administer it so carefully that they killed Litvinenko and nobody else. Wouldn’t an anonymous bullet in an alleyway have been smarter? But like the previous attacks, this is a way of saying to all critics of Putin – wherever you are, we can get you, and you will die in agony, and you will know you are dying, and you will know it was us.

In case this sounds too presumptuous – do we really know Putin is responsible for murdering a British citizen on British soil? – it’s worth looking at the origins of Putin’s power, as documented by his despatched critics. In 1999, he was appointed Prime Minister by the semi-conscious President Boris Yeltsin. It was assumed he was merely the latest in a string of bland functionaries who passed through the Premiership. But then there was a slew of explosions in apartment blocks across Russia, killing more than 300 people. Putin established himself as the President-designate with response, immediately blaming Chechen fundamentalists and restarting the uniquely vicious Chechen War which has – according to some human rights organisations – killed a third of the civilian population since 1991.

But there is considerable evidence these bombs were not planted by Chechens at all, but by Putin’s own agents. On the day of the apartment explosions, in a town called Ryazan 100 miles south of Moscow, a local engineer spotted another huge bomb, and three suspicious men nearby. They were quickly arrested by the police – and revealed to be FSB agents. They claimed that, while the country was under attack, they were planting real bombs in yet another apartment block as part of a “training exercise.” A slew of highly respected journalists, from my colleague Patrick Cockburn to Channel Four’s Despatches team, have suggested that the bombings were Putin’s Reichstag fire.

Yet the British government has a vested interest in not acknowledging these bleak realities about Russia, and in doing anything they can to avoid the conclusion that Litvinenko was killed on the orders of the Kremlin. The hard geopolitical story about Russia over the past week was not the death of a dissident, but the meeting between top EU officials and Putin in Helsinki to talk gas. Put simply, Europe is addicted to Russia’s oil and gas supplies. We need them, desperately. If Russia turned off the gas – as they did earlier this year with Ukraine as part of a nasty diplomatic dispute – Europe would freeze.

Putin knows it. As the American journalist Thomas Friedman has put it, no addict stands up to his dealer. If global warming wasn’t reason enough for us to urgently develop alternatives to fossil fuels, the fact that Europe’s closest supplies are in the hands of a blackmailing gangster provides a second unanswerable case. Until then, our ability to stand up to Putin – even when he kills one of our own, here in London – will be woefully limited.

But this radioactive slap in the face for Britain should also be an opportunity to understand how Russia came to be slumping back into totalitarianism just fifteen years after the fall of Soviet tyranny. A conservative-pessimist school has emerged which says that democracy was always an alien implant in Russia. Millions of Russians took the streets to weep for Stalin when he died, even though he had slain 30 million of their countrymen. Millions cheer for Putin now. Russians will always want a stern father in the Kremlin, they argue. For them, any February revolution in Russia will always find its October.

But the reality is more complex – and forces us in the West to take a large slice of the blame for Russia’s current condition. The fall of the Soviet Union was quickly presented here as a victory for the Reaganite right. This was largely myth-making: the Soviet system fell because of its own disastrous contradictions. But nonetheless, it meant the supposed victors got to set the terms of the peace. As the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it, “They argued for a new religion – market fundamentalism – as a substitute for the old one – Marxism.” Without consulting the Russian people, the International Monetary Fund forced on Russia “shock therapy”, a form of regulation-free turbo-capitalism more extreme than anything ever tried in any democracy.

The result was a catastrophe. Russian industrial production fell by 60 percent. GDP fell by 54 percent. Life expectancy fell by three years – from the already dire levels of the Soviet Union. Ordinary Russians saw a handful of Yeltsin cronies become billionaires, while there was nothing in the state coffers to pay their $15 a month pensions. Thanks to the Thatcho-Reaganite IMF, Russians came to associate democracy with chaos, criminality and mass unemployment. Think of it as Weimar syndrome. That’s why, when Putin arrived with his neo-Soviet totalitarianism, it no longer seemed so repulsive.

And so we are back where we started, with a totalitarian Russia, and the few remaining dissidents being picked off one by one. “The bastards got me, but they won’t get us all,” Litvinenko said a few hours before he died. I hope so, Alexander. I hope so.

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article just for me to j.hari -at- independent.co.uk or for publication in the Indie to letters -at- independent.co.uk

Over the past five years, the gay community has been keeping a secret: unprotected sex is slowly becoming normal again. In the darkroom of any gay club, on gaydar, in those hurried pre-sex conversations about condoms, one little question – do you bareback? – has become casual, ordinary, everyday. The defenders of this “raw” sex see condoms as sissy and prissy, and brag that playing Russian roulette with their genitals is “manly” and “hard”. The authoritative Gay Men’s Sexual Survey found recently that 60 percent of gay men now sometimes have unprotected sex – and the new HIV statistics released this week are merely a predictable coda to this cultural shift. They should finally drag our secret into the light.

Why has this suicidal shift occurred? Why are so many young gay men gambling with their lives? There is a blizzard of causes, and it is tempting to look first at the ones that are not our fault. The children of Section 28 – whose teachers were forbidden from discussing gay sexual health, lest it sound like “promotion” – are now sexually active men, and thanks to Thatcher’s policy they are frighteningly ignorant. A recent Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) survey found that most young gay men were given no education about gay sexual safety, and 14 percent of them did not even know they are more likely to contract HIV if their partner ejaculates inside them.

Some of the other causes for this HIV spike are the perverse side-effects of progress. The invention of protease inhibitors, keeping HIV-positive men alive and healthy, has actually made HIV seem less like cancer and more like diabetes – an unpleasant but essentially manageable illness. Some people have dubbed them “protease disinhibitors”.

Similarly, the well-intentioned campaigns to stress that HIV is not a “gay plague” – that it affects straight people too – have had a disastrous downside. We have begun to believe it, in defiance of the hard statistics. Over the past decade, the government’s anti-AIDS health campaigns have been redirected away from young gay men who are seriously at risk, towards straight teenagers who are in reality extremely statistically unlikely to contract HIV. As Will Nutland of THT admits, "Everyone in HIV prevention is very reluctant to say it because we are worried about a homophobic backlash, so we have colluded in this Ibiza-isation of HIV, but the result is that money is being wasted targeting very low-risk straight holiday-makers, and high-risk people are not getting the protection they need."

The other causes don’t even have these good intentions gone awry, and offer nobody else to blame but ourselves. There are currently lots of people making money out of normalising bare-backing, whether it’s through porn or clubs offering “raw” nights. Most of us passively acquiesce in it; who wants the embarrassment of a row? The drug crystal meth (also known by the sweet name of Tina) is also spreading on the gay party scene. It simultaneously makes you extremely horny, and lowers your sense of risk – a recipe for unprotected sex.

The HIV-positive playwright Larry Kramer, who lost most of his friends in the first wave of AIDS, is incredulous at these changes. Addressing men who choose unprotected sex, he says, "I cannot understand how, life having been given back to us again, you treat your life with such contempt… How many lovers and friends do you have to bury before you learn to put on a condom? Is that what it’s going to take?”

Even in death, the right misses the point. Milton Friedman – the Messiah of Monetarism, saviour of small-state conservatism – is about to be buried, but his mourners have conspicuously failed to laud his one great argument.

In the past week, his conservative obituarists have concentrated on the slew of issues he got wrong, lathering praise on his demonstrably false belief that a limp, slashed-back state delivers greater social mobility and a broader middle class than a mixed social democratic economy. Just compare Sweden to Texas to test that one – or look at the collapse in Latin American growth since Friedmanomics forced out Keynesianism. Yet on one issue, Friedman applied the forensic brilliance of his brain to a deserving purpose. Over forty years, he offered the most devastating slap-downs of the “war on drugs” ever written.

Friedman was a child when alcohol was criminalised in America. The Prohibitionist crusade to banish the “demon rum” and dry out the United States lasted until he was in his twenties. The lessons lasted his lifetime. He saw that even when you use force – the police and army – to try to physically prevent people from using a popular intoxicant, you don’t actually reduce its use very much. “I wasn't very old and was not much of a drinker but there was no difficulty in finding speakeasies,” he explained. The most generous estimate is that alcohol consumption fell by a fifth initially, and then rose to pre-prohibition levels as people discovered surreptitious channels for a mouthful of moonshine.

But while prohibition didn’t succeed in the fantasies of its fans that it would “end alcoholism”, it did succeed gloriously in one respect. It handed a massive, popular industry to armed criminal gangs, who succeeded to ramp up the murder rate up by 78 percent and make a mockery of the rule of law. “We had this spectacle of Al Capone, of the hijackings, of the gang wars...” Friedman wrote. “Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse - for both the addict and the rest of us.”

Friedman saw – way ahead of almost any other commentator – how prohibiting cannabis, cocaine and heroin would spawn a thousand Capones. He warned, “Al Capone epitomizes our earlier attempt at Prohibition; the Crips and Bloods epitomize this one.” The old Chicago gangster famously gunned down six of his alcohol-hawking competitors on the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. But in the age of drug prohibition, there are equivalent dealer shoot-outs every minute of the day in South Central Los Angeles – and Hackney, and Bogata, and Kabul. People without recourse to the law will protect their property with hard ammunition. Late in his life, Friedman calculated that 10,000 people were dying every year in the US alone as a direct result of these killings, equivalent to more than three September 11ths. Most were bystanders caught in the cross-fire.

And by globalising this Puritan war on drugs, the US government has globalised this gangsterism. Friedman warned that the war on drugs has “undermined the very foundations of Colombian society” and “condemned hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Colombians to violent death.” I have just returned from Mexico, which is rapidly Colombianizing, with whole areas controlled by dealers who bribe or out-gun the police force and terrorize the local population. The same thing is happening on a huge scale in Afghanistan. “By what right do we destroy other people’s countries just because we cannot enforce our own laws?” Friedman asked.

But armed gangsters are not the only species of crime generated by prohibition. In his careful, methodical style, Friedman proved that criminalising drugs causes an explosion in muggings and burglary, making us all victims of this war at some time in our lives. How? A kilo of heroin passes through six different dealers in the supply chain before it reaches the veins of a Londoner. Each link in the chain demands a fat fee for risking jail. This means heroin costs 3000 percent more than it would in a legal, risk-free market – and a heroin addict must steal 3000 percent more to buy it. 3000 percent more grannies mugged, 3000 percent more homes burgled.

That’s why so many police officers are now coming out in favour of unpicking hardline prohibition and prescribing heroin to addicts, with Howard Roberts, the deputy chief constable of Nottinghamshire, joining the queue yesterday. They know from the experience in Switzerland – an ultra-conservative country that now nonetheless prescribes heroin – that it a silver bullet (or syringe?), bringing crime rates crashing down.

This does not mean Friedman was in favour of drugs. One of the biggest problem with the legalization brand is that it is still contaminated by the legacy of idiots like Timothy O’Leary, who though drugs use was an active good, an act of liberation. (Go visit a heroin addict in rehab and tell them how liberated they are). By contrast, Friedman thought (rightly) that heavy drug use – whether it was alcoholism, cannabis-addiction or junkiedom – was a human disaster. He once told Bill Bennett, Bush Snr’s drugs tsar, “You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favour are a major source of the evils you deplore.”

Friedman proved, for example, that prohibition changes the way people use drugs, making many people use stronger, more dangerous variants than they would in a legal market. During alcohol prohibition, moonshine eclipsed beer; during drug prohibition, crack is eclipsing coke. He called his rule explaining this curious historical fact “the Iron Law of Prohibition”: the harder the police crack down on a substance, the more concentrated the substance will become.

Why? If you run a bootleg bar in Prohibition-era Chicago and you are going to make a gallon of alcoholic drink, you could make a gallon of beer, which one person can drink and constitutes one sale – or you can make a gallon of pucheen, which is so strong it takes thirty people to drink it and constitutes thirty sales. Prohibition encourages you produce and provide the stronger, more harmful drink. If you are a drug dealer in Hackney, you can use the kilo of cocaine you own to sell to casual coke users who will snort it and come back a month later – or you can microwave it into crack, which is far more addictive, and you will have your customer coming back for more in a few hours. Prohibition encourages you to produce and provide the more harmful drug.

For Friedman, the solution was stark: take drugs back from criminals and hand them to doctors, pharmacists, and off-licenses. Legalize. Chronic drug use will be a problem whatever we do, but adding a vast layer of criminality, making the drugs more toxic, and squandering £20bn on enforcing prohibition that could be spent on prescription and rehab, only exacerbates the problem. “Drugs are a tragedy for addicts,” he said. “But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike.”

Some people imagine that after drug prohibition ends, drug use will become rampant, with Chigwell housewives shooting up next to the chintzy ironing board. No historical analogy is perfect, but with one of his extraordinary dense statistical analyses, Friedman showed that the fears at the end of alcohol prohibition – that everyone would be glugging gin the moment they could freely buy it – proved to be false. In fact, alcohol use went back to pre-Prohibition levels, and has been falling since, with a brief spike in the Second World War. He also showed that the vast majority of criminals who had bartered in alcohol did not simply move into another form of crime, but went legit when the temptations of such a profitable criminal market disappeared.

Today, an end to drug prohibition seems like a distant fantasy. But in 1924, even as vociferous a wet as Clarence Darrow was in despair, writing that it would require “a political revolution” to legalize alcohol in the US. Within a decade, it was done. We are approaching a tipping-point in the drugs debate, when failure becomes undeniable. As we wait, I can still hear Milton Friedman in one of his last interviews: “In the meantime, should we allow the killing to go on in the ghettos? 10,000 additional murders a year? In the meantime, should we continue to destroy Colombia and Afghanistan?”

POSTSCRIPT: You can send comments on this article for publication in the Indie to letters -at- independent.co.uk or just for meto j.hari -at - independent.co.uk

Between the money-shuffling palaces of the City and the corporate glass-towers of Docklands, there lies a long scar of concrete and poverty whose name – the East End – evokes a thousand grimy images. When most Londoners look East, they see the city’s bleakest side. Jack the Ripper de-livering prostitutes. The Elephant Man howling in the basement of the Royal London Hospital. Oswald Mosley trying to march his black-shirted fascists down Cable Street. The Krays nailing their enemies to snooker tables with a psycho-grin. Islamic fundamentalists plotting to blow up airlines over the Atlantic from their jihadi-house in Walthamstan. The dull agony of Pauline Folwer and the dum-de-de-dum-de-dum of Albert Square. It is like the East End has become the repository of London’s nightmares.

This conventional picture leaves out only one thing – the East End is the most slap-in-the-face exciting, the most blackly fascinating, the most wake-up startling part of London to live in. In Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, her central character Nasneen sees the East End at first as merely “a vast dump of people rotting away under a mean strip of sky”, and when I first moved here as a skint jobbing journo seven years ago, I felt the same way.

But the East End reveals itself to you like a slow-motion stripper, each new patch making your eyes widen just a little bit more. My conversion began in one of those the burn-your-mouth curry houses on Brick Lane, where one wintry night I noticed the old white working class was mingling with Kashmiri separatists, the middle class Bohos were chatting to Somalian refugees, and a thousand other human flavourings were fusing before me. I began to realise something is happening in this place – a great smelting of peoples.

And so the East End begins its seduction. You realise you share your apartment block with people huddling together from all over the world, “the whole world in one city”, as Ken put it while the East End bled on 7/7. You begin to talk to the veiled women, the Colombian refugees, the Bengali cleaners, each of them carrying a world-view you could never have imagined. And then you realise that a few feet from where you live, single mums survive on a fiver a day, and desperate Bangladeshi families live eight-to-a-room. You discover that charities that normally work in Africa are setting up relief missions here and you think – what is this place?

This was always the patch where London’s newest arrivals wash up, bewildered and trying to comprehend this incomprehensible city. The East End’s slogan could be: give me your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe smog. Each wave – the Irish, the Jews, the Muslims – has left its trace in the concrete crevices of this area. Here’s a dusty old synagogue, there’s a shiny new mosque, and here’s the 24-hour bagel shop still churning out delicious doughy-yeast for 10p. This is a place where Bonfire Night is combined with Eid, where Bollywood trumps Hollywood, where you live on a cultural faultline and see people skipping from side to side trying to reconcile the two. It is best symbolised for me by the ever-more-frequent sight of a young Muslim girl secretly swapping her hijab for make-up and a long snog in a damp alleyway with her white boyfriend.

The East End throws at you more world-views than the cosy suburbs of North London, more primary colours than the cosseted West, more humanity than you can handle. Yes it’s concrete, yes it’s run-down – but it’s burning with life. Go East – I guarantee you will never be bored.

When Jorg Haider's far-right Freedom Party joined the governing coalition in Austria in 2000, the world offered a collective retch and moved to isolate the country. In the past fortnight, a startlingly similar far-right politician named Avigdor Lieberman has joined the governing coalition in Israel - in the lofty position of Deputy Prime Minister - but the world's gagging reflex has yet to respond.

Lieberman is an ex-nightclub bouncer, once arrested for attacking a boy who he suspected of insulting his son. His party, Yisrael Beytenu (Israel, Our Home), has campaigned on two ugly issues. The first is the claim that Israel's two million Arab citizens are "a danger to the country", to be dispensed with, in part, by ethnic cleansing. Lieberman wanted to bus thousands of released Palestinian prisoners to the Dead Sea and drown them.

Today, he has moderated his stance and merely wants to "transfer" many hundreds of thousands of Israeli Arabs - inevitably by force - to the scraps of remaining land that will be labelled Palestine after Israel has annexed the major illegal settlement blocks. If your name's not on the list, you're not staying in.

His model is Cyprus in the 1970s, where the mixed Turkish and Greek populations were separated out at gunpoint. "The final result was better," he sighs. "Minorities are the biggest problem in the world." He would like to begin these racist expulsions with a simple, swift move: executing Israeli Arab members of the Knesset. Since they have spoken to the democratically elected Palestinian leadership, they are "traitors", Lieberman argues.

His second issue has been an attempt to streamline and centralise power into the hands of one Strong Man. Lieberman grew up in the Soviet Union. His support base is overwhelmingly among the one million Jews who emigrated to Israel after the fall of Communism. Much as they despised Soviet anti-Semitism, many have imbibed Soviet habits of mind and do not see why faffing about with coalitions and supreme courts should be allowed to get in the way of the Great Leader vanquishing the Great Enemy.

It is important to stress that Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister, says he rejects Lieberman's views, and will not carry out his policies. But he has placed Lieberman in charge of the largest single issue in Israeli politics - how to respond to Iran's imminent nuclear bomb. We already know his views on this: Lieberman was calling for bombing of Iran as long ago as 2001, and says Israel is "on the frontline of the clash of religions".

The silence that has greeted Lieberman's appointment is a bleak sign of how far Israel has drifted to the right. In the 1980s, a fascist called Rabbi Meir Kahane emerged calling for a Lieberman-style "pure Jewish state" that was "cleansed of Arab contaminants" and "stripped of liberal democratic illusions". He was execrated by everyone and banned by the Supreme Court from sitting in the Knesset even as a fringe member. Yet today, only a handful of heroic Israelis have spoken out at the appointment of Lieberman to the deputy premiership. One Labour cabinet minister - one - resigned, saying it would be a betrayal of everything the Jews have learned to sit alongside "a racist".

It is revealing that ethnic cleansing would re-emerge as a mainstream issue in Israel politics now, as the country undergoes a national nervous breakdown. This summer, in the sands of Lebanon, Israel effectively lost a war for the first time. (In his testimony before a Knesset committee last month, Olmert was reduced to defiantly bragging, "Half of Lebanon was destroyed - is that a loss?"). The country's political class is on life support just as surely as Ariel Sharon, with the President facing rape charges and Olmert facing a battery of corruption allegations.

In the midst of all this, a national taboo has melted away. Anybody who studies the history with open eyes can now see that ethnic cleansing of Palestine's indigenous population was Israel's original sin, a prerequisite for the state to come into existence. Today the Israeli people feel their existence is threatened once more, so they are returning in their minds - via Lieberman - to those birth crimes in the search for solutions.

David Ben-Gurion, Israel's founding father, wrote in 1937, "I support compulsory transfer. I do not see in it anything immoral ... The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war." The brave Israeli historian Ilan Pappe's new book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, documents in detail how Ben Gurion's plan was carried out, village by village, town by town, in 1948. The Jewish soldiers who carried out this crime were often still emaciated from the Nazi concentration camps, trying desperately to convince themselves that these totally innocent Arab peasants were somehow akin to Nazis - that Adolf Hitler was hiding in Ramallah, or Bethlehem, or Nablus.

Lieberman's argument is, in essence, that the ethnic cleansing of 1948 did not go far enough. Yes, 800,000 were driven out - but almost as many were left behind, a "fifth column" within Israel, who must now be dealt with.

The best symbol of how Israeli thinking has cracked and reverted to an earlier, base impulse is the historian Benny Morris, who I met up with last time he was in London. In the 1980s, Morris became a hero to the Israeli and international left because he was the first man brave enough to pore into the declassified Israeli military archives from the 1940s and show how Israel's founders carried out the expulsion of the Palestinians.

But then at the height of the second intifada, he gave an interview in which he said he had been misunderstood all these years. All this time he was talking about ethnic cleansing, he didn't mean it was a bad thing. No - "You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands," he said. It would have been "much better" if they had driven out all the Arabs, he declared.

The ugliest strains in Israeli political thought are rising to the surface. There have always been some anti-democratic forces in the country - Sharon considered mounting a military coup in 1967, for example. There have always been ethnic cleansers, from Ben Gurion to the politicians who today authorise the blowing up of "unpermitted" Arab (never Jewish) houses in East Jerusalem, a process I have witnessed myself.

But Avigdor Lieberman is a logo for all this at its most extreme, and today he is only a few bullets away from the Premiership. For the sake of the Palestinians, for the sake of Israel itself, now is the time for the world to jolt Israel, just as we jolted Austria back from its dark dance with the far right. But given how muted the world's reaction has been to the collective punishment of Gaza and the destruction of Lebanon, what are the odds of that?