Israeli and Palestinian scholars say that after years of focusing exclusively on their own plight at the hands of their Israeli neighbours, Palestinians are starting to accept in their articles, books and classrooms that Jews were also persecuted.

An atmosphere of reconciliation, launched by the landmark Oslo peace deal in 1993, appears to have prompted a change in attitude starting with a scholarly few, the experts say.

It is far from a revolution. A more traditional Arab approach has been to deny or even justify the killing of six million Jews by the Nazis.

But driven by peace hopes, Palestinian intellectuals are starting to call for mutual recognition of the two peoples' historic hardships.

``An understanding of what the other side feels is critically important to any sort of co-existence,'' saidPalestinian-Jordanian journalist Rami Khouri. ``The Holocaust is a defining moment of modern Jewish history. We need to understand exactly what it means to Israelis.''

The intellectuals are beginning to separate the Holocaust from the creation of a Zionist state, said Esther Webman, an Israeli researcher at Tel Aviv University.

``For the first time, there are a small group of scholars who realise Jewish people went through a tragedy which affects their thinking and their being,'' Webman said.

The national identity of each people is shaped in part by what each views as a cataclysm half a century ago.

For Israelis it is the Holocaust, and for Palestinians, what they call the nakba -- or ``catastrophe'' of their dispossession and flight upon Israel's creation in 1948.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced to leave when Israel was founded at the end of the British mandate in Palestine. More became refugees when Israel captured the West Bank and Gaza strip in the 1967 West Asiawar.

Israeli analysts say that when Palestinians invoke the Holocaust, it is to speak of Jews as Nazis.

But Lebanese author Hazim Saghiya criticises the traditional Arab attitude, writing that once Palestinians acknowledge the Holocaust, the world will recognise their own suffering.

``He understands the Holocaust had such an impact on Western history and culture that it has become a general moral lesson for everybody,'' Webman said.

Edward Said, a Palestinian professor of comparative literature at Columbia University in New York, writes of a link between the histories of Israelis and Palestinians since World War II that should lead to a mutual understanding.

In January 1998, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was invited to visit Washington's Holocaust museum. Arafat left Washington without visiting the museum after Israeli government officials said they would have been ashamed of such a visit.

But many Arab writers supported Arafat's readiness for reconciliation. Khouri wrote in the JordanTimes newspaper that he saw it as a missed opportunity. His own visit to the museum was ``a very powerful experience,'' Khouri told Reuters.

But Khouri stresses that the process is mutual.

``Israelis should go to the moral and political equivalent of going to the Holocaust museum,'' he said.

Arabs overwhelmingly supported French Muslim author Roger Garaudy in the face of his 1998 trial for questioning the Holocaust but his conviction triggered a spurt of articles in the Arab press criticising Arab support for Garaudy.

Yolla Haddaden, director of the Palestinian Centre for Peace, said it was still an uphill battle because many Palestinians believed they had become the victims of victims.

``We do not deny The holocaust,'' she said. ``We are very sorry for what happened to the Jews, but now we are paying the price for what happened a long time ago in Europe.''

Dr Ahmed Sa'di, an Israeli Arab lecturer at Emek Yezre'el College near Nazareth, said Arabs believed Israel had exploited theHolocaust to try to make its case for statehood with the rest of the world.

``The problem is with the consequences and how the Holocaust was manipulated to serve the interests of Israel,'' said Sa'di, who specialises in the politics of Israeli Arabs.

Israeli author and journalist Tom Segev said most Palestinians were still ignorant of the Holocaust and unwilling to learn about it.

``I know some Palestinian historians who feel uneasy about this attitude, but it is still the dominant attitude,'' he said.

Peace is impossible so long as Palestinians deny the role of the Holocaust in Israel's collective identity, Segev said.

``It's a matter of understanding that the Holocaust is not a piece of Zionist propaganda,'' Segev said.

``You cannot understand Israel without understanding the Holocaust,'' he said. ``And unless you understand your enemy, you cannot make peace with your enemy.''

Khouri said he wants to separate the trauma of the past from the peace talks of the future, saying many Arabs believeaccepting the Holocaust means they must accept Israeli conditions for statehood.

The peace process is only a symptom of a wider process of humanisation, he said.

``It is a process of seeing the other person as a normal human being,'' Khouri said. ``'We have the same human rights, and also, we deserve the same national rights.''