It was said by Holocaust survivors that what provoked in them the most intense despair, to the point where some attempted suicide, was not the infernal depredations to which they had been subject by their Nazi exterminators but the subsequent indifference and rank disbelief of a world which refused to face up to the enormity of what had happened and, in varying ways, sought to deny it. The survivors bore witness to a terrible truth, but no-one believed them. They spoke, but no-one heard.

This weekend, as rockets continue to rain down on northern Israel, there is a rash of demonstrations around Britain against Israel. Not against the genocidal warmongers of Syria and Iran, but against their victim, Israel. Not against Hezbollah, whose rockets are tipped with ball bearings in order to murder and maim as many innocents as possible, but against Israel for waging a war of self defence in which, as in all wars, civilians tragically will lose their lives. Even though Israel, unlike Hezbollah, is delivering repeated warnings to those civilians in advance of its attacks in order to minimise the loss of innocent life whereas the aim of Hezbollah and Hamas is to maximise their murder rate, it is Israel, not Hamas and Hezbollah, which stands condemned in too much of Britain — and as this war grinds on and the casualty rate in Lebanon mounts, such condemnation will surely only increase.

It is Israel, the target of annihilatory attack, which is seen as the guilty party. It is Israel, struggling to defend itself — which it may well not succeed in doing — (so much for its supposedly mythic power, one of the principal motifs of anti-Israel feeling) which is being demonised as brutal and violent, overreacting and at fault. It is Hezbollah which has hidden its rockets in the basements of Lebanon’s apartment buildings, thus using the population of Lebanon as a collective human shield (as Hamas has done in Gaza) behind which it can pursue its murderous purpose against Israel. But it is Israel which is blamed for razing the ‘Paris of the Levant’.

Much has been made of the loss of Lebanon’s tourism industry. The loss of Israel’s tourism industry is not even mentioned. Israelis across the north of the country — some quarter of the population — are virtually living in bomb shelters and their casualty count is rising. No-one cares because all eyes are fixed on the suffering of the Lebanese – real and terrible as that is — and so the impression is created that Lebanon, not Israel, is the victim of this war. Yes, the suffering of the Lebanese deserves compassion. But Hezbollah is part of the Lebanese government, which has done nothing whatsoever to disarm it in defiance of the UN. Israel, by contrast, has done nothing to attract such violence except exist.

No matter. From the summit of Mount Self-Absorbtion, Britain’s lazy, ignorant, prejudiced intelligentsia yawns and flicks some more poison across the pages of the newspapers. In the Times, Matthew Parris languidly informs his readers that he won’t write about Israel because a) he’s too bored by the subject and b) it upsets his Jewish friends. Then he proceeds to write about Israel — and we can see why his Jewish friends would indeed be upset.

The past 40 years have been a catastrophe, gradual and incremental, for world Jewry. Seldom in history have the name and reputation of a human grouping lost so vast a store of support and sympathy so fast. My opinion — held not passionately but with little personal doubt — is that there is no point in arguing about whether the state of Israel should have been established where and when it was because it has become a fact. To try to remove it now would be at least as great an injustice as the one originally done to the Palestinians. But Israel’s best and perhaps only security for the future would be to rest upon a settlement that everyone the whole world over — everyone but the anti-Zionist fanatics — could see was reasonable. There would need to be no room left for argument. Then Israel would be able to feel confident of the full-hearted support not just of governments but of their peoples.

So holding his nose, Parris doesn’t actually side with the annihilation of Israel simply because, it would appear, he finds that intellectually rather vulgar — but is sure that Israel’s behaviour is the reason that other countries want to destroy it. Thus Parris blames the Jews for their own catastrophe.

That’s in the supposedly pro-Israel Times. The anti-Israel Guardian has lived up to its vile reputation. Its cartoonist Martin Rowson depicts a huge mailed fist with Stars of David as knuckledusters hammering down upon a bloody child while a wasp, representing Hezbollah, buzzes ineffectually around.

This loathsome image accurately conveys the disgusting mindset of the British left: that Israel is a brutal and gigantic oppressor, that Hezbollah is a minor irritant and that Iran and Syria are simply not in the picture at all. Furthermore, by using Stars of David it also crosses the (mythical) line between ‘criticism of Israel’ and vilification of the Jewish people and takes its place in the hideous pantheon of Judeophobic images.

Protests elicited this ‘ clarification’ from the Guardian today:

Yesterday’s cartoon on page 29 (Comment) portrayed Israeli military action in Lebanon in the form of a mailed fist with Stars of David as knuckle-dusters. By failing to identify them in a specifically Israeli form - such as in the colours of the flag - the point the cartoon was making might have been interpreted as implicating Judaism rather than the Israeli government in the present conflict. That was not the intention, and we are sorry if anyone saw it that way.

Ah. So vilifying the Jewish state using Judeophobic imagery is ok, as long as everyone knows it’s Israel that’s being vilified and not Jews, who are of course different.

The source of this venom is not merely the charge that Israel is using ‘disproportionate’ force in Lebanon and Gaza. It is the belief that Israel has no right to use force at all to defend itself, because Israel has no right to exist.

The venom of Arab propaganda — aided and abetted, it cannot be said too often, by Israeli revisionist ‘historians’ whose own pathological lies and distortions aimed at constructing the myth of Israel’s birth in original sin have been seized upon by Jew-haters the world over — has seeped deep into the British psyche, uniting the left, Islamists, neo-Nazis and a vast swathe of basically well-meaning but lethally confused and ignorant Middle Britain in the firm belief that Israel, the principal victim of Islamic fascism, is actually the instigator of injustice.

Such people believe the Palestinians are true inhabitants of a land called ‘Palestine’, who were cruelly dispossessed by the European Jews after the Holocaust. This is untrue. It is the Jews who are the historic inhabitants of the land of Israel, a nation state restored to them by the world in recognition of that historic claim and the unique global persecution of the Jews for which the world bore no small responsibility. Very few Pasletinian Arabs were dispossessed: the actual land was overwhelmingly sold, by Arabs to Jews, or it was empty, or the Arabs fled from it because they were told by the Arab world that the Jewish state would be strangled at its rebirth.

When the promise of a Jewish national home in Palestine was first made in the early years of the last century, there were very few people there at all. Many of those who now claim to be ‘refugees’ are the descendants of Arabs who flocked to Palestine in those decades solely because the incoming Jews brought with them the promise of employment and prosperity as they worked to establish their promised national home. The British, who were entrusted with delivering that promise, betrayed the Jews almost immediately and sided with the Arabs, who waged terrorist pogroms against the Jews of Palestine and then formed an axis with the Nazis during the war years. When Israel was created by the decision of the world — with half its citizens coming not from Europe but as refugees from the Arab states that persecuted them — the Arabs started their war of annihilation which continues to this day, despite the fact that a home was offered to the Arabs of Palestine alongside Israel in 1948 and in 2000. But they didn’t want a home of their own. They wanted to destroy Israel.

I give this potted history because so many are so astoundingly ignorant of it, believing instead the propaganda that fuels hatred and murder. No other county, whatever ambiguities or concerns surrounding its creation, is subjected to such a campaign of delegitimisation, let alone a campaign based on a series of outright historical fabrications and distortions. In its ignorance, British public opinion has hugely bought into the falsely inverted narrative of Palestinian victimisation and Israeli oppression.

But of course, Hezbollah’s attacks are by their own lights not about a Palestinian state.

‘We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you’,

said the former leader of Hezbollah, Hussein Massawi. And on October 22, 2002, Hassan Nasrallah told Lebanon’s Daily Star,

‘If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them world wide.’

This agenda is simply non negotiable. There is no room here for a peace process, no room for a cease fire. As for the suggestion of UN peacekeepers — please! UN peacekeepers proved themselves to be worse then useless in enforcing the UN’s own resolution to disarm Hezbollah in Lebanon. How could this be otherwise, given that the UN is a terror club whose own venomous hatred of Israel has been demonstrated time after time?

It is far from certain that Israel will get the better of Hezbollah in Lebanon – at least, not before the fickle world stops it on the basis that it is not performing a miracle by eradicating an army which has deliberately dug in within a civilian population without harming that population. Israel may well have to send ground troops into Lebanon, where it will surely be met with savagery, including the weapon of the human bomb.

Even if it were to destroy Hezbollah, however, this is not the head of the snake. That lies in Syria and Iran. Only if those regimes are toppled will the fight-back against evil have any chance of success. The fear that worse may follow is a recipe for pre-emptive surrender — not just by Israel, but by the free world on whose behalf Israel is currently fighting. And it is this attitude which is why we are currently losing the war against Islamic fascism — as David Selbourne writes in a fine piece in the Spectator. The real problem is America. Far from being too gung-ho, it has flinched from what needs to be done. Its failure to hold Iran and Syria to account explains in large measure why it is in such a mess in Iraq — precisely where Iran wants it to be. These terrible events now unfolding in the Middle East have been caused by Iran and Syria —but it is America’s lack of steadfastness, courage and strategic vision over many years which have allowed this crisis to unfold.