The hatred of Israel that now courses through Britain’s veins has now erupted in yet another frenzy whose irrationality and spite are scarcely credible. One now gets a whiff of what it must have been like during the witch-hunts of the Middle Ages; one now begins to understand just what Kafka was describing. British Jews are being swept up in a psychic maelstrom targeted at their right to peoplehood. As the violence against Israel increases with more than 300 rockets fired on Sderot and the western Negev since May, killing two Israeli civilians, wounding many others and traumatising untold numbers in addition; as Hamas threatens Israel with an endless war of annihilation; as Iran races towards the nuclear bomb to finish Israel off, Britain’s industrialised and professional classes are deciding once again to take the high ground of moral nihilism and punish not the instigators of this genocidal onslaught but the nation that is their victim.

Delegates at the first conference of the new University and College Union in Bournemouth voted by 158 to 99 to recommend to its branches’ a comprehensive and consistent boycott’ of all Israeli academic institutions. The Alan Johnston video was clearly made under duress but the British licence-fee payer might must have wondered why Fatah al Islam bothered to kidnap him for eleven weeks in order to get him to blame Israel for everything — and blame Britain for Israel as well as for Iraq and Afghanistan — when such views are transmitted by the BBC virtually every day of the week. The Hamas/al Qaeda script on Israel is now the British orthodoxy. And this week’s 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War will usher in a wave of hate-fuelled demonstrations by people supporting those who are working on that same script towards the destruction of Israel, Jewish peoplehood and Jews worldwide.

There are, it must be said, many good people in Britain who are horrified by the boycott and its implications for the fight to defend the free world. And the UCU boycott call might be rescinded by academics opposed to the far-left cabal which has captured this union. This capture of the UCU was predicted two years ago when the first academic boycott was introduced and then swiftly reversed. People assumed that the danger had gone away, but it was clear to some of us that the boycott had been fought on the important but ultimately secondary grounds of freedom of speech. Crucial though this principle clearly was and is, the deeper and more important issue was the Big Lie about Israel’s Sin of Occupation and even greater Original Sin of Existence which now passes for the orthodoxy on campus and are the obsessions that fuel the boycott.

Those obsessions, which are built upon lies, have never been challenged. They are the result of a world-wide Arab propaganda campaign shrewdly targeted to manipulate and exploit the preoccupations of the liberal west, which is all too eagerly disposed to take at face value any third world narrative of ‘colonial’ dispossession by western interests, even when this is demonstrably and verifiably untrue in every detail. This has been no mere propaganda campaign but a carefully calibrated strategic inversion of history and reality in order to turn the Arab aggressors into victims and the Israeli victims into aggressors in the western mind. It is a military strategy of systematic deception, dissimulation, fabrication and falsification. And it has surely succeeded – thanks to the intellectual and moral evisceration of British and western intellectuals – beyond the Arabs’ wildest expectations.

The organised Arab strategy behind the boycotts, which set out to draw an analogy between Israel and apartheid South Africa to fill the void caused by the collapse of real apartheid in the cause-hungry liberal psyche, is set out here:

The analytic link with South African apartheid helps to clarify the real nature of Zionism as a reactionary and exclusivist colonial project. The strategic demands of boycott, divestment, and sanctions that we put forward help to illustrate the powerful ties between North American and European capital and the Zionist state. We can also build upon the experiences and lessons of the earlier anti-apartheid movement.

There is a powerful momentum building around the world for a boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign. On July 9, 2005 a call was made by over 170 Palestinian organizations to launch a global BDS campaign. Churches in North America have begun to investigate the possibility of divestment. In Norway, the first provincial council to have adopted a boycott of South African apartheid recently did the same in regards to Israel. Twenty Quebec organizations, including the Fédération des Femmes du Québec (FFQ) and the provincial union of CEGEP teachers, have endorsed a new campaign to boycott Israeli products and companies supporting Israeli apartheid…

A boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign based upon an apartheid analysis can provide an overarching framework for our other Palestine work. It doesn’t replace the need for outreach, education, and action around the myriad of issues connected to Palestine such as refugees, the apartheid wall, or prisoners. Rather, a BDS campaign can answer the question: what to do next? It provides a concrete strategic focus that raises consciousness around Palestine as we carry it out. Pushing a divestment motion through a union requires sustained work to convince the membership of Israel’s apartheid character. Recent successes show that these demands are winnable and can provide tangible gains.

The apartheid comparison is of course a demonstrable and grotesque lie — and a profound insult, moreover, to all those Africans who suffered under real apartheid. The comparison is indeed a kind of apartheid denial. But then all facts are being stood on their heads by the Israel-haters. Israel is blamed for the plight of the Palestinians when the Palestinians are responsible for the plight of Israel. Israel is represented as the aggressor and the Palestinians its victims whereas the Palestinians are the aggressors and Israelis the victims of terror attacks, human bomb atrocities and 1400 rockets from Gaza since disengagement. Israel is accused of preventing Palestinian statehood whereas in reality the Jews agreed to it repeatedly in 1937, 1948, 1967 and 2000 and it was the Arabs who rejected it and tried to destroy Israel instead.

Israel is accused of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide. But it is Israel where Arab students attend university and sit in the parliament and the courts, and where not a day passes when Israeli hospitals aren’t treating Palestinian children injured in the fighting between Palestinians in Gaza; whereas it is Iran that is committed to genocide, and the Palestinians to ethnic cleansing from a Palestine which would be Judenrein and where no Jews would be allowed to live (by fervent agreement of the boycott supporters for whom not one Jewish settlement is to be allowed in ‘Palestinian’ territory.)

Why are facts being turned inside out like this? The UCU resolution had the gall to say that criticism of Israel was not antisemitism, with the clear implication that it never could be antisemitism. Well, no-one has ever said that criticism of Israel is antisemitism. But what’s going is not criticism of Israel. It’s a unique delegitimisation based on lies and libels as a softening up process for Israel’s extinction. It’s singling out Jewish peoplehood uniquely for denial. And it’s that double standard that cannot be explained other than by a profound prejudice.

As the Nobel Laureate Professor Steven Weinberg of Texas University said when he cancelled his proposed visit to Imperial College London in July in protest at the NUJ boycott:

I know some will say that these boycotts are directed only against Israel, rather than generally against Jews. But given the history of attacks on Israel and the oppressiveness and aggressiveness of other countries in the Middle East and elsewhere, boycotting Israel indicates a moral blindness for which it is hard to find any explanation other than anti-Semitism. (The only other explanation I can imagine is a desire to pander to the growing Muslim minority in Britain.) I see this bias reflected from time to time in the news reporting of The Guardian, The Independent and the BBC, so it is not really surprising that the NUJ would take this action.

Indeed. And how else are we to describe this editorial comment by the once august Financial Times on May 31:

Fourth, the timing of this ill-thought through initiative could hardly be worse. For the first time in more than a generation, the pro-Israel lobby in the US, where informed debate on the Middle East is far less vigorous than it is in Israel, is being openly challenged and can no longer rely on bullying Americans into a consensus that is bad for Israel and makes it impossible for the US to articulate its own national interest in the region.

Or how else are we to describe this reported comment by Pamela Hardyment who, justifying her backing for the NUJ boycott, described Israel as:

a wonderful Nazi-like killing machine backed by the world’s richest Jews

and referred to the

so-called Holocaust

before concluding:

Shame on all Jews, may your lives be cursed.

There is still more madness to come. This week will see a rally in London by Israel-haters under the banner of ‘Enough’ on a platform entitled ‘The World Says No to Israeli Occupation’. The world does not apparently say ‘No’ to the planned genocide of the Jews by Iran. It apparently does not say ‘No’ to the aim to annihilate Israel and every Jew that is the policy of Hamas. On the contrary, the rally will broadcast a video message from the Palestinian Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. This is what Hamas says in its Covenant:

Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him…In order to face the usurpation of Palestine by the Jews, we have no escape from raising the banner of Jihad. This would require the propagation of Islamic consciousness. We must spread the spirit of Jihad among the [Islamic] Umma… introducing fundamental changes in educational curricula in order to cleanse them from all vestiges of the ideological invasion which has been brought about by orientalists and missionaries… ‘I swear by that who holds in His Hands the Soul of Muhammad! I indeed wish to go to war for the sake of Allah! I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill’.

Those attending the Enough rally will not be saying ‘No’ to this.

Also on the platform will be the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, Riah Abu El Assal. Bishop Riah has falsified Jewish history and claimed of Palestinian Christians:

We are the true Israel. No-one can deny me the right to inherit the promises, and after all the promises were first given to Abraham and Abraham is never spoken of in the Bible as a Jew. He is the father of the faithful.

Those attending the rally will not be saying ‘No’ to this.

Then there will also be Lord Phillips of Sudbury who wrote in the Times on March 26 2004:

If terrorism is ‘the systematic use of violence and intimidation’, then Israel, too, is guilty of it.

Those at the rally will not be saying ‘No’ to this.

There will be Dr Azzam Tamimi. Dr Tamimi has supported suicide bombings against Israelis and was denounced in Parliament for inciting hatred against the Jews.

Those at the rally will not be saying ‘No’ to this.

Indeed, this rally will not be saying ‘No’ to Israeli occupation. It will be saying ‘No’ to Israel’s existence and Jewish peoplehood. It will be saying ‘No’ to respecting the equality and dignity of the Jewish people. It will be saying ‘No’ to the truth.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, more than 100 people are said to have been killed in the attack upon the Nahr al-Bared camp. According to the Observer:

Those inside reported dire conditions. ‘ More than 60 per cent of the camp has been destroyed,’ Abu Darwish, a resident, said….The violence - the worst internal fighting since the end of Lebanon’s civil war 17 years ago - has driven up to 25,000 of the camp’s 31,000 residents to flee. Thousands remain trapped. ‘This is it. We tried to negotiate, but it didn’t work,’ said one special forces officer. ‘The army will continue until they are all dead. There is no stopping.’

…Some Lebanese government officials have accused Fatah al-Islam of using civilians as human shields and having fired on people who were attempting to escape the camp. ‘The last civilians I took out of the camp were a family with a handicapped father five days ago,’ said one civil defence worker. ‘Fatah al-Islam would shoot at us every time we entered the camp. The Lebanese army would have to fight them just to get us close enough to take out the sick and the wounded. I could hear them screaming “Allahu Akbar” [God is great] as the soldiers killed them while we were taking out wounded civilians,’ he said.

No-one in Britain is saying ‘No’ to this. No-one in Britain is organising boycotts or demonstrations against Lebanon. No-one seems to care at all.

What is happening to England, once the most civilised, humane, fair-minded country on earth, but now consumed by hatred of its allies and the desire to grovel to its mortal enemies, is a tragedy. And we’ve been here before. A reader has sent me the following:

When Patrick Leigh Fermor, on his journey across Europe in 1933, was questioned in some bierstube on the result of the Oxford Union vote that ‘under no circumstances would they fight for King and country’ he described the atmosphere thus:

‘I was surrounded by glaring eyeballs and teeth. Someone would shrug and let out a staccato laugh like three notches on a watchman’s rattle. I could detect a kindling glint of scornful pity and triumph in the surrounding eyes which declared quite plainly their certainty that, were I right, England was too far gone in degeneracy and frivolity to present a problem. But the distress I could detect on the face of a silent opponent of the régime was still harder to bear: it hinted that the will or the capacity to save civilization was lacking where it might have been hoped for.’

It is indeed the loss once more of that will that is the real tragedy.