The early Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin damned Jews as "an exploiting sect, a bloodsucking people, a unique devouring parasite", a bigotry that would gain currency in the Soviet Union after the rise of Stalin. Where Lenin had raged against "accursed Tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews", by the time of the Slansky show trial in 1952 Czechoslovakia, a key phase in Stalin's campaign to purge Jews from senior positions in the party, anti-Semitism had become for Wistrich "a quasi-official state doctrine". While party officials denied animus towards Jews, Soviet newspapers in the 1960s and '70s seethed with a anti-Semitism reminicent of the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Stürmer.

The Six-Day War, therefore, was not a genesis but a turning point that "freed certain ‘critics' of the Jewish State from the unwritten taboo on openly anti-Jewish aspersions following the revelation of the Nazi death camps". Israel became the collective Jew and the recipient of all the old hatreds and myths rebranded as "resistance". Thus the Jewish plan for world domination became the "Israel lobby", the blood libel the "deliberate targeting" of Palestinian children, and the thieving Jew the Israeli land-grabber. Student protestors could fetishise Israeli human rights abuses, real and imagined, while ignoring far greater crimes perpetuated by the regimes in Khartoum, Tehran, Pyongyang, and indeed Ramallah and Gaza. Wistrich locates in this a new fusionist politics that "offers a bridge between the Christian churches and the fundamentalist mosques, between left-wing radicals and conservative nationalists, between the ‘chattering classes' in Western Europe and the more militant protestors on the streets who scream ‘Death to Israel!'"

There is a strong British flavour to the book-Wistrich studied at Cambridge and London-and the penultimate chapter takes the UK as a case study. Readers of Standpoint will be familiar with the greatest hits of British Israelophobia, many of which get an outing in Wistrich's book:  the Independent's noxious cartoon depicting Ariel Sharon eating a Palestinian baby, the New Statesman's revolting "Kosher conspiracy" cover, and the undisguised Jew-hatred displayed on the Guardian's Comment is Free website. The British Left recounts fondly the "Battle of  Cable Street" in 1936, when Communists, socialists and trade unionists stood in solidarity with the Jews of London's East End. Today, impeccably left-wing politicians such as Paul Flynn, Jenny Tonge and Tam Dalyell issue vicious denunciations of Jews and Israel. Tom Paulin, the Oxford academic and BBC favourite, has gone so far as to support the killing of Israelis living in Judea and Samaria. "They should be shot dead," he told an Egyptian newspaper. "I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them." We are a long way from Cable Street.

Israel is the repudiation of the discredited doctrines of the radical Left, or, as Wistrich puts it, "one massive slap in the face for the entire Marxist tradition of theorising on the ‘Jewish Question'" and a rebuke to the "failed Marxist prognoses" of the wider socialist critique. Israel has flourished at a time when the nation-state is supposed to be in retreat. It has balanced its Jewish character with religious pluralism and legal equality for the 20 per cent of its citizens who are Arab. It has taken a desert land and turned it into an economic powerhouse and technological miracle-worker. It has endured-one might say, as if by providence-against the most fearsome enemies. The Left may have betrayed Israel but Israel has exposed the fallacies and failures of leftism like no other country since the   United States.