And here's another extraordinary thing. It might have been expected that Iran's inflammatory warmongering would produce a comparable pre-1967 reaction of fear and even panic that another Holocaust is taking shape, and the world has no more room in it for Israelis than it had once for Jews. Not a bit of it. The view propagated by Tehran that Israel is a monstrosity fit only to be destroyed has acquired widespread currency, becoming almost a truism. Everywhere, the radical Left and the radical Right unite in rehearsing Iranian propaganda that Israeli measures of self-defence against Iranian-led terror are crimes against humanity. 

Held to standards inapplicable everywhere else, Israel is the one and only state in the world whose right to exist is brought into question. Parliamentarians, academics, every kind of artist and intellectual, NGOs and charities, trade unions, work assiduously to turn Israel into an outlaw by proposing condemnations, bans and boycotts in one area or another of public life. People who consider themselves progressive agitate and demonstrate alongside Islamists proud to be bigoted, and all of them conscious or unconscious proponents of genocide.

How the Two Minutes' Hate directed against Israel has been generalised is a complex phenomenon arising from Europe's interpretation of its past. The continent that gave the world communism and Nazism seems to have decided that it risks doing something equally criminal all over again unless it junks the nationalism that gave each country its historic identity. By some logic so twisted that nobody is ever able to explain it, nationalism is the specific prescription for those in the Third World, for instance Palestinians, but original sin in everyone else, and quite especially Israel. 

The UN and the EU exist theoretically to pursue trans-national aims, and hundreds of media outlets rally in a supportive chorus, with the BBC and the Guardian having the loudest voices in this country. Dissolving historic nationalisms into a new empire, the EU has dispensed with any idea of self-defence by military means. Throughout the continent, the lingering death of the basic instinct of self-preservation is in complete political, intellectual and emotional opposition to Israel's will to survive. The vilification and criminalisation of Israel for defending itself has the further consequence of making Jews out to be destroyers of the peace, and that is an indispensable step in normalising the 1930s and the Holocaust. Israel is currently presented by Islamism and its supporters with a test greater than any other in the state's history, but it has the life-force to deal with whatever materialises. I see no reason to change the conclusions I reached back in the Golden Age in Panorama Road.