Next Generation, the book I published in 1964, tells the stories of people representative of that Golden Age. To do justice to van Leer and some others I met was beyond me. One such larger-than-life figure was David Hacohen, who introduced me to Zionists of his generation. In the course of a tumultuous career, he had been engaged on wartime sabotage missions with the British. One of his fellow-dynamiters was Adrian Bishop, who as far as I know has not received the biography he deserves. A Trappist monk, he'd left his monastery out of determination to fight Nazism, and was assassinated in Iran by German agents. One day, Hacohen, a member of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, took me to a meeting in Tel Aviv of Mapai, the governing party. David Ben-
Gurion, the Prime Minister, had me sit next to him, and kept up a running commentary sotto voce on the speakers. This really was an open society. On another day, van Leer received a phone call from Ben-Gurion. Some disease was affecting the Egyptian cotton crop, Nasser had appealed for help, Israel had the requisite spray, and the PM was ordering Wim to provide immediately enough barrels to ship the stuff. The Middle East was more complicated than I had appreciated. 

When Nasser moved troops into Sinai in May 1967, war became a certainty. John Anstey, the editor of the Daily Telegraph Magazine, was willing to send me to cover it. A general sense of fear — more than that, panic — spread that the world was about to witness another Holocaust. Grown-up men and women were reported to be in tears over what seemed bound to come. The Six-Day War that June proved that the Israelis already had a national identity strong enough to enable them to survive. 

The most extraordinary thing then happened. Public opinion was reversed in exactly the process described by George Orwell in 1984 as the Two Minutes' Hate. His model had been the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 whereby a stroke of the pen made allies of two totalitarian powers fundamentally hostile until then. In the Orwellian Hate Week, the speaker switches from one line to the other in mid-sentence. "A large part of the political literature of five years was now completely obsolete," wrote Orwell, showing, as he put it, that Ignorance is Strength. "Reports and records of all kinds, newspapers, books, pamphlets, films, sound tracks, photographs — all had to be rectified at lightning speed." 

Before that war, a very famous playwright had talked to me about the bloodthirsty Arabs and the imperative of smashing them. Next time we had a conversation, this same famous playwright was full of righteous indignation about Israel as an imperialist, colonising, US puppet and the need to rescue the Arabs from it. In objective reality nothing had changed but the roles of aggressor and victim had been switched as it were in mid-sentence for this man and millions like him. Purposeful lies really could manipulate public opinion. The Soviet Union had backed Egypt, Syria and Iraq, and had suffered a humiliating defeat along with its clients. Thousands of media outlets all over the world were outright Soviet mouthpieces or susceptible to Moscow's line in one way or another. From now on, with single-minded accord, they got their own back by abusing Israel as Nazi and its leaders as new Hitlers. What had been the issue of a disputed boundary became fully intractable in the context of the Cold War.