The West has, however, adopted a disturbingly complacent attitude towards those who consistently advocate a "world without Israel". One even encounters a growing trend towards the unreflective negation of the Zionist narrative by many Western opinion-makers. Israel is not entirely blameless for this situation but for reasons diametrically opposite to the conventional wisdom that blames everything on Israeli "occupation" of Palestinian lands. The truth is rather that the more that the Jewish state under its present vacillating and at times confused leadership communicates uncertainty, hesitation, an insecure identity, or guilt feelings about its inalienable right to robust self-defence, the more emboldened its Islamist and other enemies will become. Just as in the West, Israeli intellectuals and journalists often seem paralysed or even strangled by their own political correctness. That is hardly a convincing way to defeat terror or anti-Semitism. There is no point in fighting such a war, unless one is determined, committed and intends to win; and for that one has to believe in the justice of one's own cause and act accordingly. Unfortunately, that is not the message conveyed by successive Israeli governments, or by a significant part of the Israeli media, its academics or intellectual and artistic elites. How can one effectively diminish the global expansion of anti-Zionist prejudice when much of the Israeli elite itself appears to lack any basic conviction concerning the raison d'être of the Jewish state, its history, its heritage and identity? Israel and the Diaspora need to get their houses in order, to clean out the Augean stables and focus on a new approach, better adapted to the 21^st century yet rooted in Jewish ethics, which lays out a common national purpose and a convincing universalist message to the world.

As Hillel, the Palestinian Jewish sage of antiquity, once said, if I am not for myself, who is for me? And why should others be for me or want to ally with me? That does not preclude or exclude sensitivity to the "other" but is rather a precondition for it. A secure Israel, self-confident in its identity, can be magnanimous. But first of all it must reconnect with the roots of its existence in Zion and with the meaning of Jewishness and Judaism in the world as a whole. It is this value-vacuum which facilitates endless and pernicious clichés about Israel as a narrowly nationalist "anachronism" or as the last European colonial project. Israeli leaders often seem helpless when confronted with malicious propaganda branding them as flouters of international law, serial violators of human rights, lackeys of American imperialism, colonialist occupiers, "ethnic cleansers", founders of an apartheid state or heirs of the Third Reich. Silence in the face of such grotesque demonisation in Europe and the Middle East is not an option. This rhetoric has been aggravated by the prevalence of so-called "progressive" Jews in the front line of the Israel-bashing chorus.

None of this poison is going to disappear on its own. The struggle against the "new" anti-Semitism will have to face this challenge, while accepting the right to Jewish dissent, to engage with alternative voices. Nothing will be gained by counter-boycotts of leftwing Jews: that can only play into the hands of those all too eager publicly to show the world how "repressed" they are by the Jewish establishment. Heavy-handed tactics are useless in a battle of ideas. To win this struggle one has to go back to the more basic principles of freedom and democracy, themselves solidly anchored in the Judeo-Christian tradition.