When I was growing up, Israel was a favourite in some progressive quarters – an open-minded and successful society in a national-socialist Middle East, with trendily progressive kibbutzim where gap year students could go and hang out in the sunshine.

Israel had been created in 1948 with the best possible level of international credibility of the times – support from both Washington and Moscow, as shown by these wise words:

During the last war, the Jewish people underwent exceptional sorrow and suffering… The United Nations cannot and must not regard this situation with indifference, since this would be incompatible with the high principles proclaimed in its Charter…

The fact that no Western European State has been able to ensure the defence of the elementary rights of the Jewish people and to safeguard it against the violence of the fascist executioners explains the aspirations of the Jews to establish their own State.

It would be unjust not to take this into consideration and to deny the right of the Jewish people to realize this aspiration.

Then slowly but surely the mood changed after the Six-Day War.

Israel started to be portrayed not only as an oppressive but increasingly as an outlandish and above all illegitimate phenomenon, a pseudo-country created and surviving only on injustice to others. A unique apartheid-style phenomenon on the world scene, with the (un)usual suspects shrill in the attack.

Their hard core aim is simple. That Israel in its current form (ie as a mainly Jewish homeland) must cease to exist.

This means that any accommodation between Israel and the Palestinians or its Arab neighbours (eg in a ‘two state’ solution) has to be at best a short-term tactical manoeuvre aimed at consolidating gains in preparation for a final heave to topple Israel (and the Jews) once and for all.

Here is a hard-nosed Israeli look at the global delegitimization attack in all its myriad current variations (my emphasis):

Clearly, an Israeli and Palestinian comprehensive Permanent Status Agreement that establishes a Palestinian state and brings about an ‘end of conflict’ or ‘finality of claims’ would weaken the grounds of Israel’s delegitimization. However, even given such an agreement, the logic of the delegitimization campaign would persist.

The issue of Israel’s Arab citizens may become the next ‘outstanding issue’ driving delegitimization in the event that an Israeli-Palestinian Permanent Status Agreement is secured. In fact, the Resistance Network has already attempted to mobilize this community albeit with very limited success.

Here too, credible and persistent commitment for full integration and equality of Israel’s Arab citizens would weaken the grounds of Israel’s delegitimizers, but will not end their campaign, whose logic is rooted in challenging Israel’s existence and not its policies.

The binary ‘to be or not to be’ policy aimed at destroying Israel has had a huge boost from the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran. He more than anyone else (OK, with some noisy help from Chavez) has radicalised global discourse and challenged hitherto established moral standards, all in an explicitly anti-civilisational direction. See eg his explicit anti-Israel diatribes and his sly Holocaust denial.

The practical result of this sort of language, as backed by huge amounts of Arab oil money pumped and unrelenting official Islamic indignation, is that demands for ‘justice for the Palestinians’ morph effortlessly into rabid anti-Western and anti-semitic ideologies. Anti-Israeli and openly anti-semitic ravings seep into Western discourse at all levels, not least the Guardian and Independent.

Israel struggles to cope with the sheer weight of propaganda and military force aimed in its direction. Maintaining reasonable and consistent operational policies is increasingly difficult.

Here is a good short piece by Jeffrey Goldberg which wonders if Israel can still summon the seichel (which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: It connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance) to deal with the existential threats it now faces.

An important new force in all this is Turkey. For many years Israel and Turkey had a close and friendly relationship, with Turkey happy with its role as a key Western ally and growing European partner.

That is changing fast. Turkey’s ‘moderate’ Islamic leadership see the USA’s interest in NATO wilting and the ailing EU looking hard for reasons not to let Turkey join any time soon, if ever.

So as a large and confident country Turkey finds new opportunites for unilateral regional and even global leadership, eg by getting engaged with Iran and Brazil on the Iran nuclear problem and by asserting an ever-tougher leadership role vis-a-vis Israel. The Ottoman Empire Strikes Back – not necessarily something which the Arab states welcome? In any case, a major setback for general Western cohesion.

All this leaves ‘the West’ unhappy and uncertain.

Much of President Obama’s openly Left and Hard Left Democrat base seems to have given up on Israel completely, leaving President Obama at best a lukewarm supporter of Israel’s cause. Pro-Israeli conservatives in the USA find it all depressingly hard going.

The European Union with its growing Muslim minorities wrings its hands; the new UK government has edged towards a more critical position.

The main point for me is that the intellectual and political onslaught against Israel is so stunningly dishonest as to reveal that a much deeper Negotiation is going on.

Basically, almost all parts of the planet and indeed much of the chattering classes’ space in the democratic West are directly or by implication supporting policies of a new Strident Irrationalism, aimed at delegitimizing not only Israel but Truth itself.

Facts in this drama count for nothing. Not the fact that if we are looking for brutal violence at sea and horrible oppression at home, North Korea leaves Israel and everywhere else on Earth far behind.

Not the fact that when Muslims are massacred almost every day they are massacred not by Israelis but by crazed Muslims.

Nor the fact that if we want to rail against crimes against humanity in the Middle East, the biggest and worst have been committed by Arab leaders against their own people.

And certainly not the fact that whereas Israel obviously operates some sort of pluralist political system, much of the Arab world is still rotten with the legacy of oppressive lumpen national socialist extremism dating back to WW2. Had the Arab world opted for pluralism and progress after the Cold War ended, the whole context for dealing with the Palestine problem would have been far easier.

Behind these malodorous hypocrisies lurks a darker force, hoping to deligitimise not only Israel but also the Holocaust and Nazi/Soviet crimes and the whole moral force of ‘the West’ and the Enlightenment.

This is the Negotiation of our age. Between Hope and Nihilism. Israel and the Palestinians are merely collateral damage.