The fantastic Howard Jacobson has written a breathtakingly brilliant essay in today’s Independent. With a potent combination of passion and clarity, he shows the recent increase in ‘criticism’ of Israel for what it nearly always is: antisemitism. He takes those who liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto and shows once and for all why “there is not the remotest similarity, either in intention or in deed – even in the most grossly mis-reported deed – between Gaza and Warsaw”.

Of those who make such comparisons, he writes: “Given the number of besieged and battered cities there have been in however many thousands of years of pitiless warfare there is only one explanation for this invocation of Warsaw before any of those – it is to wound Jews in their recent and most anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. Its aim is a sort of retrospective retribution, cancelling out all debts of guilt and sorrow. It is as though, by a reversal of the usual laws of cause and effect, Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday.”

Then he takes to pieces Caryl Churchill’s hideous Seven Jewish Children play, in which “lie follows lie, omission follows omission”. He concludes of Churchill’s play: “Once you repeat in another form the medieval blood-libel of Jews rejoicing in the murder of little children, you have crossed over. This is the old stuff. Jew-hating pure and simple.”

Let’s be clear: the Royal Court Theatre has been made fully aware of the dishonesty and racism in the play it is showing. That they keep showing it tells its own story.

Please read Howard’s brilliant essay in full. As regular readers know, I’ve always been a big fan (that’s me below with him last summer). Having read this essay I might have to see if I can find an even bigger pedestal to put him on.

So I did indeed meet up with Ashley Perry, the aforementioned ‘settler’ from Israel who is over in England this week. Sorry Peaceniks, but he wasn’t a monster. Not once – as we sat in a boiling hot Solly’s – did he try and steal my chair from me, for instance. Instead he was exactly what I expected him to be: a brilliant and fascinating man.

It was great to hear the inside story of the Israeli elections and Ashley’s predictions for what will happen next. He worked on the Yisrael Beiteinu campaign and whereas I was aware that Avigdor Lieberman has been unfairly demonised, only listening to Ashley did I realise to what extent this is the case. Lieberman could be a good kingmaker for the next Israeli PM. He could certainly do with more people like Ashley on his side.

We talked on. With the extent of anti-Israel feeling in the UK so high, Ashley asked me how much of this I believe is motivated purely by antisemitism. It’s a good question. I don’t want to think that all Israel basher are antisemites. There are surely other feelings that motivate some of them. But are such feelings any less contemptible?

I believe that a substantial number of European opponents of Israel are motivated out of a sense of guilt from the Shoah. Far from taking that sense of guilt and responsibility and using it for something beautiful, they instead use it for the ugliest of things. Against all evidence, they rush – no sprint – to conclude that Israel is committing war crimes, so they can tell themselves ‘They can be monsters, too -  we’re all equal.’

As well as being factually incorrect, this equivalence does the opposite of what its proponents want. It doesn’t wash Europe’s hands of what happened to the Jews in the 20th century. Rather, it reawakens that hatred in the 21st century under a new cloak. So we are back where we started: antisemitism.

Others are motivated out of a ‘bleeding heart’ belief that in aligning themselves with Israel’s enemies, they are backing the underdog against the big bully, the poor brown man against the nasty white man. Never mind that Israel is a tiny state of seven million people surrounded by billions of people who want it wiped off the map. Never mind either that – not that this should matter – numerous Israeli Jews are darker of skin than many of their Arab enemies.

The truth matters not a jot to those who demonise Israel. But why? Why is Israel constantly misrepresented in the media? Why do everyday people who would openly admit to not understanding other conflicts in the world so happily take such a strong stance against Israel despite not knowing even basic facts about the conflict? Why do they consistently overlook egregious human rights abuses and horrific atrocities across the world, while tirelessly – and wrongly – accusing Israel of such crimes?

Always the Jewish state. Is it not the case that all these roads lead to the same thing – antisemitism?

“I’m afraid the BBC has to stand up to the Israeli authorities occasionally.” So said Health Minister Ben Bradshaw of the BBC Gaza aid controversy. Presuming he’s serious, I think the Health Minister should be examining his own medical health. The BBC does nothing but heap abuse and distortion on Israel.

Similar unhinged thinking from the Catalunya government which has cancelled Holocaust Rememberance Day in protest against Israel’s defensive mission in Gaza. An Israeli friend of mine rang his 88-year-old holocaust survivor grandmother to tell her this news. She described those who made the decision as “little bastards”.Speaking of which, I see the pro-Hamas bandwagon is demonstrating outside the BBC today.

I strong recommend you read the superb article that author, psychiatrist and historian Kenneth Levin has written for FrontPage Magazine about the many enemies of Israel.

He includes the Arab enemies:

There are obviously those eager for Israel’s demise. Since the Jewish state’s creation, the Arab world has wanted it to disappear and this has not changed. Promotion of Arab supremacism, which accords little if any rights to non-Muslim or non-Arab groups in what the Arabs deem their proper domain, extends beyond Israel to abuse of Christians throughout that world as well as of Muslim but non-Arab peoples such as the Kurds of Iraq and Syria, the Muslim blacks of Darfur, the Berbers of Algeria. That abuse has repeatedly reached the level of genocidal campaigns, as reflected not only in the slaughter in Darfur, but also in the murder of some two hundred thousand Kurds in Iraq and some two million Christian and animist blacks in southern Sudan.

In terms of genocidal incitement against minority populations, none is as graphic and incessant as that purveyed in Arab media, mosques and schools – even in countries with which Israel is formally at peace – against the Jews and Israel. The existence of Israel is seen as an intolerable distortion of the proper order of things, according to which Jews should either be dead or, at best, subjugated members of society existing at the sufferance of their Arab betters.

The UN:

Israel is also attacked, and its very existence challenged, in the United Nations, an institution that has largely become the monster it was created to fight….The UNWRA, which for six decades has been responsible for Palestinian refugees and their families, promotes genocide under the flag of the UN. UNWRA schools teach the glories of suicide bombing and martyrdom in the effort to destroy Israel, employ members of terrorist organizations on its staff, including as teachers, and serve as a conduit for recruiting children into terrorist cadres.

The European left and media chatterers:

In addition to the animosity of the Arab world, Israel is faced with much hostile sentiment in Europe, fed by traditional anti-Semitism, by leftist anti-Americanism and association of Israel with America, by perverse, ahistorical leftist twisting of the Israeli-Arab conflict into Israeli colonialists brutalizing the supposedly indigenous population, and by the European media being house organs for anti-Israel bigotry of all these pedigrees. The growing threat of radical Islam to European states, particularly as manifested within those states’ immigrant Muslim populations, has in some quarters led to greater sympathy with Israel’s predicament. But elsewhere, especially among the cadres of the Left, which include most of the media, this threat has had the opposite impact and inspired a wishful thinking that all would be well, Islamist hostility would be appeased, if only Israel would make sufficient amends or simply disappear.

And much more beside. Hats off to the man.

Jon Snow of Channel 4 News presented a Dispatches documentary last night complaining about how Israel managed the media during Operation Cast Lead. Snow was his usual pompous self and was absolutely incredulous that Israel has legitimate concerns about Western reporters producing distorted coverage of the conflict.

Distored coverage? Hmmm, who is this in this video describing the Qassam rockets that Hamas have been firing at Israel as: “pretty pathetic things – nobody gets injured.”

This photograph is of four-year-old Yuval Abebah, just one of the many Israelis who have been killed by the Qassam rockets that Jon Snow thinks are “pretty pathetic things” that injure nobody. Indeed, Abebah was killed long before Snow made this statement.

PS – When Jon Snow reported on last November’s Mumbai massacre, he described the killers as “practitioners”, rather than what they are – Islamic terrorists. (cf the BBC which refuses to describe suicide bombers who blow up school buses full of kids as ‘terrorists’, preferring to use the term ‘militants’, as if they are 21st century Derek Hattons.) Snow also, astonishingly, reported that the Mumbai terrorists showed a “wanton disregard for race or creed” when the exact opposite was the case. They deliberately and carefully targeted Jews, Americans and Britons.