Does Israel Seriously Think It Can Convince the World That It's the Underdog?

This article was first published on February 2nd.

So the propaganda war is on. Forget Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the 15,000 Lebanese and Palestinian dead. Forget the Sabra and Shatila massacre that same year by Israel's militia allies as their troops watched. Erase the Qana massacre of 1996 -- 106 Lebanese killed by Israeli shellfire, more than half of them children -- and delete the 1,500 in the 2006 Lebanon war. And forget, of course, the more than 1,300 Palestinians slaughtered by Israel in Gaza last year (and the 13 Israelis killed by Hamas at that time) after Hamas rockets fell on Sderot. Israel -- if you believe the security elite of Israel's right wing here in Herzliya -- is now under an even more dangerous, near-unprecedented attack.

Britain -- this came yesterday from Israel's ambassador in London, no less -- is "a battlefield" in which Israel's enemies wish to "de-legitimize" the 62-year-old Jewish state.

Even Israel's erstwhile friend, that fine Jewish judge Richard Goldstone, is now, in the words of one of Israel's staunchest American-Jewish supporters, Al Dershowitz, an "absolute traitor to the Jewish people" and "an evil, evil man." (Headlines for this, of course, in Israel yesterday.)

Israel under siege. That was the dreary, familiar, hopelessly misunderstood theme at the 10th annual Herzliya conference of diplomats, Israeli civil servants, military gold braid and government yesterday.

Israel the underdog. Israel the victim. Israel whose state-of-the-art, more-moral-than-any-other army was now in danger of seeing its generals arraigned on war crimes charges if they set foot in Europe.

Heaven forbid that Israeli officers should ever be accused of atrocities! The Jerusalem Post yesterday carried a photograph of Kadima leader Tzipi Livni looking at a Krakow poster abusing her as "wanted for war crimes in Gaza". Forget that she did nothing as Foreign Minister when the Israelis rained phosphorus on Gaza. This whole judicial attack on Israel was an abuse, a deliberate use of international law to de-legitimise the state of Israel -- like all the other condemnation of Israel. Would that it was. This current identity crisis is indeed a tragedy for Israel -- though not in the way that its right-wing government now suggests.

I remember all too well how, after the disastrous Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, a huge London conference sought to find out how Israeli "propaganda" failed. Never mind the slaughter of the Lebanese and the growing Israeli military casualties. How come Israel's message didn't get across? How come the anti-Semitic press was allowed to get away with such calumny? It was an identikit forum to this week's Herzliya confab.

Today we must forget Operation Cast Lead against Gaza and its savage casualties. We must condemn the Goldstone Report for its unspeakable lies -- that the army of good may have committed war crimes against the terrorists of evil - and realise that Israel only wanted peace.

In reality, Israel has made a series of terrible diplomatic mistakes. I'm not talking about the humiliation heaped on the Turkish ambassador by Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon -- he, too, was at Herzliya. I'm not referring to the preposterous complaints by Ron Prossor, the Israeli ambassador to Britain, that in times of crisis there was "a cacophany of voices from Israel", rather than a single voice.

No, Israel's gravest mistake in recent years was to refuse to contribute to Goldstone's report on the 2008-09 slaughter in Gaza. A "foolish boycott", the daily Haaretz called it. A disaster, according to Israel's liberal left, who rightly spotted that it placed Israel on the level of Hamas.