LONDON: What is it about Israel and the US that provokes emotions in otherwise intelligent people which can only be described as unhinged? A noted television pundit recently wrecked a charity performance by two well-known comics by shouting that they were “wankers” for not talking about “US Zionism”. Harold Pinter’s description of America in the latest issue of Granta as a “rogue state” and a “gold-plated monster” is equally wacky.

There is a lot wrong both with the US and Israel, especially now. But why, in a world where dictators slaughter their own citizens with poison gas, or use rape as a systematic tool of oppression, or incite one ethnic group to exterminate another, do these two democracies produce such spitting, eye-rolling rage?

Why do some western intellectuals get more worked up about George Bush than they do about Saddam Hussein, and more about Ramallah than Kashmir? Suicide-bombing is understandable, but harsh treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay inexcusable.

It is true that anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are linked, historically, and dovetail nicely in the demonology of anti-capitalism. But, especially in the case of Pinter, anti-Semitism is surely a bit implausible.

The two world wars, stoked in the furnace of European power politics, resulted in such catastrophic carnage that almost all Europeans, apart from some nostalgic Brits, were more than happy to renounce big power politics, colonialism, and the use of military force for ever.

The French still have some Francophone business in Africa (one reason they let mass murder in Rwanda pass without so much as a murmur).

The Dutch tried to hang on to Indonesia and New Guinea too long. And the British lapse into delusions of old grandeur. But, on the whole, Europeans were ready for a new age of civilized peace, welfare at home, and non-intervention abroad. “Never again” could be the motto of postwar Europe.

It turned out to be a bit of a fool’s paradise, for our newly civilized state could only survive under the protection of the US, which was the last and only western democracy still prepared, with some lapses into peevish withdrawal, to play the old big power games, first against communist empires, and now against Islamist terror and middle-eastern tyrannies.

Israel is forced to use methods all too reminiscent of our own colonial past. The fear is that we will be dragged by Israel and the US from our fool’s paradise back into a nightmarish world we thought we had left for ever. Fairly or not, the US and Israel remind us of what we once were, and they are hated for it.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.