The West has developed a perfect cover story for cocooning Israel, its fascist offspring: those who oppose the subjugation and brutalisation of the Palestinian people are denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination. They are thus “antisemites”.

In parallel, any Palestinian who resists subjugation and brutalisation is a terrorist. Ergo, those who ally with Palestinians are in league with terrorists.

In a further leap, because the West has cast Palestinians as part of the Muslim masses of the Arab world – even though there are many Palestinian Christians and Druze – Palestinian resistance to Israeli oppression can be presented as an adjunct of a supposed Islamist threat to the West.

In truth, no Palestinian group is fighting to conquer the West, or to impose sharia law on Europe and the US. Palestinian resistance groups are seeking only to liberate their homeland from decades of colonial oppression and ethnic cleansing.

Predictably, the longer that oppression has continued, with extravagant western backing, the more Palestinians facing Israel’s abuses have been drawn to less accommodationist militant groups, like Hamas, proscribed as a terrorist organisation in the UK and other countries.

No matter. Israel is presented as a small, heroic nation defending the West from the Muslim hordes. In a narrative that utterly inverts reality, Israel serves as the humanist rampart against Palestinian – and by extension, Muslim – barbarism.

It is this premise that makes it possible for Michael Gove, a former British government minister, to write an article in the midst of Israel’s genocide headlined: “The IDF [Israeli military] should be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize”.

It is this premise that allows a respected writer, Howard Jacobson, to demand silence at the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza, because speaking in their defence supposedly amounts to a “blood libel” against the Jewish people.

It is this premise that means Melanie Phillips, a journalistic staple of BBC panel shows, can get away with writing: “If you support the Palestinian Arab cause today, you are facilitating deranged and murderous Jew-hatred.”

These are self-pitying, delusional narratives that our European forefathers – plundering Africa of its wealth, enslaving its “savage” peoples or killing millions who refused to accept the West’s civilisational “superiority” – would be only too comfortable espousing.

This is an extract from my latest article The new fascism: Israel is the template for Trump and Europe’s war on freedom. Read more: