All this is the background to what Brendan O'Neill, writing in Spiked, thinks may be the official abandonment of Israel by Europe;
"An anti-war movement? It’s the opposite. The current street-based fury with Israel is best seen, not as any kind of independent or progressive or peacenik grouping, but rather as the protesting wing of the West itself, as the attack dog of Western institutions’ own exasperation with Israel and their desire to distance themselves from it."O'Neill argues that Western politicians and institutions are increasingly turning their back on Israel:"The nations and institutions of the West, once keen supporters of Israel, have now turned against the Jewish State, coming to view it as a pest and possibly even a pariah."This speaks to some major shifts in world affairs in the post-Cold War period. Where in the Cold War era Israel was viewed and treated by the West as a kind of useful policeman in a Middle East that had large Arab nationalist movements funded by the Soviet Union, in the post-Cold War world Israel has come to be seen as surplus to requirements, as a state not really needed now that the Soviet Union is out of the picture and when the big conflicts in that part of the world are no longer West/East in nature but rather are increasingly localised and religious."And anti-Israel activists' street-based agitation against the Jewish State is but a more shouty version of this shift, of Western imperialism’s own judgement that Israel has gone from being important to being irritating."As a consequence, says O'Neill, anti-Israel activism has no peace-movement feel to it, but rather is a "profoundly ugly phenomenon":"It masquerades as a peace movement but actually devotes its energies to drumming up hatred, sanctions and possibly even Western intervention against a state that it has found guilty in the kangaroo court of liberal opinion of being a ‘rogue’."