The refusal to fight the war took many forms. It meant responding to every Arab atrocity with "self-restraint" and turning the other cheek. It meant the now-familiar hectoring of Israelis to fight against terror by striving to maintain their daily routine and mundane ordinariness, rather than fighting the war by killing the enemy. It meant rhetorical concessions, where Israel adopted each and every rhetorical invention and each and every piece of misrepresentation of the conflict by the Arabs as its own official representation.

But more than anything else, it involved abandonment of any attempt to fight the Arab fascists in the realm of political and moral debate.

Israel has NEVER had a serious "hasbara" or public relations campaign. It has never had any interest in developing one. It has never invested any efforts or resources in defending its name. The absence of any attempt to defend itself in the media goes back to the ghetto-stedtel mentality of Israel’s leaders. In the old Eastern European stedtels, there was no need to persuade the peasants and the ordinary people of the decency or righteousness of the Jews. It was enough to strike an understanding with the local nobleman. As long as HE was bought off or bribed or persuaded in some other way, the problem was fixed. There was no need for PR nor for spin.

Israel’s leaders adopted this same preference for ignoring public relations and striking quiet deals with the nobleman, usually the one in the White House. While ignoring the press and refusing to defend their country rhetorically.

This was reinforced back in the days of Ben Gurion who had a general disparagement of those who worry about what the gentiles think. Later, Israel’s Prime Ministership became the hereditary entitlement of ex-generals. Generals usually have no interest in the press, and sometimes do not read at all. They have no capacity to express themselves to and in the press. They are content to reach understandings with the generals in the Pentagon.

Until the 1980s, part of the explanation for the abandonment of this battlefront was that Israelis were so overwhelmingly convinced of the unchallengeable righteousness of their cause that they considered it an insult to their intelligence to have to engage in PR activism. The Arab world consisted of petty fascists and barbarians, and the Israelis were obviously the good guys. Only an obvious anti-Semite could think otherwise, and Israelis in general were under the delusion that overseas anti-Semitism had stopped existing the moment they had no personal contact with it. Israel had always been in the right, and Arab whining and propaganda was about as convincing as the PR statements of Idi Amin or Robert Mugabe.

But then in 1982 there came a bursting of the dam. Israel was flooded in domestic Jewish anti-Semitism, in self-hatred and self-abasement, in Leftist anti-Zionism. The entire Israeli elite, and in particular the universities, the media, the political Left and the Israeli Labor Party, revised and deconstructed their entire world outlook. They led an assault against the very legitimacy and existence of their own country. Many sought to commit national suicide.

This self-hatred and Jewish leftist anti-Semitism was the foundation upon which Oslo was built and imposed upon the country.

It was also of course the very last foundation upon which any effective defense of the country in the media could be organized. When Israel’s own leaders, its own professors and journalists, agree with the Arabs that Israel is the aggressor, an occupier, that the key to a settlement is to force Israel back to its 1949 borders and dismantle all settlements, when these very same people are supporting mutiny and insubordination by soldiers refusing to serve their country, when they are increasingly justifying PLO atrocities and terrorism as just and as necessary, then how on earth can Israel defend itself in the battleground of world opinion? How can overseas gentiles be less anti-Semitic then Israel’s own chattering classes? When Ehud Barak says he would be a terrorist if he had been born an Arab, when even Ariel Sharon agrees that the Palestinians are a "people" with a "right" to a state, how can his PR agent - who happens to be Shimon Peres - defend Israel’s right to defend itself militarily?

The great irony is that every time Israel really demonstrates generosity and high-minded goodwill towards the Palestinians, these gestures are accompanied by escalated anti-Semitism and denunciation of Israeli criminality in the world media. Who today remembers that it was a but year and a half back when Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians the most unbelievably generous (and the most foolish) offer ever made to any group of people in the history of the planet? Where in the media is Israel congratulated for exercising such self-restraint over so many decades?

To the contrary. This history of Israeli niceness has produced a situation where nearly the entire world’s media paints Israel as a fascist racist aggressor country, one that simply kills Palestinians for no reason at all, where PLO terrorists who murder children are defending the Palestinians against Israeli crimes, where the media agree that Palestinians murdering Jewish children are justified because Israel is so evil. If this is what niceness produces, what has Israel ever had to lose by behaving with determination and harshness, by doing to the Palestinians what Bush did to the al-Qaida or what King Hussein did to the Palestinians (a matter that no one in the media remembers)?

If the dununciations of Israel escalate in direct proportion to the degree of Israeli niceness and self-restraint, then a major part of this is the abandonment of any attempt by Israel’s political elite to defend the country in any way, including in the media. These people long ago turned the Israeli campus and the Israeli media over to the anti-Jewish extremist Left, and have never made any attempt to recover the lost ground, even under Likud "rule". (In fact the Likud never "rules" when it holds office, it simply tries to implement Labor Party policies.) If the political elite has forfeited the campaign to defend Israel within Israel, then why is anyone surprised that it makes no attempt to defend Israel overseas?

If Israel is eventually destroyed, it will be because Israelis forfeited the moral battle, the attempt to maintain their moral justification. They surrendered to Arab savagery, first and foremost in the moral contest. They abandoned the attempt to defend their moral position, not only in the eyes of the world but first and foremost in their own eyes. They did so because they have been afflicted with Diasporatic self-hatred and self-denial and self-abasement, in doses never seen in the Diaspora.

Israel is today the most Diasporatic Jewish community on earth.