Recently, I heard a pro-Palestinian campaigner call for the destruction of Israel. It was dangerous stuff. The individual in question was no more anti-Semitic than a chief rabbi. He was essentially reacting in outrage to the awful treatment of the Palestinians and other victims of the Israeli Defence Forces. But he was also unintentionally promoting an agenda which could see Jews fleeing in lifeboats across the waters of the Mediterranean 60 years after the Holocaust.
Maybe some day the hoped-for democratic paradise of equality and mutual respect will emerge and what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories will become a secular bi-national state. Meanwhile, the slow and inevitably grubby process of political compromise should be encouraged, with no support, implicit or explicit, for the extremist agendas of Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who apparently wishes to see Israel wiped out of existence.
It's a danger well-meaning westerners and campaigners against the excesses of Israeli security policy don't always avoid. Sympathy for the principal victims of violence should not blind us to the possibility that these victims could in turn become oppressors if the shoe was on the other foot. Doesn't the history of Israel itself teach us that lesson?
Ever since I can remember, and certainly since the Six Day War of 1967, the Middle East has been perhaps the most awkward and intractable issue on the international scene. Interviewed recently by a postgrad writing a thesis on media coverage of the region, I was reminded how popular Israel once was, and of how visiting a kibbutz was seen as a "cool" left-wing way to spend your summer holidays.
If you mentioned the word "Palestinians" in those days you would draw a blank in most quarters. But very soon Yasser Arafat and his associates put their people on the map. Being rather young and naive at the time, I still believed that the warring factions could be persuaded to see sense. Why couldn't the Jews and the Palestinians live side by side the way Jews and other ethnic groups co-existed, more or less contentedly, in New York or London?
The logic of that position was that you didn't need a Jewish state, because the two communities would live together in peace and harmony in a secular bi-national society. However, when I put forward this view at a public meeting in Dublin, I got a rude awakening that was the beginning of my political education on the Middle East. As soon as I had finished making my argument for the replacement of the Jewish state by a more humane and egalitarian society, a grizzled old gent got to his feet and shouted: "That's right, we must drive the Jews into the sea!"
The sheer horror of this, just 20 years after the Holocaust, left me stunned. I wanted to say, in the words of T.S. Eliot: "That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all."
I wanted no truck whatsoever with anti-Semitism and was merely advancing a position that was shared by prominent Jewish intellectuals such as Martin Buber and, subsequently, Noam Chomsky.
But, years later, when I began visiting the region as a journalist, I found that being subjectively opposed to anti-Semitism was not enough to preserve one from the charge. With some of the friends Israel has, it doesn't need enemies. Maligning journalists as anti-Semites when they are only reporting what they see - often at considerable personal risk - does the Jewish state a profound disservice.
Ireland has a fairly honourable record in the Middle East conflict and our representatives have consistently argued that there is a middle way between war and stalemate, as has been seen in our own peace process.
There were reasons why the state of Israel came into being. The overriding one was the need for a refuge for Jews after the awful cataclysm of the Holocaust.
Having lost six million brothers and sisters, Jews from eastern Europe flooded into the area because it looked like the only safe place to be. Many Jews also fled from Arab countries.
There will ultimately have to be a mutually-agreed settlement, because neither those living in the region nor the rest of the international community can afford to let this conflagration burn forever. The outlines of such a peace pact have been discernible for some time. Israel will have to withdraw from the West Bank, as it has done from Gaza. A stable and sustainable Palestinian state will have to be established, run by an administration that is not corrupt and does not allow its territory to be used as a base for further war against Israel.
It's not ideal, but it might be achievable if some future resident of the White House takes up the task.
Meanwhile, opinion in Ireland and elsewhere should be wary of allowing legitimate and necessary criticisms of Israeli actions, such as the bombing of civilian areas in Lebanon, shade into the provision of comfort to sectarian forces whose ultimate aim is the destruction of the "Zionist entity". We've already had one Holocaust; we don't want another.