...The kidnapping of the BBC's Alan Johnston in Gaza, and now the broadcast of his taped denunciation of the fact of Israel's existence, are only one small part of a wider campaign. And it is working.

The international community is being drip-fed the toxic assertion that, were it not for Israel, ours would be a peaceful world, a harmonious community of nations, living in tranquility alongside each other, respecting differences and working out disagreements in a spirit of compromise. If it were not for Israel, the Original Sin, the bone in the Islamic throat.

In Alan Johnston's Britain, the campaign is proving particularly effective. So much so that the union that represents his own profession, the National Union of Journalists, along with many academics, members of the clergy and numerous other opinion-shapers, now subscribe to this notion of Israel as prime irritant, prompter of terrorism.

They will have nodded sagely this weekend when Johnston, in what must be regarded as a text scripted for him, lamented the fate of the Palestinians, purportedly "arrested, imprisoned for no reason... killed on a daily basis," and forced into "absolute despair after nearly 40 years of Israeli occupation which has been supported by the West," and when he castigated Britain for having "worked to bring about the State of Israel, which is the cause of all the suffering of the Palestinian people."

Willfully overlooked by those who seek to delegitimize Israel and, appallingly by those who fall prey to the campaign, are the basic truths at the root of our Middle East reality, at the root of the Islamist terror campaign.

Willfully overlooked is the fact that modern Israel is not some upstart Western invention, supplanting the state of Palestine, but the ancestral homeland of the Jewish nation, the land where our nation long lived and has always sought to live. The world is filled with Muslim nation-states and Christian nation-states. Ours is the only Jewish nation-state. It is the only nation-state that the Jewish nation has ever sought. ...