Back in 2003, Richard Ingrams, one of Britain’s best known columnists and a co-founder of the satirical weekly Private Eye wrote in the Observer (sister newspaper on Sunday to the Guardian) the following gem about his attitude to Israel and the Jews:

“I have developed a habit,” he said, “when confronted by letters to the editor in support of the Israeli government to look at the signature to see if the writer has a Jewish name. If so, I tend not to read it.”

As I have said on many occasions (see previous entry for example), there is now no price to be paid in mainstream Britain for such attitudes. They are taken as normal. Now consider his latest piece of writing, this time in the Independent, as an example of what happens when such “normal” attitudes are allowed to fester.

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Charles de Gaulle once famously referred to the Jews as an “arrogant and domineering people”. The Guardian newspaper in its editorial today refers to Israel as “an arrogant nation that has overreached itself”. Not the government of Israel — castigated by the Guardian for using British passports in a “Mossad murder squad” in Dubai, as well as over the spat with Washington — but the nation of Israel itself.

I suppose they would argue that that there is still enough daylight, however thin a sliver of it, between de Gaulle’s open disdain for Jews and their equally open disdain for the Jewish state.

But let’s leave whatever room for discussion may still be available on that particular question to one side for a moment, and move on to an op-ed piece published alongside the editorial by a senior Foreign Office mandarin who last year made one of the meanest anti-Semitic remarks to have been made in mainstream Britain for many years.

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I say it is the last word, even though it almost certainly won’t be. Nonetheless, Charles Krauthammer’s explanation of what it all means is certainly among the best to have been published.

Having manufactured a crisis out of a diplomatic gaffe, the Obama administration, Krauthammer says, then attempted to shift the blame for the overall conflict onto Israel:

“Israel? Israelis have been looking for peace – literally dying for peace – since 1947, when they accepted the UN partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state. (The Arabs refused and declared war. They lost.) Israel made peace offers in 1967, 1978 and in the 1993 Oslo peace accords that Yasser Arafat tore up seven years later to launch a terror war that killed a thousand Israelis. Why, Clinton’s own husband testifies to the remarkably courageous and visionary peace offer made in his presence by Ehud Barak (now Netanyahu’s defense minister) at the 2000 Camp David talks.

“Arafat rejected it. In 2008, prime minister Ehud Olmert offered equally generous terms to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Refused again.”

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Today, I am inviting comments from readers. This is a huge week for everyone interested in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It’s the AIPAC conference in Washington. It appears that Netanyahu and Obama will meet, as will dozens of their officials. Everyone is watching.

What do you think Israel should do? Please feel free to comment on everything from handling the current spat over settlements to what Israel could or should concede (if anything) in negotiations. Should Israel even agree to negotiations at all? Make suggestions on both tactics and strategy.

Here are some guidelines for comments:

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While Russia continues with the de-facto annexation of the South Ossetian and Abkhazian provinces of its southern neighbour Georgia, Ban Ki-Moon, Hilary Clinton and the other members of the Mid-East Quartet met in Moscow this morning to reaffirm the international community’s refusal to recognise the annexation of east Jerusalem by Israel. I believe the word is “chutzpah”, though I could think of a few others — unprintable, unfortunately — that might be even more appropriate in the circumstances.

Clinton repeated America’s condemnation of the recent settlement announcement in east Jerusalem and sat impassively as Ban spoke on behalf of the US and the rest of the Quartet saying: “The Quartet urges the government of Israel to freeze all settlement activity, including natural growth, dismantle outposts erected since March 2001 and to refrain from demolitions and evictions in east Jerusalem.” I’m confused.

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