Game over. No way back. An entire edifice of anti-Israeli demonisation definitively consigned to the scrap heap, never to be recycled again. This is the uncompromising message that comes out of yesterday’s revelations on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. To the horror of a European political intelligentsia which has been steadfast to the point of fanatical in its opposition to Israeli “settlements” in east Jerusalem, the Palestinian leadership itself, we now know, has long accepted that the vast majority of Israeli settlements can be considered legitimate and would become part of Israel under any reasonable peace agreement.

This is utterly devastating since it simultaneously shows that everyone from the British Foreign Office and the BBC to the European Commission and the continent’s passionately anti-Israeli NGO community have been adopting a position which was significantly more uncompromising on “settlements” than the Palestinian leadership itself, and also that that same Palestinian leadership had accepted that the so called 1967 “borders” — the gold standard for practically every anti-Israeli polemic around — are irrelevant to the prospects of a lasting peace.

In one of its most resentful leader columns for years, the Guardian was nothing short of apoplectic: not so much with Israel, but with a Palestinian leadership which has effectively blown the credibility of the Guardian’s very own mantras on the MidEast straight out of the water. The Palestinian leadership, the paper declaimed, had been shown to be “weak” and “craven”. Their concessions amounted to “surrender of land Palestinians have lived on for centuries”. And, in words that look alarmingly close to the position adopted by Hamas, “The Palestinian Authority may continue as an employer but, as of today, its legitimacy as negotiators will have all but ended on the Palestinian street.” This is sheer spite.

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At first sight, it may not appear as the sexiest story in the world. But Gideon Levy’s deeply flawed analysis today of the effective collapse of the Israeli Labor Party following Ehud Barak’s departure to create the Atzmaut party, is symptomatic of wider misunderstandings of key political dynamics in both Israel and western Europe. Writing in Haretz, where he is a regular columnist and something of a superstar figure for the old Israeli left, Levy laments Barak’s alleged treachery in the following terms:

“[Barak] officially turned Israel into the only state in the West, not counting the United States, that lacks a Labor party, a Socio-Democrat party or a left wing. All European countries have such parties… we are now more like the third world ¬ we are a state that has about one and a half parties. Almost all there is in Israel is an ultra-nationalist right, comprised of parties that have various names: Likud, Kadima, Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu, National Union; yesterday, Atzmaut (Independence) joined them”.

But Levy spectacularly misses the point. The reason for the collapse of the Israeli left is that the multi-culturalist, third-worldist assumptions that sustained it have taken a 10 year beating from which they were never going to recover. Ever since Barak’s peace offers, brokered by Bill Clinton in 2000 and 2001, were flatly rejected by the “moderate” Palestinian leadership in favour of violence and rejectionsim the core argument of the Israeli left that the Palestinian cause was based on legitimate grievances that could be addressed via the “land for peace” formula simply lacked credibility inside the Israeli electorate. And given that social populism — another facet of left-wing parties — is now almost as much a feature of several other parties in Israel, the Labor Party simply found itself with nothing to offer. Its implosion was thus inevitable.

Apart from his inability to get the point, it is Levy’s implicit assumption that Israel is now inferior to other western democracies that really speaks to the paucity of his analytical framework.

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Perhaps it has something to do with its craving for an ever wider readership. As it has doubled its audience in little more than a decade (to more than 1.6 million weekly sales), the temptation to fall into line with the default assumptions that that audience could reasonably be expected to hold may have been too great to resist. Or perhaps it is simply that, like so many other institutions associated with the British political intelligentsia, it has surrendered to the politically correct orthodoxies that now run riot through the country’s foreign policy establishment.

Either way, the Economist isn’t what it used to be. Flat, dull, lazy and predictable, a once great institution is now little better than a receptacle for every received wisdom in the book.

There was a sense of dreary inevitability, therefore, about this week’s leader column (the most commented article on the Economist website) urging President Obama to impose a peace agreement from above lest the hapless Israelis manoeuvre the region into yet another war with their (largely guiltless) neighbours. The key points in the article are as follows:

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In another one of those this-is-all-you-really-need-to-know stories from the Middle East, the Jerusalem Post is reporting today that a vulture has been detained in Saudi Arabia for being an Israeli spy. The bird carried an Israeli tag and a transmitter of the kind that is standard for tracking avian migration patterns.

The Saudi newspaper Al-Weeam said the bird was part of a “Zionist plot”, while Arabic language websites were said to be now awash with talk about Zionists training birds for spying missions.

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Friendly with dictatorships however vile, accommodating of an anti-Semitism that knows no parallel since Germany in the 1930s, and willfully contemptuous of Britain’s long term interests in the war against terrorism, UK foreign policy in the Middle East had surely reached rock bottom long, long ago. Not so. When it comes to the British Foreign Office and its relations with Israel, there are always new depths to be plumbed.

And so it is that we wake up today to the news that two staff at the British consulate in Jerusalem have been arrested by the Israeli authorities for gun-running for Palestinian (Hamas) terrorists planning to cause carnage by bombing a packed football stadium.

The Foreign Office is being quoted as saying that security procedures will be reviewed and that the Israeli authorities do not believe the incident has anything to do with the staffers’ jobs at the embassy. But how can British embassy security procedures be anything other than severely compromised when the Foreign Office itself adopts such a conciliatory line towards Palestinian terror groups?

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