Israel up for grabs?

According to Mark Steyn, maybe it is.

In 1936, during the Cable Street riots, the British Union of Fascists jeered at London Jews, "Go back to Palestine!", "Palestine" being in those days the designation for the Jewish homeland. Last week, Helen Thomas, the doyenne of the White House press corps, jeered at today's Jews, "Get the hell out of Palestine," "Palestine" being now the designation for the land illegally occupied by the Jewish apartheid state. "Go home," advised Miss Thomas, "to Poland and Germany." Wherever a Jew is, whatever a Jew is, he should be something else somewhere else. And then he can be hated for that, too.

North Korea sinks a South Korean ship; hundreds of thousands of people die in the Sudan; millions die in the Congo. But 10 men die at the hands of Israeli commandos and it dominates the news day in, day out for weeks, with UN resolutions, international investigations, calls for boycotts, and every Western prime minister and foreign minister expected to rise in parliament and express the outrage of the international community.

Odd. But why?

Because Israel is supposed to be up for grabs in a way that the Congo, Sudan or even North Korea aren't. Only the Jewish state attracts an intellectually respectable movement querying its very existence, and insisting that, after 62 years of independence, that issue is still not resolved. Let's take a nation that came into existence at precisely the same time as the Zionist Entity, and involved far bloodier population displacements. I happen to think the creation of Pakistan was the greatest failure of postwar British imperial policy. But the fact is that Pakistan exists, and if I were to launch a movement of anti-Pakism it would get pretty short shrift, and in Canada a "human rights" complaint or three.

The "Palestinian question" is a land dispute, but not in the sense of a boundary-line argument between two Ontario farmers. Rather, it represents the coming together of two psychoses. Islam is a one-way street. Once you're in the Dar al-Islam, that's it; there's no checkout desk. They take land, they hold it, forever.

....

That's the reason the "Palestinian question" is never settled. Because, as long as it's unresolved, then Israel's legitimacy is unsettled, too.

Still, the impatience of the new globalized Judenhass is now palpable. I used to think that, when Iran got the bomb, it wouldn't use it. I wouldn't take that bet now. The new anti-Semitism is a Euro-Islamic fusion so universal, so irrational and so fevered that it's foolish to assume any limits.