That convenient scapegoat, Israel

WHO knows what devils inhabit the night-thoughts of the absolute tyrant?

What fear could be grand enough to haunt the waking dreams of someone with the power of life and death over all their eyes fall upon? How towering must be your conspiracies; how roiling your paranoias?

In the years following World War II the great butcher Joseph Stalin slept steadily less well, and became preoccupied with terrifying thoughts of mortality. Everyone around him, among the gaggle of malevolent nobodies he surrounded himself with, looked either like a rival or a foe. His country, which he had purged time and again, ostensibly to remove the millions of traitors he saw around him, seemed once again alive with potential enemies, like hives of seething insects. When he looked around the globe it always seemed as if the walls were closing in, pushed ever nearer by the limitless strength of his American world rivals.

Thus when new Israeli prime minister Golda Meir toured Moscow in autumn 1948 to be greeted by Yiddish voices chanting "The people of Israel lives", Stalin knew at once what this sign meant. The new Jewish state and the American "fascist" world threat were one and the same malevolent entity, in differing disguises. The same "rootless cosmopolitanism" that infested Jewish culture was the source of all threats to Soviet authority. And so, as Simon Montefiore explains: "Working alone, and keeping complete control over all the parallel threads", Stalin "wove together every intrigue since the war to mobilise the Soviet people against the external enemy, America, and its internal agents, the Jews, and justify a new Terror". Thousands of Zionists (in Stalin's official euphemism) were arrested; tens of thousands lost their jobs; new camps were built in Siberia. Stalin's Final Solution was arrested only by his squalid death in 1953, when he expired without care because - like devotees of a malign god - even his own bodyguards were scared to touch him.

In recent years anyone who cares to inform themselves has discovered the depressing links between modern Islamism and Nazi Germany: the influence of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who headed a Muslim division of the Waffen SS and preached nightly from Berlin into the Middle East; the threads that link the Grand Mufti to the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood and their modern-day Gaza offshoots, through the labyrinth of time. But we forget this far simpler and more obvious explanation for the never-ending Israel obsession which envelops us all, whether on Cairo's streets or among the self-styled anti-Zionist sophisticates of the contemporary West.

For Stalin bequeathed to the world through his empire the ultimate conspiracy theory, featuring the only scapegoats capable of assuming all of the sins of the entire world: the mystic alliance of American imperialism and Israeli Zionism that together have poisoned all the wells of the world, and ritually sacrificed all its children, in the minds of militants across the globe for two generations.

In all likelihood 2011 will see the apogee of Western Israel-loathing, eclipsing even the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Israel's victories over the Arab armies led to the invention of an imaginary country, the Israeli Goliath bullying the Arab David, and to the invention of an imaginary people, the saintly and unstained Palestinians, who forever lie bereft by the side of the road waiting for their Good Samaritan.

Israeli internal politics is becoming ever more bitterly self-divided and mutually intolerant. Ever since the so-called Gaza convoy, Israeli public opinion has resumed its old suspicion - first cemented in the awful days of the 1972 Munich Olympics - that the Western decision-making classes are basically and ritually allergic towards the Jews, and that it is futile and perverse for Israelis to care what anybody else thinks of them.

Hamas, that strange freak of nature which, rather than sustaining its offspring with its blood, actually feeds upon its supporters' blood for its own succour, swells in strength as its international respectability grows. (Why, even now Western activists are assembling funds for a new flotilla in its aid.) And the Iranian nuclear catastrophe inches ever closer, demanding some kind of urgent action. On almost every front, Israel will be compelled to give its opponents new grounds for their never-sated hatred.

Christianity, we are told, bequeathed to the modern secular West a fundamental aversion to the idea of the scapegoat, since Christ, the God-man, freely allowed himself to be scapegoated in order to assume all our sins, and in doing so shamed us forever. And yet in practice almost everybody who claims to be opposed to the scapegoating of particular groups, be they 1950s Hollywood film producers or contemporary Western Muslims, seems compelled to substitute an even greater scapegoat for the lesser one, as if in some act of spiritual compensation. If Muslims could not have brought down the World Trade Centre in 2001, then surely it must have been Mossad and the CIA in ghostly concert. If the Iraq War cannot be sufficiently explained by American oil-lust, then surely it must have been a dark plan of Jewish White House neocons. Why, in the past couple of days the citizens of Egypt have been told, on the authority of senior intellectual figures in Cairo, that it was not Muslims who bombed the Coptic church in Alexandria, but rather Israeli agents in their usual cunning disguises. The Israeli conspiracy is a well that never empties.

Israeli citizens may perhaps comfort themselves with this small paradoxical thought. Just as it suits Arab governments for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to go on forever, and for the Palestinians to remain the lightning-rod for all the discontents of the region, so it would ill-suit Israel-haters for Israel actually to be wiped from the map. How, after all, could victory for Hamas bring peace in the region any closer? What would the triumphant Palestinian state look like that emerged in Israel's place, and how could Western radicals possibly find the reserves of self-deceit necessary to stay in love with it?

And who else, when all is said and done, could provide a sufficient repository for all that fear and loathing? As Stalin well knew, the most useful conspiracy theories are those that nourish themselves in perpetuity, no matter how many accidental lives might be blighted along the way.