What's in a boycott? The campaign to delegitimize Israel has smelly historical roots.

VARIOUS Arab armed forces these past decades have resorted to military means to eliminate Israel from the world's map. All have failed. More than that, the wars each time strengthened Israel, and the Arabs have thus achieved the very opposite of their ambitions. This opens the way to the alternative approach of psychological warfare, a familiar element in all modern wars. PW, in the shorthand the experts use, mobilizes allies and undermines enemies. What is required is a master idea, and people to propagandize in words clever enough for the general public to accept it as the truth.

The master idea in this case is simplicity itself: Jewish nationalism, or Zionism, is an absolute evil, Palestinian nationalism is an absolute virtue. To establish this, the Jews must be shown to be wicked and wrong in every matter great and small, so that the Palestinians appear victims through no fault of their own, innocent people in special need of redress and rescue. With skill and persistence, the Palestinians and their Arab supporters have built up a worldwide PW lobby with helpers in the United Nations, the European Union, the Red Cross, the churches, the universities, and so on. One step at a time, they are subverting the legitimacy of Israel. Their multiple voices and pressures have persuaded the worldwide Left to believe that Israel is a state that ought to be dismantled forthwith. At the very least, they sap Israeli will to survive, and fortify Palestinian will to prefer armed struggle to the necessary compromises of peace.

Like much else, the Palestinian master idea is rooted in the Cold War. Backing the Arabs, the Soviet Union suffered a major defeat in the Six Day War of 1967. Trying to recover, the Soviet leadership immediately began to equate Israel with Nazi Germany, its deadliest foe. Hitherto tending to sympathize with Israel, the Left everywhere and unanimously swung against it. Here was a manipulation of opinion of the kind immortalized by George Orwell in 1984 as a Two Minute Hate. The Marxist lexicon--"imperialism," "colonialism," "occupation," "settler society"--was deployed to curse Israel. By 1975, the United Nations was declaring that Zionism is racism, and a state built on racism can only be a focus of outrage, the proper target of sanctions and boycotts. Successful American pressure on the United Nations rescinded that resolutions. The Left's inherent anti-Americanism then joined forces irrevocably with the pro-Palestinian PW.

It has been commonplace to portray Israeli leaders like Moshe Dayan and Menachem Begin as Nazis. Self-appointed bodies, including the BBC, have proposed--and sometimes staged--a trial of Ariel Sharon as a war criminal. Posters in Paris today declare, "Hitler has a son--Sharon." Over half of those questioned in a recent poll in Germany equated the Israel Defense Force with the Nazi army. Jose Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, considers that Israelis are treating Palestinians as Jews were treated in Auschwitz. A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mairead Maguire, compares Israel's nuclear arsenal to Hitler's gas chambers.

Smearing Jews by attaching to them the label of their chief persecutors and ultimate murderers is not as recent a phenomenon as one might think. The very first person to compare Zionism to Nazism seems to have been the French ambassador to Warsaw in the Thirties, when the government there was already practicing an anti-Jewish policy. Jews then and after tried to emigrate to what became Israel in the hope of surviving the Holocaust, but Gen. Sir Edward Spears, Churchill's wartime representative in the Levant, and the historian A. J. Toynbee were among prominent British personalities who blackguarded these unfortunates as Nazis.

The deadlock between Palestinian nationalism and Zionism led from the 1980s onward to a new set of comparisons, this time between Israel and South Africa. This was PW of a malign brilliance. Politically and socially, the two countries had nothing in common. Apartheid does not exist in Israel, where Arabs are represented in parliament and in the foreign service; Druze and Bedouin serve in the army; there are no pass laws or anything like them, and all Arabs enjoy freedom of speech and assembly, indeed more political rights than Arabs anywhere else in the Middle East, except possibly for the new Iraq. Visiting Israel in 1989, Bishop Desmond Tutu secured this new comparison in all its falsity, saying that what he had seen was "much like what happened to us black people in South Africa." Its triumph was the U.N. gathering at Durban in September 2001, when 3,000 assembled non-governmental organizations passed a resolution calling Israel "a racist apartheid state."

The white population of South Africa could see no way either to reform or to stay in power. To significant numbers of Palestinians, including both Fatah and Hamas, the simple and unconditional surrender of power by South African whites is an example for Israel to follow. Nelson Mandela always made a point of supporting Yasser Arafat, and excusing Palestinian terror. Once their will is sufficiently sapped, runs the argument, the Israelis will disappear on the ships that once brought them, and a pristine Palestine will rise up in their place. More than anyone else, Edward Said, the prominent Palestinian spokesman, fashioned this wish-fulfillment into a PW weapon with the claim that Palestinians have a moral monopoly, and therefore are bound to be the ultimate victors. Less sophisticated than Said, other Palestinian publicists, preachers, and educators incite violence directly when they describe Jews as bloodsuckers, descendants of pigs and apes, treacherous, and much else of the sort. Israelis are held to be masters of America, and simultaneously its hireling tools, just as once Jews were simultaneously capitalists and Bolsheviks. When they defend themselves against terror, they are accused of crime and even of committing a massacre at Jenin when no such thing occurred--a PW coup if ever there was one, given that gullible Western journalists were spreading the fiction.

The burning of books and the boycott of Jewish businesses organized by Hitler and Goebbels are models of PW designed to rally supporters and intimidate enemies. The approaching violence was evident, and so was what Einstein at the time called the "psychic illness of the masses." Yet some Jews preferred their form of rather pathetic wish-fulfillment to the terrifying reality. Felix Jacoby, for instance, a historian at Kiel University in Germany, opened his 1933 lecture course by declaring that he had voted for Hitler since 1927, and could only compare him to the emperor Augustus. Dr. Hans-Joachim Schoeps even tried to form a movement of Jews for Hitler (though other Jews replied with the grim joke that his real slogan was Raus mit Uns, or "Out with Us").

The same psychopathology is at work in Israel today. By and large, Israeli intellectuals have succumbed to Palestinian PW, and do whatever they can to weaken the will for a national existence. Appealing for mobilization against Israel in a Raus mit Uns spirit, they speak at international conferences and publish in chic outlets as though they believe with the Palestinians that the Zionist state is a misconceived project to be brought to an end as soon as possible.

The Association of University Teachers in Britain has just voted to boycott the Israeli universities of Haifa and Bar-Ilan (and to scrutinize the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for its correctness), and a wonderful microcosm it is, too, of how this particular PW campaign operates. Supposed injustice to Palestinians under occupation has precedence over academic freedom. A few years ago, Hilary and Steven Rose, both of them Jewish and academics, were calling for a boycott of Israeli universities. "Cooperating with Israeli institutions," they claimed quite typically, is "like collaborating with the apartheid regime." Sporadic attempts followed to boycott Israeli researchers and students. Someone called Lisa Taraki, described as "Coordinator for the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel," contacted the AUT, and in particular a lecturer at Birmingham University by the name of Sue Blackwell, described as a former Christian fundamentalist now turned socialist. (Her website was found to recommend a link to the site of a neo-Nazi activist.) At the AUT meeting, Blackwell wore a Palestinian-flag dress, and spoke for the boycott motion. Israeli academics were not allowed to address the floor. Nobody mentioned that Arabs constitute almost a third of the Haifa student body.

In itself, such a boycott is gesture politics of no great significance. Those who voted for it are merely useful idiots in someone else's cause, puffed up with moral indignation that costs them nothing but that fortifies their self-righteousness and vanity. And yet the delegitimization of Israel takes many forms in many forums, and in their way the AUT boycotters are helping to confirm the primacy of the Palestinian cause in today's political sphere. Under cover of that cause, irrationality toward Israel is diffusing into irrationality about Jews generally, sweeping one country after another. Palestinian psychological warfare has already created conditions for a fresh eruption of the psychic illness of the masses.