In 1947, the state of Israel was born in a cataclysmic explosion of violence. For the last 56 years, though its intensity has risen and fallen, that violence has never ceased. Confrontation has sustained the Zionist dream, which itself was refined and tempered by the ferocity and savagery of World War II.

It is worth wondering, as yet another round of peace negotiations begins, whether Zionists within the Israeli political system are not afraid of the consequences of peace. If Israel can no longer lay claim to the appealing persona of a “plucky little democratic nation struggling to survive in a sea of implacable Arab enmity”, how will its financial and political fortunes change? At the moment Zionists around the world, who themselves do not fancy the difficulties of living in the “Promised Land”, assuage their consciences by writing fat checks on a regular basis. Their massive political clout also causes billions of US taxpayers’ dollars to be channeled to the Middle East, to sustain the Israeli war machine, its ever-tottering economy and its creeping carpet of fortified settlements on Arab lands.

Successive Israeli governments have also capitalized brilliantly upon both their country’s alleged vulnerability and the guilt felt in Europe at the obscenities of the Holocaust. Israeli propagandists have been masterful in the way they have consistently managed to obscure their country’s savage treatment of the Palestinians as well as the justice of the Palestinian cause. They have hidden the awful irony that the agony of the Palestinians mirrors that of European Jewry, before Hitler and his butchers instigated the horrors of systematic mass murder. All this has been achieved because Israel has been a “cause”. By presenting the myth that it was beleaguered and endangered, it has sucked in vast sympathy and cash from North America and Europe.

Peace would bring an end to all this. Israel would become just another state, having to make its way in competition with other countries in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean littoral. For sure, there would still be a flow of sentimental investment, but if the eventual returns were not good enough, even that cash would dry up. The peace dividend for Israel could therefore be economic, if not political, bankruptcy. Who among the starry-eyed Zionist idealists who have flocked to “defend “the country would be prepared to stay on in a corrupt, overcrowded state devoid of natural resources? And peace would unleash the fissiparous nature of Israeli politics, currently more often than not suppressed in the cause of national unity. Religious fundamentalists would start to take on the Zionists who, though themselves often irreligious, have used religion to justify their aggressive politics. Ordinary Israelis may dream of peace, but for their political leaders peace could be a nightmare. They must fear that in the long run, Israel could not survive an end to the struggle from which it has drawn life for almost 60 years.

That is why, as the country’s leaders work on their scripts for the coming road map negotiations and practice their crocodile tears for when it all goes wrong, they must be blessing the extremists of Hamas and Abu Jihad and glorying in the anger they have generated among the mass of once-moderate Palestinians. As long as fires of fury burn in Palestinian breasts, there will be no danger of peace and Israel’s survival will be assured.