What is it about Israel that prompts such widespread departure from commonsense, reason and moral reality? I took part in a discussion about the Middle East recently. It was surreal.

Not merely was I the only pro-Israeli person in the panel of four, but the chairwoman, Olivia O’Leary, also felt obliged to throw in her three-ha'pence worth.

Israeli settlers on the West Bank were on stolen land, she sniffed. Palestinians in their refugee camps had title deeds to the ancient properties. The UN had repeatedly condemned Israel.

Brian Keenan, who was held hostage by Arab terrorists for four years, then detailed Israeli human-rights abuses, to loud cheers.

Israel — and its sole defender on the panel (yours truly) — were then roundly attacked by members of the audience.

But what was most striking about the audience’s contributions was the raw emotion: they seemed to loathe Israel.

But how can anyone possibly think that Gaza is the primary centre of injustice in the Middle East? According to Mathilde Redmatn, deputy director of the International Red Cross in Gaza, there is in fact no humanitarian crisis there at all.

But, by God, there is one in Syria, where possibly thousands have died in the past six weeks.

However, I notice that none of the do-gooders is sending an aid ship to Latakia.

Why?

Is it because they know that the Syrians do not deal with dissenting vessels by lads with truncheons abseiling down from helicopters, but with belt-fed machine-guns?

What about a humanitarian ship to Libya? Surely no one on the Gaza aid ship MV Saoirse could possible maintain that life under Gaddafi qualified it as a civilised state.

Not merely did it murder opponents by the bucketload at home and abroad, it kept the IRA campaign going for 20 years. It also brought down the Pan Am flight at Lockerbie.

Then there's Iraq. Throughout the decades of Saddam Hussein, whose regime caused the deaths of well over a million people, there wasn’t a breath of liberal protest against him.

Gassing the Kurds? Not a whimper. Invading Kuwait? Not a single angry placard. Destroying the drainage systems of the Marsh Arabs? Silence.

Next, Saudi Arabia, whose revolting practices cannot be called medieval without doing a grave injustice to the Middle Ages.

It is led by savages who have studiously turned their backs on knowledge — even as they sip |their Krug and their Bollinger in their £100m apartments in Belgravia.

They behead and behand, they torture and they mutilate and they have spent billions on their foul madrasahs teaching young Muslims right across the world to hate us kaffirs.

But what demonstrations are there outside Saudi embassies? What flotillas to defend the human rights of the millions of immigrant serfs who toil without any rights in Saudi homes and in the oil industry?

There isn’t a single Arab |country — not one — with the constitutional protection that Israel confers on all its citizens, regardless of religion, or ethnicity, or sexual orientation.

And, no, I don't like the settlements on the West Bank, but, really, by any decent measure, it is simply not possible to gaze upon the entire region, reaching from Casablanca to Yemen, and then to point indignantly and say: “Ah yes, Gaza: that’s where the one great injustice lies.”

It is also utterly disingenuous to talk about bringing ‘assistance’ to the ‘beleaguered’ Gazans — some of who, funnily enough, can now cross into Egypt anytime they like and buy their explosives and their Kalashnikovs in the local arms bazaar.

And as for human rights abuses: why, nothing that Israel has done in the 63 years of its existence can possibly compare with the mass murders of Fatah members by Hamas firing squads over the past five years.

The colossal western intellectual dissonance between evidence and perception on the subject of Israel at this point in history can perhaps only be explained by anthropologists.

This dissonance is, perhaps, at its most acute in Ireland, where no empirical proof seems capable of changing people’s minds.

Israel — just about the only country in the entire region where Arabs are not rising up against their rulers — is also the only country that the chattering classes unite in condemning.

Rather pathetic, really.