My Israeli classmates in a high school overseas in the late 1980s, in moments typical of rowdy adolescent boisterousness and friendly banter, would spew out quasi-nationalistic quasi-ethno-religious challenges to their Muslim friends.

"All of you put together, we still kicked your [collective posteriors]! Israel's the best!" they would say.

They were, of course, reminding us of 'our' armies' collective humiliation at the hands of the Israeli forces during the 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982 wars. Against individual armies, and on some occasions the combined forces, of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq, Israel's defense forces succeeded not only in "whipping" them but in stretching the boundaries of Israel considerably.

My Israeli classmates' banter was, of course, in the spirit of harmless rowdy adolescent boisterousness and mock rivalry. Moreover, a number of historians, Jewish and goyim, would beg to differ as to the factual accuracy of my friends' belief that the relative sizes of the opposing armies were comparable to the biblical struggle of David against Goliath.

What was unmistakable, however, and did not pass unnoticed amongst us gentiles in high school was the attitude of my Jewish Israeli friends as indicated in their unabashed claims. We all remarked among ourselves how the Hebrews, as they called themselves, generally held and expressed an open belligerency and boasted of their belief in Israel's right and ability not just to exist but to expand ("and we can do it again!") at the expense of the Arabs.

Jewish sentiments

The more tactful ones among the Hebrews differed only in how loud they boasted and expressed their beliefs, but it was an attitude that the bulk of them apparently felt no need to suppress.

Their attitude was also a microcosmic expression of the international spirit of the decades in which the world, or more accurately the Americans and West Europeans, regarded Israel as the victims in a heroic fight for survival, the only bastion of democracy in the 'jungle' of the Arabs' 'barbaric' Middle East.

The pendulum of political correctness pointed to Tel Aviv/Jerusalem and anybody who did not subscribe to that moral compass was either anti-Semitic, in particular, or illiberal and insensitive, generally, to the right of Jews to a nation of their own. Collective guilt for centuries of Christian Europe's persecution of the Jews together with the nationalism of the early 19th and early 20th centuries had considerably expedited Zionist enterprise. In the 1980s, both these sentiments still held sway in the West's public imagination.

'Respectable' international human rights organisations such as AI and HRW in the 1970s and 1980s were subdued, when not silent, in condemning violations by the state of Israel, in contrast to their current reports on the present Israel-Palestine situation.

At the peak of such political correctness appeared France's 1990 Loi Gaysoot ("Gaysoot law") which, incredibly for France's license of everything else, proscribed and rendered punishable even academic effort to scrutinize any aspect of the Holocaust.

Whereas most of my schoolmates were probably aware of and sensitive to anti-Semitism (although my Arab friends cynically and rightfully knew the term did not include abuses against them), the Hebrews of my school and elsewhere undoubtedly knew the privileged position they held in the eyes of the world. Thus, their open flaunting of that knowledge through their boasts and claims.

'No longer the underdogs'

Times and attitudes, however, have changed on account of the picture emerging of Zionism in practice.

Reports reached the public about Israel's use, beginning in the 1970s, of torture as standard (systemic) practice against Palestinian detainees.

Change may also have begun on account of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the bombing of thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children therein.

It may have been the incident of Sabra and Shatila, in particular, when hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese villagers, in a three-day orgy of murder, rape and torture, fell victim to Lebanese militias acting under the supervision of then minister of defense Ariel Sharon, now prime minister.

By 1986, Israel had become a country which possessed a stockpile of nuclear weapons, a revelation that led experts to estimate that arsenal to consist of at least 100 nuclear bombs.

The systematic policy of economic and social strangulation of the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, a policy meant to eat away at Palestinian will to remain easily translated in practice into house demolitions as means of 'collective punishment.'

From the years 1987 to April of this year, in fact, we are told that there were more than 1,007 Palestinian house demolitions; in just one week of the month of May 2004, more than 167 houses were demolished, rendering homeless 3,451 Palestinians within Gaza.

A recently published book Stolen Youth: The Politics of Israel's Detention of Palestinian Children documents the conditions of 2,000 Palestinian children who have been detained within the last three years.

Support via whispers

Whatever the catalyst for change, Israel was no longer that innocent little Jewish child David facing off against a monstrously larger Goliath, and efforts to portray the Israeli state as such make for a poor case.

I doubt that Hebrews in high schools today other than where they are the majority would make such boasts, or at least as loudly as those made by the Hebrews of my high school.

Alan Dershowitz, author of The Case for Israel , complained to his audience in Sydney last March (Keynote address, Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, March 31) what one young Jew confided to him: "If I speak up on behalf of Israel, I won't be able to get a date, no one will go out with me, I will be perceived as uncool."

Dershowitz went on to relate how professors in the United States can only whisper their support of him for fear that their social, if not their career, standing would be compromised if their stand were made known.

The point here is not that one should espouse the Palestinians struggle, or encourage others to do so, merely because of some fickle social weather vane that dictates what constitute 'fashionable issues', just as the Aids cause has become fashionable for entertainment celebrities.

It simply means that Israel, in view of its present violations and abuses of Palestinians beyond, and often contrary to, any moral justification or reasoning, has become an embarrassment to its supporters; the racist policies within Israeli ala apartheid-South Africa as well as its colonialist policies within the occupied territories have became so clear and vicious that it has became impossible, for those who profess a concern for human rights, to deny.

Next: The fringe elements

FAUWAZ ABDUL AZIZ is a former malaysiakini journalist.