Quotes of the Day

A new EU poll shows that 59% of Europeans perceive Israel as the biggest threat to the world peace. The easiest explanation for this figure is that Israel appears almost daily in the news headlines, usually in a violent context.

Sometimes the news stories are about suicide bombers who are killing innocent Israeli civilians, at other times they are about Palestinian casualties of Israeli actions or the new security "fence". However, with its military superiority (and sometimes with the "help" of biased reporting) Israel is almost always presented by the European media as the only aggressor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even when the reality is much more complicated. The public's conclusions are, then, simple and simplistic.

But another survey, carried out this week in Italy, provides a deeper and darker explanation for that statistic. The new poll, published in the prestigious Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera, links the perception of Israel as a global danger with the denouncement of its very right to exist.

Following statements by Italian public figures that the slant of the EU poll was misleading, the new survey put forward more precise questions. But the results were, if anything, even more discouraging: 17% of the participants thought it would be best if Israel ceased to exist. 22% declared that Jewish Italian are "not real Italians", 8% want the Jews to leave Italy and 14% want them to leave Israel (where to, they did not suggest).

These two alarming polls come in a climate where the distinction between opposition to the policies of the Ariel Sharon government, anti-Israeli attitudes, and anti-Semitism has become blurred. It's hard to say where the border lies between legitimate (and often necessary) criticism of Israeli policy, and hidden (or unconscious) feeling that the Original Sin lies in the very existence of Israel as a state. Israeli politicians and spokesmen tend to blame every criticism of Israel as a product of anti-Semitism. It's an easy escape, but it works: the Israeli public is by now so suspicious of European motives, that, for instance, one of the strongest objections to the Geneva Initiative (an independent Israeli-Palestinian paper written by civilians, politicians and former military activists from both sides, which suggests a peaceful way to the conflict) is that it has European backing.

Many Israelis simply don't believe that Europeans could possibly support anything which would be in Israel's interests. This makes the Israelis seem paranoid, but, as the two polls show, there's some truth to the old Henry Kissinger quotation: "Even a paranoid has some real enemies."

• Two polls expose Europeans' negative attitude towards Israel and Jews