In the light that reveals the Arab lunacy gripping the Middle East today, Israel has proved to be – despite the bad patches with the US in the recent past – a sane, democratic island surrounded by an ocean of hate and self-destructive mayhem.

As Israel invades Gaza, justifiably in my view, the news coverage is a striking contrast to reports since 1948, extolling the brave Israelis, that continued through the 1980s. In the media view during this era, the Jews had conquered the desert, defeated their Arab foes, created a parliamentary government and set an example of derring-do and survival envied world-wide.

Then things began to change in the early 1980s, beginning with the Left in Great Britain (remember Vanessa Redgrave demonstrating for Palestinian rights?). The Soviets began active measures campaigns in the refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon, and the USSR placed Yasser Arafat on the KGB payroll to stir up trouble against Israel as a beard to thwart the United States.

In the US, Jewish anti-defamation organizations had been quite effective and big givers to political campaigns, especially Democrats. Far-right Republicans didn't fall into that camp until North Carolina's US Senator Jesse Helms, the most powerful Conservative in the mid-1980s, suddenly performed a volte-face and began supporting Israel. I asked Republican king-maker Tom Ellis how this happened.

"Well," he said, "they flew Jesse over to the Holy Land and let him walk where Jesus walked and he hasn't been the same since." Thus, even as activists began their campaign for the Palestinians against Israel, it took until the 1990s for the shift in public opinion in the US to move against Israel. But it did, and today – in one of the most stunning reversals in world opinion – Israel is now the bête noir of the chattering classes across the globe. The coverage of the invasion of Gaza ironically stains the Israelis as the Gestapo of the Middle East, an amazing turn of events.

In 1982, before this sea change began to swell, the Jewish Defense League came to call on me. The three gentlemen asked if I knew what the JDL was. I answered I certainly have heard of you, but was unclear on your role. The visitors said they monitor area media wherever Jews live, seeking out reportage they construe as anti-Semitic. I said I was not an anti-Semite, and they said they didn't think so, either, as readers of my city weekly Spectator magazine in Raleigh, NC. But there was a problem about an editorial I had written that caused them concern.

And then I knew my crime. I had written that I was furious that the Israeli Prime Minister had refused to meet with the American ambassador over some issue – and I didn't like it. My reasoning was, the US funds and secures the existence of Israel, making them to me, if not a vassal state, at least a dependent entity on the largess of America. I also wrote that Israel had been sauntering around the region in jack boots ordering everyone about, and worse, had engaged in espionage against the US. When caught, remorse was replaced by righteousness, as if Israel answers to a higher calling as the Chosen People. In their view, the usual rules of statecraft don't apply.

The JDL gents thought they had a point, but I said they didn't. Criticism of the behavior of a sovereign state is not religious bigotry – or in this case anti-Semitism. I looked them straight in the eye and said so. Not used to people standing up to them, the JDL SWAT Team looked at each other and said they would be back to me later. Fine, I said, but don't go around accusing me of anti-Semitism in the meantime. Shalom.

Two days later I received a call asking if I would attend a "debate" at the Hillel Foundation auditorium in Chapel Hill, a town in our coverage area. I agreed and the date was set for a mid-week evening.

I walked into the auditorium and felt a frisson of exotic adventure. Crowded in the 200-seat hall were Jews of all sizes and stripes – Einstein-looking professors; Middle Eastern dressed women; Hasidic Jews with beards; many short-sleeved men in yarmulkes and uniformed soldiers of the IDF – the Israeli Defense Forces. They looked agitated.

The debate was actually a front for an inquisition. A token writer for the Chapel Hill newspaper was introduced and promptly disappeared into the woodwork. It was only I and a room full of angry Jews – angry at me.

Immediately, questions fired out from the audience, accusing me of being a racist bigot and an anti-Semite for daring to criticize Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin for his snub to the American ambassador. I took this hostile fusillade for a half-hour and then held up my hand and said,

Wait a minute:

You are proving to me tonight why anti-Semitism exists. You are attacking me based on a pre-conception that anyone who dares criticize Israel for its actions as an alleged democratic state is an anti-Semite. My points about Begin's behavior had not one iota of racial or religious bias. Yet, because it suits you to switch identities to win an argument, you abandon your democratic identity (the only democracy in the Middle East etc) and hoist the Ark of the Covenant on your shoulders in order to take the moral high ground on a purely secular issue.

On the other hand, if your religious arguments are losing ground, you elevate your secular views above others as a democratic state, taking the disingenuous view that religion has nothing to do with the position you are taking on issues. You want it both ways in any argument. In the process, you force outsiders to question your tactics and motives. And when you insult America, the one nation that supports you through thick and thin, you undermine the loyalty of US Jewry to the United States.

This did not go over well, especially when I added that Jews have got to stop seeing ovens whenever anyone criticizes the national state of Israel; no other country will take you seriously if you keep this up, jumping from the Chosen Ones to the Elected Ones to suit your argument du jour.

You'd think I would be lynched, but actually we all became friends. I think they saw my point – you will make me into an anti-Semite by attacking me for criticizing the elected official of your democratic state. Had I launched into the Protocols of the Elders of Zion or argued for Holocaust denial, I would indeed be guilty of anti-Semitism. And vigilance against the conspiracy nut cases and authentic anti-Semites is a necessary reality. But leave the people alone who accept you as a nation by feeling free to point out your diplomatic mistakes.

Today, I stand four-square behind Israel, whose people have emerged again as our true friends in a region where Anti-Americanism is the real danger. In the light that reveals the Arab lunacy gripping the Middle East today, Israel has proved to be – despite the bad patches with the US in the recent past – a sane, democratic island surrounded by an ocean of hate and self-destructive mayhem. Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah and the rest are not credible entities for the world to support. Israel is – and the world media need to abstain from bashing them for protecting their existence.